Re: Challenge to Curt

On Mar 23, 9:54 am, "Alpha" <OmegaZero2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
... I do trust my reasoning and Leibniz's
Law tells me that the properties of the experience
of red do NOT include, for example, : an electrical
pulse, or is gooey, or looks like brain material,
or involves molecular conformational changes etc.
Nor is an AP red in color.

That the properties that make up your subjective
experiences do not match the properties that make up
an objective view of the brain can be explained as
there being two points of view.

When a mental event of a certain kind occurs a
physical event of a certain kind occurs as well.
It is not like lightening and thunder that may
correlate but are not identical things. It is
the same thing, a physical event as observed
objectively via our senses and a mental event
as "observed" by our brain processes.


So contrary to your *assumption*, rational reasoning
tells me that an AP (or host of APs or any other
brain property, including the behavior of brain stuff),
is not *identical with* the experience of red.

What is not identical is your experience of viewing
the brain stuff and your experience of red. It does
not follow that the source of both experiences is
not the same.

Now, I am all with you on the assumption and data that
we have that shows that there is correlation between
brain processes and what we feel and think. But
just as War and Peace loses all meaning when looked
at as swirling atoms or even as ink and cellulose
molecules, APs firing do NOT have the meaning of the
thought or experience, whatever they may be to a
first-person perspective.

The properties of water at the macro level do not match
the properties of water molecules at the atomic level
yet they are identical in the sense they depend on the
same things to be there. It is just two viewpoints.

Of course a thought is not identical with the firing
of a particular neuron, it is a macro phenomena, but
there is nothing extra required for that phenomena
to take place over and beyond a network of neurons.


I was an experimenter and developer in the biofeedback
arena, coupling medical parameter measuring devices
with computers, including 16-channel EEG devices which,
when using the software I wrote (on the Mac in the
early to mid 1990's), showed on a screen, how certain
"thought" or feeling patterns resulted in changing
hues and intensities of objects on the screen with
practice. One could learn to change the color of a
box with practice. I could therefore *see* my brain's
effects in the real world and correlated such with my
thoughts (which were actually a lot like affective
experiences than any kind of one-to-one visualization
of a cube changing coloring the mind's eye - it did
not actually work that way). There is nothing in that
scenario, or in one in which one supplants the decade
-old technology with more sophisticated technology
(fMRI etc.) that shows that blood flow or electrical
activity is the same as what is being experienced in
the mind. They are different *types* or *classes* of
phenomena.

I don't see any of the above as inconsistent with the
view that the objective and subjective view of the brain,
although different as experiences, in fact refer to the
same physical event.

JC
.

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