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Viliam comments on ​My recent thoughts on consciousness - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: AlexLundborg 24 June 2015 12:37AM

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Comment author: Viliam 30 June 2015 07:53:39AM 0 points [-]

"is my red your red"?

We need to look at the brain activity, whether seeing "red" activates the same parts of the brain for different people.

Take one person, show them a red screen, a green screen, a blue screen. Record the brain activity. Do the same thing with another person. Based on the first person's data, looking at the brain activity of the second person, could you tell what color do they see?

Thoughts and feelings are not immaterial, they can be detected, even if we still have a problem decoding them. Even if we don't know how exactly a given pattern of brain data creates the feeling of "red", these things could be simple enough so that we could compare patterns from different people, and see whether they are similar.

Comment author: eternal_neophyte 30 June 2015 12:26:47PM 0 points [-]

Such an experimental procedure depends on materialism; and materialism itself is the topic under scrutiny. Which is to say its results would under-determine the materialist/psychist dichotomy.