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Viliam comments on My recent thoughts on consciousness - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's an ancient philosophical chestnut: "is my red your red"? So this is in fact not clear at all.
Same argument as for the chemicals applies. You won't be able to make any useful prediction that doesn't ultimately rely on your ability to simply perceive red.
Derive its chemical properties. There is some intuition involved in your knowledge of mathematics, but that's not the same as relying on an innate intuition as to its constitution. There was some point in time when the constitution of water was unknown, and anyone with enough knowledge of chemistry would have been able to make valuable predictions about the behaviour of water under various experiments once they learned how it was constructed, which did not rely on his ability to intuit the H20ness of water.
It doesn't help you recognise it in somebody with total bodily and facial paralysis either. Does it mean that it's nonsensical to ascribe consciousness to such persons?
By degree of complexity and organization, if nothing else.
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.
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.