Re: consciousness

Curt Welch writes:

Allan C Cybulskie <allan_c_cybulskie@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 20, 6:37 pm, Don Geddis <d...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why is it so hard for you to understand the analogy with neurons and
minds? Why would you ever expect to see actual physical redness inside
the voltage spike in a brain's neurons?

Well, here's what you're missing: the thing that's actually red, the
thing that we care about, and the thing that you're claiming is
produced by the brain ... is actually the PRINTED PICTURE. When I
experience red, the red is printed for me; it's there, it's
represented, it's presented in all of its glory. So where is the red
in the brain that's supposed to be what's making that picture appear?

Well, here's the thing you can't grasp. The neuron firing is the redness.

Curt, the neurons in the retina get first crack at processing and
representing optical information. Further downstream is the V4
cortex. Let's say in the presence of a ripe tomato that a neuron in
the retina and a neuron in V4 both fire in response to the tomato.
Which neuron firing is the "redness"?

There may be neurons firing all over the place in response to red
objects. Why should any one get singled out as "the redness"?

Your desire to equate the term "redness" with an independent entity is
the, um, heart and soul of dualism. All you are doing is replacing
the magical ghost with a magical neuron.

The question I have for you, is why would you expect to see redness when
you open up a brain and look the neuron?

Yes, we would find something that looks red when we opened up a brain:
blood.

If the camera had arms and opened
up it's own brain, would it find something in there that _LOOKED_ red to
it?

Maybe some stripes on the resistors?

When you open your brain and look at it,

For you youngsters lurking out there, don't try this at home without
asking your parents first!

it causes different neurons to
fire, and those different neurons are not the red neurons. For it to look
red to you, it would have to create the same neural pattern.

In other words, the world plays as much a role in perception as our
bodies. For it to look red to you, it would have to be red or present
the same ambient optical information as red objects do.

Lets assume you didn't have the experience of redness, and blueness in your
mind. What what happen? You wouldn't be able to tell red things from blue
things.

Curt, I realize that we see this type of argument all the time in
philosophy, but keep in mind that this is just stuff people made up.
Science has found no "redness or blueness in the mind", nor would it
even know what to look for or where to look for it.

Or maybe, you simply wouldn't see red things at all since you had
no internal representation of redness. Just like we can't see IR. WE have
no internal representation of IR light in the brain, so we just can't sense
it at all.

Hold your hand under a heat lamp.

But since we do have red and blue sensors, and, like the camera, we do have
internal representations of red and blue, how would you expect them to
appear to you?

Your next objective, Curt, should be to move beyond
representationalism. Sure, there are relationships between what
happens in the world and neurons firing in the brain, and the
neuroscientist can call those representations. But representations
are just dead, static entities. You are trying to reduce vision to
these dead symbols.

In the camera, red may be represented as the RGB triplet (255, 0, 0)
and blue as (0, 0, 255). Is the difference between red and blue,
then, going to be found in a study of these two triplets? No. The
representation at first seems like it is the key thing, but on closer
inspection, you realize that you need to look elsewhere, or that you
are focusing too closely and have excluded too much.

Red would have to be different from blue. If it were not, you could not
tell red things from blue things.

More properly: red things would have to be different from blue things
and you would need a means to tell them apart. You don't see red. You
see a tomato, an apple, a fire truck. (Take a look around you.
Objects everywhere!) Speaking simply, to say something is red is to
say that you cannot easily tell it apart from the reference set of red
objects.

And black would have to be different
from red. And sound would be different from red. Basically, everything
you can experience, would be different from red.

So what is "red" to us? We really only know red as being red because it's
not blue, and it's not black, and it's not a sound, and it's not a smell,
and it's not taste. We know what red is, by relativity to everything else
we can know.

We know red because our parents, teachers, and society classifies
particular objects as red objects and we learned the same skill. If
you worked at a paint store and somebody wanted paint of a particular
shade of green, they could bring in and show you a sample, say, a
square on a color chart or a piece of carpet. But your point applies
here as well: perception is an ability to tell things apart. If you
couldn't tell shades of green apart that well, you might mix up a can
of paint that the customer sees as a slightly different color than
what he wanted.

If I program a robot so it can see red and blue, and talk about what it's
looking at, and have memories of what it's done, and seen, in the past, how
would the program describe to us, it's qualia of redness? Why wouldn't it
have a qualia of redness like we have? It can sense the redness in objects
it looks at. It can have memories (read the image out of the memory card)
of redness and use those memories to generate strings of thoughts and other
behaviors. It could say to us, remember how red that sunset was
yesterday?. This is the type of thing we can already program into a
computer. And because the computer does have it's own internal
representation of redness, it wouldn't just be spitting out words, it would
actually be making reference to something it saw for itself yesterday and
be making reference to it's on internal qualia (it's own internal
representation of redness).

The way you structure this example, the robot is making reference to
the sunset it saw yesterday. That it would be making reference to
"internal qualia" is just a supposition on your part. You have
demonstrate that is the case. If you could demonstrate the existence
of qualia, why, I bet philosophers across the world would celebrate
with joy in the streets. They would build statues in your image and
name firstborn after you.

Now, the computer can't see what our redness looks like. It's entire
understanding of reality is limited to how it's system represents
everything it knows in it's brain. It can't actually "see" light. It only
"sees" and reacts to, the internal representations. You could replace it's
body and it's camera eyes and keep only it's computer brain and feed it
signals generated by another computer running a 3D simulation of the
computer. The computer would not be able to tell whether it was hooked to
the simulation, or the real world, if the simulation was good enough. But
yet, in both causes, this robot would still see redness, and could still
talk to us about it's perception of redness.

I know this argument is a staple in philosophy, but it is flawed.
Notice that you hook up something external, a fancy computer, yet
conclude that redness is internal. That doesn't follow. At best,
this argument shows that we and our robot brethren see the environment
and that seeing is a matter of discriminating patterns in the
environment. A red apple reflecting light and a computer simulation
shooting out pulses present the same information, but not necessarily
in the same form.

Perception is an ability to tell things apart. That ability is
limited, so there will always be cases of ambiguity. That we cannot
tell a red apple and a simulated apple apart does not mean the apple,
in a sense, is inside us. In this case it means that there are
features in the environment that we cannot tell apart and that we will
treat the same.

But, the computer might get confused by this, and say things to us like,
"but what I sense as redness is what I sense when I see an apple, and I
don't sense anything like that when I look at my own brain, so therefore,
my phenomenal experience of redness must not be an identity with the
movement of electrons in my brain! But we explain to the robot that the
movement of electrons is all there is. But he says, it can't be, because I
sense redness as well, I don't sense movement of elections!

Robots are smarter than philosophers. Robots know that movement of
electrons is not all there is. It knows that there are also apples
and cherries and red Ferrari's.

So we explain to the robot that humans get confused in the same way. We
tell him that humans see red because they have eyes and neurons that signal
the existence of redness and the brain produces behavior in response to
those redness signals. Humans then tell us that that they "see red" when
in fact what they are reacting to is just neurons firing. So when they say
the see red, they are really only sensing neurons in their head firing.

The robot, not being caught in the grips of philosophy, will remind
the human of how he came to learn his color words in the first place,
by learning to group objects in particular ways. Yes, electrons
played a role, but they are not the objects seen. The teacher graded
how well the student identified the color of objects, not the
particular electron dances that went on, which could be different for
different students.

But the robot still doesn't understand any of this. He knows he sees red
(which is true) but he fails to understand that "seeing red" for the robot
just means that the redness signal in his brain has activated. He just not
able to grasp that idea that the redness signal in the computer brain is
what he's actually talking about when he says he has a phenomenal
experience of redness.

The teacher doesn't say, "and kids, by 'red' I mean this"--and then
points to her head.

Basically, phenomenal experience is the picture, not the storage in
memory of those qualities. And your example references the memory,
not the picture.

The redness isn't in the apple, or the picture of the apple. It's in the
wires of the camera which sensed the apple as being red.

Red is not an independent entity. Colors aren't things. They don't
have homes. You don't have to go looking for them to explain them.
Look at what people do in the world and what they have to do to live.
Color lives in that context.

--
Joe Durnavich
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: consciousness
    ... there is no physical property of the isolated neurons or transistors ... What is the *representation* of the symbol for red in terms of the neuron, ... redness, ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: consciousness
    ... Why would you ever expect to see actual physical redness ... inside the voltage spike in a brain's neurons? ... produced by the brain ... ... A red apple reflecting light and a computer simulation ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: consciousness
    ... there is no physical property of the isolated neurons or transistors ... redness, ... look at a single bit stored in the camera and have any idea whether you were ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: consciousness
    ... produced by the brain ... ... The neuron firing is the redness. ... When you open your brain and look at it, it causes different neurons to ... those redness signals. ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: consciousness
    ... I see no "redness" when a purported set of APs gives rise to the redness ... I wonder how you think this is any different from a digital camera. ... spike in a brain's neurons? ... generate an RGB hitogram of an image from the representation!!) ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)