So your problem is that the two things lack a primitive resemblance?
They lack any resemblance at all. A trillion tiny particles moving in space is nothing like a “private shade of homogeneous pink”, to use the phrase from Dennett (he has quite a talent for describing things which he then says aren’t there). And yet one is supposed to be the same thing as the other.
The evidence from neuroscience is, originally, data about correlation. Color, taste, pain have some relationship with physical brain events. The correlation itself is not going to tell you whether to be an eliminativist, a property dualist, or an identity theorist.
I am interested in the psychological processes contributing to this philosophical choice but I do not understand them yet. What especially interests me is the response to this “lack of resemblance” issue, when a person who insists that A is B concedes that A does not “resemble” B. My answer is to say that B is A—that physics is just formalism, implying nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities it describes, and that conscious experience is giving us a glimpse of the intrinsic nature of at least a few of those entities. Physics is actually about pink, rather than about particles. But what people seem to prefer is to deny pinkness in favor of particles, or to say that the pinkness is what it’s like to be those particles, etc.
A trillion tiny particles moving in space is nothing like a “private shade of homogeneous pink”
A trillion tiny particles moving in space is like a “private shade of homogeneous pink” in that it reflects light that stimulates nerves that generate a private shade of homogenous pink. If you forbid even this relationship, you’ve assumed your conclusion. If not, you use “nothing” too freely. If this is a factual claim, and not an assumption, I’d like to see the research and experiments corroborating it, because I doubt they exist, or, indeed, are even meaningfully possible at this time.
To use my previous example, the electrical impulses describing a series of ones and zeroes are “nothing like” lesswrong.com, yet here we are.
I don’t see how this is meaningfully distinct from Alicorn’s sweater. Sweater-ness is not a property of cloth fibers or buttons.
I think the real problem here is that consciousness is so dark and mysterious. Because the units are so small and fragile, we can’t really take it apart and put it back together again, or hit it with a hammer and see what happens. Our minds really aren’t evolved to think about it, and, without the ability to take it apart and put it back together and make it happen in a test tube—taking good samples seems to rather break the process—it’s extremely difficult to force our minds to think about it. By contrast, we’re quite used to thinking about sweaters or social organization or websites. We may not be used thinking about say, photosynthesis or the ATP cycle, but we can take them apart and put them back together again, and recreate them in a test tube.
It might behoove you to examine Luciano Floridi’s treatment of “Levels of Abstraction”—he seems to be getting at much the same thing, if I’m understanding you correctly. To read in in a pragmatist light: there’s a certain sense in which we want to talk about particles, and a sense in which we want to talk about pinkness, and on the face of it there’s no reason to prefer one over another.
It does make sense to assert that Physics is trying to explain “pinkness” via particles, and is therefore about pinkness, not about particles.
They lack any resemblance at all. A trillion tiny particles moving in space is nothing like a “private shade of homogeneous pink”, to use the phrase from Dennett (he has quite a talent for describing things which he then says aren’t there). And yet one is supposed to be the same thing as the other.
The evidence from neuroscience is, originally, data about correlation. Color, taste, pain have some relationship with physical brain events. The correlation itself is not going to tell you whether to be an eliminativist, a property dualist, or an identity theorist.
I am interested in the psychological processes contributing to this philosophical choice but I do not understand them yet. What especially interests me is the response to this “lack of resemblance” issue, when a person who insists that A is B concedes that A does not “resemble” B. My answer is to say that B is A—that physics is just formalism, implying nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities it describes, and that conscious experience is giving us a glimpse of the intrinsic nature of at least a few of those entities. Physics is actually about pink, rather than about particles. But what people seem to prefer is to deny pinkness in favor of particles, or to say that the pinkness is what it’s like to be those particles, etc.
A trillion tiny particles moving in space is like a “private shade of homogeneous pink” in that it reflects light that stimulates nerves that generate a private shade of homogenous pink. If you forbid even this relationship, you’ve assumed your conclusion. If not, you use “nothing” too freely. If this is a factual claim, and not an assumption, I’d like to see the research and experiments corroborating it, because I doubt they exist, or, indeed, are even meaningfully possible at this time.
To use my previous example, the electrical impulses describing a series of ones and zeroes are “nothing like” lesswrong.com, yet here we are.
I’m referring to the particles in the brain, some aspect of which is supposed to be the private shade of color.
I don’t see how this is meaningfully distinct from Alicorn’s sweater. Sweater-ness is not a property of cloth fibers or buttons.
I think the real problem here is that consciousness is so dark and mysterious. Because the units are so small and fragile, we can’t really take it apart and put it back together again, or hit it with a hammer and see what happens. Our minds really aren’t evolved to think about it, and, without the ability to take it apart and put it back together and make it happen in a test tube—taking good samples seems to rather break the process—it’s extremely difficult to force our minds to think about it. By contrast, we’re quite used to thinking about sweaters or social organization or websites. We may not be used thinking about say, photosynthesis or the ATP cycle, but we can take them apart and put them back together again, and recreate them in a test tube.
It might behoove you to examine Luciano Floridi’s treatment of “Levels of Abstraction”—he seems to be getting at much the same thing, if I’m understanding you correctly. To read in in a pragmatist light: there’s a certain sense in which we want to talk about particles, and a sense in which we want to talk about pinkness, and on the face of it there’s no reason to prefer one over another.
It does make sense to assert that Physics is trying to explain “pinkness” via particles, and is therefore about pinkness, not about particles.