I had thought you were someone else, thus the wrongly gendered pronouns, but I know who you are now.
Don’t sweat it—I honestly don’t care in the slightest.
I am quite happy to assert that there is no color in a colorless physics because the range of things you can get out of such a physics is so straightforward to describe. Everything reduces to causal interactions among localized quantitative properties, and so the possible higher-order entities are those you can build out of quantity, space, and causality. It’s thoroughly unmysterious. What is mysterious is to suggest that you will get colored objects spontaneously showing up as well, like the ghost of Mickey Mouse hovering above the equations.
I will have to agree with rhollerith_dot_com here—you are treating as absurd a thesis we consider ordinary. And I think it’s actually worse than that: you are treating as absurd a theory which you explicitly state you would not treat as absurd in any other context. That’s not just strange—that’s downright reckless.
Now, you would be justified in being this reckless if you had a substantial amount of evidence to support your idea. We accept quantum mechanics, which is downright strange relative to the Middle-World of our day-to-day experience, but we accept it because it’s been proven sixteen ways to next Sunday. But in support of your thesis that human consciousness must be analyzed differently to every other phenomenon in the universe, you have … the naive sensation of indivisibility in the subjective experience of color.
That’s not evidence. That’s the phenomenon that needs explaining. And given all the myriad ways in which consciousness fails—all the errors it makes in analyzing the physical world—there is no sense in which subjective sensation can ever be a fitting element in a fundamental Theory Of Everything the way you seem to be proposing.
you are treating as absurd a theory which you explicitly state you would not treat as absurd in any other context
But I did explain why. We have some direct knowledge of consciousness. We have no direct knowledge of what’s outside it. Therefore we are not as free to theorize about what consciousness really is; we must at least acknowledge what is there. That includes color, and so theories of nature which don’t include color are ultimately untenable, even if they can have interim value as heuristic partial theories.
And by the way, indivisibility of color is not the problem. It is the failure to actually produce color by piling up lots of noncolor.
So far as I can determine, you have not understood anything I or any other physicalist has said. I cannot see any value in spending any further time on this discussion.
Don’t sweat it—I honestly don’t care in the slightest.
I will have to agree with rhollerith_dot_com here—you are treating as absurd a thesis we consider ordinary. And I think it’s actually worse than that: you are treating as absurd a theory which you explicitly state you would not treat as absurd in any other context. That’s not just strange—that’s downright reckless.
Now, you would be justified in being this reckless if you had a substantial amount of evidence to support your idea. We accept quantum mechanics, which is downright strange relative to the Middle-World of our day-to-day experience, but we accept it because it’s been proven sixteen ways to next Sunday. But in support of your thesis that human consciousness must be analyzed differently to every other phenomenon in the universe, you have … the naive sensation of indivisibility in the subjective experience of color.
That’s not evidence. That’s the phenomenon that needs explaining. And given all the myriad ways in which consciousness fails—all the errors it makes in analyzing the physical world—there is no sense in which subjective sensation can ever be a fitting element in a fundamental Theory Of Everything the way you seem to be proposing.
Heh, I was kind of scratching my head at it though. “Wait, did I miss something about Robin Z?”
Only the degree of my indifference to pronouns!
But I did explain why. We have some direct knowledge of consciousness. We have no direct knowledge of what’s outside it. Therefore we are not as free to theorize about what consciousness really is; we must at least acknowledge what is there. That includes color, and so theories of nature which don’t include color are ultimately untenable, even if they can have interim value as heuristic partial theories.
And by the way, indivisibility of color is not the problem. It is the failure to actually produce color by piling up lots of noncolor.
So far as I can determine, you have not understood anything I or any other physicalist has said. I cannot see any value in spending any further time on this discussion.