I’m used to using the word “green” to describe objects that reflect certain wavelengths of light (which are interpreted in a certain way by the human visual system)
But you would have been using the word “green” before you knew about wavelengths of light, or had the idea that your experiences were somehow the product of your brain. Green originally denotes a very basic phenomenon, a type of color. As a child you may have been a “naive realist”, thinking that what you see is the world itself. Now you think of your experience as something in your brain, with causes outside the brain. But the experience itself has not changed. In particular, green things are still actually green, even if they are now understood as “part of an experience that is inside one’s brain” rather than “part of the world outside one’s body”.
“Interpretation” is too abstract a word to describe something as concrete as color. It provides yet another way to dodge the reality of color itself. You don’t say that the act of falling over is an “interpretation” of being in the Earth’s gravitation field. The green experiences are green, they’re not just “interpreted as green”.
It feels odd to me to say that a brain is green—after all, they don’t look green when you’re cutting open a skull to see what’s inside of it.
Since we are assuming that our experiences are parts of our brains, this would be the wrong way to think about it anyway. Your experience of anything, including cutting open someone else’s skull, is supposed to be an object inside your own brain, and any properties of that experience are properties of part of your own brain. You won’t see the color in another brain by looking at it. But somehow, you see the color in your own brain by being it.
If “green” in Mitchell-Porter-English means the same thing as “experiences the sensation of greenness” does in CronoDAS-English
The latter expression again pushes away the real issue—is there such a thing as actual greenness or not. We earlier had some quotes from an Australian philosopher, JJC Smart, who would say there are “experiences of green”, but there’s no actual green. He says this because he’s a materialist, so he believes that all there is in reality is just neurons doing their thing, and he knows that standard physical ontology doesn’t contain anything like actual green. He has to deny the reality of one of the most obviously real things there is, but, at least he takes a stand.
On the other hand, someone else who talks about “experiences of green” might decide that what they mean is exactly the same thing as they would have meant by green, when they were a child and a direct realist. Talking about experience in this case is just a way to emphasize the adult understanding of what it is that one directly experiences—parts of your own brain, rather than objects outside it. But independent of this attitude, you still face a choice: will you say that yes, green is there in the same way it ever was, or will you say that it just can’t be, because physics is true and physics contains no such thing as “actual green”?
Lot of words there… I hope I’m understanding better.
But independent of this attitude, you still face a choice: will you say that yes, green is there in the same way it ever was, or will you say that it just can’t be, because physics is true and physics contains no such thing as “actual green”?
This is what I’ve been trying to say: “Green” exists, and “green” is also present (indirectly) in physics. (I think.)
Not one of the fundamental properties, but definable in terms of them.
In other words, present in the same way “diamond” is—there’s no property “green” in the fundamental equations of physics, but it “emerges” from them, or can (in principle) be defined in terms of them. (I’m embarrassed to use the word “emergent”, but, well...)
To use an analogy, there’s no mention of “even numbers” in the axioms of Peano Arithmetic or in first order logic, but S(S(0)) is still even; evenness is present indirectly within Peano Arithmetic. You can talk about even numbers within Peano Arithmetic by writing a formula fragment that is true of all even numbers and false for all other numbers, and using that as your “definition” of even. (It would be something like “Ǝy(S(S(0))y) = x)”.) If I understand correctly, “standard physical ontology” is also a formal system, so the exact same trick should work for talking about concepts such as “diamond” or “green”—we just don’t happen to know (yet) how to define “green” the same way we can define “diamond” or “even”, but I’m pretty sure that, in principle, there is a way to do it.
is exactly like saying that if you count through the natural numbers, all of the numbers after 5 x 10^37 are blue.
Let’s compare the plausibility of getting colors out of combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology, and the plausibility of getting colors out of Peano Arithmetic. I think the two cases are quite similar. In both cases you have an infinite tower of increasingly complex conjunctive (etc) properties that can be defined in terms of an ontological base, but getting to color just from arithmetic or just from points arranged in space is asking for magic. (Whereas getting a diamond from points arranged in space is not problematic.)
There are quantifiable things you can say about subjective color, for example its three-dimensionality (hue, saturation, brightness). The color state of a visual region can be represented by a mapping from the region (as a two-dimensional set of points) into three-dimensional color space. So there ought to be a sense in which the actually colored parts of experience are instances of certain maps which are roughly of the form R^2 → R^3. (To be more precise, the range and domain will be certain subsets of R^2 and R^3.) But this doesn’t mean that a color experience can be identified with this mathematical object, or with a structurally isomorphic computational state.
You could say that my “methodology”, in attempting to construct a physical ontology that contains consciousness, is to discover as much as I can about the structure and constituent relations of a conscious experience, and then to insist that these are realized in the states of a physically elementary “state machine” rather than a virtual machine, because that allows me to be a realist about the “parts” of consciousness, and their properties.
Let’s compare the plausibility of getting colors out of combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology, and the plausibility of getting colors out of Peano Arithmetic.
In one sense, there already is a demonstration that you can get colors from the combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology: you can specify a brain in standard physical ontology. And, heck, maybe you can get colors out of Peano Arithmetic, too! ;)
At this point we have at least identified what we disagree on. I suspect that there is nothing more we can say about the topic that will affect each other’s opinion, so I’m going to withdraw from the discussion.
But you would have been using the word “green” before you knew about wavelengths of light, or had the idea that your experiences were somehow the product of your brain. Green originally denotes a very basic phenomenon, a type of color. As a child you may have been a “naive realist”, thinking that what you see is the world itself. Now you think of your experience as something in your brain, with causes outside the brain. But the experience itself has not changed. In particular, green things are still actually green, even if they are now understood as “part of an experience that is inside one’s brain” rather than “part of the world outside one’s body”.
“Interpretation” is too abstract a word to describe something as concrete as color. It provides yet another way to dodge the reality of color itself. You don’t say that the act of falling over is an “interpretation” of being in the Earth’s gravitation field. The green experiences are green, they’re not just “interpreted as green”.
Since we are assuming that our experiences are parts of our brains, this would be the wrong way to think about it anyway. Your experience of anything, including cutting open someone else’s skull, is supposed to be an object inside your own brain, and any properties of that experience are properties of part of your own brain. You won’t see the color in another brain by looking at it. But somehow, you see the color in your own brain by being it.
The latter expression again pushes away the real issue—is there such a thing as actual greenness or not. We earlier had some quotes from an Australian philosopher, JJC Smart, who would say there are “experiences of green”, but there’s no actual green. He says this because he’s a materialist, so he believes that all there is in reality is just neurons doing their thing, and he knows that standard physical ontology doesn’t contain anything like actual green. He has to deny the reality of one of the most obviously real things there is, but, at least he takes a stand.
On the other hand, someone else who talks about “experiences of green” might decide that what they mean is exactly the same thing as they would have meant by green, when they were a child and a direct realist. Talking about experience in this case is just a way to emphasize the adult understanding of what it is that one directly experiences—parts of your own brain, rather than objects outside it. But independent of this attitude, you still face a choice: will you say that yes, green is there in the same way it ever was, or will you say that it just can’t be, because physics is true and physics contains no such thing as “actual green”?
Lot of words there… I hope I’m understanding better.
This is what I’ve been trying to say: “Green” exists, and “green” is also present (indirectly) in physics. (I think.)
What does “present indirectly” mean?
Not one of the fundamental properties, but definable in terms of them.
In other words, present in the same way “diamond” is—there’s no property “green” in the fundamental equations of physics, but it “emerges” from them, or can (in principle) be defined in terms of them. (I’m embarrassed to use the word “emergent”, but, well...)
To use an analogy, there’s no mention of “even numbers” in the axioms of Peano Arithmetic or in first order logic, but S(S(0)) is still even; evenness is present indirectly within Peano Arithmetic. You can talk about even numbers within Peano Arithmetic by writing a formula fragment that is true of all even numbers and false for all other numbers, and using that as your “definition” of even. (It would be something like “Ǝy(S(S(0))y) = x)”.) If I understand correctly, “standard physical ontology” is also a formal system, so the exact same trick should work for talking about concepts such as “diamond” or “green”—we just don’t happen to know (yet) how to define “green” the same way we can define “diamond” or “even”, but I’m pretty sure that, in principle, there is a way to do it.
(I hope that made sense...)
Here I fall back on my earlier statement that this
Let’s compare the plausibility of getting colors out of combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology, and the plausibility of getting colors out of Peano Arithmetic. I think the two cases are quite similar. In both cases you have an infinite tower of increasingly complex conjunctive (etc) properties that can be defined in terms of an ontological base, but getting to color just from arithmetic or just from points arranged in space is asking for magic. (Whereas getting a diamond from points arranged in space is not problematic.)
There are quantifiable things you can say about subjective color, for example its three-dimensionality (hue, saturation, brightness). The color state of a visual region can be represented by a mapping from the region (as a two-dimensional set of points) into three-dimensional color space. So there ought to be a sense in which the actually colored parts of experience are instances of certain maps which are roughly of the form R^2 → R^3. (To be more precise, the range and domain will be certain subsets of R^2 and R^3.) But this doesn’t mean that a color experience can be identified with this mathematical object, or with a structurally isomorphic computational state.
You could say that my “methodology”, in attempting to construct a physical ontology that contains consciousness, is to discover as much as I can about the structure and constituent relations of a conscious experience, and then to insist that these are realized in the states of a physically elementary “state machine” rather than a virtual machine, because that allows me to be a realist about the “parts” of consciousness, and their properties.
In one sense, there already is a demonstration that you can get colors from the combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology: you can specify a brain in standard physical ontology. And, heck, maybe you can get colors out of Peano Arithmetic, too! ;)
At this point we have at least identified what we disagree on. I suspect that there is nothing more we can say about the topic that will affect each other’s opinion, so I’m going to withdraw from the discussion.