No worries at all, my friend. I don’t mind my threads being derailed, so long as they produce fun conversation. Of course, I’ll continue to post my analysis of Rick and Morty around these conversation, but I’m not going to stop them.
For the most part, you’re right–no optic nerves, no vision; though there are cases of sensory deprivation in which the subject ends up seeing an amazing light show. I think the occipital lobe, where vision occurs in the brain, has a tendency to “light up” after a while of no signals coming in on the optic nerves. But the point is, there is always some brain activity going on to give us vision and all the qualia that goes with it.
Well, that would definitely be closer to my view–especially about the quality/qualia being directly in the physical info–this fits into my pantheism quite nicely. All physical info is, well, physical, and as I said about physicality above: it is a sensory representation of qualia going on somewhere in the universal mind–or, to put it another way, it is a sensory representation of qualia going on in the physical system itself (i.e. the qualia is the system’s mind).
Now if you take that phrase: qualia being directly in the physical info, and drop the “physical”, you’d be even closer to my view. Physicality is just a representation, remember, and it exists only in the human subjective reality (I shouldn’t say “only”–who knows what other conscious beings out there experience physicality). What it represents is a kind of mental substance (the qualia of other systems’ minds), and I define this substance as a trio: 1) quality, 2) being, 3) meaning. ← It is a “stuff” composed of these three aspects all wrapped up in one. You can see how consciousness ties into being here: it is the stuff of being. And you can also see how info ties into this: “info” is just another word for “meaning”. ← So you can do away with the physics (or rather leave it in its proper place–the human subjective reality) and keep the info. Info is everywhere, melded with being and quality–the stuff of reality.
Yes! What you’re talking about is “flow”–the tendency of mind to be in flux, for qualia to change from one form to another–this is essentially a communication process, mind talking to itself so to speak.
Meaning is always there in experience–it is the info you’re referring to–and it is responsible for the flow of mind. Take a rational thought process, for example:
All grass is green.
All men are grass.
Therefore, all men are green.
The above syllogism is a good example of the flow of thought. One thought enters the mind: All grass is green. Then another thought enters the mind: All men are grass. These two thoughts are qualia just like anything else in the mind. They definitely have a kind of “cognitive” quality (or feel) to them, and they project as something real (truth*) thereby showing that they have being, and of course all our thoughts have a meaning. But now notice that it’s only in virtue of this meaning that we can draw the conclusion in the syllogism above: the meaning in one thought is “All grass is green” and the meaning in the other thought is “All men are grass”, and this allows us to draw out a third thought: “All men are grass”. Meaning begets meaning. This is why our thoughts flow.
(Why flow feels like the passage of time for creatures like us is another matter).
- I suppose “All men are grass” doesn’t always project as true.
Well, if we start with how I defined the “substance” of mind above, we know that everything is an instance of some quality, some form of being, and some meaning. Red is an easy one. It’s obviously qualitative, and it has being (it’s always experienced as the property of an external object), and it contains a meaning: “the object is red”. ← That’s what red is. If we start by thinking of it as a quale, as something in the mind, then all we need in order to understand it’s relation to red qua physical property is that the latter is simply the projection of the former. As for this quale’s relation to the brain, again, the brain which supposedly produces this quale is not really producing it at all. Rather, it represents the quale. The way this works is as follows: the quale red flows like any other quale (thanks to its meaning), and one of the ways it can flow is by transforming its quality (flow is just change, after all) until it takes on the quality of a specific kind of brain activity–that is, it morphs from the perception of red to the perception of a brain process (the very one that represents the red). And it does flow this way (not all paths of flow are conscious) as evinced by how it works with the physics. The way you end up seeing a brain is by way of light reflecting off that brain and entering your eye. This is a physical process that represents the manner by which the red morphs and flows into the perception of a brain. The transmission of light is the quale morphing.
Right. I would just add that the device has that color only because we project it from our perception of the color.
You mean nothing projected by the observer?
Well, you’re right, the self is ultimately real. If it is experienced at all, it must have being (right?). But my point is we define the self based on the experiences we know we’re having. As I said, it all begins with knowledge. If I have a pain in my hand, and I acknowledge that pain cognitively (Ah-ha! My hand hurts!), then I have just identified an experience and claimed it “mine”. It becomes “my” experience. The self, ultimately, is that which knows about (acknowledges) all its experiences. Not all experience can be known, and so there ends up being a divide between this self which is defined by way of acknowledging experiences and everything else which is not being acknowledged (because it can’t).
The mind generates this experience for itself–the experience of being a “self”–and as such, it projects like any other experience–existence suddenly acquires a “me”.