But we part ways on the meaning of that. Apparently you think that even my hallucination isn’t really yellow. Instead, there’s some neural thing happening which has been tagged as yellow—whatever that means.
The relevant part of the optical cortex which fires on yellow objects has fired; the rest of your brain behaves as if there were a yellow banana out in front of it. “Tagging” seemed like the best high level term for it. A collection of stimuli are being collected together as an atomic thing. There’s a neural thing happening, and part of that neural thing is normally caused by yellow things in the visual field.
The most obvious point where it has subjective import is when things change[1]. I probably experience colours as you do; when I introspect on colour, or time, I cannot find good cause to distinguish it from “visualising” an infinite set or a function. The only apparent different is that reality isn’t under concious control. I don’t assume that the naive ontology that is presented to me is a true ontology.
[1] There are a pair of coloured mugs (blue and purple) that I can’t distinguish in my peripheral vision, for example. When I see one in my peripheral vision, it is coloured (blue, say); when I look at it directly, there is a period in which it is both blue and purple, as best I can describe, before definitively becoming purple. Head MRI’s do this too.
Edit: The problem is that there isn’t an easy way to introspect on the processes leading to perceptions; they are presented ex nihilo. As best I can tell, there’s no good distinguisher of my senses from “experiencing what it’s like to have a perception tagged as yellow”
The relevant part of the optical cortex which fires on yellow objects has fired; the rest of your brain behaves as if there were a yellow banana out in front of it. “Tagging” seemed like the best high level term for it. A collection of stimuli are being collected together as an atomic thing. There’s a neural thing happening, and part of that neural thing is normally caused by yellow things in the visual field.
The most obvious point where it has subjective import is when things change[1]. I probably experience colours as you do; when I introspect on colour, or time, I cannot find good cause to distinguish it from “visualising” an infinite set or a function. The only apparent different is that reality isn’t under concious control. I don’t assume that the naive ontology that is presented to me is a true ontology.
[1] There are a pair of coloured mugs (blue and purple) that I can’t distinguish in my peripheral vision, for example. When I see one in my peripheral vision, it is coloured (blue, say); when I look at it directly, there is a period in which it is both blue and purple, as best I can describe, before definitively becoming purple. Head MRI’s do this too.
Edit: The problem is that there isn’t an easy way to introspect on the processes leading to perceptions; they are presented ex nihilo. As best I can tell, there’s no good distinguisher of my senses from “experiencing what it’s like to have a perception tagged as yellow”