Projecting the ontology of your (flawed) internal representations onto reality is a bad idea. "Doing a Dennet" is also not dealt with, except by incredulity.
It's a fact that the individual shades of color exist, however it is that we group them - and your ontology must contain them, if it pretends to completeness.
This is simply not the case. The fact that we can compare two stimuli more accurately than we can identify a stimuli merely means that internally we represent reality with lesser fidelity than our senses theoretically can achieve. On a reductionist view at most you've established "greater than" and "round to nearest" are implemented in neurons. You do not need to have colour.
Let's unpack "blueness". It's a property we ascribe to objects, yet it's trivial to "concieve of" blueness independent of an object. Neurologically, we process colour, motion, edge finding and so in in parallel; the linking of them together occurs at a higher level. Furthermore the brain fakes much of the data, giving the perception of colour vision, for example, in regions of the visual field where no ability to discriminate colour exists, and case...
You really need to link the previous post -- and important subthreads, 1, 2, 3 -- when you make a post like this. Other people need to be able to easily access the discussions you refer to. (Yes, that compilation may be biased toward what I was involved in.)
There were several notable replies that you also should have accounted for here, including:
1) How "where is color?" question is turned around to "where is the chess in Deep Blue?"
2) The Gary Drescher approach of equating qualia with generated symbols.
Let me try coming at this another way. What would you not expect in a Turing-implementable Universe?
EDIT NB: I'm asking what you see that you would not expect to see if you were looking into a Turing-universe from the outside. If your position is that there's nothing in this Universe visible to an external observer that shows it to be non-Turing, including our utterances, please make that explicit.
If I'd written a post that'd gotten downvoted into the negative that decisively, I'd take a day or two off to avoid posting extremely defensive comments. I have no idea if that's what Mitchell is doing, but while he probably should make some attempt to field comments on his post, chiding him for being untimely is not nice.
Asking about the blueness of blue, or anything to do with color, is deliberately misleading. You admit that seeing blue is an event caused by the firing of neurons; the fact that blue light stimulating the retina causes this firing of neurons is largely besides the point. The question is, simply, "How does neurons firing cause us to have a subjective experience?"
The best answer that I think can be given at this point is, "We don't really know, but it's extremely unlikely it involves magic, and if we knew enough to build something that worked almost exactly like our brain, it'd have subjective experience too."
As for the "type" distinction, the idea that blueness in the brain must emerge from some primal blueness, or whatever exactly you're trying to argue, seems like a serious mistake in categories. As another commenter said, there's no chess in deep blue. There's no sense of temperature in a thermostat, no concept of light in a photoreceptor, no sense of lesswrong.com in my CPU. The demand that blueness cannot be merely physical seems to be the mere protestations of a brain contemplating that which it did not evolve to contemplate.
But a common theme seems to be that blueness is a "feel" somehow "associated" with the entity, or even associated with being the entity. To see blue is how it feels to have your neurons firing that way.
This is the dualism which doesn't know it's dualism.
As a reductionist who disagrees with your overall critique of reductionism, I have to say that you hit the nail on the head here. Some self-styled reductionists do seem prone to "explaining" subjective experience by saying that it's nothing more than what certain algorithms feel like from the inside. As you say, that's really a dualist account if you leave it there.
I don't understand where this perceived confusion comes from (despite, or because, I read much of the relevant literature).
If we have an electronic device that emits light at 450THz and another that detects light and reports what "color" it is (red), then we can build/execute all of that without accounting for "redness" (except of course in the step where it decides what to call the "color"). Is there a problem here?
Is color a special topic here? Do we have the same issues in phenomenology of sound?
If we have an electronic d...
What dire consequences should we expect if we do, in fact, deny that there is anything that is blue ?
For my money, the discussion in p.375 and onwards of Consciousness Explained says all there is to say (in addition to theories of electromagnetism, optics and so on) about the experience of color.
I can't really do justice to that section in a comment here, but I will note its starting point:
...Many have noticed that it is curiously difficult to say just what properties of things in the world colors could be. [...] What is beyond dispute is that there is no s
Thomas Nagel's classic essay What is it like to be a bat? raises the question of a bat's qualia:
...Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as
Another thread for answers to specific questions.
Second question: Where is computation?
People like to attribute computational states, not just to computers, but to the brain. And they want to say that thoughts, perceptions, etc., consist of being in a certain computational state. But a physical state does not correspond inherently to any one computational state... To be in a particular cognitive state is to be in a particular computational state. But if the "computational state" of a physical object is an observer-dependent attribution rather than an intrinsic property, then how can my thoughts be brain states?
All your questions come down to: why does our existence feel like something? Why is there subjective, personal, conscious experience? And why does it feel the way it does and not some other way?
In the following, I assume that your position about qualia deserving an explanation is correct. I don't have a fully formed opinion yet myself - I defer an explanation - but here's what I came up with by assuming your position.
First, I propose that we both accept the Materialistic Hypothesis as regards minds. In the following text I will use the abbreviation MP for ...
This article contains three simple questions which I want to see answered. To organize the discussion, I'm creating a thread for each question, so people with an answer can state it or link to it. If you link, please provide a brief summary of your answer here as well.
First question: Where is color?
I see a red apple. The redness, I grant you, is not a property of the thing that grew on the tree, the object outside my skull. It's the sensation or perception of the apple which is red. However, I do insist that something is red. But if reality is nothing but particles in space, and empty space is not red, and the particles are not red, then what is? What is the red thing; where is the redness?
However, I do insist that something is red.
Why?
That aside: Red is something that arises out of things that are not themselves red. Right now I'm wearing a sweater, which is made out of things that are not themselves sweaters (plastic, cotton with a little nylon and spandex; or on a higher level, buttons, sleeves, etc.) A sweater came into existence when the sleeves were sewn onto the rest of it (or however it was pieced together); no particles, however, came into existence. My sweater just is a spatial relationship between a vague set of particles (I say "vague" because it could lose a button and still be a sweater, but unlike a piece of lint, the button is really part of the sweater). If I put it through the shredder, no particles would be destroyed, but it would not be a sweater.
My sweater is also red. When I look at it, I experience the impression of looking at a red object. No particles come into existence when I start to have this experience, but they do arrange differently. Some of the ways my brain can be arranged are such that when they are instantiated, I experience the impression of looking at something red - such as the ones that come into play when ...
Where is lesswrong.com? "On the internet" would be the naive answer, but there's no part of the internet we could naively recognize as being lesswrong.com. A bunch of electrical impulses get interpreted as ones and zeroes which get translated in a certain language, which converts them into another language (English), which each mind interacting with the site translates in its own way. At the base level, before minds get involved, there's nothing more complex that a bunch of magnets and electric signals and some servers and so on (I'm not a computer person, so cut me some slack on the details). Yet, out of all of that emerges your post, this comment, and so on.
I know that it is in principle possible to understand how all of this comes together, but I also know that I do not in fact understand it. If I were really to look at how complex this site is - down to the level of the chemist who makes the fertilizer to supply the farmer who feeds the truck driver who delivers the petroleum that gets refined into the plastic that makes the keyboard of the engineer who maintains the power plant that keeps the server running - I have absolutely no idea what's going on, and probably ne...
The problem with the analogy is that we know a whole lot about numbers - math is an artificial language which we created and decided upon the axioms of. How do you know enough about matter and neurons to know that it relates to consciousness in the way that adding positive numbers relates to negative numbers or apples? But I've made this point before.
What I would find more interesting is an explanation of what magic would do here. It seems obvious that our perception of a homogenous shade of pink is, in some significant way, related to lightwave frequencies, retinas, and neurons. Let's assume there is some "magic" involved that in turn converts this physical phenomena into an experience. Wouldn't it have to interact with neurons and such, so that it generates an experience of pink and not an experience of strawberry-rhubarb pie? If it's epiphenomenal, how could it accomplish this, and how could it be meaningful? If it's not epiphenomenal, how does it interact with actual matter? Why can't we detect it?
It's quite clear that when it comes to how consciousness works, the current best answer is, "We don't get it, but it has something to do with the brain and neurons.&quo...
Suppose it turned out that the part of the brain devoted to experiencing (or processing) the color red actually was red, and similarly for the other colors. Would this explain anything?
Wouldn't we then wonder why the part of the brain devoted to smelling flowers did not smell like flowers, and the part for smelling sewage didn't stink?
Would we wonder why the part of the brain for hearing high pitches didn't sound like a high pitch? Why the part which feels a punch in the nose doesn't actually reach out and punch us in the nose when we lean close?
I can't help feeling that this line of questioning is bizarre and unproductive.
A final thread for answers to specific questions.
Third question: Where is meaning?
Thoughts are about things. What aspect of the physical state of an object makes that state "about" something in particular, or about anything at all?
I defer to Wittgenstein: the limits of our language are the limits of the world. We can literally ask the questions above, but I cannot find meaning in them. Blueness, computational states, time, and aboutness do not seem to me to have any implementation in the world beyond the ones you reject as inadequate, and I simply don't see how we can speak meaningfully (that is, in a way that allows justification or pursues truth) about things outside the observable universe.
I don't believe that confabulating a confused topic is a useful activity that is expected to advance understanding. We'd all be better off avoiding this mode of thinking, and building on better-understood concepts instead.
Given that you accept heterophenomenology, I wish you'd put this in explicitly heterophenomenological terms - in terms of accounting for the utterances that people make, in other words. The reason I keep banging on about this is that I think that it is the key move in defusing the confusions you exhibit here.
Simple "Our experience is what world looks like if you happen to be a bunch of neurons firing inside an apes head" is surprisingly strong reply to the questions you raised. If we take neurons that are put together like they are in brain, and give it sensory input that resembles blue ball, we can ask that brain what it thinks it's seeing. It'll answer "blue ball", and there's nothing weird happening here. Here, answering, thinking or even seeing the blue ball is simply a brain state, purely physical phenomenon.
The mystery, as far as I ca...
Did anyone else notice the similarity of Mitchell's arguments in this post, and the one in his comment to one of my posts? Here he says that there is no color in a purely physical description of a mind, and in his comment to my post he said that there is no utility function in a purely physical description of a mind.
I think this argument actually works better here (with color), because my counter-argument to his comment doesn't work. What I said was that in principle we know how to go from a utility function to a physical description of an object (by creat...
I'm not quite sure I understand the problem with blueness as you see it.
Suppose nouroscience was advanced enough that it could manipulate your perception of colors in any arbitrary way just by manipulating your neurons. For example they could make you perceive blue as you previously perceived red and the other way round, induce synaesthesia and make you perceive the smell of roses, the taste of salt, the note C or other things as blue. They could change your perception of color completely, leaving your new perception of colors only as similar to your old ...
No offense, but...
Your previous article on the subject got downvoted to -15, and yet you posted a second article anyway? Why did you do that? Did you perform further research to determine whether all of us were confused, or only you? Did you try to determine whether there was any question to answer or not? Did you try to figure out why it seemed like there was a question to answer?
I don't know you very well at all, but it appears that you're an intelligent and useful person. I'm guessing that seeing the response to your articles will be leaving you disappo...
Honestly, I read this:
Someone else can do the metalevel analysis and extract the rationality lessons.
And noticed that the post is currently rated at -2. All signs are telling me to not bother reading this post. I probably will anyway, but I felt like reminding my future self why the karma system is here. :P
EDIT:
Color was an issue last time.
Where is "last time"?
Thought I accounted for aboutness already, in The Simple Truth. Please explain what aspect of aboutness I failed to account for here.
“The local worldview reduces everything to some combination of physics, mathematics, and computer science, with the exact combination depending on the person. I think it is manifestly the case that this does not work for consciousness.” No it doesn't work because you have left out BIOLOGY. You cannot just jump from physics and algorithms to how brains function. Here is the outline of a possible path: 1.We know that consciousness has an important function because it consumes a great deal of energy – that's how evolution works. 2.Animals move – therefore th...
You can do a Dennett and deny that anything is really blue.
I'd like to see what he'd do if presented with blue and a red balls and given a task: "Pick up the blue ball and you'll receive 3^^^3 dollars".
Even though many claim to be confused about these common words their actual behaviour betrays them. Which raises the question that what is the benefit of this wondering of "blueness"? What does it help anyone to actually do?
Can't we just define "blue" or "blueness" or what have you to be an equivalence class and be done with it?
(ETA: I've created three threads - color, computation, meaning - for the discussion of three questions posed in this article. If you are answering one of those specific questions, please answer there.)
I don't know how to make this about rationality. It's an attack on something which is a standard view, not only here, but throughout scientific culture. Someone else can do the metalevel analysis and extract the rationality lessons.
The local worldview reduces everything to some combination of physics, mathematics, and computer science, with the exact combination depending on the person. I think it is manifestly the case that this does not work for consciousness. I took this line before, but people struggled to understand my own speculations and this complicated the discussion. So the focus is going to be much more on what other people think - like you, dear reader. If you think consciousness can be reduced to some combination of the above, here's your chance to make your case.
The main exhibits will be color and computation. Then we'll talk about reference; then time; and finally the "unity of consciousness".
Color was an issue last time. I ended up going back and forth fruitlessly with several people. From my perspective it's very simple: where is the color in your theory? Whether your physics consists of fields and particles in space, or flows of amplitude in configuration space, or even if you think reality consists of "mathematical structures" or Platonic computer programs, or whatever - I don't see anything red or green there, and yet I do see it right now, here in reality. So if you intend to tell me that reality consists solely of physics, mathematics, or computation, you need to tell me where the colors are.
Occasionally someone says that red and green are just words, and they don't even mean the same thing for different cultures or different people. True. But that's just a matter of classification. It's a fact that the individual shades of color exist, however it is that we group them - and your ontology must contain them, if it pretends to completeness.
Then, there are various other things which have some relation to color - the physics of surface reflection, or the cognitive neuroscience of color attribution. I think we all agree that the first doesn't matter too much; you don't even need blue light to see blue, you just need the right nerves to fire. So the second one seems a lot more relevant, in the attempt to explain color using the physics we have. Somehow the answer lies in the brain.
There is one last dodge comparable to focusing on color words, namely, focusing on color-related cognition. Explaining why you say the words, explaining why you categorize the perceived object as being of a certain color. We're getting closer here. The explanation of color, if there is such, clearly has a close connection to those explanations.
But in the end, either you say that blueness is there, or it is not there. And if it is there, at least "in experience" or "in consciousness", then something somewhere is blue. And all there is in the brain, according to standard physics, is a bunch of particles in various changing configurations. So: where's the blue? What is the blue thing?
I can't answer that question. At least, I can't answer that question for you if you hold with orthodoxy here. However, I have noticed maybe three orthodox approaches to this question.
First is faith. I don't understand how it could be so, but I'm sure one day it will make sense.
Second, puzzlement plus faith. I don't understand how it could be so, and I agree that it really really looks like an insurmountable problem, but we overcame great problems in the past without having to overthrow the whole of science. So maybe if we stand on our heads, hold our breath, and think different, one day it will all make sense.
Third, dualism that doesn't notice it's dualism. This comes from people who think they have an answer. The blueness is the pattern of neural firing, or the von Neumann entropy of the neural state compared to that of the light source, or some other particular physical entity or property. If one then asks, okay, if you say so, but where's the blue... the reactions vary. But a common theme seems to be that blueness is a "feel" somehow "associated" with the entity, or even associated with being the entity. To see blue is how it feels to have your neurons firing that way.
This is the dualism which doesn't know it's dualism. We have a perfectly sensible and precise physical description of neurons firing: ions moving through macromolecular gateways in a membrane, and so forth. There's no end of things we can say about it. We can count the number of ions in a particular spatial volume, we can describe how the electromagnetic fields develop, we can say that this was caused by that... But you'll notice - nothing about feels. When you say that this feels like something, you're introducing a whole new property to the physical description. Basically, you're constructing a dual-aspect materialism, just like David Chalmers proposed. Technically, you're a property dualist rather than a substance dualist.
Now dualism is supposed to be beyond horrible, so what's the alternative? You can do a Dennett and deny that anything is really blue. A few people go there, but not many. If the blueness does exist, and you don't want to be a dualist, and you want to believe in existing physics, then you have to conclude that blueness is what the physics was about all along. We represented it to ourselves as being about little point-particles moving around in space, but all we ever actually had was mathematics and correct predictions, so it must be that some part of the mathematics was actually talking about blueness - real blueness - all along. Problem solved!
Except, it's rather hard to make this work in detail. Blueness, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It's part of a larger experience. So if you take this path, you may as well say that experiences are real, and part of physics must have been describing them all along. And when you try to make some part of physics look like a whole experience - well, I won't say the m word here. Still, this is the path I took, so it's the one I endorse; it just leads you a lot further afield than you might imagine.
Next up, computation. Again, the basic criticism is simple, it's the attempt to rationalize things which makes the discussion complicated. People like to attribute computational states, not just to computers, but to the brain. And they want to say that thoughts, perceptions, etc., consist of being in a certain computational state. But a physical state does not correspond inherently to any one computational state.
There's also a problem with semantics - saying that the state is about something - which I will come to in due course. But first up, let's just look at the problems involved in attributing a non-referential "computational state" to a physical entity.
Physically speaking, an object, like a computer or a brain, can be in any of a large number of exact microphysical states. When we say it is in a computational state, we are grouping those microphysically distinct states together and saying, every state in this group corresponds to the same abstract high-level state, every microphysical state in this other group corresponds to some other abstract high-level state, and so on. But there are many many ways of grouping the states together. Which clustering is the true one, the one that corresponds to cognitive states? Remember, the orthodoxy is functionalism: low-level details don't matter. To be in a particular cognitive state is to be in a particular computational state. But if the "computational state" of a physical object is an observer-dependent attribution rather than an intrinsic property, then how can my thoughts be brain states?
We didn't have this discussion before, so I won't try to anticipate the possible defenses of functionalism. No-one will be surprised, I suppose, to hear that I don't believe this either. Instead, I deduce from this problem that functionalism is wrong. But here's your chance, functionalists: tell the world the one true state-clustering which tells us the computation being implemented by a physical object!
I promised a problem with semantics too. Again I think it's pretty simple. Even if we settle on the One True Clustering of microstates - each such macrostate is still just a region of a physical configuration space. Thoughts have semantic content, they are "about" things. Where's the aboutness?
I also promised to mention time and unity-of-consciousness in conclusion. Time I think offers another outstanding example of the will to deny an aspect of conscious experience (or rather, to call it an illusion) for the sake of insisting that reality conforms entirely to a particular scientific ontology. Basically, we have a physics that spatializes time; we can visualize a space-time as a static, completed thing. So time in the sense of flow - change, process - isn't there in the model; but it appears to be there in reality; therefore it is an illusion.
Without trying to preempt the debate about time, perhaps you can see by now why I would be rather skeptical of attempts to deny the obvious for the sake of a particular scientific ontology. Perhaps it's not actually necessary. Maybe, if someone thinks about it hard enough, they can come up with an ontology in which time is real and "flows" after all, and which still gives rise to the right physical predictions. (In general relativity, a world-line has a local time associated with it. So if the world-line is that of an actually and persistently existing object, perhaps time can be real and flowing inside the object... in some sense. That's my suggestion.)
And finally, unity of consciousness. In the debate over physicalism and consciousness, the discussion usually doesn't even get this far. It gets stuck on whether the individual "qualia" are real. But they do actually form a whole. All this stuff - color, meaning, time - is drawn from that whole. It is a real and very difficult task to properly characterize that whole: not just what its ingredients are, but how they are joined together, what it is that makes it a whole. After all, that whole is your life. Nonetheless, if anyone has come this far with me, perhaps you'll agree that it's the ontology of the subjective whole which is the ultimate challenge here. If we are going to say that a particular ontology is the way that reality is, then it must not only contain color, meaning, and time, it has to contain that subjective whole. In phenomenology, the standard term for that whole is the "lifeworld". Even cranky mistaken reductionists have a lifeworld - they just haven't noticed the inconsistencies between what they believe and what they experience. The ultimate challenge in the science of consciousness is to get the ontology of the lifeworld right, and then to find a broader scientific ontology which contains the lifeworld ontology. But first, as difficult as it may seem, we have to get past the partial ontologies which, for all their predictive power and their seductive exactness, just can't be the whole story.