Other concepts that happen to also be termed "values", such as your ancestors' values, don't say anything more about comparative goodness of the future-configurations, and if they do, then that is also part of your values.

I'm having difficulty understanding the relevance of this sentence. It sounds like you think I'm treating "my ancestors' values" as a term in my own set of values, instead of a separate set of values that overlaps with mine in some respects.

My ancestors tried to steer their future away from economic systems that included money loaned at interest. They were unsuccessful, and that turned out to be fortunate; loaning money turned out to be economically valuable. If they had known in advance that loaning money would work out in everyone's best interest, they would have updated their values (future-configuration preferences).

Of course, you could argue that neither of us really cared about loaning at interest; what we really cared about was a higher-level goal like a healthy economy. It would be convenient if we could establish a restate our values in a well-organized hierarchy, with a node at the top that was invariant on available information. But even if that could be done, which I doubt, it would still leave a role for available information in deciding something as concrete as a preferred future-configuration.

New ideas are held to much higher standard than old ones... Behaviorists, Freudians, and Social Psychologists all had created their own theories of "ultimate causation" for human behavior. None of those theories would have stood up to the strenuous demands for experimental validation that Ev. psych endured.

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that standards of evidence for new ideas are higher now than they have been in the past, or that people are generally biased in favor of older ideas over newer ones? Either claim interests me and I'd like a bit more explanation of whichever you intended.

In general, I think scientific hypotheses should invite "strenuous demands for experimental validation", not endure them.

I agree (see, e.g., The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition for why this is the case). Unfortunately, I see this as a key inferential gap between people who are and aren't trained in rationality.

The problem is that many people-- dare I say most-- feel no obligation to gather evidence for their intuitive feelings, or to let empirical evidence inform their feelings. They don't think of intuitive feelings as predictions to be updated by Bayesian evidence; they treat their intuitive feelings as evidence.

It's a common affair (at least in the United States) to see debaters use unsubstantiated intuitive feelings as linchpins of their arguments. It's even common on internet debates to see whole chains of reasoning in which every link is supported by gut feeling alone. This style of argument is not only unpersuasive to anyone who doesn't share those intuitions already-- it prevents the debater from updating, as long as his intuitions don't change.

As a tentative rephrasing, something that's "emotionally implausible" is something that "I would never do" or that "could never happen to me." Like you, I can visualize myself falling with a high degree of accuracy; but I can't imagine throwing myself off the bridge in the first place. Suicide? I would never do that.

It occurs to me that "can't imagine" implies a binary division when ability to imagine is more of a continuum: the quality of imagination drops steadily between trying to imagine brushing my teeth (everyday), calling 911 (very rare, but I've done it before), punching through a wall (never done it, but maybe if I was mad enough), and jumping off a bridge (I would never do that).

For all four, I can imagine the physical events as bare facts; but for the first two I can easily place myself in the simulation, complete with cognitive and emotional states. That's much harder in the third case; in the fourth, I'm about as confident in my imagination as I am in trying to imagine a world where 1+1=3.

If you've exercised before, you can probably remember the feeling in your body when you're finished--the 'afterglow' of muscle fatigue, endorphins, and heightened metabolism--and you can visualize that. If you haven't, or can't remember, you can imagine feelings in your mind like confidence and self-satisfaction that you'll have at the end of the exercise.

As for studying, the goal isn't to study, per se; it's to do well on the test. Visualizing the emotional rewards of success on the test itself can motivate you to study, as well as get enough sleep the night before, eat appropriately the day of, take performance enhancing drugs, etc.

Imagination is a funny thing. You can imagine things that could physically never happen--but if you try to imagine something that's emotionally implausible to you, you'll likely fail. Just now I imagined moving objects with my mind, with no trouble at all; then I tried to imagine smacking my mother in the face and failed utterly. If you actually try to imagine having something--not just think about trying--and fail, it's probably because deep down you don't believe you could ever have it.

The human experience of colour is not really about recognizing a specific wavelength of light.

True, but irrelevant to the subject at hand.

the qualia of colour are associated more with the invariant surface properties of objects than they are with invariant wavelengths of light.

No, the qualia of color have nothing to do with the observed object. This is the pons asinorum of qualia. The experience of color is a product of the invariant surface properties of objects; the qualia of color is a product of the relationship between that experience and other similar experiences.

A human looking at an optical illusion might say, "That looks red, but it's really white," acknowledging that spectral color is objective, but psychophysical color is more malleable. But compare that sentence to "that sounds good, but it's really bad." Statements about color aren't entirely subjective--to some extent they're about fact, not opinion.

Statements about qualia are about the subjective aspect of an experience: e.g., red is the color of rage; of love; the color that means 'stop.'

Your eyes do detect the frequency of light, your nose does detect the chemical composition of smells, and your tongue does detect the chemical composition of food. That's exactly what the senses of sight, smell, and taste do.

Our brains then interpret the data from our eyes, noses, and tongues as color, scent, and flavor. It's possible to 'decode', e.g., color into a number (the frequency of light), and vice versa; you can find charts on the internet that match frequency/wavelength numbers to color. Decoding taste and scent data into the molecules that produce them is more difficult, but people find ways to do it--that's how artificial flavorings are made.

There are lots of different ways to encode data, and some of them are more useful in some situations, but none of them are strictly privileged. A non-human brain could experience the 'color' of light as a number that just happens to correspond to its frequency in oscillations/second, but that wouldn't prevent it from having qualia, any more than encoding numbers into hexadecimal prevents you from doing addition.

So it's not the 'redness' of light that's a quale; 'red' is just a code word for 'wavelength 635-700 nanometers.' The qualia of redness are the associations, connections, emotional responses that your brain attaches to the plain sensory experience.