Sorry about the physics stuff, but james was saying that light isn’t in the brain, or it sounded like he was anyway.
Its like software/hardware, the machine and what it produces are different yes, but colour qualia is composed by the brain and not some mysterious facet we consider to be ‘mind’. that’s why we can be tricked by optical illusions, you wouldn’t suggest that we are consciously doing that surely?
I am asking; ‘what is colour’ and by that I am not referring to holistic definitions. My answer is that colour is not an idea, pigment or material, it only occurs where light hits such a material and changes its frequency. Ergo for the brain to be creating colour it must be producing light, otherwise the ‘mind’ wouldn’t be able to see it. A blind person cannot see colour if they loose the physical ability, and a colour-blind person’s brain is composing colour relative to the incorrect information its getting ~ akin to optical illusions [which is light being changed by the brain.
I see your point, and its been a long battle in science and philosophy, but a physicist would say that information which is measurably out there exists. Information which doesn’t have physical form like meanings, stories dreams etc, are the products of the physics. One is the machine the other is what the machine makes.
That’s a whole topic in itself and I am inclined to agree, perhaps we could go so far as to say that only subjective things exist? If you consider what Einstein said which agrees with your position, a relative object is not objectively real or even exactly located.
I disagree however that existence itself is a matter of judgement, how we judge things only changes our subjective interpretation of a thing. You could judge that the mountain doesn’t exist, but it still does. Just because its particles cannot be located if you try to observe them, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They are a bit like a bee in a jar - so when there are collections of relative particles acting as information upon one another, the result is a substance and that isn’t relative. Otherwise we’d be saying that information does not inform, yet it measurably does, even our minds use info.
Epistemology is more a language [/meaning] problem, mathematics and physical information isn’t necessarily the same. No matter how we describe something, that doesn’t change what the thing is, it just changes our description of the mountain.
_