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whowhowho comments on State your physical account of experienced color - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (53)
Presuably, some explanation of how and why perceived colours match up to neural acivity, not just an observation to the e effect that they do. Reduction is a form of explanation, not an assertion of brute fact.
When people ask for an explanation, they want to hear something which makes them feeling less confused about the problem. But what exactly constitutes an explanation is very subjective - people with same knowledge of facts may differ significantly in their feelings of confusion. What you call brute assertion of facts is a sufficient explanation to me; it is perhaps not sufficient for Mitchell_Porter, but if I have to provide him an explanation he would accept, I need to understand what kinds of information are explanatory in his view. Stating that an explanation is better than non-explanation isn't much helpful - I knew that already.
Apart from that, Mitchell_Porter isn't asking for explanation in form of a detailed description of neural activity in response to green light reflecting on the retina. He makes it quite clear that whatever such detailed description can't possibly capture the concept of green, or something along these lines.
It's not entirely subjective
Some brute assertions or all brute assertions? The problem is that brute assertion as explanation sets the bar very low, leading to quodlibet. If "blue is how some neural activity seems from the inside" is an explanation, why isn't "the sky is blue because that is how god wills it"?
Why would he want that? It is uncontentious that pure description is not explanation. The reporter describes the battle; the historian explains the causes.
I am not saying that it is entirely subjective. Still I don't know what would you or the author of the post accept as valid explanation in this very case.
The assertion that certain wavelengths are perceived as green are sufficient explanation of the concept of "green" in terms of physics of elementary particles.
It is contentious whether to call the historian's work as description of the causes or explanation thereof. Anyway, I don't wish to get into a debate over the meaning of "explanation". I just wanted to point out that Mitchell_Porter appeared to be (at least when he was writing the post) quite certain that no detailed account of the correspondence between physics and neural activity could faithfully capture the concepts of colours, whether the account included causal relationships or not. He was claiming that a whole new ontology is needed, probably with colours and other qualia as primitives.
something that is as explanatory as other explanations. I don't think it is a case of raising the bar artificialy high
I don't think any special pleading is needed to reject that as an explanation. It doens't even look like an explanation--it contains no "because" clauses. Explanations do not generally look like blunt assertions, and and, as I noted before, allowing blunt assertions to be explanations leads to a free-for-all.
I don't see why not. It seems to be a key issue.
Yes. A lot of people have that intuition.