Qualia and the Mystery of Colors

No in fact Putnam started off by talking about circuit boards and logic and computation in the logical mind, which he later abandoned for more fuzzy logical systems.

You should read his book. It was a real eye opener for me.

Which book? I have some of his stuff already. :slight_smile: The guy is a genius. However, I don’t see ho functionalism, even in tandem with fuzzy logic, will give rise to consciousness. It will give rise to better, more convincing zombies though :smiley:.

Maybe I’m just hung up on the whole, machine idea, and how machines, consciously, are absolutely dark inside-- that is, not thinking things in the since that we are. Do they know what it is to “play” a game, to never want it to end, like a game of chess or life? Do they “understand” or is it just following a function that a human programmed it to do?

The Three Fold Chord.

lrb.co.uk/v22/n14/jerry-fodo … f-tuesdays

You’re right the zombie issue is a real pain in the ass, I am not saying that Hillary Putnam has solved the problem just that I cannot see a problem with his theories as they stand. Hell that review is very critical, but suffice to say he came up with a really interesting idea about qualia.

I think it’s a good idea to think of things all acting together as one, but as one ‘substance’ ~ I’m not so sure. Philosophers and scientist try to bring everything down to matter/substance, but I don’t see how mind and info or even colour can be reduced to that. For me its better to reduce both the material and mental down to a third party, probably information and communication.

It doesn’t have to be just different machines imho, if we imagine consciousness as a machine but not physical, I don’t see why that wont work. Essentially consciousness mirrors the informational input from the human machine, kinda like a stamp upon wax and in that, it ‘knows’.

Colour it would seem, is a mental quality produced relative to sensory info as perceived, but it is ‘something’ too. It all seems to come down to weather or not we accept there is more than the machine going on, but to not accept that is to say that your experience doesn’t exist, the colours you see in the world do not exist. Can we say that and make any kind of sense?

Geeze… people argue about a paradox, but never try the circumstances in reality. Its called a Hypnogogic Hallucination. I had a room down in a unfurnished coal cellar as a kid cause my mom didn’t love me. No windows, cold, furniture is what I found, including a black, white, and green tv (I dunno why green, it was really old from the 50s on it’s last leg, found it tossed out). I saw color patterns all the time. You can measure this effect by the footlamp… certain cognitive styles will be more prone to it, I’m a INTJ, given your a professor up in Michigan, you can test this on a class. Black out all the lights, including from the door in a class, and gave just a lamp you can progressively turn off, by degrees. The measurement the light gives off it a footlamp… that’s it’s metric, not a kind of lamp. I’m Catholic, but also spent time learning various meditation styles. I could never tell if I was doing “Zen Correctly” cause all my instructors were initially of the Dogen persuasion and just told me to sit there, and keep still, and ignore everything… which didn’t answer my question. Wasn’t till I found Nicheran Zen who used this sort of light to dim the room did I realize how futile meditation was for me. The exact light level most people preferred for mediating, caused the light patterns associated with hypnogogic hallucinations to become very noticable. I see thus stuff always, but trained myself to ignore it. Its like staring at the sun or bright light, then looking away… you see something of it floating around, burned… it becomes a blob, fades into other colors, green, blue, yellow… same thing here, save I’m not staring at the sun. Some patterns are just lines and waves, others quite colorful. A black and white TV still produces white… and white can burn a image, and this image can morph colors. Likewise, the darkness and lack of stimulation can assert activity… it functions like musical ear syndrome in deft people, but for the eyes… lack of sensory information forces the brain to produce it. If you ask volunteers to try this, and to take a free online MBTI test, you can test the effective range of those who wouldn’t be bound to thus paradox through natural Hypnigogic hallucinations. Likewise… everyone will experience color bleeding when focusing on a black and white TV. If she is this great optical neurologist, she will certainly notice something is up. So Mary sees in colors… what does this mean for her philosophically? It means she has seen the outside world while stuck still very much in this Platonic Cave of yours.

Hello,

I am the original poster, Frankenstein. I’m surprised this was revived. I’m glad to see people still debating this. I’m sorry I’m posting under a new alias now. The password and email attached are lost to me.

Mr. Ferguson, in principle do you see the fundemantal problem here? This goes for touch, for sight, for hearing, for tasting, you can make an argument about taking a fundemantal color like blue and turn it off but what if mary never did that and only watched it for the news? What if she had no cones in her retna, which meant that she couldn’t see color? But in the future she is given the power to with advanced medical procedures? What of a person that is completely deaf, only then to be given the means to hear again? What if Mary never tasted anything before because of a medicine she has always been on? This goes for all qualia.

Furthermore, your Meyer’s Briggs test, as impressive as it is, just rates your personality. It has nothing to do with sense perception I believe, but I could be wrong. So i’ll end this post with a semicolon;

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :confusion-seeingstars: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

It does, your MBTI rating has a lot to do with how information is processed, including information processed through the Frontal Eye Fields, how imagination is used and visualized, etc.

And yes, I’m aware, we have a member blind, no eyes at all, she is used as a example occasionally. Doesn’t undermine my position, that observation isn’t restricted to a monochrome even in a impossed monochromatic world, externally in the case of controlling the light, or internally, with random lesions to your inner eye.

Reason why is, sight has much more to do with the interpretation of seeing, and maintaining this, than actually seeing. I can, for example, write a essay on musical composition with musical ear syndrome, even if I became completely deft… that music comes from my memory, new each time… but the music is encoded to learned rules… but it’s always The Best Music Ever for that kind of music (it’s true, look into musical ear syndrome). Deft people hear it, or people in strict isolation, like I was on guard often in the army. Its never just something you’ve heard, but a new formulation of music at it’s best. Someone like Mozart (if I recall, he went deft, might be thinking of someone else) might of always been at that high level, and not noticed after losing his hearing fantastic music playing… might of been normal for him, but for me, it is always great music. You’ll find this mentioned a lot on Musical Ear Syndrome pages. Not so for when the lack of sight forces images… they can come off as bizarre or outlandish.

I believe this eventually dies off in the completely deft and/or blind, as the brain adjusts to not needing that sense, so you gotta factor in Locke’s outlook of a person constantly in a state of change.

If you just poke your eyes, you’ll see flashes of light similar to hypnogogic hallucinations… not quite the same, but similar.

And yes, I know who you are, came across this thread long ago, found you online. When I saw you signed up again, brought it back. From my limited knowledge, you also have a background in the classics, you’ll find Aristotle wrote on the eye phenomena… I’ve recently been leaning back towards the idea (in a much modified fashion) of how Aristotle approached sense perception, since researching Hynogogic Hallucinations. I don’t do drugs, smoke, or drink… so it’s not artificially simulated. And naturally personality type differences that effect how your brain processes info will in turn mean your using parts of your brain others of a far different type don’t use as much. Its one of the side effects of why I notice this happening, I do believe, over those who can’t see anything at all, unless they are near sleep.

Optometrists tend to know a lot on this subject, even your small town doctors. I can’t see how this woman doing these tests in isolation, wouldn’t possibly notice her sensory system going into fluxuations. If she us trying to lust all phenomenal ranges, she would have to explain every oddity, traced back to it’s source. I’m holding my smartphone in the dark, I blink, IRS “light” bleeds into my sight.

I turn away, a largely white screen bleeds into Green. I see color. I close my eye near it, I see red. I close them, I see red, yellow, green.

If you start cutting out chunks of the mind though, or take someone blind from birth, this differs. Blind from birth people have occasionally sworn they see colors in a dream, but honestly, I doubt it. I seriously doubt you can just beam a image into their head via some scifi “wifi” and will notice any change at first. To us, it’s common sense, sight is right in front of us, but if you turned it in for no one who never had it before, even compensated with a chip for all the brain and neural degeneracy of never using that part of the mind… would they even know they are “seeing”, or would it not even register till some painful conditioned responses kicked in? Like waving in front of the face… feeling the air from the hand… then snaking them hard… then waving, smaking… a few dozen times, until that say “wait… something is odd, what is this… I’m not certain, I never noticed this before”.

It may take along time for them to descern the cardinal directions visually, despite knowing it haptically. Optical illusions would stump them. Staring at the sun will burn their eyes, all the while not knowing they are even looking at it… they may see it just their eyes hurt, and are getting watery, and they are blinking often, to everyone else sighted we would know they are starring at the sun.

It takes us a while as babies and even as children to get this. A grown adult with haptic equivalents should get it faster, but not at first.

I have a question about qualia.

Can we count them and measure their interactions with one another?

Maybe that’s 2 questions. But you get what I’m asking right?

You are right about your direction of seeking answers and those enlightenment philosophers were wrong, including scientists. There is something for sure that is primarily responsible for sensation which resides outside physical brain too. You can name it what you want; qualia, consciousness or something else.

With love,
Sanjay

I like how the first 2 paragraphs give away key information without saying anything. It is a rather elegant writing style.

Destroy certain neurons and you’ll destroy some experience of qualia. Also, I can relieve pain with an aspirin. Apparently the connection between qualia and neuronal activity has not been adequately explained by philosophers or neuroscientists.
That such a connection does exist and is experienced is evidence of the physicality of qualia. I’m with Dennett on this. Attempts to mystify qualia lead to mystical interpretations of natural phenomena. Mary was equipped, genetically, to experience red even though she had never experienced it before. Being genetically equipped to visualize things in a certain way is a survival necessity.

There seems to be a lot of scrap in these posts, so I’m scrapping all of your posts and putting out a new version from scratch.

The bottom line is, the brain seems to be an object that follows our consciousness around, or our consciousness follows it around. When we look in a mirror we see a body and we assume the brain is in our body. When other people die we see their brains fall out their body. But we can never actually see our own brain. The closest we can get to seeing our own brain is when we get a CAT scan and we assume a trustworthy doctor is scanning our brain. Only other way is to have a hole drilled in our brain so we can see our own brains.

As for the color thing, It is a case of Machine seeing state of Other Machines. I dont think the Giant Building analogy is accurate or true. If the brain was a Giant Building, we could actually see the colors. It would be RGB colors because retina only supports three colors. So in the building we would see the actual colors somewhere in some cubicle somewhere. Or electrical impulses the same wavelength as colors.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are no actual colors in the brain. Maybe colors are converted into colorless information and then magically converted into colorful qualia. But I don’t think so. And if I’m right, it’s a case of Machines Seeing Other Machines. Colors are the Absolute. If I can see colors, i can see other people’s colors in their brain. Its like an infinite mirror. I am in a brain, I can see its colors. And if I look at someone else’s brain, I can see their colors they see. But if I cannot see colors, then I can never know what colors is.
And if I’m wrong, if there are no actual colors in the brain, then retina colors are converted into colorless information which magically converts into colorful qualia. One must explore the idea of inverted colors. For instance, if I see blue, my brain could alter the wavelength so that blue is green, but still the colors woould be colors, blue would still be green. It wouldn’t nullify the idea of color. Only thing that would nullify the idea of color is if the mind converted color to random wavelengths, whitenoise, appearing as color. Magic. Therefore, if the mind keeps the wavelength constant, it doesnt matter if it converts it into a wavelength of EM radio frequency. Color is color, we’d just think xrays are blue and blues are xrays, but blue would still be blue, because blue is blue, blue is xrays. So, no magic is involved if the wavelength is not random.
Which means I’m probably not wrong.

I hope yall can understand what Im saying, because Im not even done yet.
Science isn’t fake, but most of yall dont even understand what it even is. If I take a recording that says a lightwave is .1 nanometers, that is ultimate reality. But it aint the lightwave. It is just a rune that says “.1 nanometers”. Like, if I draw a sine wave on paper, that is ultimate reality. But it aint a lightwave, it is just a sketch on paper (although technically, lightwaves are bouncing off it making me see it.) Runes and drawings are like signs, road maps, not the destination. But signs and roadmaps are part of ultimate reality. Like, .1 nanometers is not what a light wave is. It just tells me, this is what the alternative name is for the road I’m going to. If I want to go down the road and see the light wave that is .1 nanometers, I go down to .1 nanometer road, or Blue Highway. Xray may really be Superhighway but we thought it was Blue Highway at first so we call it Xray Highway soometimes but its really Xray highway but converts into BlueHighway. I switch on the thing to .1 nanometers and viola, I’m on BlueHIghway.
So the original thing about BigBuilding is really is your consciousness BlueEnabled because if it is, you should be able to see Blue in other people’s BigBuildingBrains too. unless its converted to Xray, then you need the XrayToBlueConversionModule2.0
Only way I’d be wrong about this, is if retina info is converted into whitenoise. Highly doubt it because that would be crazy.

Key thing of Big Building is macrobility. For example, we hear ideas as word sounds. Audio snippets. So thats ultimate reality. What you hear is what you get. When you see a waveform, you dont hear it. You gotta actually play it, and once you play it, what you hear is what you get. Ultimate Reality is ultimate reality. Saying a waveform is not ultimate reality means you are confused. You are just not playing it in the right format. You are confusing the sign for the road. The Audacity wave from, is what you call “scientific discovery”. But thats not actually the same format as an idea. Your mind is the audio player, that converts the picture of a waveform, into an idea, which is the same as mental audio.
Now mental audio you cannot hear other peoples thoughts, because it is converted into electrical waveforms, rather than atom vibrational waveforms.

As for vision, it seems to fill up our whole fields. Like it might as well be called infinite because it is all there is, we cannot see outside our vision so it might as well be called finite too. Its like, somehow a little kid is our brain, stuck in one cubicle, fixated on it, and cannot see outside of it, cannot see the actual atoms of the brain itself. It can only see and feel in electrical impulses. And this tiny part of our brain, feels like it is gigantic, but yet even though it is gigantic it feels like sounds are a part of it, yet not a part of it because sounds are different. Sounds you cannot see but hear. And what does scale matter? The scale feels big because we are close in proximity to it. Sounds might as well be called infinite, because they have no size, yet might as well be called finite, because they are still within the bounds of our vision, yet are boundless and not even in our vision, so might as well be called infinite and finite.

Rest assured, ideas can be read, if they are converted into the right format, from electrical audio to atom audio. Unless Im wrong and they are random white noise, which would be looney. But still, even encrypted for some odd reason and not a=a type data, see XraytoBlueConversionModule2.0 and so even if encrypted im still right, the only way Im wrong is if whitenoise.

The one thing is taste. So we zoom out of our taste impulses at a certain scale, and somehow the image that emerges is taste? Why do some images taste better than others? And why is the image invisible? Sometimes it feels like God just came out of the sky and said “You cannot see taste images, only taste them. And this one will taste good to you and this one is bad. Why because I say so, there is no explanation.” Of course you can make a psuedo explanation by saying "it triggers oxytocin and other feel good hromones But that is a psuedo explanation, doesnt satisfy me. Why does it not satisfy me? Because hormones are delayed reactions, it doesnt explain why taste immediately tastes good, nor does it explain why taste tastes like tastes and why we cannot see or hear taste images. I could explain the first part though. I can say we are actually living somewhat in the future, and we know tastes are good because we anticipate the feel good hormones from the future. Like how music seems like we are in the future and one measure feels timeless at the same time. So maybe the memory and neurons themselves associated with the prediction of hormones feel good not just hormones.

And it doesnt explain what time is. Why are we time beings that feel like we are real one second, and then all of a sudden months later is not real anymore. Doesnt explain why we are timeless yet timeful.

Irrellus is on the right track though. Irrelus said if we disable neurons we disable qualia. And this is why the neuronal selective disablerenabler device needs to be constructed. We need to explore consciousness directly, by being able to selective disable and reenable neurons and to experience their perceived effects on qualia of consciousness. Only then will we truly understand the secrets of the universe. This is why I am the greatest genius who ever lived, this device is n the same level of genius as the DNA machine. And Irrelus doesn’t know it, but he stumbled on a gem when he said the thing about disabling qualia, making him an accidentally better scientist than most other scientists, because other scientists are wasting their time with goose chases that wont solve all the secrets of the universe.

Thanks for the first positive thing you ever said about me. Yes, the NSDD needs to be devised. We know about consciousness now only from brain probes and brain disorders. Many are still looking for the image inside the computer without considering how the computer produces images. For those who claim to be something other than neurons can produce. there exists no quale, no “I”, without neuronal and genetic hardwire.

BTW, I created a DNA machine in my 1987 novel, “Atom and Eve”; the novel was not published. Readers claimed they could not understand it.

A quale is a quantum of sensation. It is a process that cannot be reduced to something other than its activity, from its formation from neurochemicals and neurons.

The problem of defining qualia comes fro seeing a process as an entity.

If we see a man running, “running” is the process, correct? However, we would see a man running, otherwise known as a runner. The point of the Mary Problem, is that she experiences something new, the color blue for the first time. That new experience is knowledge. The process has to work upon something though, mustn’t it? So we have to identify what the process is doing to things, and those things are elementary quale, aren’t they? Thoughts?

The problem is created by the degenerate tendency to reduce multiplicity (particulars) to singularity (one universal.)

For example, color and wave-length are two different objects neither of which can be reduced to the other for that would confuse, which is to say eliminate distinction between, the two. On the other hand, that does not mean there is no relation between the two. We know, for example, that there is a strong type of correlation between the two that we refer to as causation. We know that when wave-length changes that the color changes too.

There is nothing mysterious regarding qualia. What there is is an illusion of mystery created by the inability to comprehend that categories are man-made and that whether we are going to categorize some object of experience as physical or qualitative does not make that object any more or less mysterious.

The so-called “physical realm” is quite simply a category that includes some objects of experience and excludes others. In its most abstract from, it includes only formulas, viewing physical sensations as merely “subjective” (in other words, it puts them in a category that is called “subjective realm”.)

Someone may ask “if it doesn’t belong to physical realm then where does it belong?” And to be able to answer that question one would have to enumerate every known category and make sure that each one is sufficiently defined so that we can unambiguously determine whether any given object of experience belongs to it or not. Then, we would simply compare our non-physical object against the requirements of every category and note where it belongs, if it belongs anywhere. And what if it belongs nowhere? Then we would simply categorize it as “uncategorized”. Simple.

So, yes, qualitative objects such as color, smell, taste, etc do not belong to or exist in physical realm. No matter how deep you look into a physical brain or perform calculations in order to predict its behavior, you will never experience any colors, tastes, smells, etc. So where do they belong or exist? They belong to or exist in . . . qualitative realm. Realm being nothing but a fancy word for category, class, set and other container objects.

“Oh my god, that’s so deep!”

Yeah, it is deep as hell.

Qualitative objects such as color can have their physical correlates such as wavelength.

No need to confuse the two.
Everyone is happy.

You say that Dennett is correct in asserting that there is no “objective” evidence of qualia. This implies you know what kind of evidence he’s looking for. I, personally, do not, so I would appreciate it if you could help me. What kind of evidence is he asking for?

I would say qualia, e.g. colors, are evident. Whoever denies this, his intelligence must be questioned.

Is he saying that qualia must be something other than qualia in order to be able to accept them as evidently something other than qualia? Wouldn’t such a remark be irrelevant?

Or is he saying that qualia, in the form of qualia, cannot be evident?

Very bizarre.