Yes I would agree that I'm trying to establish a theory of pure difference. That "they are all the same" in terms of only being differences is not a negative but a perk of the theory, its what makes it compatible with a monist materialism. As soon as you permit a positive meaning you must permit these different aspects or plains of existence.
Does pain really have no characteristic s other than being different from pleasure?
Pain is differentiated not just from pleasure but from all other experiences. Difference doesn't all mean the same difference, I'm thinking of like neural net weights where each connection is some number between zero and one. When this becomes a many to many network of connections, the possible structural patterns can become quite complex. Its my hypothesis for example that pain has a unique structural pattern that comes from causing changes within many sensous input systems themselves, and is therefore characterized as "a mode of perceiving and subjective experience which is undesired".
Obviously not, since humans have conditions in which qualia can go missing, or become hypertrophic, eg. colour blindness and synaesthesia.
Not sure I understand what the objection is here.
I don't see why camp #1 requires dualism
Camp 1 is unable to account for self evident experience qua experience, it creates an outside to physical reality in saying "this isn't worth addressing", there's what's real and, perhaps uncharitably, what's fiction. To create a truly material monist ontology you must create a material account of this fiction or belief or whatever experience. The failure to do this is a major error in analytic philosophy and the failure of people like Yudkowsky in my opinion.
Right I'm arguing that the specific differences which fully enable the experience of a qualia are unconscious, and must necessarily be outside of consciousness awareness, that's what I was talking about wrt to the patterns of qualia and their relations necessarily implying an external phenomenal substance which we are not always aware of.
There's also differentiation in time, and so long as you're aware that it's the presence or absence of your focus, then you're aware it's differentiated from the rest of your awareness/experience.
No no, I'm not saying that I myself am actively aware of all difference in my experience, I feel the noise too, but whenever I investigate a phenomenon what I find is that it just gets broken into more difference that I didn't notice originally. Since noise logically requires difference, you can't get static without some variation in the signal, and when I investigate I only find more difference, never any positive thing in itself, I can only conclude that the difference extends down to the noise, the texture, and I'm simply not aware of the full extent of the differences.
If you're speaking of /specific/ colors, sounds and smells, then you're already acknowledging that you're differentiating them from other experiences.
I'm purposefully trying to avoid either camp as both camps require a type of dualism. What I'm trying to claim here is that any subjective feeling is only pure difference, even from a purely phenomenological analysis. If you pay attention to any specific sound or sight or smell, all you're gonna notice are the differences to other such experiences. Any notion of positive, non-differential experience, I claim, is just an illusion created by the difficulty in specifically being aware of all the differences in experience at once. I used references to sense organs just as a means of mapping internal sensations, as well as explain where the noise is coming from. But noise itself is logically impossible without difference, and so if there is noise in our awareness of differences that just points to differences we're not aware of but still experience.
I think the texture of coffee smell is just the texture of smelling as such, and probably exists in the different overall type/pattern of noise that exists in olfactory sense compared to other senses. I think the texture of smelling coffee would basically be the same as smelling anything else except to the extent different smells actually activate different sense organs. For example I'm pretty sure that garbage smells are felt much more acutely in the back of the nose/throat than something like coffee but I haven't done much research on the topic.
I take the "texture" of qualia to be the noise inherent to the input senses, this noise is essentially the difference between the level of differentiation which exists within our own mind for making sense of things, and the smallest amount of differentiation in the world which our sense are capable of detecting. When you look at a painting, you'll first get like a gestalt impression based on the largest structures you notice, the biggest shapes and largest color groups, etc. But your eye can detect smaller structures, down to whatever size. Until your brain creates active distinctions on that level, those smaller structures are just noise which /potentially/ can be understood. Without this really existing differentiation beyond comprehension, the texture would also be impossible.
I guess it's obvious to me I have phenomenal experience but it is not intuitive to me that this is limited to the specific experiences I'm aware of. Furthermore, it's very important to me that the functional structure exists /within/ phenomenal experience, I can observe internally how my mind differentiates between things and /learns/ how to differentiate. Given any specific, identifiable aspect of my internal state requires it to be differentiated, I assume this differentiation goes all the way down. Hence, this differentiation is not imposed from the outside by a scientific investigation of a physical system. Perhaps my mind is just too corrupted from thinking about semiotics too much, but I believe some of these internal observations should generalize to others experiences given they match neatly onto debates and descriptions of language acquisition.
When you're budgeting resources, conflicts with adversaries are a little different than other sorts of categories of expense, which might be largely determined by your own consumption habits or, if put at risk by unexpected changes in nature or in the economy, don't change in a way to actively thwart us, are more or less random. When in a conflict, you're always going to want to be conservative in estimating the resources you need, which is something obvious in any book on military logistics, and being conservative requires overestimating what your opponent can do, and underestimating how far your current resources will actually go. If you weren't conservative, you could put more resources towards other things (guns vs butter debates) but being conservative is probably more evolutionarily fit than being more accurate in that estimation, as the conservative planner will be more prepared in unexpected situations.
I dunno that arrows and set stuff makes even less sense to me, and if I can't understand I can't write it down. And as far as I'm concerned I did give what inputs each function takes and what outputs they produce.
If that's how you want to define it then sure. But all the examples of camp 1 they gave in that piece were people who weren't interested in a phenomenal analysis of qualia, only interested in explaining it using science in terms of physics. I think that trying to assert that science need not explain human negativity like experience, fiction, ideology or lies is itself slipping out of a materialist ontology.