I suppose you experience colors just like I do, but (when you think about it) you tell yourself that what naively seems to be a matter of seeing a yellow object is actually experiencing what it’s like to have a perception tagged as yellow. But how does that translate, subjectively? When you see yellow, do you tell yourself you’re seeing the tag? Do you just semi-visualize a bunch of neurons firing in a certain way?
We went over this issue a bit in the previous discussion. My response (following Drescher) was: “To experience [yellow] is to feel your cognitive architecture assigning a label to sensory data.”
As I elaborated:
… the phenomenal experience of blue is what it is like to be a program that has classified incoming data as being a certain kind of light, under the constraint of having to coherently represent all of its other data (other colors, other visual qualities, other senses, other combined extrapolations from multiple senses, etc) but with limited comparison abilities.
The point being: I can’t give a complete answer now, but I can tell you what the solution will look like. It will involve describing how a cognitive architecture works, then looking at the distinctions it has to make, then looking at what constraints these distinctions operate under (e.g. color being orthogonal to sound [unless you have synaesthesia], etc.), then identifying what parts of the process can access each other.
Out of all of that, only certain data representations are possible, and one of these (perhaps, hopefully, the only one) is the one with the same qualities as our perception of color. You know you’re at the solution, when you say, Aha! If I had to express what information I receive, under all those constraints, that is what qualities it would need to have.
Though you object to the comparison, this is the same kind of error as demanding that there be a fundamental “chess thing” in Deep Blue. There is no fundamental color, just as there is no fundamental chess. There is only a regularity the system follows, compressible by reference to the concept of color or chess.
We went over this issue a bit in the previous discussion. My response (following Drescher) was: “To experience [yellow] is to feel your cognitive architecture assigning a label to sensory data.”
As I elaborated:
The point being: I can’t give a complete answer now, but I can tell you what the solution will look like. It will involve describing how a cognitive architecture works, then looking at the distinctions it has to make, then looking at what constraints these distinctions operate under (e.g. color being orthogonal to sound [unless you have synaesthesia], etc.), then identifying what parts of the process can access each other.
Out of all of that, only certain data representations are possible, and one of these (perhaps, hopefully, the only one) is the one with the same qualities as our perception of color. You know you’re at the solution, when you say, Aha! If I had to express what information I receive, under all those constraints, that is what qualities it would need to have.
To that, you replied:
Though you object to the comparison, this is the same kind of error as demanding that there be a fundamental “chess thing” in Deep Blue. There is no fundamental color, just as there is no fundamental chess. There is only a regularity the system follows, compressible by reference to the concept of color or chess.