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.
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.