That aside: Red is something that arises out of things that are not themselves red. Right now I’m wearing a sweater, which is made out of things that are not themselves sweaters (plastic, cotton with a little nylon and spandex; or on a higher level, buttons, sleeves, etc.) A sweater came into existence when the sleeves were sewn onto the rest of it (or however it was pieced together); no particles, however, came into existence. My sweater just is a spatial relationship between a vague set of particles (I say “vague” because it could lose a button and still be a sweater, but unlike a piece of lint, the button is really part of the sweater). If I put it through the shredder, no particles would be destroyed, but it would not be a sweater.
My sweater is also red. When I look at it, I experience the impression of looking at a red object. No particles come into existence when I start to have this experience, but they do arrange differently. Some of the ways my brain can be arranged are such that when they are instantiated, I experience the impression of looking at something red—such as the ones that come into play when I look at my sweater in light good enough for me to have color vision. If I put my brain through the shredder, not only would I die, but I’d also no longer be experiencing the impression of looking at my sweater.
Why does the fact that individual particles are not red prompt, for you, the question of what is red, but the fact that individual particles are not sweaters does not prompt the question of what sweaters are?
Why do I believe it, or why do I insist on it? I believe it because I see it, and I insist on it because other people keep telling me that redness is actually some thing which doesn’t sound red.
Why does the fact that individual particles are not red prompt, for you, the question of what is red, but the fact that individual particles are not sweaters does not prompt the question of what sweaters are?
When you say a “sweater just is a spatial relationship between a vague set of particles”, it is not mysterious how that set of particles manages to have the properties that define a sweater. If we ignore the aspect of purpose (meant to be worn), and consider a sweater to be an object of specified size, shape, and substance—I know and can see how to achieve those properties by arranging atoms appropriately.
But when you say that experiencing redness is also a matter of atoms in your brain arranging themselves appropriately, I see that as an expression of physicalist faith. Not only are the details unknown, but it is a complete mystery as to how, even in principle, you would make redness by combining the entities and properties available in physical ontology. And this is not the case for size, shape, and substance; it is not at all mysterious how to make those out of basic physics.
As I say in the main article, the specific proposals to get subjective color out of physics are actually property dualisms. They posit an identity between the actual color, that we see in experience, and some complicated functional, computational, or other physical property of part of the brain. My position is that the color experience, the thing we are trying to understand, is nothing like the thing on the other side of the alleged identity; so if that’s your theory, you should be a property dualist. I want to be a monist, but that is going to require a new physical ontology, in which things that do look like experiences are among the posited entities.
people keep telling me that redness is actually some thing which doesn’t sound red.
Sound red? If nothing sounds red, that means you are free of a particular sort of synesthesia. :P
Anyway: Suppose somebody ever-so-carefully saws open your skull and gives your brain a little electric shock in just exactly the right place to cause you to taste key lime pie. The shock does something we understand in terms of physics. It encourages itty bits of your brain to migrate to new locations. The electric shock does not have a mystical secondary existence on a special experiences-only plane that’s dormant until it gets near your brain but suddenly springs into existence when it’s called upon to generate pie taste, does it?
We don’t know enough about the brain to do this manually, as it were, for all possible experiences; or even anything very specific. fMRIs will tell us the general neighborhood of brain activity as it happens; and hormone levels will tell us some of the functions of some of the soup in which the organ swims; and electrical brain stimulation experiments will let us investigate more directly. Of course we aren’t done yet. The brain is fantastically complicated and there’s this annoying problem where if we mess with it too much we get charged with murder and thrown in jail. But they have yet to run into a wall; why do you think that, when they’ve found where pain lives and can tell you what you must have injured if you display behavior pattern X, they’re suddenly going to stop making progress?
My position is that the color experience, the thing we are trying to understand, is nothing like the thing on the other side of the alleged identity
So your problem is that the two things lack a primitive resemblance? My sweater’s unproblematic because it and the yarn that was used to make it are… what, the same color? Both things you already associate with sweaters? If somebody told you that the brain doesn’t handle emotions, the heart does—the literal, physical heart—would you buy that more readily because the heart is traditionally associated with emotion and that sounds right, so there’s some kind of resemblance going on? If that’s what’s going on, I hope having it pointed out helps you discard that… “like”, in English, contains so much stuff all curled up in it that if you’re relying on your concept thereof to guide your theorizing, you’re in deep trouble.
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.
Why?
That aside: Red is something that arises out of things that are not themselves red. Right now I’m wearing a sweater, which is made out of things that are not themselves sweaters (plastic, cotton with a little nylon and spandex; or on a higher level, buttons, sleeves, etc.) A sweater came into existence when the sleeves were sewn onto the rest of it (or however it was pieced together); no particles, however, came into existence. My sweater just is a spatial relationship between a vague set of particles (I say “vague” because it could lose a button and still be a sweater, but unlike a piece of lint, the button is really part of the sweater). If I put it through the shredder, no particles would be destroyed, but it would not be a sweater.
My sweater is also red. When I look at it, I experience the impression of looking at a red object. No particles come into existence when I start to have this experience, but they do arrange differently. Some of the ways my brain can be arranged are such that when they are instantiated, I experience the impression of looking at something red—such as the ones that come into play when I look at my sweater in light good enough for me to have color vision. If I put my brain through the shredder, not only would I die, but I’d also no longer be experiencing the impression of looking at my sweater.
Why does the fact that individual particles are not red prompt, for you, the question of what is red, but the fact that individual particles are not sweaters does not prompt the question of what sweaters are?
Why do I believe it, or why do I insist on it? I believe it because I see it, and I insist on it because other people keep telling me that redness is actually some thing which doesn’t sound red.
When you say a “sweater just is a spatial relationship between a vague set of particles”, it is not mysterious how that set of particles manages to have the properties that define a sweater. If we ignore the aspect of purpose (meant to be worn), and consider a sweater to be an object of specified size, shape, and substance—I know and can see how to achieve those properties by arranging atoms appropriately.
But when you say that experiencing redness is also a matter of atoms in your brain arranging themselves appropriately, I see that as an expression of physicalist faith. Not only are the details unknown, but it is a complete mystery as to how, even in principle, you would make redness by combining the entities and properties available in physical ontology. And this is not the case for size, shape, and substance; it is not at all mysterious how to make those out of basic physics.
As I say in the main article, the specific proposals to get subjective color out of physics are actually property dualisms. They posit an identity between the actual color, that we see in experience, and some complicated functional, computational, or other physical property of part of the brain. My position is that the color experience, the thing we are trying to understand, is nothing like the thing on the other side of the alleged identity; so if that’s your theory, you should be a property dualist. I want to be a monist, but that is going to require a new physical ontology, in which things that do look like experiences are among the posited entities.
Sound red? If nothing sounds red, that means you are free of a particular sort of synesthesia. :P
Anyway: Suppose somebody ever-so-carefully saws open your skull and gives your brain a little electric shock in just exactly the right place to cause you to taste key lime pie. The shock does something we understand in terms of physics. It encourages itty bits of your brain to migrate to new locations. The electric shock does not have a mystical secondary existence on a special experiences-only plane that’s dormant until it gets near your brain but suddenly springs into existence when it’s called upon to generate pie taste, does it?
We don’t know enough about the brain to do this manually, as it were, for all possible experiences; or even anything very specific. fMRIs will tell us the general neighborhood of brain activity as it happens; and hormone levels will tell us some of the functions of some of the soup in which the organ swims; and electrical brain stimulation experiments will let us investigate more directly. Of course we aren’t done yet. The brain is fantastically complicated and there’s this annoying problem where if we mess with it too much we get charged with murder and thrown in jail. But they have yet to run into a wall; why do you think that, when they’ve found where pain lives and can tell you what you must have injured if you display behavior pattern X, they’re suddenly going to stop making progress?
So your problem is that the two things lack a primitive resemblance? My sweater’s unproblematic because it and the yarn that was used to make it are… what, the same color? Both things you already associate with sweaters? If somebody told you that the brain doesn’t handle emotions, the heart does—the literal, physical heart—would you buy that more readily because the heart is traditionally associated with emotion and that sounds right, so there’s some kind of resemblance going on? If that’s what’s going on, I hope having it pointed out helps you discard that… “like”, in English, contains so much stuff all curled up in it that if you’re relying on your concept thereof to guide your theorizing, you’re in deep trouble.
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.