My thesis is that the true ontology—the correct set of concepts by means of which to understand the nature of reality—is several layers deeper than anything you can find in natural science or computer science. The attempt to describe reality entirely in terms of the existing concepts of those disciplines is necessarily incomplete, partly because it’s all about X causing Y but not about what X and Y are. Consciousness gives us a glimpse of the “true nature” of at least one thing—itself, i.e. our own minds—and therefore a glimpse of the true ontological depths. But rationalists and materialists who define their rationalism and materialism as “explaining everything in terms of the existing concepts” create intellectual barriers within themselves to the sort of progress which could come from this reflective, phenomenological approach.
I’m not just talking about arcane metaphysical “aspects” of consciousness. I’m talking about something as basic as color. Color does not exist in standard physical ontology—“colors” are supposed to be wavelengths, but a length is not a color; this is an example of the redefining of concepts that I mentioned in the previous long comment. This is actually an enormous clue about the nature of reality—color exists, it’s part of a conscious state, therefore, if the brain is the conscious thing, then part of the brain must be where the color is. But it sounds too weird, so people settle for the usual paradoxical crypto-dualism: the material world consists of colorless particles, but the experience of color is in the brain somewhere, but that doesn’t mean that anything in the brain is actually “colored”. This is a paradox, but it allows people to preserve the sense that they understand reality.
You asked for a simple exposition but that’s just not easy. Certainly color ought to be a very simple example: it’s there in reality, it’s not there in physics. But let me try to express my thoughts about the actual nature of color… it’s an elementary property instantiated in certain submanifolds of the total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs existing at the object pole of a monadic intentionality which is formally a slice through the worldline of a big coherent tensor factor in the Machian quantum geometry which is the brain’s exact microphysical state… it’s almost better just to say nothing, until I’ve written some treatise which explains all my terms and their motivations.
I only made my original comment because you spontaneously expressed perplexity at the nature of “sentience”, and I wanted to warn you against the false solutions that most rationalist-materialists will adopt, under the self-generated pressure to explain everything using just the narrow ontological concepts they already have.
This is hard to reply on. I really wish to not insult you, I really do, but I have to say some harsh words. I do not mean this as any form of personal attack.
You are confused, you are decieving yourself, you are pretending to be wise, you are trying to make yourself unconfused my moving your confusion into such a complicated framework that you loose track of it.
Halt, melt and catch fire. It is time to say a loud and resounding “whoops.”
You seemingly have something you think is a great idea. I can discern that it is about ontology and something about a dichotomy between “physical things” and “mental? things” and how “color” and related concepts exists in neither? I am a reasonably intelligent man, and I can literally not make sense of what you are communicating. You yourself admit you cannot summarize your thoughts which is almost always a bad sign.
My thesis is that the true ontology—the correct set of concepts by means of which to understand the nature of reality—is several layers deeper than anything you can find in natural science or computer science.
What evidence do you have?
The attempt to describe reality entirely in terms of the existing concepts of those disciplines is necessarily incomplete, partly because it’s all about X causing Y but not about what X and Y are.
This is literally false for almost any branch of computer- or natural science.
Consciousness gives us a glimpse of the “true nature” of at least one thing—itself, i.e. our own minds and therefore a glimpse of the true ontological depths.
How do you know that?
But rationalists and materialists who define their rationalism and materialism as “explaining everything in terms of the existing concepts” create intellectual barriers within themselves to the sort of progress which could come from this reflective, phenomenological approach.
This is either a strawman or a misunderstanding. What rational and reductionist inference in a lawful universe is about is saying “this looks complicated, I bet if we break it up the parts are simpler.”
And you need to elaborate on ” reflective, phenomenological approach.” A lot.
Color does not exist in standard physical ontology—“colors” are supposed to be wavelengths, but a length is not a color; this is an example of the redefining of concepts that I mentioned in the previous long comment.
Color is a convenient shorthand for *counts* about 20 different (off the top of my head) computational or mathematically fundamental properties in physics (from chromodynamics to RGB to retinae responses to visual cortex neuro-activity, naming a few). It is a short comunicative entity, if you remove the mind that understands “color” in a context the syllables themselves are devoid of meaning.
I hereby define “Wakalixes” to mean “The frequency of oscilliation of space-propagating electromagnetic/electric oscilliation patterns as predicted by Maxwells equations.” Is Wakalixes physically meaningless? I hope not. Is “Wakalixes” and arbitrary combination of syllables? Yes. When I from now on speak of Wakalixes I hope that we can use it to describe us some good old Maxwelian optics.
The point is, the word is not important, the redefinition not even. The important part is do you understand what I am saying? The Wakalixes of what I call “the color green” lies roughly between 1.734e-15 seconds and 1.901e-15 seconds.
The same can be said about me defining “Wokypokies” to mean “that kind of neurological response exhibited in the visual cortex of a heathly human when her retinae are exposed to a lot of Wakalixes between 1.267e-15 seconds and 2.468e-15 seconds (combinations of many different Wakalixes in complex patterns included)”
What part of “Wakalixes” and “Wokypokies” being things we normally refer to as “Color” do you have an objection against? What part of them is “not existing”?
This is actually an enormous clue about the nature of reality—color exists, it’s part of a conscious state, therefore, if the brain is the conscious thing, then part of the brain must be where the color is.
Yes. Nothing new there, color is mere Wakalixes, it is only when a mind is involved it turns into Wokypokies!
But it sounds too weird,
No it doesn’t.
so people settle for the usual paradoxical crypto-dualism: the material world consists of colorless particles, but the experience of color is in the brain somewhere, but that doesn’t mean that anything in the brain is actually “colored”.
I don’t. Most of my friends don’t. Also, quit using “color” and describe what you actually mean when you say “color” instead. It seems you are committing the standard philosophical fallacy of reasoning by homonyms.
This is a paradox,
No it isn’t.
but it allows people to preserve the sense that they understand reality.
Strawman.
You asked for a simple exposition but that’s just not easy.
Warning sign. Tread carefully, pinpoint inferential distances, write equations. Ontology in this universe is mathematically simple and I am good at maths, try me.
Certainly color ought to be a very simple example
It is, you are complicating it trying to think tongue in cheek big thoughts.
it’s there in reality, it’s not there in physics.
Are we even talking about Wakalixes or Wokypokies anymore?
But let me try to express my thoughts about the actual nature of color… it’s an elementary property instantiated in certain submanifolds of the total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs existing at the object pole of a monadic intentionality which is formally a slice through the worldline of a big coherent tensor factor in the Machian quantum geometry which is the brain’s exact microphysical state… it’s almost better just to say nothing, until I’ve written some treatise which explains all my terms and their motivations.
So color isn’t Wakalixes? Or it isn’t Wokypokies? Can you write that in an equation? Why not just say “brain’s exact microphysical state”? Wasn’t monadic intentionality disproven? Are you really, really, really sure you are not overcomplicating stuff? Like, really sure?
Can color not just be Wakalixes or Wokypokies? Does this explaination of color let you make advance predictions about, say, blind people? Colourblindness? Whether we can agree on something being “green”?
Also, just how microphysical? Don’t you need quantum gravity to describe it in suficcient detail? What about thermal noise?
I only made my original comment because you spontaneously expressed perplexity at the nature of “sentience”, and I wanted to warn you against the false solutions that most rationalist-materialists will adopt, under the self-generated pressure to explain everything using just the narrow ontological concepts they already have.
Wow. Just wow. I legitimately feel sorry for you.
Go read the core sequences again. Especially Mysterious Questions and Humans Guide to words.
You may see the unacknowledged dualism to which I refer, in the phrase “how an algorithm feels from inside”. This implies that the facts about a sentient computer or sentient brain consist of (1) all the physical facts (locations of particles, or whatever the ultimate physical properties are) (2) “how it feels” to be the entity.
All those many definitions of color will be found on one side or the other side of that divide, usually on the “physical” side. The original meaning of color is usually shunted off to “experienced color”, “subjective color”, “color qualia”, and so on. It ends up on the “feeling” side.
People generally notice at some point that the “color feelings” don’t exist on the physical side. Nothing there is actually red, actually green, etc, in the original sense of those words. There are two main ways of dealing with this. Either you say that there aren’t any real color feelings, there’s just a feeling of color feelings that is somehow a side effect of information processing. Or, you say that subjective conscious experience is a terrible mystery, but one day we’ll solve it somehow. (On this site, I nominate orthonormal as a representative of the first option, and Richard Kennaway of the second option.)
The third option, which I represent, says this: The only way to admit the existence of consciousness, and believe in physics, and not believe in dualism, is for the “feelings” to be the physical entities. They aren’t “how it feels to be” some particular entity which is fundamentally defined in “non-feeling” terms, and which plays a certain causal role in the physical description of the world. The “feelings” themselves (the qualia, if you prefer that term) have to be causally active. The qualia must enter physics at a fundamental level, not in an emergent, abstracted, or epiphenomenal way.
They will have an abstracted mathematical description, in terms of their causal role, but it is wrong to say that they are nothing but That Which Plays A Certain Causal Role; yet this is all you can say about them, so long as you only allow physical, causal, and functional analysis. And this is the blue pill that most rationalists and materialists swallow. It keeps them on the merry-go-round, finding consciousness an unfathomable mystery which always eludes analysis, yet confident that eventually they will catch up and understand it using just their existing conceptual toolkit.
If you really want to understand it, you have to get off the merry-go-round, deal with consciousness on its own terms, and make a theory which by design contains it from the beginning. So you don’t say: I can understand almost everything in terms of interacting elementary particles, but there’s something elusive about the mind that I can’t quite fathom… Instead you say: reality is that I exist, that I am experiencing these qualia, they come in certain types and forms, and the total gestalt of qualia that I experience evolves from moment to moment in a systematic way. Therefore, my theory of reality must contain an entity with all these attributes. How can I reconcile this fact with the instrumental success of a theory based on elementary particles?
If I were to tell you that I have a theory, according to which there’s a single big long superstring that extends through a large part of the cortex (which is made up of ordinary, simple superstrings), and that the physical dynamics causes parts of the string to be knotted and unknotted like an Inca quipu tally device, and that this superstring is the “global workspace” of consciousness, you might be extremely skeptical, but you should at least understand what I’m saying, because it conforms to the familiar computational idea of consciousness. In the end I would just be saying, there’s this physical thing, it undergoes various transformations of state, they have a computational interpretation, and oh yeah, our conscious experience is just how this alleged stringy computation “feels from the inside”.
What I am saying is less than this and more than this. I am indeed saying that the physical correlate of consciousness in the brain is some physical subsystem that needs to be understood at a fundamental physical level; but I only have tentative, speculative, vague hypotheses about what it might be. But I am also saying that the “physical” description is only an abstracted one. The ontological reality is some sort of “structure”, that probably deserves the name “self”, and which contains the “qualia” (such as color in the primary sense of the word), and about which it is rather difficult to say anything directly, but this is why a person needs to study phenomenology—in order to develop rigor and fluency in their direct descriptions of subjective experience.
The historical roots of natural science, especially physics, include a deliberate methodological choice, to ignore “feelings”, colors, thoughts, and the whole “subjective pole” of experience, in order to focus on quantity, causality, shape, space, and time. As a result, we have a scientific culture with a highly developed model of the world employing only those categories, and generations of individuals who are technically adept at thinking within those categories. But of course the subjective pole is still there in reality, although badly understood and conceptualized. In an attempt to think about it, this scientific culture tries to utilize the categories it knows about; and this gives the mystery of consciousness its peculiar flavor. We could explain everything else using just these categories; how can it not work here as well!
But in turning our attention to the subjective pole, we are confronting precisely that part of reality which was excluded from consideration in order to create the scientific paradigm. It has its own categories, to which we give inadequate names like qualia, intentionality, and subjectivity, which have been studied in scientifically shunned disciplines like “transcendental phenomenology” and “existential phenomenology”; and a real understanding of consciousness will not be obtained using just the scientifically familiar categories. We need an ontology which combines the familiar and the unfamiliar categories.
So if I am hard to understand, remember that I am not just stating an idiosyncratic hypothesis about the physical locus of consciousness, I am trying to hint at how that physical locus would be described in an ontology yet to come, in which the subjective ontology of qualia and the self is the primary way that we talk about it, and in which the physical description in terms of causal role is just a black-box abstraction away from this.
The usual materialist approach is the inverse: physics as we know it and conceptualize it now is fundamental, and psychology is an abstracted description of brain physics and brain computation. But the concepts of physics were already obtained by looking away from part of reality, in order to focus on another part; we aren’t going to get the excluded part back by abstracting even further, from physics to computation.
Hopefully I have addressed most of your questions now, albeit indirectly.
Or, you say that subjective conscious experience is a terrible mystery, but one day we’ll solve it somehow. (On this site, I nominate orthonormal as a representative of the first option, and Richard Kennaway of the second option.)
That accurately characterises my view. I’d just like to clarify it by saying that by “somehow, one day” I’m not pushing it off to Far-Far-Land (the rationalist version of Never-Never-Land). For all I know, “one day” could be today, and “we” could be you. I think it fairly unlikely, but that’s just an expression of my ignorance, not my evidence. On the other hand, it could be as far off as electron microscopes from the ancient Greeks.
People generally notice at some point that the “color feelings” don’t exist on the physical side.
You’re begging the question. I think you mean it doesn’t seem obvious that a functional process is a feeling of color. You object to the fact that we don’t recognize ourselves with certainty in this description. And yet you know that functionalism doesn’t predict certain recognition. You know that it would seem, if not directly self-contradictory per Gödel and Löb, at least rather surprising for a mind in a functionalist world to find functionalism intuitively obvious when viewed from this angle.
But we don’t have to speculate about the limits of self-consciousness in humans. We know for a fact that a lot of ‘unconscious’ processing takes place during perception. And orthonormal provides a credible account of how that could produce thoughts like yours.
I would actually say that if you think a functionally-human version of “Martha” would not have consciousness, your intuition is broken. So now we have an impasse between dueling intuitions. I suppose you could try to argue that one intuition seems more reliable than the other. Or we could just admit that they aren’t reliable.
There are no fundamental “feelings.” The map of reality exists inside a brain which is a part of reality. Your modal logic and monad tensor algebra is unnecessary and meaningless. Everything you say has simpler explanations. You’re begging the question, you show clear signs of self deception.
The universe is fundamentally simple, only in our map-of-the-universe do we pretend that things are different in order to compress the information.
You are misusing words. Like, basic errors.
And I am not going to take apart your wall-of-text philosophy. Come back when you have equations and predictions. Until then I am a material reductionist.
Halt, melt, catch fire. Now. Unless you Aumann up, this conversation is over.
I think the confusion here stems from the fact that the word “color” has two different meanings.
When physicists talk about “color”, what they mean is, “a specific wavelength of light”. Let’s call this “color-a”.
When biologists or sociologists (or graphic artists) talk about “color”, what they mean is, “a series of biochemical reactions in the brain which is usually the result of certain wavelengths of light hitting the retina”. Let’s call this “color-b”.
Both “color-a” and “color-b” are physical phenomena, but they are distinct. As it happens, “color-b” is often caused by “color-a”, but that isn’t always the case. And we can often map “color-b” back onto a single “color-a”, but that isn’t always the case either; for example, the “color-b” we know as “brown” depends on local contrast, and thus does not have a single “color-a” cause.
This confusion in terms makes philosophical discussions confusing, but that’s just an artifact of the English language. The concepts themselves are relatively simple, IMO.
Using the distinction I introduce here, both your color-a and your color-b are on the “physics side”, but there absolutely has to be color on the “feeling side” as well; that’s the original meaning of color and the one that we know about directly.
Now, in real life I have a deadline to meet, and further communications will be delayed for a few days, if I’m wise…
I think you may be somewhat confused about Eliezer’s terminology. You say:
You may see the unacknowledged dualism to which I refer, in the phrase “how an algorithm feels from inside”. This implies that the facts about a sentient computer or sentient brain consist of (1) all the physical facts (locations of particles, or whatever the ultimate physical properties are) (2) “how it feels” to be the entity.
But the original article does not propose any kind of a dualism. Instead (IMO), it attempts to expose certain mental biases inherent to all humans, which are caused by the specific ways in which our neural hardware is configured: “Because we don’t instinctively see our intuitions as “intuitions”, we just see them as the world”.
You say that...
People generally notice at some point that the “color feelings” don’t exist on the physical side.
But people “generally notice” a lot of things, including the existence of gods and demons, and the shape of the Earth, which is flat. Just because people notice something, doesn’t mean it’s there (but it doesn’t mean it’s not there, either). You go on to say that materialists are...
...finding consciousness an unfathomable mystery which always eludes analysis...
But this just isn’t true. We know a lot (though not everything) about how our consciousness operates; in fact, we can even observe some of it happening in real time under fMRI scans. Sure, some philosophers might wax poetic about the grand mystery of consciousness, but they are the same kinds of people who waxed poetic about the grand mystery of the heavens before Newtonian Mechanics was discovered.
Thus, I’m not convinced that...
...there absolutely has to be color on the “feeling side” as well...
...assuming of course that by “feeling side” you mean something distinct from brain-states. I could be wrong, of course; but since you are making the positive proposition about the existence of qualia, the burden of proof is on you.
Do you mean ‘intensionality’? (and should we worry that the Chrome spell check recognizes neither of these words?)
it’s an elementary property instantiated in certain submanifolds of the total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs existing at the object pole of a monadic intentionality which is formally a slice through the worldline of a big coherent tensor factor in the Machian quantum geometry which is the brain’s exact microphysical state…
This sounds like you mean “the perception of color is a brain state”. Am I missing something?
This sounds like you mean “the perception of color is a brain state”. Am I missing something?
Again, see my latest comments, on the need to reintroduce at a fundamental level, ontological categories which have been excluded as subjective in order to build the scientific model of the world. I am hinting that, rather than intentionality being an abstraction from a mass of microphysical causal relations, the locus of consciousness is a specific, complex, but microphysically exactly bounded object, whose actual ontology includes intentionality, and for which the standard physical description would be the abstracted one.
That is, in reality the world consists of a causal network of “monads”, some of which have extremely complex intentionality, but most of which are simple and are entirely pre- or non-intentional in their nature; but that the mathematical representation of this ontology is the “Machian quantum geometry” of “coherent tensor factors”. Machian quantum geometry is not a well-defined mathematical concept, it’s a rhetorical construct meant to suggest a quantum geometry based on matter (analogous to Ernst Mach’s ideas). The monads are the “matter”, the “geometry” encodes their immediate causal relations… This is handwaving meant to convey the gist of a way of thinking.
OK, so, I perceive certain things are red, and I perceive certain groups of things as numbering four.
On your account, I perceive the “redness” by virtue of an elementary property instantiated in certain submanifolds of the total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs existing at the object pole of a monadic intentionality which is formally a slice through the worldline of a big coherent tensor factor in the Machian quantum geometry which is the brain’s exact microphysical state. OK.
On your account, do I perceive the “fourness” the same way? Or is that different?
To understand my position, first see this latest comment. It is that physical ontology is a subset of the true ontology, a bit like replacing a meaningful communication with a tree diagram. The tree structure is present in the original communication, and it inhabits everything to do with syntax and semantics, but the tree structure does not in itself contain the meaning.
Analogously, everything following ”...which is formally...” is the abstracted description of consciousness, in mathematical/physical terms. The true ontology is the stuff about monadic intentionality with a subjective pole and an objective pole. My supposition is that this takes a finite number of bits to describe, and if you were to just talk about the structure and dynamics of those bits, solely in physical and computational terms, you would find yourself talking about (e.g.) nested qubit structures in the Hilbert space of entangled microtubular electrons. (That last is not a hypothesis that I advance with deadly seriousness and specificity, it’s just usefully concrete.)
So if you want to talk about the basis of perception and knowledge, there are two levels available. There is the physical-computational level, and then the level of “true ontology”. Perception and knowledge are really concepts at the deeper, truer level, because in truth they involve the “subjective” categories like intentionality, as well as the purely “objective” ones like structure and cause. But they will have their abstracted counterparts on the computational level of description.
In principle, the way we learn about the scientifically neglected subjective side of ontology is through phenomenology, i.e. introspection of an unusually systematic and rigorous sort, usually conducted in a doubting-Cartesian mode in which you put to one side the question of whether there is an external world causing your perceptions, and just focus on the nature of the perceptions themselves. Your question—what’s going on when you perceive something as red, what’s going on when you perceive fourness, and is there any difference—should be answered by introspective comparison of the two states.
In practice, any such introspection and comparison is likely to already be “theory-laden”. This is one of the difficulties of the subject. Consider the very idea of intentionality, the idea that consciousness is all about a subject perceiving an object under an aspect. Now that I have the concept, it seems ubiquitously valid—every example of consciousness that I come upon, can be analyzed this way—and that offers a retroactive validation of the concept. But I can’t say that I know how to get into a subjective state whereby I am agnostic about the existence of intentionality, and then have the intentional structure of consciousness forced upon me anyway, in the way that the existence of colors is impossible to deny. Maybe it becomes possible, at a higher level of phenomenological proficiency, to achieve a direct awareness of the reasons for believing in intentionality; or maybe it’s a concept that is only ever validated in that retroactive way: once you have it, it becomes supremely plausible because of its analytical utility, but it’s something that you have to hypothesize and “test” against the phenomenological “data”, it’s not something you can just “see directly” in the data.
My ideas about the difference between perceiving redness and perceiving fourness are on that level, at best; they are ideas that I picked up somehow, and which I can test against experience, but for which I don’t have a subjective procedure which demonstrates them without presupposition, which is the epistemological gold standard for phenomenology…
A perceptual state of consciousness involves a “total object” which is “present” to a subject. This total object is what I called the “total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs”, by definition it’s the union of all current objects of awareness; the “world” you are experiencing at a given moment. Some of these objects will be continua of qualia; for example, the total visual component of an experience. The subjective visual field is part of the world-object, along with other sensory continua. The subjective visual field isn’t homogeneous, its hue, intensity, and value varies from location to location. This variation constitutes its form.
So far this is just a crude ontological analysis of the object end of an experience. When you ask how we perceive redness and fourness, you’re also asking for an ontological analysis of how the object end relates to the subject end. In principle, that should derive from a phenomenological analysis of perceiving red and perceiving four… The trouble lies in distinguishing the component of the experience which is posited, from the component of the experience which is “given”—the part of the experience which is just there. I think fourness is posited on the basis of simpler local structural forms which are given, and I think there is a crude difference between red and, say, green, which is given, but more specific identification of colors requires conceptual synthesis, e.g. you have to notice that the shade of color is not just red, it’s also dark, and then you can say it’s a dark red.
Bertrand Russell and others talked about “knowledge by acquaintance” versus other forms of indirectly obtained knowledge; “knowledge by acquaintance” is the direct knowing that comes from direct awareness. So that which is given is known by acquaintance, and that which is posited is at best known to be consistent with experience. In this language, we know a shade of color as red-not-green by acquaintance, and we know that it is dark by acquaintance, but we know that it is dark red only by conceptual synthesis. And I think that a perception of fourness similarly arises from conceptual synthesis of more primitive facts that we know by acquaintance…
But one of the most challenging things is to say something convincing or even comprehensible about the direct awareness of objects by a subject. Should we treat qualia and this “total object” as part of the self, or as something external to the self that it’s “aware of”? Is the awareness something that is caused by a particular relation between self and object, or is it the relation itself?
It’s quite understandable why people prefer to focus on neurons, computation, and impersonal descriptions. If the physical side of my idea were ever validated, this would mean focusing on qubits, electron states, and so forth. But in the end, the vague and confusing subjective language of subject, object, awareness, acquaintance… would have to apply to entities and relations for which we also had a physical description. The “objective pole of the monadic intentionality” might correspond to “the union of all the leaves of the tree in the quantum data structure”, and the “subjective pole” might be “the union of all the edges connected to the root node”. (Undoubtedly that’s not how it is, but again, concrete example for the purpose of discussion...)
You see intimations of this promised fusion between neurophysical, computational, and subjective ontologies when people have a feeling that it’s all come together in their heads in a marvelous heap. “I am the computation, as well as the computer performing the computation!” might be how they express it, and behind this is a cognitive phenomenology in which there has been a miniature crossover and fusion of specific concepts from the different ontologies. I don’t believe anyone has yet seen the truth of how it works, but the occasional illusion of insight gives us a foretaste of how the actual knowledge would feel, and meanwhile we need to keep switching back and forth between speculative synthesis and critical analysis, in order to make incremental progress. I just think getting to the answer requires a big leap in a new direction that’s hard to convey.
If you intended to answer my question, you might want to know that after reading your response, I still have no idea whether on your account perceiving some system as comprised of four things requires some ontologically distinct noncomputational something-or-other in the same way that perceiving a system as red does.
If you intended to use my question as a launching pad from which to expound your philosophy, or intended to be obscurantist, then you might not.
I still have no idea whether on your account perceiving some system as comprised of four things requires some ontologically distinct noncomputational something-or-other in the same way that perceiving a system as red does.
Aha! Only now do I understand exactly what you were asking.
Recap: I complain that colors, such as redness, exist in reality, but not in physics as we describe it now, not even in the physics of the brain. So I just postulate that somewhere in the brain are entities, “manifolds of qualia”, which will have a naturalistic, mathematical description as physical degres of freedom, but which in their full ontological reality are actually red.
So great, I’ve “saved the phenomenon”, my ontology contains true color. But now I need an ontological account of awareness of color. Reality contains awareness of redness, just as much as it contains redness. This is why I started talking about “positing” and “givenness” and the subjective pole of intentionality—because that stuff is needed in order to say what awareness is.
The question about fourness starts out looking simpler than that. If you asked, Does your ontology contain redness, I can say, Yes; it contains qualia-manifolds, and they can be genuinely red. The question about fourness seems quite analogous. If there is a square in your visual field, do I claim that there is a platonic property of fourness inhabiting your manifold of visual qualia?
I believe in the existence of colors, but I am a skeptic about the existence of numbers. You might get away with a metaphysics in which there are no number-entities, just states of processes for counting. I’m not sure; if numbers are real, they might be properties of collections… but I’m a skeptic.
More importantly, my ontology of conscious states gives redness and fourness a different status, which allows me to be agnostic about whether or not there’s a real “essence of fourness” inhabiting the visual sensation of a square. I hypothesize that the entity “redness” (more precisely, a particular shade of redness) is itself part of the entity, “awareness of that shade of redness”; but that “awareness of fourness” does not contain any correspondingly real “fourness”. Analysed, it would be more like “awareness of a group of lines to which the concept of fourness is posited to apply”, or perhaps “awareness of a group of lines together with the awareness that they are being categorized as a foursome by your nervous system”. I’m willing to countenance a functionalist account of number “perception”, but not of color perception.
I hope that this answer, if not intellectually satisfying, at least addresses the question. And now, back to work for a few days…
I believe in the existence of colors, but I am a skeptic about the existence of numbers. You might get away with a metaphysics in which there are no number-entities, just states of processes for counting. I’m not sure; if numbers are real, they might be properties of collections… but I’m a skeptic. [..] I’m willing to countenance a functionalist account of number “perception”, but not of color perception.
OK, cool. That does indeed address the question, thank you.
When you have the time, I would be interested in your thoughts about what sort of evidence might convince you that a functionalist account of number “perception” is inadequate in the same way that (on your account) a functionalist account of color perception is.
My thesis is that the true ontology—the correct set of concepts by means of which to understand the nature of reality—is several layers deeper than anything you can find in natural science or computer science. The attempt to describe reality entirely in terms of the existing concepts of those disciplines is necessarily incomplete, partly because it’s all about X causing Y but not about what X and Y are. Consciousness gives us a glimpse of the “true nature” of at least one thing—itself, i.e. our own minds—and therefore a glimpse of the true ontological depths. But rationalists and materialists who define their rationalism and materialism as “explaining everything in terms of the existing concepts” create intellectual barriers within themselves to the sort of progress which could come from this reflective, phenomenological approach.
I’m not just talking about arcane metaphysical “aspects” of consciousness. I’m talking about something as basic as color. Color does not exist in standard physical ontology—“colors” are supposed to be wavelengths, but a length is not a color; this is an example of the redefining of concepts that I mentioned in the previous long comment. This is actually an enormous clue about the nature of reality—color exists, it’s part of a conscious state, therefore, if the brain is the conscious thing, then part of the brain must be where the color is. But it sounds too weird, so people settle for the usual paradoxical crypto-dualism: the material world consists of colorless particles, but the experience of color is in the brain somewhere, but that doesn’t mean that anything in the brain is actually “colored”. This is a paradox, but it allows people to preserve the sense that they understand reality.
You asked for a simple exposition but that’s just not easy. Certainly color ought to be a very simple example: it’s there in reality, it’s not there in physics. But let me try to express my thoughts about the actual nature of color… it’s an elementary property instantiated in certain submanifolds of the total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs existing at the object pole of a monadic intentionality which is formally a slice through the worldline of a big coherent tensor factor in the Machian quantum geometry which is the brain’s exact microphysical state… it’s almost better just to say nothing, until I’ve written some treatise which explains all my terms and their motivations.
I only made my original comment because you spontaneously expressed perplexity at the nature of “sentience”, and I wanted to warn you against the false solutions that most rationalist-materialists will adopt, under the self-generated pressure to explain everything using just the narrow ontological concepts they already have.
This is hard to reply on. I really wish to not insult you, I really do, but I have to say some harsh words. I do not mean this as any form of personal attack.
You are confused, you are decieving yourself, you are pretending to be wise, you are trying to make yourself unconfused my moving your confusion into such a complicated framework that you loose track of it.
Halt, melt and catch fire. It is time to say a loud and resounding “whoops.”
You seemingly have something you think is a great idea. I can discern that it is about ontology and something about a dichotomy between “physical things” and “mental? things” and how “color” and related concepts exists in neither? I am a reasonably intelligent man, and I can literally not make sense of what you are communicating. You yourself admit you cannot summarize your thoughts which is almost always a bad sign.
What evidence do you have?
This is literally false for almost any branch of computer- or natural science.
How do you know that?
This is either a strawman or a misunderstanding. What rational and reductionist inference in a lawful universe is about is saying “this looks complicated, I bet if we break it up the parts are simpler.”
And you need to elaborate on ” reflective, phenomenological approach.” A lot.
Color is a convenient shorthand for *counts* about 20 different (off the top of my head) computational or mathematically fundamental properties in physics (from chromodynamics to RGB to retinae responses to visual cortex neuro-activity, naming a few). It is a short comunicative entity, if you remove the mind that understands “color” in a context the syllables themselves are devoid of meaning.
I hereby define “Wakalixes” to mean “The frequency of oscilliation of space-propagating electromagnetic/electric oscilliation patterns as predicted by Maxwells equations.” Is Wakalixes physically meaningless? I hope not. Is “Wakalixes” and arbitrary combination of syllables? Yes. When I from now on speak of Wakalixes I hope that we can use it to describe us some good old Maxwelian optics.
The point is, the word is not important, the redefinition not even. The important part is do you understand what I am saying? The Wakalixes of what I call “the color green” lies roughly between 1.734e-15 seconds and 1.901e-15 seconds.
The same can be said about me defining “Wokypokies” to mean “that kind of neurological response exhibited in the visual cortex of a heathly human when her retinae are exposed to a lot of Wakalixes between 1.267e-15 seconds and 2.468e-15 seconds (combinations of many different Wakalixes in complex patterns included)”
What part of “Wakalixes” and “Wokypokies” being things we normally refer to as “Color” do you have an objection against? What part of them is “not existing”?
Yes. Nothing new there, color is mere Wakalixes, it is only when a mind is involved it turns into Wokypokies!
No it doesn’t.
I don’t. Most of my friends don’t. Also, quit using “color” and describe what you actually mean when you say “color” instead. It seems you are committing the standard philosophical fallacy of reasoning by homonyms.
No it isn’t.
Strawman.
Warning sign. Tread carefully, pinpoint inferential distances, write equations. Ontology in this universe is mathematically simple and I am good at maths, try me.
It is, you are complicating it trying to think tongue in cheek big thoughts.
Are we even talking about Wakalixes or Wokypokies anymore?
So color isn’t Wakalixes? Or it isn’t Wokypokies? Can you write that in an equation? Why not just say “brain’s exact microphysical state”? Wasn’t monadic intentionality disproven? Are you really, really, really sure you are not overcomplicating stuff? Like, really sure?
Can color not just be Wakalixes or Wokypokies? Does this explaination of color let you make advance predictions about, say, blind people? Colourblindness? Whether we can agree on something being “green”?
Also, just how microphysical? Don’t you need quantum gravity to describe it in suficcient detail? What about thermal noise?
Wow. Just wow. I legitimately feel sorry for you.
Go read the core sequences again. Especially Mysterious Questions and Humans Guide to words.
You may see the unacknowledged dualism to which I refer, in the phrase “how an algorithm feels from inside”. This implies that the facts about a sentient computer or sentient brain consist of (1) all the physical facts (locations of particles, or whatever the ultimate physical properties are) (2) “how it feels” to be the entity.
All those many definitions of color will be found on one side or the other side of that divide, usually on the “physical” side. The original meaning of color is usually shunted off to “experienced color”, “subjective color”, “color qualia”, and so on. It ends up on the “feeling” side.
People generally notice at some point that the “color feelings” don’t exist on the physical side. Nothing there is actually red, actually green, etc, in the original sense of those words. There are two main ways of dealing with this. Either you say that there aren’t any real color feelings, there’s just a feeling of color feelings that is somehow a side effect of information processing. Or, you say that subjective conscious experience is a terrible mystery, but one day we’ll solve it somehow. (On this site, I nominate orthonormal as a representative of the first option, and Richard Kennaway of the second option.)
The third option, which I represent, says this: The only way to admit the existence of consciousness, and believe in physics, and not believe in dualism, is for the “feelings” to be the physical entities. They aren’t “how it feels to be” some particular entity which is fundamentally defined in “non-feeling” terms, and which plays a certain causal role in the physical description of the world. The “feelings” themselves (the qualia, if you prefer that term) have to be causally active. The qualia must enter physics at a fundamental level, not in an emergent, abstracted, or epiphenomenal way.
They will have an abstracted mathematical description, in terms of their causal role, but it is wrong to say that they are nothing but That Which Plays A Certain Causal Role; yet this is all you can say about them, so long as you only allow physical, causal, and functional analysis. And this is the blue pill that most rationalists and materialists swallow. It keeps them on the merry-go-round, finding consciousness an unfathomable mystery which always eludes analysis, yet confident that eventually they will catch up and understand it using just their existing conceptual toolkit.
If you really want to understand it, you have to get off the merry-go-round, deal with consciousness on its own terms, and make a theory which by design contains it from the beginning. So you don’t say: I can understand almost everything in terms of interacting elementary particles, but there’s something elusive about the mind that I can’t quite fathom… Instead you say: reality is that I exist, that I am experiencing these qualia, they come in certain types and forms, and the total gestalt of qualia that I experience evolves from moment to moment in a systematic way. Therefore, my theory of reality must contain an entity with all these attributes. How can I reconcile this fact with the instrumental success of a theory based on elementary particles?
If I were to tell you that I have a theory, according to which there’s a single big long superstring that extends through a large part of the cortex (which is made up of ordinary, simple superstrings), and that the physical dynamics causes parts of the string to be knotted and unknotted like an Inca quipu tally device, and that this superstring is the “global workspace” of consciousness, you might be extremely skeptical, but you should at least understand what I’m saying, because it conforms to the familiar computational idea of consciousness. In the end I would just be saying, there’s this physical thing, it undergoes various transformations of state, they have a computational interpretation, and oh yeah, our conscious experience is just how this alleged stringy computation “feels from the inside”.
What I am saying is less than this and more than this. I am indeed saying that the physical correlate of consciousness in the brain is some physical subsystem that needs to be understood at a fundamental physical level; but I only have tentative, speculative, vague hypotheses about what it might be. But I am also saying that the “physical” description is only an abstracted one. The ontological reality is some sort of “structure”, that probably deserves the name “self”, and which contains the “qualia” (such as color in the primary sense of the word), and about which it is rather difficult to say anything directly, but this is why a person needs to study phenomenology—in order to develop rigor and fluency in their direct descriptions of subjective experience.
The historical roots of natural science, especially physics, include a deliberate methodological choice, to ignore “feelings”, colors, thoughts, and the whole “subjective pole” of experience, in order to focus on quantity, causality, shape, space, and time. As a result, we have a scientific culture with a highly developed model of the world employing only those categories, and generations of individuals who are technically adept at thinking within those categories. But of course the subjective pole is still there in reality, although badly understood and conceptualized. In an attempt to think about it, this scientific culture tries to utilize the categories it knows about; and this gives the mystery of consciousness its peculiar flavor. We could explain everything else using just these categories; how can it not work here as well!
But in turning our attention to the subjective pole, we are confronting precisely that part of reality which was excluded from consideration in order to create the scientific paradigm. It has its own categories, to which we give inadequate names like qualia, intentionality, and subjectivity, which have been studied in scientifically shunned disciplines like “transcendental phenomenology” and “existential phenomenology”; and a real understanding of consciousness will not be obtained using just the scientifically familiar categories. We need an ontology which combines the familiar and the unfamiliar categories.
So if I am hard to understand, remember that I am not just stating an idiosyncratic hypothesis about the physical locus of consciousness, I am trying to hint at how that physical locus would be described in an ontology yet to come, in which the subjective ontology of qualia and the self is the primary way that we talk about it, and in which the physical description in terms of causal role is just a black-box abstraction away from this.
The usual materialist approach is the inverse: physics as we know it and conceptualize it now is fundamental, and psychology is an abstracted description of brain physics and brain computation. But the concepts of physics were already obtained by looking away from part of reality, in order to focus on another part; we aren’t going to get the excluded part back by abstracting even further, from physics to computation.
Hopefully I have addressed most of your questions now, albeit indirectly.
That accurately characterises my view. I’d just like to clarify it by saying that by “somehow, one day” I’m not pushing it off to Far-Far-Land (the rationalist version of Never-Never-Land). For all I know, “one day” could be today, and “we” could be you. I think it fairly unlikely, but that’s just an expression of my ignorance, not my evidence. On the other hand, it could be as far off as electron microscopes from the ancient Greeks.
You’re begging the question. I think you mean it doesn’t seem obvious that a functional process is a feeling of color. You object to the fact that we don’t recognize ourselves with certainty in this description. And yet you know that functionalism doesn’t predict certain recognition. You know that it would seem, if not directly self-contradictory per Gödel and Löb, at least rather surprising for a mind in a functionalist world to find functionalism intuitively obvious when viewed from this angle.
But we don’t have to speculate about the limits of self-consciousness in humans. We know for a fact that a lot of ‘unconscious’ processing takes place during perception. And orthonormal provides a credible account of how that could produce thoughts like yours.
I would actually say that if you think a functionally-human version of “Martha” would not have consciousness, your intuition is broken. So now we have an impasse between dueling intuitions. I suppose you could try to argue that one intuition seems more reliable than the other. Or we could just admit that they aren’t reliable.
There are no fundamental “feelings.” The map of reality exists inside a brain which is a part of reality. Your modal logic and monad tensor algebra is unnecessary and meaningless. Everything you say has simpler explanations. You’re begging the question, you show clear signs of self deception.
The universe is fundamentally simple, only in our map-of-the-universe do we pretend that things are different in order to compress the information.
You are misusing words. Like, basic errors.
And I am not going to take apart your wall-of-text philosophy. Come back when you have equations and predictions. Until then I am a material reductionist.
Halt, melt, catch fire. Now. Unless you Aumann up, this conversation is over.
Aumann agreement is a cooperative process. Flying off the handle in the face of persistent disagreement does not look like part of such a process.
For you and Mitchell Porter, that is probably the best achievable outcome.
I think the confusion here stems from the fact that the word “color” has two different meanings.
When physicists talk about “color”, what they mean is, “a specific wavelength of light”. Let’s call this “color-a”.
When biologists or sociologists (or graphic artists) talk about “color”, what they mean is, “a series of biochemical reactions in the brain which is usually the result of certain wavelengths of light hitting the retina”. Let’s call this “color-b”.
Both “color-a” and “color-b” are physical phenomena, but they are distinct. As it happens, “color-b” is often caused by “color-a”, but that isn’t always the case. And we can often map “color-b” back onto a single “color-a”, but that isn’t always the case either; for example, the “color-b” we know as “brown” depends on local contrast, and thus does not have a single “color-a” cause.
This confusion in terms makes philosophical discussions confusing, but that’s just an artifact of the English language. The concepts themselves are relatively simple, IMO.
Using the distinction I introduce here, both your color-a and your color-b are on the “physics side”, but there absolutely has to be color on the “feeling side” as well; that’s the original meaning of color and the one that we know about directly.
Now, in real life I have a deadline to meet, and further communications will be delayed for a few days, if I’m wise…
I think you may be somewhat confused about Eliezer’s terminology. You say:
But the original article does not propose any kind of a dualism. Instead (IMO), it attempts to expose certain mental biases inherent to all humans, which are caused by the specific ways in which our neural hardware is configured: “Because we don’t instinctively see our intuitions as “intuitions”, we just see them as the world”.
You say that...
But people “generally notice” a lot of things, including the existence of gods and demons, and the shape of the Earth, which is flat. Just because people notice something, doesn’t mean it’s there (but it doesn’t mean it’s not there, either). You go on to say that materialists are...
But this just isn’t true. We know a lot (though not everything) about how our consciousness operates; in fact, we can even observe some of it happening in real time under fMRI scans. Sure, some philosophers might wax poetic about the grand mystery of consciousness, but they are the same kinds of people who waxed poetic about the grand mystery of the heavens before Newtonian Mechanics was discovered.
Thus, I’m not convinced that...
...assuming of course that by “feeling side” you mean something distinct from brain-states. I could be wrong, of course; but since you are making the positive proposition about the existence of qualia, the burden of proof is on you.
Do you mean ‘intensionality’? (and should we worry that the Chrome spell check recognizes neither of these words?)
This sounds like you mean “the perception of color is a brain state”. Am I missing something?
I definitely mean intentionality with a T.
Again, see my latest comments, on the need to reintroduce at a fundamental level, ontological categories which have been excluded as subjective in order to build the scientific model of the world. I am hinting that, rather than intentionality being an abstraction from a mass of microphysical causal relations, the locus of consciousness is a specific, complex, but microphysically exactly bounded object, whose actual ontology includes intentionality, and for which the standard physical description would be the abstracted one.
That is, in reality the world consists of a causal network of “monads”, some of which have extremely complex intentionality, but most of which are simple and are entirely pre- or non-intentional in their nature; but that the mathematical representation of this ontology is the “Machian quantum geometry” of “coherent tensor factors”. Machian quantum geometry is not a well-defined mathematical concept, it’s a rhetorical construct meant to suggest a quantum geometry based on matter (analogous to Ernst Mach’s ideas). The monads are the “matter”, the “geometry” encodes their immediate causal relations… This is handwaving meant to convey the gist of a way of thinking.
OK, so, I perceive certain things are red, and I perceive certain groups of things as numbering four.
On your account, I perceive the “redness” by virtue of an elementary property instantiated in certain submanifolds of the total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs existing at the object pole of a monadic intentionality which is formally a slice through the worldline of a big coherent tensor factor in the Machian quantum geometry which is the brain’s exact microphysical state. OK.
On your account, do I perceive the “fourness” the same way? Or is that different?
To understand my position, first see this latest comment. It is that physical ontology is a subset of the true ontology, a bit like replacing a meaningful communication with a tree diagram. The tree structure is present in the original communication, and it inhabits everything to do with syntax and semantics, but the tree structure does not in itself contain the meaning.
Analogously, everything following ”...which is formally...” is the abstracted description of consciousness, in mathematical/physical terms. The true ontology is the stuff about monadic intentionality with a subjective pole and an objective pole. My supposition is that this takes a finite number of bits to describe, and if you were to just talk about the structure and dynamics of those bits, solely in physical and computational terms, you would find yourself talking about (e.g.) nested qubit structures in the Hilbert space of entangled microtubular electrons. (That last is not a hypothesis that I advance with deadly seriousness and specificity, it’s just usefully concrete.)
So if you want to talk about the basis of perception and knowledge, there are two levels available. There is the physical-computational level, and then the level of “true ontology”. Perception and knowledge are really concepts at the deeper, truer level, because in truth they involve the “subjective” categories like intentionality, as well as the purely “objective” ones like structure and cause. But they will have their abstracted counterparts on the computational level of description.
In principle, the way we learn about the scientifically neglected subjective side of ontology is through phenomenology, i.e. introspection of an unusually systematic and rigorous sort, usually conducted in a doubting-Cartesian mode in which you put to one side the question of whether there is an external world causing your perceptions, and just focus on the nature of the perceptions themselves. Your question—what’s going on when you perceive something as red, what’s going on when you perceive fourness, and is there any difference—should be answered by introspective comparison of the two states.
In practice, any such introspection and comparison is likely to already be “theory-laden”. This is one of the difficulties of the subject. Consider the very idea of intentionality, the idea that consciousness is all about a subject perceiving an object under an aspect. Now that I have the concept, it seems ubiquitously valid—every example of consciousness that I come upon, can be analyzed this way—and that offers a retroactive validation of the concept. But I can’t say that I know how to get into a subjective state whereby I am agnostic about the existence of intentionality, and then have the intentional structure of consciousness forced upon me anyway, in the way that the existence of colors is impossible to deny. Maybe it becomes possible, at a higher level of phenomenological proficiency, to achieve a direct awareness of the reasons for believing in intentionality; or maybe it’s a concept that is only ever validated in that retroactive way: once you have it, it becomes supremely plausible because of its analytical utility, but it’s something that you have to hypothesize and “test” against the phenomenological “data”, it’s not something you can just “see directly” in the data.
My ideas about the difference between perceiving redness and perceiving fourness are on that level, at best; they are ideas that I picked up somehow, and which I can test against experience, but for which I don’t have a subjective procedure which demonstrates them without presupposition, which is the epistemological gold standard for phenomenology…
A perceptual state of consciousness involves a “total object” which is “present” to a subject. This total object is what I called the “total instantaneous phenomenal state of affairs”, by definition it’s the union of all current objects of awareness; the “world” you are experiencing at a given moment. Some of these objects will be continua of qualia; for example, the total visual component of an experience. The subjective visual field is part of the world-object, along with other sensory continua. The subjective visual field isn’t homogeneous, its hue, intensity, and value varies from location to location. This variation constitutes its form.
So far this is just a crude ontological analysis of the object end of an experience. When you ask how we perceive redness and fourness, you’re also asking for an ontological analysis of how the object end relates to the subject end. In principle, that should derive from a phenomenological analysis of perceiving red and perceiving four… The trouble lies in distinguishing the component of the experience which is posited, from the component of the experience which is “given”—the part of the experience which is just there. I think fourness is posited on the basis of simpler local structural forms which are given, and I think there is a crude difference between red and, say, green, which is given, but more specific identification of colors requires conceptual synthesis, e.g. you have to notice that the shade of color is not just red, it’s also dark, and then you can say it’s a dark red.
Bertrand Russell and others talked about “knowledge by acquaintance” versus other forms of indirectly obtained knowledge; “knowledge by acquaintance” is the direct knowing that comes from direct awareness. So that which is given is known by acquaintance, and that which is posited is at best known to be consistent with experience. In this language, we know a shade of color as red-not-green by acquaintance, and we know that it is dark by acquaintance, but we know that it is dark red only by conceptual synthesis. And I think that a perception of fourness similarly arises from conceptual synthesis of more primitive facts that we know by acquaintance…
But one of the most challenging things is to say something convincing or even comprehensible about the direct awareness of objects by a subject. Should we treat qualia and this “total object” as part of the self, or as something external to the self that it’s “aware of”? Is the awareness something that is caused by a particular relation between self and object, or is it the relation itself?
It’s quite understandable why people prefer to focus on neurons, computation, and impersonal descriptions. If the physical side of my idea were ever validated, this would mean focusing on qubits, electron states, and so forth. But in the end, the vague and confusing subjective language of subject, object, awareness, acquaintance… would have to apply to entities and relations for which we also had a physical description. The “objective pole of the monadic intentionality” might correspond to “the union of all the leaves of the tree in the quantum data structure”, and the “subjective pole” might be “the union of all the edges connected to the root node”. (Undoubtedly that’s not how it is, but again, concrete example for the purpose of discussion...)
You see intimations of this promised fusion between neurophysical, computational, and subjective ontologies when people have a feeling that it’s all come together in their heads in a marvelous heap. “I am the computation, as well as the computer performing the computation!” might be how they express it, and behind this is a cognitive phenomenology in which there has been a miniature crossover and fusion of specific concepts from the different ontologies. I don’t believe anyone has yet seen the truth of how it works, but the occasional illusion of insight gives us a foretaste of how the actual knowledge would feel, and meanwhile we need to keep switching back and forth between speculative synthesis and critical analysis, in order to make incremental progress. I just think getting to the answer requires a big leap in a new direction that’s hard to convey.
If you intended to answer my question, you might want to know that after reading your response, I still have no idea whether on your account perceiving some system as comprised of four things requires some ontologically distinct noncomputational something-or-other in the same way that perceiving a system as red does.
If you intended to use my question as a launching pad from which to expound your philosophy, or intended to be obscurantist, then you might not.
Aha! Only now do I understand exactly what you were asking.
Recap: I complain that colors, such as redness, exist in reality, but not in physics as we describe it now, not even in the physics of the brain. So I just postulate that somewhere in the brain are entities, “manifolds of qualia”, which will have a naturalistic, mathematical description as physical degres of freedom, but which in their full ontological reality are actually red.
So great, I’ve “saved the phenomenon”, my ontology contains true color. But now I need an ontological account of awareness of color. Reality contains awareness of redness, just as much as it contains redness. This is why I started talking about “positing” and “givenness” and the subjective pole of intentionality—because that stuff is needed in order to say what awareness is.
The question about fourness starts out looking simpler than that. If you asked, Does your ontology contain redness, I can say, Yes; it contains qualia-manifolds, and they can be genuinely red. The question about fourness seems quite analogous. If there is a square in your visual field, do I claim that there is a platonic property of fourness inhabiting your manifold of visual qualia?
I believe in the existence of colors, but I am a skeptic about the existence of numbers. You might get away with a metaphysics in which there are no number-entities, just states of processes for counting. I’m not sure; if numbers are real, they might be properties of collections… but I’m a skeptic.
More importantly, my ontology of conscious states gives redness and fourness a different status, which allows me to be agnostic about whether or not there’s a real “essence of fourness” inhabiting the visual sensation of a square. I hypothesize that the entity “redness” (more precisely, a particular shade of redness) is itself part of the entity, “awareness of that shade of redness”; but that “awareness of fourness” does not contain any correspondingly real “fourness”. Analysed, it would be more like “awareness of a group of lines to which the concept of fourness is posited to apply”, or perhaps “awareness of a group of lines together with the awareness that they are being categorized as a foursome by your nervous system”. I’m willing to countenance a functionalist account of number “perception”, but not of color perception.
I hope that this answer, if not intellectually satisfying, at least addresses the question. And now, back to work for a few days…
OK, cool. That does indeed address the question, thank you.
When you have the time, I would be interested in your thoughts about what sort of evidence might convince you that a functionalist account of number “perception” is inadequate in the same way that (on your account) a functionalist account of color perception is.