It would be possible for a person to maintain that only the natural numbers exist, and that there is nothing else. They could point to all the things which can be described using natural numbers; and if you insisted that some particular thing was not actually a natural number, but merely had a relationship to the numbers, they would keep returning their focus to the numerical part of the description of everything, and handwave away every other aspect as not really real, or as itself just being another number.
In the discussion of whether color can be reduced to the motions of particles in space, I feel myself to be in a comparable situation. The discussion of color as such repeatedly turns into a discussion of particles in the light source or particles in the brain…
Perhaps someone out there has conducted the subjective experiment of attending to actual color for a moment, and asking themselves afresh whether this thing could “really” be just particles in motion. The first thing to ask yourself is whether this alleged identity derives any impetus at all from the intrinsic nature of particles in motion. If somehow you knew nothing of color experiences or of neuropsychology, would you have any reason to think, in contemplating any assortment of particles circulating in space, that “color” or “the experience of color” was there? I think not. The motivation for the identity comes entirely from the belief that the world in general has already been explained by a physics of this form, and so color (and everything else about consciousness) must, somehow, also reduce to particles in motion. There is nothing in the intrinsic nature of color or the intrinsic nature of particles in motion to make you think that it is even possible for one to be the other.
That is the sort of argument that you have to resort to with someone who thinks that color is particles, or that everything is a number. You have to draw their attention to their actual experience, and make them question from the very beginning whether what they are saying makes sense. But Richard, I have no idea how to do that within these epistemic formalisms you promote, which seem to mostly be good for arriving at the simplest possible causal structure for hidden causes, and say nothing about how to correctly think about appearances as such, or how to ensure that you are placing a thing in the right ontological category.
It would be possible for a person to maintain that only the natural numbers exist, and that there is nothing else. They could point to all the things which can be described using natural numbers; and if you insisted that some particular thing was not actually a natural number, but merely had a relationship to the numbers, they would keep returning their focus to the numerical part of the description of everything, and handwave away every other aspect as not really real, or as itself just being another number.
In the discussion of whether color can be reduced to the motions of particles in space, I feel myself to be in a comparable situation. The discussion of color as such repeatedly turns into a discussion of particles in the light source or particles in the brain…
Perhaps someone out there has conducted the subjective experiment of attending to actual color for a moment, and asking themselves afresh whether this thing could “really” be just particles in motion. The first thing to ask yourself is whether this alleged identity derives any impetus at all from the intrinsic nature of particles in motion. If somehow you knew nothing of color experiences or of neuropsychology, would you have any reason to think, in contemplating any assortment of particles circulating in space, that “color” or “the experience of color” was there? I think not. The motivation for the identity comes entirely from the belief that the world in general has already been explained by a physics of this form, and so color (and everything else about consciousness) must, somehow, also reduce to particles in motion. There is nothing in the intrinsic nature of color or the intrinsic nature of particles in motion to make you think that it is even possible for one to be the other.
That is the sort of argument that you have to resort to with someone who thinks that color is particles, or that everything is a number. You have to draw their attention to their actual experience, and make them question from the very beginning whether what they are saying makes sense. But Richard, I have no idea how to do that within these epistemic formalisms you promote, which seem to mostly be good for arriving at the simplest possible causal structure for hidden causes, and say nothing about how to correctly think about appearances as such, or how to ensure that you are placing a thing in the right ontological category.