Over on Facebook (I don’t know if it’s possible to link to a Facebook post, but h/t Alexander Kruel) and Twitter, the subject of missing qualia has come up. Some people are color-blind. This deficiency can be objectively demonstrated by tasks such as the Ishihara patterns
Lacking the ability to distinguish colors well means your brain does not know which qualia to use, not that it doesn’t have all of the qualia available. I’m red/green color blind (according to the tests, and difficulty determining the color of small things), but I have very distinct red and green qualia. Most of the time my experience feels like “I’m unsure if this line is red or green”, which is different than “this line is red-green, as there is not actually a difference between the thing people call ‘red’ and the thing people call ‘green’”.
However, I have also had the experience of having red text show up as bright green and then switch on me. I was reading part of the sequences back in the day, and I could tell from the context that the word “GREEN” was supposed to be red (stroop tests), but my brain took that as a cue that the text was supposed to be green. When I brought my face closer to the screen to check, the text flipped to red. When I backed up it returned to green. In between, individual pieces of each letter would start to flip color.
That is very interesting, although it raises the old philosophical condundrum of whether your red and green, when you have them, are the same as mine (who am not colour-blind), or how much are they alike, despite the fact that my red and green are never confused with each other. Perhaps the hardware that does the qualia is the same, and doing what it can with limited data.
I heard of a blind man saying that although he had never seen the color red, he imagined that it must be something like the sound of a trumpet. I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for a vivid, pillar-box red. (Googling just now, I find the story is from Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, book 3, ch.4.)
That is extremely interesting to me. I’ve had the experience of gaining a new qualia (depth) alongside gaining a new skill (depth perception). I’ve talked to quite a few people who lack the qualia of depth but have some amount of the skill of depth perception. Some people can score a certain value on tests of depth perception while reporting that they don’t have the experience of depth, while others score that same amount and do report that they have the qualia. Whether or not you can do the task seems related but not always connected to whether or not your brain assigns that qualia to the task.
Before I was able to compute stereo depth from binocular disparity, I never remember experiencing the qualia of depth. For me, as soon as I was able to learn the skill, the qualia came with it for free. But, for many people, this does not seem to be the case, and no amount of the skill brings them the qualia. Or maybe the first and second groups are just not communicating well, it is hard to tell for sure!
Lacking the ability to distinguish colors well means your brain does not know which qualia to use, not that it doesn’t have all of the qualia available. I’m red/green color blind (according to the tests, and difficulty determining the color of small things), but I have very distinct red and green qualia. Most of the time my experience feels like “I’m unsure if this line is red or green”, which is different than “this line is red-green, as there is not actually a difference between the thing people call ‘red’ and the thing people call ‘green’”.
However, I have also had the experience of having red text show up as bright green and then switch on me. I was reading part of the sequences back in the day, and I could tell from the context that the word “GREEN” was supposed to be red (stroop tests), but my brain took that as a cue that the text was supposed to be green. When I brought my face closer to the screen to check, the text flipped to red. When I backed up it returned to green. In between, individual pieces of each letter would start to flip color.
That is very interesting, although it raises the old philosophical condundrum of whether your red and green, when you have them, are the same as mine (who am not colour-blind), or how much are they alike, despite the fact that my red and green are never confused with each other. Perhaps the hardware that does the qualia is the same, and doing what it can with limited data.
I heard of a blind man saying that although he had never seen the color red, he imagined that it must be something like the sound of a trumpet. I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for a vivid, pillar-box red. (Googling just now, I find the story is from Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, book 3, ch.4.)
That is extremely interesting to me. I’ve had the experience of gaining a new qualia (depth) alongside gaining a new skill (depth perception). I’ve talked to quite a few people who lack the qualia of depth but have some amount of the skill of depth perception. Some people can score a certain value on tests of depth perception while reporting that they don’t have the experience of depth, while others score that same amount and do report that they have the qualia. Whether or not you can do the task seems related but not always connected to whether or not your brain assigns that qualia to the task.
Before I was able to compute stereo depth from binocular disparity, I never remember experiencing the qualia of depth. For me, as soon as I was able to learn the skill, the qualia came with it for free. But, for many people, this does not seem to be the case, and no amount of the skill brings them the qualia. Or maybe the first and second groups are just not communicating well, it is hard to tell for sure!