I’ll only answer with an analogy. Visualize a cluster of magnetized particles on a hard disk platters. Billions of atoms linked with complicated quantum electromagnetic fields. A magnetic head goes over them. It fires electrical currents, that are sent a semi-conductor. That semi-conductor then starts doing computation, which is just electrons flowing from one part to another, from a semi-conductor to another. And then, another flow of electrons fired by a electron gun and hitting a screen, and they end up printing numbers.
You have that in your mind’s eye ? Now, those numbers are the digits of Pi. According to my theory, the digits of Pi that appears on the screen are the same thing as some aspect of all those billions of Pi-less atoms in motion. Well, yes, and ? There is no dualism involved in that.
As for something being “green”, we can detect “green” with webcams and computers. My Gimp as a “anti-red eye filter” that can not only detect a kind of red and even its shape, and remove it. Being green is a very physical property of light, or of matter that emits/absorbs light. There is even less dualism in that than in my Pi example, or in any other kind of file (text, pictures, sound, movie, …) stored in a hard disk.
Both you and prase seem to be missing the point. The experience of green has nothing to with wavelengths of light. Wavelengths of light are completely incidental to the experience. Why? Because you can experience the qualia of green thanks to synesthesia. Likewise, if you take LSD at a sufficient dose, you will experience a lot of colors that are unrelated to the particular input your senses are receiving. Finally, you can also experience such color in a dream. I did that last night.
The experience of green is not the result of information-processing that works to discriminate between wavelengths of light. Instead, the experience of green was recruited by natural selection to be part of an information-processing system that discriminates between wavelengths of light. If it had been more convenient, less energetically costly, more easily accessible in the neighborhood of exploration, etc. evolution would have recruited entirely different qualia in order to achieve the exact same information-processing tasks color currently takes part in.
In other words, stating what stimuli triggers the phenomenology is not going to help at all in elucidating the very nature of color qualia. For all we know, other people may experience feelings of heat and cold instead of colors (locally bounded to objects in their 2.5D visual field), and still behave reasonably well as judged by outside observers.
The experience of green has nothing to with wavelengths of light. Wavelengths of light are completely incidental to the experience.
Not at all. The experience of green is the way our information processing system internally represent “light of green wavelength”, nothing else. That if you voluntarily mess up with your cognitive hardware by taking drugs, or that during background maintenance tasks, or that “bugs” in the processing system can lead to “experience of green” when there is no real green to be perceived doesn’t change anything about it—the experience of green is the way “green wavelenngth” is encoded in our information processing system, nothing less, nothing more.
I have seen this argument before, and I must confess that I am very puzzled about the kind of mistake that is going on here. I might call it naïve functionalist realism, or something like that. So whereas in “standard” naïve realism people find it hard to dissociate their experiences with an existing mind-independent world, they then go on to perceive everything as “seeing the world directly, nothing else, nothing more.” Naïve realists will interpret their experiences as direct, unmediated, impressions of the real world.
Of course this is a problematic view, and there killer arguments against it. For instance, hallucinations. However, naïve realists can still come back and say that you are talking about cases of “misapprehension”, where you don’t really perceive the world directly anymore. That does not mean you “weren’t perceiving the world directly before.” But here the naïve realist has simply not integrated the argument in a rational way. If you need to explain hallucinations as “failed representations of true objects” you don’t, anymore, need to in addition restate one’s previous belief in “perceiving the world directly.” Now you end up having two ontologies instead of one: Inner representations and also direct perception. And yet, you only need one: Inner representations.
Analogously, I would describe your argument as naïve functionalist realism. Here you first see a certain function associated to an experience, and you decide to skip the experience altogether and simply focus on the function. In itself, this is reasonable, since the data can be accounted for with no problem. But when I mention LSD and dream, suddenly that is part of another category like a “bug” in one’s mind. So here you have two ontologies, where you can certainly explain it all with just one.
Namely, the green is a particular qualia, which gets triggered under particular circumstances. Green does not refer to the wavelength of light that triggers it, since you can experience it without such light. To instead postulate that this is in fact just a “bug” of the original function, but that the original function is in and of itself what green is, simply adds another ontology which, when taken on its own, already can account for the phenomena.
No, it is much more simple than that—“green” is a wavelength of light, and “the feeling of green” is how the information “green” is encoded in your information processing system, that’s it. No special ontology for qualia or whatever. Qualia isn’t a fundamental component of the universe like quarks and photons are, it’s only encoding of information in your brain.
But yes, how reality is encoded in an information system sometimes doesn’t match the external world, the information system can be wrong. That’s a natural, direct consequence of that ontology, not a new postulate, and definitely not any other ontology. The fact that “the feeling of green” is how “green wavelength” is encoded in an information processing system automatically implies that if you perturbate the information processing system by giving it LSD, it may very well encode “green wavelength” without “green wavelength” being actually present.
In short, ontology is not the right level to look at qualia—qualia is information in a (very) complex information processing system, it has no fundamental existence. Trying to explain it at an ontological level just make you ask invalid questions.
Green is not a wavelength of light. Last time I checked, wavelength is measured in units of length, not in words. We might call light of wavelength 520nm “green” if we want, and we do BECAUSE we are conscious and we have the qualia of green whenever we see light of wavelength 520nm. But this is only a shorthand, a convention. For all I know, other people might see light of wavelength 520nm as red (i.e. what I describe as red, i.e. light of wavelength 700nm), but refer to it as green because there is no direct way to compare the qualia.
I’m not sure how the first two paragraphs are analogous to consciousness at all. Yes, the screen prints out numbers. These printed numbers are still mere physical entities. The screen doesn’t really produce the number Pi from the physical objects, it just manipulates the physical objects. Consciousness is not about manipulating physical objects, as two identical physical configurations could correspond to two distinct conscious experiences.
As for something being “green”, we can detect “green” with webcams and computers. My Gimp as a “anti-red eye filter” that can not only detect a kind of red and even its shape, and remove it. Being green is a very physical property of light, or of matter that emits/absorbs light. There is even less dualism in that than in my Pi example, or in any other kind of file (text, pictures, sound, movie, …) stored in a hard disk.
Haha, no. Strictly speaking, we cannot detect “green” with webcams or computers (such an expression is only a simplification). We can detect light of a particular wavelength with a camera and we can detect a particular value of the G channel with a computer. But that’s not the green color. The green color is what we see (and we can’t even be sure that we see the same color when we use the word “green”). Any equivalence between that and the state of a camera of disk memory is false.
I’ll only answer with an analogy. Visualize a cluster of magnetized particles on a hard disk platters. Billions of atoms linked with complicated quantum electromagnetic fields. A magnetic head goes over them. It fires electrical currents, that are sent a semi-conductor. That semi-conductor then starts doing computation, which is just electrons flowing from one part to another, from a semi-conductor to another. And then, another flow of electrons fired by a electron gun and hitting a screen, and they end up printing numbers.
You have that in your mind’s eye ? Now, those numbers are the digits of Pi. According to my theory, the digits of Pi that appears on the screen are the same thing as some aspect of all those billions of Pi-less atoms in motion. Well, yes, and ? There is no dualism involved in that.
As for something being “green”, we can detect “green” with webcams and computers. My Gimp as a “anti-red eye filter” that can not only detect a kind of red and even its shape, and remove it. Being green is a very physical property of light, or of matter that emits/absorbs light. There is even less dualism in that than in my Pi example, or in any other kind of file (text, pictures, sound, movie, …) stored in a hard disk.
Both you and prase seem to be missing the point. The experience of green has nothing to with wavelengths of light. Wavelengths of light are completely incidental to the experience. Why? Because you can experience the qualia of green thanks to synesthesia. Likewise, if you take LSD at a sufficient dose, you will experience a lot of colors that are unrelated to the particular input your senses are receiving. Finally, you can also experience such color in a dream. I did that last night.
The experience of green is not the result of information-processing that works to discriminate between wavelengths of light. Instead, the experience of green was recruited by natural selection to be part of an information-processing system that discriminates between wavelengths of light. If it had been more convenient, less energetically costly, more easily accessible in the neighborhood of exploration, etc. evolution would have recruited entirely different qualia in order to achieve the exact same information-processing tasks color currently takes part in.
In other words, stating what stimuli triggers the phenomenology is not going to help at all in elucidating the very nature of color qualia. For all we know, other people may experience feelings of heat and cold instead of colors (locally bounded to objects in their 2.5D visual field), and still behave reasonably well as judged by outside observers.
Not at all. The experience of green is the way our information processing system internally represent “light of green wavelength”, nothing else. That if you voluntarily mess up with your cognitive hardware by taking drugs, or that during background maintenance tasks, or that “bugs” in the processing system can lead to “experience of green” when there is no real green to be perceived doesn’t change anything about it—the experience of green is the way “green wavelenngth” is encoded in our information processing system, nothing less, nothing more.
I have seen this argument before, and I must confess that I am very puzzled about the kind of mistake that is going on here. I might call it naïve functionalist realism, or something like that. So whereas in “standard” naïve realism people find it hard to dissociate their experiences with an existing mind-independent world, they then go on to perceive everything as “seeing the world directly, nothing else, nothing more.” Naïve realists will interpret their experiences as direct, unmediated, impressions of the real world.
Of course this is a problematic view, and there killer arguments against it. For instance, hallucinations. However, naïve realists can still come back and say that you are talking about cases of “misapprehension”, where you don’t really perceive the world directly anymore. That does not mean you “weren’t perceiving the world directly before.” But here the naïve realist has simply not integrated the argument in a rational way. If you need to explain hallucinations as “failed representations of true objects” you don’t, anymore, need to in addition restate one’s previous belief in “perceiving the world directly.” Now you end up having two ontologies instead of one: Inner representations and also direct perception. And yet, you only need one: Inner representations.
Analogously, I would describe your argument as naïve functionalist realism. Here you first see a certain function associated to an experience, and you decide to skip the experience altogether and simply focus on the function. In itself, this is reasonable, since the data can be accounted for with no problem. But when I mention LSD and dream, suddenly that is part of another category like a “bug” in one’s mind. So here you have two ontologies, where you can certainly explain it all with just one.
Namely, the green is a particular qualia, which gets triggered under particular circumstances. Green does not refer to the wavelength of light that triggers it, since you can experience it without such light. To instead postulate that this is in fact just a “bug” of the original function, but that the original function is in and of itself what green is, simply adds another ontology which, when taken on its own, already can account for the phenomena.
No, it is much more simple than that—“green” is a wavelength of light, and “the feeling of green” is how the information “green” is encoded in your information processing system, that’s it. No special ontology for qualia or whatever. Qualia isn’t a fundamental component of the universe like quarks and photons are, it’s only encoding of information in your brain.
But yes, how reality is encoded in an information system sometimes doesn’t match the external world, the information system can be wrong. That’s a natural, direct consequence of that ontology, not a new postulate, and definitely not any other ontology. The fact that “the feeling of green” is how “green wavelength” is encoded in an information processing system automatically implies that if you perturbate the information processing system by giving it LSD, it may very well encode “green wavelength” without “green wavelength” being actually present.
In short, ontology is not the right level to look at qualia—qualia is information in a (very) complex information processing system, it has no fundamental existence. Trying to explain it at an ontological level just make you ask invalid questions.
Green is not a wavelength of light. Last time I checked, wavelength is measured in units of length, not in words. We might call light of wavelength 520nm “green” if we want, and we do BECAUSE we are conscious and we have the qualia of green whenever we see light of wavelength 520nm. But this is only a shorthand, a convention. For all I know, other people might see light of wavelength 520nm as red (i.e. what I describe as red, i.e. light of wavelength 700nm), but refer to it as green because there is no direct way to compare the qualia.
I’m not sure how the first two paragraphs are analogous to consciousness at all. Yes, the screen prints out numbers. These printed numbers are still mere physical entities. The screen doesn’t really produce the number Pi from the physical objects, it just manipulates the physical objects. Consciousness is not about manipulating physical objects, as two identical physical configurations could correspond to two distinct conscious experiences.
Haha, no. Strictly speaking, we cannot detect “green” with webcams or computers (such an expression is only a simplification). We can detect light of a particular wavelength with a camera and we can detect a particular value of the G channel with a computer. But that’s not the green color. The green color is what we see (and we can’t even be sure that we see the same color when we use the word “green”). Any equivalence between that and the state of a camera of disk memory is false.
So Mary would be able to figure out what Red looks like in her room?