The study of atoms in the brain doesn't explain the redness of red;Materialism = FAKE

[RedStapler]

but we still don't know if their experience of red (quale) is the same as ours and can't really explain it.

And, of course, this doesn't matter at all Just another obvious "* of the gaps"

"A person who has never seen a certain wavelength of light cannot be explained the wavelength by using words"

Real breaktrough here...

 

[xjx388]

No, the qualia are the "experience of actually seeing red" and the "raw taste of the coffee itself" both taken in the subjective, phenomenal sense.

OK, but why do we need a fancy word to describe it? It's just sensations, chemical reactions.

I think you mistyped something here. Maybe you meant to say "I do know that there is no evidence that something outside of physical processes is interacting with the physical universe"?

I meant simply that everything we experience and feel is the result of a brain process interacting with the physical universe. There is nothing external from that other than the stimuls of the external thing and the response from our brain.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. No brain = no qualia I think everyone would agree.

Right . . .I'm just questioning the usefulness of "qualia" as a concept. No brain = no thought, no sensation, no feeling, no emotion, no conciousness. Those words are perfectly adequate. "Qualia" just sounds like inventing a new word to lend a bit of mystery to something we already understand.

The "redness of red" and the "experience of red" are both good shorthands for a specific quale. But saying "they're explained entirely by atoms" does not help much. The question is how?

Light reflected into the eye (stimulus) evokes certain chemical processes in the brain which the person perceives as red (response).

And where (if anywhere at all) does the redness of red appear? In the Cartesian Theater?

I don't think it's anything like that. It's simply a product of conciousness, which we don't understand all that well. But we understand enough to know that conciousness arises out of the brain; it's physical. We can render people unconcious with chemicals. We can alter their behavior, emotions and perceptions with chemicals.

A lack of full understanding does not therefore imply something beyond the physical. Posit a non physical spirit which somehow interacts with the physical body, for example. OK . . . how is that explaining anything? It's just putting the question off, really -creating another layer of things we have to explain.

Or is it real at all? Some people are color nihilists and argue that colors do not actually exist.

Colors exist because we perceive them. We may not understand all the processes that are happening and how the perception is created and perceived. There is no real use for philosophical musing as far as coming to an understanding of what's happening with perception. Unless we are passing some good weed around . . .

 

[Robin]

Let's say that today, it can't. I have no idea, but let's say today it takes 1 hour to decode it. Are you claiming it will never get faster? Are you claiming regardless of future advances in computer speed, it will never become real time?

No, why should you think I am saying that?

Because otherwise, I dont see the point to this objection.

Did I say it was an objection?

As I said, I was surprised by the claim that this could be done in real time and I was interested because I have downloaded an MRI dataset and looked into the kinds of processing normally done on these sets.

It doesn't have relevance to the debate one way or another.

 

[abaddon]

"Qualia" is the plural, the singular form is "quale".

Super. That's great. You still falied to tell me what a "quale" is.

You're right, it is a difficult question, but mostly because it's a nonsensical question.

It's easy to come up with other questions of a similiar nature:

- What is the flavor of an electron?
- What is the mass of happiness?

Electrons have no flavour.
Happiness has no mass.

So define a "quale". If you can you can. But you cannot, because if you could you would have already and when challenged, you couldn't.

So one can only conclude that you have no idea what a "quale" actually is.

 

[xjx388]

I just checked this link

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...omise-sharper-artificial-vision-blind-people#

This does, in no way, qualify as explaining red to blind people. You basically manipulate and modify their brains...etc. But not explaining to them what red looks like.

I can't explain what love feels like to me. This does not imply that the feeling of love is anything more than an internal experience created by neurons squirting chemicals into each other.

Blind people simply don't have the experience of color like I do. They have nothing to base the description on. I could try maybe associating colors with the experiences I've had with the color and emotions/thoughts/behaviors it evokes in me, "A woman wearing red lipstick is seductive. Red signs when I'm driving mean 'Stop.' " But they don't have the chemical reactions I do when I see red. They don't have the physical apparatus to do so. Which should tell you that the process is entirely physical.

I can just say "my underwear is red" to someone who can see and they will have an idea of what I'm talking about, even if they have a different internal representation of what red is than I do. Maybe what I see as red, they see as what I think of as green? Doesn't matter, we can both look at something red and agree that it's red -it's just an object that reflects a wavelength between 620-750nm into our retinas that we have all learned is called red.

If there is a non-physical thing that interacts with brain processes that does the actual perceiving, it seems entirely irrelevant to understanding anything. It can be a spirit, a homunculous in a Cartesian Theater, the soul, whatever. Whatever it is, it seems to be entirely dependent on the physical body and its processes. It may as well not even be there.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

OK, but why do we need a fancy word to describe it? It's just sensations, chemical reactions.

If you want to call it a sensation, go ahead. Say "the sensation of seeing red" if you want. That's close enough for most purposes. But saying it's just a chemical reaction seems to be missing a lot of what the term is trying to get at.

I meant simply that everything we experience and feel is the result of a brain process interacting with the physical universe. There is nothing external from that other than the stimuls of the external thing and the response from our brain.

Probably.

Right . . .I'm just questioning the usefulness of "qualia" as a concept. No brain = no thought, no sensation, no feeling, no emotion, no conciousness. Those words are perfectly adequate. "Qualia" just sounds like inventing a new word to lend a bit of mystery to something we already understand.

I think you're overconfident in your assessment that "we already" understand these thing. Sure, most modern neuroscientists think the brain is roughly an analogue of a digital computer, buy saying we already understand consciousness and conscious experience seems a bit premature.

Light reflected into the eye (stimulus) evokes certain chemical processes in the brain which the person perceives as red (response). I don't think it's anything like that. It's simply a product of conciousness, which we don't understand all that well. But we understand enough to know that conciousness arises out of the brain; it's physical. We can render people unconcious with chemicals. We can alter their behavior, emotions and perceptions with chemicals.

Sure, I think I've heard of qualia once referred to as 'the furniture of consciousness'. But yes, I agree that we have a pretty good idea by now that consciousness is somehow what the brain does. The chemical argument is great evidence as are the brains and experiences of people with brain injuries.

But that still leaves us with a boatload of questions remaining. Could we ever build conscious robots with the sensation of seeing red? What is it like to be a bat? Are there p-zombies among us?

A lack of full understanding does not therefore imply something beyond the physical. Posit a non physical spirit which somehow interacts with the physical body, for example. OK . . . how is that explaining anything? It's just putting the question off, really -creating another layer of things we have to explain.Colors exist because we perceive them. We may not understand all the processes that are happening and how the perception is created and perceived.

I've certainly never meant to suggest that there was anything non-physical in the way you're probably referring to. I do think one can say there are certain non-physical "things" or "entities" in a certain sense, like the number seven, for example, or the color red.

But I don't believe in any sort of other immaterial realm where consciousness exists, and then sort of reaches down into the physical world to control brains.

There is no real use for philosophical musing as far as coming to an understanding of what's happening with perception. Unless we are passing some good weed around . . .

Oh, I think there is plenty of room for philosophical musings, and neuroscientists, physicists and other scientists do it all the time. Einstein even said that the philosophical musings of Hume were influential in him dreaming up the ideas for the theory of relativity.

 

[Robin]

Imagine that some people had evolved the ability to directly detect magnetic fields.

Those people might say that they know "the magneticness of magnetism" or the "northness of north" or some such and that they can't describe the magneticness of magnetism to people like us.

But they would not talking be about anything that has to do with magnetism as such, merely a way their brain has of organising this data that our brain doesn't.

And we could build a device that detected magnetic fields and create implants into our brains to make them detect magnetic fields.

And then we might say "Now I understand the magneticness of magnetism", or "Now I understand the northness of north".

But that would be silly, we would have understood nothing more about magnetism than we did previously, it would just be that our brains would have a different way of organising the information. And we would have no way of knowing if our experience matched that of another person who is detecting magnetism in another way.

The "redness of red" debate is just like this. A person blind from birth can understand light and colour as well as any sighted person. They just lack a method of detecting it directly and therefore they lack one particular method of organising the data in their brain.

Some sort of implant that allowed them to detect light and colour directly can give them such a method and their experience of light and colour may or not be the same as the experience of colour that a sighted person has.

Either way, I don't see how it could be meaningfully described as explaining the redness of red to someone, any more than an implant to our brains to detect magnetic fields could be described as explaining the northness of north.

 

[Robin]

Imagine that some people had evolved the ability to directly detect magnetic fields.

Those people might say that they know "the magneticness of magnetism" or the "northness of north" or some such and that they can't describe the magneticness of magnetism to people like us.

But they would not talking be about anything that has to do with magnetism as such, merely a way their brain has of organising this data that our brain doesn't.

And we could build a device that detected magnetic fields and create implants into our brains to make them detect magnetic fields.

And then we might say "Now I understand the magneticness of magnetism", or "Now I understand the northness of north".

But that would be silly, we would have understood nothing more about magnetism than we did previously, it would just be that our brains would have a different way of organising the information. And we would have no way of knowing if our experience matched that of another person who is detecting magnetism in another way.

The "redness of red" debate is just like this. A person blind from birth can understand light and colour as well as any sighted person. They just lack a method of detecting it directly and therefore they lack one particular method of organising the data in their brain.

Some sort of implant that allowed them to detect light and colour directly can give them such a method and their experience of light and colour may or not be the same as the experience of colour that a sighted person has.

Either way, I don't see how it could be meaningfully described as explaining the redness of red to someone, any more than an implant to our brains to detect magnetic fields could be described as explaining the northness of north.

The upshot of this is that the OP is basically saying:

"You can't have the experience of X by studying the mechanism by which X is experienced, therefore Materialism is fake"

As I said earlier, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, which makes the truth or otherwise of the premise moot.

 

[Dave241]

Look at the wikipedia page above for qualia if you want a definition.

Thanks. Wiki defines qualia as:

"In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia
are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience."

Is this the definition you are going with? If not, please provide yours. If it is, then seeing would be a subjective, concious experience and as we've shown you this has already been accomplished with science. So either qualia doesnt exist, or modern science fully understands and can explain qualia.

And no, we can't describe the quale for red to a blind person any more than we can describe it to another sighted person. We can show a person something red, and say this is red but we still don't know if their experience of red (quale) is the same as ours and can't really explain it.

Eh, you do realize we've literally already done this? We can currently, right now, describe sight to a blind person.

 

[Dave241]

I'm suggesting that there is a gap between knowledge of the objective world (e.g. certain wavelengths of light are called red) and the subjective experience thereof (e.g. I perceive that apple as red).

But there is no such gap. A blind persons brain, by being fed nothing but a mathematical description of what they are seeing, can see. This is a fact, and I would appreciate you acknowledging it.

One could be entirely colorblind (all rods, no cones) and still be assured that color vision is real...

And what if we performed the same procedure on the colorblind person, so they too can see red? Wouldn't that again be describing red to them?


Edit to add: You also didnt answer my question of what happens in 20 years when we can give someone the experience of feeling love using technology?

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

Thanks. Wiki defines qualia as:

"In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia
are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience."

Is this the definition you are going with?

Sure. Although to be more precise I'd probably say the content of individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

If it is, then seeing would be a subjective, conscious experience and as we've shown you this has already been accomplished with science.

I'm assuming you mean the blind person seeing.

So either qualia doesnt exist, or modern science fully understands and can explain qualia.

False dilemma, and it doesn't follow from what you've written above.

Eh, you do realize we've literally already done this? We can currently, right now, describe sight to a blind person.

?

Of course we can describe sight to a blind person. We can read the wikipedia page about sight aloud to them. Heck, we can even read the wikipedia page for "red' to them.

 

[Dave241]

No, why should you think I am saying that?

Did I say it was an objection?

As I said, I was surprised by the claim that this could be done in real time and I was interested because I have downloaded an MRI dataset and looked into the kinds of processing normally done on these sets.

It doesn't have relevance to the debate one way or another.

Oh, my bad, i completely misunderstood your post then. Apologies.

 

[Dave241]

If you want to call it a sensation, go ahead. Say "the sensation of seeing red" if you want. That's close enough for most purposes. But saying it's just a chemical reaction seems to be missing a lot of what the term is trying to get at.

I'd like to zoom in on this particular statement, because I've seen versions of it claimed throughout this thread, and to be honest I flat out disagree with it. I claim it is actually nothing more then chemical reactions and neurons firing in the correct sequence. But clearly you disagree, so lets go with that.

You say its missing something, even though we can currently describe red to a blind person. Please describe what is missing. If you cant, then I say you have no basis to make such a claim.

 

[Dave241]

False dilemma, and it doesn't follow from what you've written above.

Sure it does. We can describe red to a blind person, the blind person will experience seeing red, therefore we currently understand what "seeing" is. Since we currently understand it, if qualia is a part of seeing then we've either already discovered and described qualia (and just named it something else. This happens occasionally in science), or qualia doesnt exist.

Of course we can describe sight to a blind person. We can read the wikipedia page about sight aloud to them. Heck, we can even read the wikipedia page for "red' to them.

This is not what I mean by describing sight. I mean the electic signals we send into a blind persons brain are describing sight to their brain, and the blind person will understand what the electrical signals mean and will be able to see from them. So no, not reading the wiki page.

 

[arthwollipot]

Aphantasia.

This is what I have been thinking as well. Darat may be aphantasic. When someone mentions "red apple" to me, I can visualise that apple in my mind even if I can't see it. I can visualise its roundness and its redness - I have a full image of that apple in my mind, and I can even visualise (or "see") what it would look like if I took a bite out of it.

This idea of visualising the redness of an apple leads to the idea of qualia. I don't know if what Darat says about the outdatedness of qualia is true, but I think it would be much more difficult for an aphantasic to experience the qualia of redness.

 

[Robin]

The concept of "qualia" is still used by some philosophers, such as Chalmers, but I think that most would consider it to have been discredited as a concept by Wittgenstein in the 1930's.

It seems to be a more popular term in science than in philosophy, for example Ramachandran and Hirstein:

You, the superscientist, study the brain of X, a normal colour perceiver, as he verbally identifies colours he is shown. You’ve become very interested in this curious phenomenon people call colour; they look at objects and describe them as red or green or blue, but the objects often all look like shades of grey to you. You point a spectrometer at the surface of one of the objects and it says that light with a wavelength of 600nm is emanating from the object, but you have no idea what colour this might correspond to, or indeed what people mean when they say ‘colour’. Intrigued, you study the pigments of the eye and so on and eventually you come up with a complete description of the laws of wavelength processing. Your theory allows you to trace out the entire sequence of neural events starting from the receptors all the way into the brain until you monitor the neural activity that generates the word ‘red’. Now, once you have completely understood the laws of colour vision (or more strictly, the laws of wavelength processing), and you are able to predict correctly which colour word X will utter when you present him with a certain light stimulus, you have no reason to doubt the completeness of your account.

One day you come up with a complete diagram. You show it to X and say, ‘This is what’s going on in your brain.’ To which he replies, ‘Sure that’s what’s going on, but I see red, where is the red in this diagram?’ ‘What is that?’ you ask. ‘That’s part of the actual experience of the colour which it seems I can never convey to you,’ he says. This is the alleged epistemological barrier which you confront in trying to understand X’s experience. Our thought experiment is also useful in that it allows us to put forward a clear definition of qualia: they are that aspect of X’s brain state that seems to make your scientific description incomplete from X’s point of view.
Ramachandran, Vilayanur & Hirstein, William. (1998). Three laws of qualia: What neurology tells us about the biological functions of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 4. 429-457.

 

[Robin]

Edit to add: You also didnt answer my question of what happens in 20 years when we can give someone the experience of feeling love using technology?

Why do you say 20 years time? Sam Harris has described taking a pill that made him feel pure unselfish love for someone that he had never met nor heard of before.

So apparently we already have this technology.

 

[xjx388]

Ok, let’s say that we can’t describe our experience of red, love or what have you -that “quaila” describes the subjectivity of experience. I don’t see how that implies that there is more to consciousness/perception than the physical.

Connect the dots.

 

[d4m10n]

Ok, let’s say that we can’t describe our experience of red, love or what have you -that “quaila” describes the subjectivity of experience. I don’t see how that implies that there is more to consciousness/perception than the physical.

It doesn't imply any such thing.

No need to deny the premise, since the conclusion doesn't follow.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N920A using Tapatalk

 

[Myriad]

The question is: In principle, can a brain compute the experience of red provided only measurable physical quantities (assuming brain has full knowledge of those physical quantities)?

Of course. What do eyes provide to the brain other than measurements of measurable physical qualities?