And then there's Qualia. What about it is a mystery?

[Citizenschallenge]

@Wayfarer

I don’t see anything that I’m saying as in contradiction to the facts of evolutionary biology.

Which is probably why much of your writing passes my sniff test, with parts that impress me.

I loved the Time Life series myself, though my lessons start on Grandma’s lap looking at ancient Encyclopedia Brittanicas, at a world full of mysteries and questions to cleared up. In hindsight, she infected me with that yearning to understand our world better, and invested me in the human project of discovery driven by a burning curiosity - that’s sort of died here in this internet run mass media era of ours.

Although in the 90s I casually picked up one T/L book while waiting in a library line - that book titled “Molecules” blew my mind. Of course, I was roughly aware of the atomic world, but to see it laid out like they did, gave that awareness an entirely new spin.

It listed the 100 simplest molecules, most organic. Paging through those diagrams and seeing the simplicity of atoms, building up unit by unit, like my old Legos, was another petit epiphany, "By gosh, Einstein was wrong! “God” really does play dice, and the atomic world is evidence of that. Mind you, my “god” is the universe and Earth with its incomparable life force.

I’ve since learned how the universe and Earth plays with loaded dice, (rather than balanced random ones).

Did you ever watch Attenborough’s Life on Earth series - 1976 ?
He traces the pageant of evolution through the scientific fossil record, and then juxtaposes that with examples of actually living creatures that possess the same biological evolutionary “break throughs” before life moved on to yet bigger and better.

In my world that series would have become part of mandatory curriculum for intermediate school, when kids are starting to get smart enough to think little, but not yet lost to the distractions of hormone rushes and teenage attitude.
Because it brings home the reality of evolution in a way that I’ve yet to see anyone else duplicate. Unfortunately, it’s rather outdated and quaint, even as the basis information and facts remains valid, though today we possess way more layers of details.

@Wayfarer

@Citizenschallenge

I have no pretense, or use, for the child of god longing

Meaning what?

I not accusing you, I’m talking about the musty air that fills philosophical discourse.

Are you telling me Descartes didn’t write with the Church and God in mind?

Or that Nagel, and Chalmers did not built their suppositions on Descartes’ framework?

And also, there’s that unexamined self-absorbed, self-serving nature of our’s that we refuse to examine, that add more weight to my attitude.

[Citizenschallenge]

@Banno

That’s exactly the problem with “qualia”: its use is confined almost entirely to philosophical disputes about itself. It has a place only in philosophical discussions; outside philosophy fora, where do we actually use it?

I use it to express what’s happening within one’s body biologically during the living moment of now.

It makes sense because I know that my body isn’t “my” body, but that “I Am” the current incarnation of a creature bloodline that goes back half a billions years worth of generations. My body possesses layers of awareness, strategies, and agenda beyond my conscious awareness.

I also accept that my body/brain knows more than I do, and in fact that my body/brain has done a better job of taking care of me, than I have myself.

That “I” being my conscious awareness.

[PatternChaser]

@Citizenschallenge

That “I” being my conscious awareness.

That’s how we’ve used the terms for many years. Oddly, it persists even after our discovery of the so-called unconscious mind, that makes up most of our minds… But that’s not what this topic is about.

[Frank]

@Citizenschallenge

But that’s not true from a modern scientific perspective.

It is because of multiple realizability. Qualia is irreducible. Maybe emergent in some way. We don’t know.

[Citizenschallenge]

@Wayfarer

You don’t convey any knowledge of philosophy, regrettably. More like contempt for it.

So? But I do strive to be civil.

I look at the world we created, and the horrendous legacy we are leaving our offspring.

Why should I not be contemptuous about our human self-absorption, self-serving, disregard for anything outside of our own self-interest?

I see philosophy used as a tool to reinforce a human exceptionalism, that we don’t deserve.

@PatternChaser

@Citizenschallenge

That “I” being my conscious awareness.

That’s how we’ve used the terms for many years. Oddly, it persists even after our discovery of the so-called unconscious mind, that makes up most of our minds… But that’s not what this topic is about.

Ah, now we get back to that most fundamental observation about our human condition, that is the Physical (biological) Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide.

It really comes in handy if you want to get into the weeds

[MadLad]

Depending on how you look at it, the act of so-called “morphological derivation” is a curse or boon on philosophy, particularly “nominalization”, since the grammar suggests something that exists in some form or other (I suppose linguists use these terms without irony). This is a natural feature of many languages, so it is unavoidable and often necessary, but it isn’t long before some philosophers believe they can explain the nature of these things as if they were things.

Discussing the inner-workings of the body can become particularly spooky because we are forever doomed to look out outwards and are unable to see exactly what is going on in there. In that sense, each of us are unreliable witnesses; but it isn’t long before a certain philosophers pretend that they are reliable ones. It’s like using the phrase “what it is like” as the catch-all description of a conscious human being, to which everyone should ask “What what is like?”, and then we can watch as they go on compounding more derivations and synonyms in a loop: experience, awareness, perception, cognition, intentionality, what-have-you.

I don’t believe this is a mistake. I believe it is a concerted effort to keep superstition in our minds, like how God keeps retreating to where no one can see him, first behind the clouds, then to the beginning of time.

[Frank]

I assert that we should do away with nominalizations like slavery. It’s just people working for their room and board, and this is what everyone does. Insisting that it’s a thing creates the false perspective that it’s something we need to explain when it’s just something people DO.

[Angel]

@Patterner

Why do we not simply have input, react, add the reaction to new input, act again…?

That’s exactly what we do. Photoreceptors transmit a signal, and we remember that signal. We remember it as a color distinct from other signals. We remember which photoreceptors transmit signals, and from this we form our own memory. The problem isn’t how this vision is formed, but that we can only compare it to a certain point. We can accurately determine whether a person sees or doesn’t see a specific wavelength of light, but we can’t see the picture itself in their mind. The logical conclusion is that people with a similar set of photoreceptors to our own see the world the same way we do, but we can’t say more.

[MadLad]

@Frank

I assert that we should do away with nominalizations like slavery. It’s just people working for their room and board, and this is what everyone does. Insisting that it’s a thing creates the false perspective that it’s something we need to explain when it’s just something people DO.

Everyone enslaves others? That seems like a crazy proposition.

[Frank]

@MadLad

Everyone enslaves others? That seems like a crazy proposition.

Sounds like it might be driven by ideology, huh? Ideological pronouncements about consciousness have no worth other than to prop up an ideology.

[MadLad]

I’m fine with it. Reifying our thoughts and describing abstractions is a fool’s errand, best left for those who require such activity.

[Frank]

You can’t speak without an abstraction or two. If you don’t like them, you can just stay silent.

[Patterner]

@Angel

We remember it as a color distinct from other signals.

The key there is “color”. The whole process is describable and understandable as physical events, except for the color aspect. There’s no hint of color in all that. We can describe and understand it as physical events in a robot, too. Does a robot see colors? As Chalmers says in The Conscious Mind:

Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other features alone.

That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps.

[Angel]

@Patterner

There’s no hint of color in all that.

Why not? We must be able to distinguish the differences in signals from different photoreceptors. How should we distinguish them? Obviously, one shouldn’t be similar to the other. And so, they are. Qualia is a way to translate quantity into quality to simplify the computational process.

[Patterner]

@Angel

Qualia is a way to translate quantity into quality to simplify the computational process.

Agreed! But how is that translation accomplished? Nothing in our brain turns blue when we see something blue, much less when we imagine something blue. The photons hitting our retina are not blue. The ions going into and out of there membranes of our neurons are not blue. Nothing anywhere is blue. So how do we experience blue?

[Michael]

It’s more complicated than just being able to distinguish wavelengths of light.

Both the person with normal vision and the person with protanopia can distinguish 380nm light from 780nm light, but the colours they each see are very different (even if they both use the words “foo” and “bar” to name them, and agree on the associated wavelengths).

And then consider that tetrachromacy adds another graph above normal vision, perhaps as different to normal vision as normal vision is to protanopia — with colours that you and I can’t even imagine.

[Angel]

@Patterner

But how is that translation accomplished? Nothing in our brain turns blue when we see something blue, much less when we imagine something blue. The photons hitting our retina are not blue. The ions going into and out of there membranes of our neurons are not blue. Nothing anywhere is blue. So how do we experience blue?

We simply see differences. In our minds, this difference creates a feeling of pleasantness, which is why the world appears colorful and we like colorful things. People with four types of photoreceptors, unlike the rest of us, see many more shades. They simply see more differences, but the world appears to them much more colorful than most people. Colorblind people, on the other hand, see the world as less colorful—in reality, they simply see less difference.

[Angel]

@Michael

Both the person with normal vision and the person with protanopia can distinguish 380nm light from 780nm light, but the colours they each see are very different (even if they both use the words “foo” and “bar” to name them, and agree on the associated wavelengths).

This still depends solely on the perception of the wavelength of light. The set and ratio of photoreceptors determines what a person can and cannot see. There are only three types of photoreceptors (some have four), and shades are determined by their ratio.

[Michael]

There’s more to vision that just the eye’s photoreceptors being stimulated by light. There’s also what the photoreceptors do in response, e.g. the amount of glutamate they release, and then how the neurons in the brain react to this glutamate and interact with one another. It’s plausible that you and I could have the exact same eyes, capable of discerning the exact same wavelengths of light, and yet still see different colours because of differences in our optic nerves and brains.

[Angel]

@Michael

It’s plausible that you and I could have the exact same eyes, capable of discerning the exact same wavelengths of light, and yet still see different colours because of differences in our optic nerves and brains.

This is unlikely to make much difference because the ratio of photoreceptors varies significantly between people. It is the ratio of photoreceptors that is the main reason why shades are perceived differently.