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eternal_neophyte comments on My recent thoughts on consciousness - Less Wrong Discussion
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If the brain were rewired to find lemons sweet, would sweetness then be an objective quality of lemons?
No need to rewire the brain, just eat some Synsepalum dulcificum and lemons will be sweet, for a while.
Yes, for that person. Remember, we're not talking about an intrinsic or inherent quality, but an objective quality. Test it however many times you like, the lemon will be sweet to that person - i.e. it's an objective quality of the lemon for that person.
Or to put it another way, the lemon is consistently "giving off" the same set of causal effects that produce in one person "tart", another person "sweet".
The initial oddness arises precisely because we think "sweetness" must itself be an intrinsic quality of something, because there's several hundred years of bad philosophy that tells us there are qualia, which are intrinsically private, intrinsically subjective, etc.
So whenever you could wire a brain to undergo some particular set of sensory experiences given stimulation of a particular type by a particular object, the sensory experiences are then an objective quality of the object. Surely it follows that all qualities are objective qualities? It's a category of quality that doesn't tell us anything.
All purely sensory qualities of an object are objective, yes. Whatever sensory experience you have of an object is just precisely how that object objectively interacts with your sensory system. The perturbation that your being (your physical substance) undergoes upon interaction with that object via the causal sensory channels is precisely the perturbation caused by that object on your physical system, with the particular configuration ("wiring") it has.
There are still subjective perceived qualities of objects though - e.g. illusory (e.g.like Müller-Lyer, etc., but not "illusions" like the famous "bent" stick in water, that's a sensory experience), pleasant, inspiring, etc.
I'm calling "sensory" here the experience (perturbation of one's being) itself, "perception" the interpretation of it (i.e. hypothetical projection of a cause of the perturbation outside the perturbation itself). Of course in doing this I'm "tidying up" what is in ordinary language often mixed (e.g. sometimes we call sensory experiences as I'm calling them "perceptions", and vice-versa). At least, there are these two quite distinct things or processes going on, in reality. There may also be caveats about at what level the brain leaves off sensorily receiving and starts actively interpreting perception, not 100% sure about that.
It would be an objective quality of your relation to the lemon.
What is a subjective quality if not a "quality of [someone's] relation to [something]"?
I can run an objective experiment where I tell people in hypnosis that the lemon tastes sweet. Given good hypnosis subject the result will be that a bunch of the people do feel the qualia of sweetness in relation to the lemon.
Well OK. I'm not sure if what I think we're talking about is what you think we're talking about. I'm wondering if there's any difference between a subjective quality of a thing and an "objective quality of a relation" between a subject and a thing. Is this what your hypothetical is meant to be addressing?
It's subjective if it's the relationship that you have to something. It's objective if you talk about the relationship someone else has with something.
So you could say that its being a subjective relation to you is not an objective relation between you and the object? Or is it?