What dire consequences should we expect if we do, in fact, deny that there is anything that is blue ?
For my money, the discussion in p.375 and onwards of Consciousness Explained says all there is to say (in addition to theories of electromagnetism, optics and so on) about the experience of color.
I can’t really do justice to that section in a comment here, but I will note its starting point:
Many have noticed that it is curiously difficult to say just what properties of things in the world colors could be. [...] What is beyond dispute is that there is no simple, nondisjunctive property of surfaces such that all and only the surfaces with that property are red.
The key insight for me is here:
The fact that apples have the surface reflectance properties they do is as much a function of the photopigments that were available to be harnessed in the cone cells in the eyes of fructivores as it is of the effects of the interactions between sugar and other compounds in the chemistry of the fruit.
There is no reason, prior to megayears of evolution, to expect that anything such as color exists. That changes with apple trees’ “need” to advertise the ripeness of their fruit, to creatures which, though hardly conscious, happen to be equipped with the ability to discriminate certain properties of the fruit at a distance. This “need” results from a) the existence of a certain optimization algorithm, Darwinian evolution, and b) contigent facts about the environment in which this algorithm unfolds.
What I take the “experience of color” to be, if it has to be anything, is an evolved equilibrium between competing strategies, together with the entire history of the genes in which these strategies were encoded.
Um, even I would have to judge that saying anything whatsoever about apple trees, in answer to the question Mitchell is asking, is blatantly running away from the scary and hence interesting part of the problem, which will concern itself solely with matters in the interior part of the skull. Anyone talking about apple trees is running away from their ignorance of the inside of the skull, and finding something they understand better to talk about. Reductionist or not, I cannot defend that.
Your response puzzles me. What I take Dennett to be saying is that apple trees and the insides of skulls are deeply entangled. “Perception” is a term that will recur often when we seek to explain the entangled history of apple trees and mobile fructivores. And I’d be rather surprised to find Dennett running away from hard questions.
OK, you’ve said where the scary part of the problem is. Can you say more about what is scary about “doing a Dennett”; or about what you take to be the scary part of the problem ?
There are some unsettling, if not scary, things that come out of considering apple trees, that do not come out of considering only the insides of skulls and simplifying color as being all about light wavelengths. For instance, if “redness” is as gerrymandered a category as Dennett’s view implies, then it would be in pratice impossible to design from scratch a mind that has the same “qualia” of redness, for lack of a better word, that we have.
Your first line (“What dire consequences should we expect if we do, in fact, deny that there is anything that is blue ?”) is an appeal to the consequences of a belief about a matter of fact, and therefore irrelevant.
“What dire conceptual consequences”, if you prefer. Mitchell says “you can do a Dennett” as if that was enough to scare away any reasonable person. I’d like to know what is so scary about Dennett’s conclusions.
What dire consequences should we expect if we do, in fact, deny that there is anything that is blue ?
For my money, the discussion in p.375 and onwards of Consciousness Explained says all there is to say (in addition to theories of electromagnetism, optics and so on) about the experience of color.
I can’t really do justice to that section in a comment here, but I will note its starting point:
The key insight for me is here:
There is no reason, prior to megayears of evolution, to expect that anything such as color exists. That changes with apple trees’ “need” to advertise the ripeness of their fruit, to creatures which, though hardly conscious, happen to be equipped with the ability to discriminate certain properties of the fruit at a distance. This “need” results from a) the existence of a certain optimization algorithm, Darwinian evolution, and b) contigent facts about the environment in which this algorithm unfolds.
What I take the “experience of color” to be, if it has to be anything, is an evolved equilibrium between competing strategies, together with the entire history of the genes in which these strategies were encoded.
Um, even I would have to judge that saying anything whatsoever about apple trees, in answer to the question Mitchell is asking, is blatantly running away from the scary and hence interesting part of the problem, which will concern itself solely with matters in the interior part of the skull. Anyone talking about apple trees is running away from their ignorance of the inside of the skull, and finding something they understand better to talk about. Reductionist or not, I cannot defend that.
Your response puzzles me. What I take Dennett to be saying is that apple trees and the insides of skulls are deeply entangled. “Perception” is a term that will recur often when we seek to explain the entangled history of apple trees and mobile fructivores. And I’d be rather surprised to find Dennett running away from hard questions.
OK, you’ve said where the scary part of the problem is. Can you say more about what is scary about “doing a Dennett”; or about what you take to be the scary part of the problem ?
There are some unsettling, if not scary, things that come out of considering apple trees, that do not come out of considering only the insides of skulls and simplifying color as being all about light wavelengths. For instance, if “redness” is as gerrymandered a category as Dennett’s view implies, then it would be in pratice impossible to design from scratch a mind that has the same “qualia” of redness, for lack of a better word, that we have.
Your first line (“What dire consequences should we expect if we do, in fact, deny that there is anything that is blue ?”) is an appeal to the consequences of a belief about a matter of fact, and therefore irrelevant.
What remains without that is good.
“What dire conceptual consequences”, if you prefer. Mitchell says “you can do a Dennett” as if that was enough to scare away any reasonable person. I’d like to know what is so scary about Dennett’s conclusions.
Ah, that’s clearer. I retract my implications.