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pedanterrific comments on State your physical account of experienced color - Less Wrong Discussion

-1 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 01 February 2012 07:00AM

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Comment author: pedanterrific 01 February 2012 09:40:09AM 3 points [-]

Why limit this argument to just color? It seems a rather arbitrarily chosen property to dispute. Why not

Now look up again at that word "Less", and remind yourself that according to your theory, the shape that you are seeing is the same thing as some aspect of all those billions of shapeless atoms in motion.

If you can imagine that "vast molecular tinker-toy structures" (bleah) could add up to the shape "Less", what makes color so different?

Comment author: whowhowho 01 February 2013 02:53:43PM 0 points [-]

Inablity to imagine it. We know how how virtual geometrical structures --shapes--can be built up in other structures because we can build things that do that -- they're called GPUs, shaders, graphics subroutines and so on. If you can engineer something you understand it. There is a sense in which a computer has its own internal representation of a geometety other than its own phsyical geometery. We don't however know how to give a computer it's own red. It just stores a number which activates an led which activates our own red. We don't know how to write seeRed().

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 February 2013 05:11:57PM 0 points [-]

You lost me a little bit. We can write "see these wavelengths in this shape and make them black" (red-eye filters). What makes "seeing" shape different from "seeing" color?

Comment author: whowhowho 01 February 2013 05:21:14PM 0 points [-]

We can give a computer an internal representation of shape, but not of colour as we experience it.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 February 2013 05:23:36PM 0 points [-]

How would it function differently if it did have "an internal representation of color as we experience it"?

Comment author: whowhowho 01 February 2013 05:37:16PM *  0 points [-]

That's hard to answer without specifying more about the nature of the AI, but it might say things like "what a beautiful sunset".

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 February 2013 06:02:18PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not going to say the goalposts are moving, but I definitely don't know where they are any more. I was talking about red-eye filters built into cameras. You seemed to be suggesting that they do have "internal representations" of shape, but not of color, even though they recognize both shape and color in the same way. I'm trying to see what the difference is.

Essentially, why can a computer have an internal representation of shape without saying "wow, what a beautiful building" but an internal representation of color would lead it to say "wow, what a beautiful sunset"?

Comment author: whowhowho 01 February 2013 06:06:30PM *  0 points [-]

I don't know why you are talking about filters.

If you think you can write seeRed(), please supply some pseudocode.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 February 2013 06:28:22PM 0 points [-]

What was wrong with this comment?

Comment author: whowhowho 01 February 2013 06:40:11PM *  0 points [-]

It doesn't relate to giving an internal system an internal represetnation of colour like ours. If you put the filter on, you don't go from red to black, you go from #FF0000 to #000000, or something.