User:Brent Allsop/sandbox

Blindness to the colors of things

I think it’s great that we have created a Wikipedia:WikiProject Color. But has anyone noticed that there is no information anywhere in wikipedia that tells us what color anything really is? If you think you already know what is and isn’t red, consider how many experts agree how naive direct realism is. In the next few paragraphs, I will propose a scientific method to falsify direct realism and objectively find out what color things really are.

The perception of color process is a long chain of causal events, starting when a ripe strawberry reflects red light. If the target of perception is the ripeness quality of a strawberry, our brain can take advantage of the fact that ripe strawberries reflect red light. Like all objective information, this light is nothing like the strawberry, so our brain needs to properly interpret this light, so we have knowledge that properly represents the target of our perception.

If we invert the red/green signal anywhere in this chain, this will of course change the quality of our knowledge of the strawberry. It is easiest to do this in the light stage of the chain like when we look at a red/green inverted negative picture of a strawberry. For example see the green one in the image to the right. But again, the only way that negative image you are looking at over there is really green, is if Naïve realism is true.

Nobody seems to notice what should be an obvious fact, which is that you can do a similar red/green signal inversion anywhere in this chain between the target of perception and our physical knowledge of the same. For example, you could move this negative picture inversion of the signal, from the light section, downstream to after the eye, in the optic nerve. In this case, red light would be landing on our eyes, but we would still have the same inverted knowledge of what would appear to be a green strawberry. Direct realism falsified.

If we are consciousnessly aware of something, there must be something physical that instantiates that knowledge. Physical knowledge is the final result of perception. We are directly aware of the causal physical qualities of our knowledge. It must be that it is our physical knowledge, which has these redness and greenness qualities, which cause us to say: “That is red.”

Red is used as a label for lots of different things, including the strawberry, the reflected light, and all the diverse physics in different heads that react to this. Obviously, defining the word “red” like this doesn’t tell us the quality of any of these things. We at least use light as some kind of physical reference, but this is only because light is the last point in the chain of perception that is easily inverted before the chain enters the body. Could it be that your brain represents what we all call “red” with something physically different than anyone else?

In order to talk about causal physical qualities, we need to use multiple words as labels for different physical things. For example, in the Canonizer camp on “Representational Qualia Theory”, we define the word “red” to be anything that reflects or emits “red” light. We use the different word “redness” as a label for whatever it is, in our brain, that has the redness physical quality. Anyone that only uses one word, like “red,” when talking about the physics of perception is blind to actual physical qualities. In other words, they are “qualia blind”. All of the information in Wikipedia is qualia blind in this way.

If we don’t know the actual color of the strawberry, what about the color of something in our brain, like the neurotransmitter glutamate? We know everything about how glutamate behaves in a synapse. But shouldn’t we be asking what that glutamate behavior is qualitatively like? Is it not a hypothetical possibility that it is glutamate that has the redness quality we can be directly aware of and that the following two names are labels for the same thing.

Subjective: redness
Object: glutamate

Various “knowledge arguments” such as “Mary's room” and “Inverted Spectrum” seem to be framed as “arguments against physicalism” or that “qualia are non physical”. Qualia tend to be framed as changing, while the physics stays the same. We also use terminology that separates qualia from physics like “generates”, “causes”, “correlates with”, “arises from” or “supervenes on”. All this kind of separation seems to be contributing to our qualia blindness. Maybe we should instead just realize that we don’t yet know what color anything is, and start using experimental methods that can tell us what color things like glutamate really are. ”Mind–body problem” solved.

To date, qualia theories have remained ineffable, or not objectively falsifiable. This has freed people to believe in a diverse set of non-falsified theories, many of which are represented in supporting sub camps to Representational Qualia Theory. This lack of consensus results in many edit wars all over Wikipedia. Representational Qualia Theory is finally a method to start falsifying theories and possibly forging a scientific consensus. This process has started, as can be seen by such facts as Dennett’s Predictive Bayesian Coding Theory is now in a supporting sub camp position to Representational Qualia Theory. Despite all this, it remains difficult to get any of this information accepted for publication in established journals. So any help by people who understand this, by joining or supporting camps, even if you disagree, will help move things forward in this field. Supporting Representational Qualia Theory or any of its sub camps, is like signing a petition, increasing completeness, credibility, and amplification of the wisdom of the crowd. Brent.Allsop (talk) 17:33, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Explanation of qualia for mathematicians and experimentalists

To understand qualia, we only need the equal sign, so we can define things in dictionaries like the following mapping from hexadecimal RGB values to English words.

0xFF0000 = Red
0x00FF00 = Green

We can intuitively see that even the word 'red' above, conveys no colored information, since we could define red to be anything we want it to be. In order to know what the word "red" means, we need to define something physical, and say THAT is red, as we do here:

0xFF0000 = Red =
0x00FF00 = Green =

However, there is a problem with only this. Dennett's four attributes of qualia are listed above. The second attribute states qualia are intrinsic qualities. In other words, qualia are intrinsic qualities of our knowledge. So if qualia are intrinsic qualities of knowledge, couldn't different people be born or engineered to use different intrinsic qualities to represent a particular color as portrayed in the inverted qualia image above? If this is the case, we would need to distinguish between reality and people's different knowledge of reality. In order to do this we would need different words for different intrinsic qualities.

We define red and green as follows:

red = the intrinsic quality of anything, like the red square above, which reflects or emits red light.
green = the intrinsic quality of anything, like the green square above, which reflects or emits green light.

We can use different words for the qualities of our knowledge of those things. Normally, red and redness are synonyms. But let's see what happens if we change definitions as follows:

redness = the intrinsic quality of your knowledge of red things.
greenness = the intrinsic quality of your knowledge of green things.

Once we have different labels for different intrinsic qualities, that inverted qualia image above starts to make sense. The only difference between those two people could be that one's retina defines red and green to be inverted signals being sent down the physically identical optic nerve. Notice that in that inverted image, the strawberry is black. This is because either of those different people's qualities of knowledge could be defined to be the "right" one. In reality, all the abstract objective information we gain from our senses is similarly devoid of actual colored information. All of our objective knowledge is just abstracts labels for, and descriptions of the behavior of intrinsic qualities. And a description of the behavior of an intrinsic quality tells us nothing of the actual quality of that behavior.

That red box, above, causes your brain to render knowledge of that box that has your redness quality. In other words, it is your brain that defines your redness to be a synonym with red, while another's brain could be born or engineered to define your greenness to be a synonym with red. Dennett's forth attribute of qualia is that we "directly apprehended" these intrinsic qualities. This direct awareness of something in our brain gives us special subjective only access to what we can only objectively observe from afar through our abstracting senses. For example, we can describe the behavior of glutamate, as it reacts in a synapse. But that description of the behavior of glutamate, tells us nothing of glutamate's intrinsic quality. It is a falsifiable theoretical possibility that our description of glutamate, could be a description of what we intrinsically know to be redness. In other words, redness and glutamate could be labels for the same thing.

Once we use multiple terms for different intrinsic qualities, and once we physically define those terms, then we can bridge the Explanatory gap and eff the ineffable nature of qualia with statements like:

My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call red.

If we start experimenting along these lines, noticing any differences in intrinsic properties of knowledge of color in brains, we may find that someone can experience redness, while there is no glutamate present. This would falsify the redness = glutamate prediction. And this kind of falsifiability is what experimentalists need. They can then try a description of something else in the brain, till they find the necessary and sufficient set of stuff which can't be falsified. We can then say it is this stuff which has your redness quality. Once we experimentally connect the subjective with the objective in this way, we will finally have the required dictionary for our abstract objective knowledge. With such a dictionary, we would finally no longer be qualia blind. Such a dictionary could finally tell us the intrinsic qualities of at least some of the stuff in this world.

We are still like Frank Jackson's Mary before she experiences redness for herself, as describe in the Knowledge argument. Mary's knowledge is initially like all the tables above, if we replaced the colored boxes with numbers for the wavelengths of light they emit. Until Mary directly apprehends the colors rendered by her brain, when she looks at those colored boxes, only then can she know what her black and white description of redness is like. If we only have one word for all things red, we can't model these kinds of intrinsic differences. All of the information in Wikipedia, except this piece, only uses one abstract word for all things red, making it all unable to model such differences. Everything in Wikipedia is qualia blind in this way. Even though we think we know the wonderful colors of everything we see, in reality, that is just the colors everything seems to be. Those colors are really just the qualities of our knowledge of those things. In reality, other than subjectively, nobody knows the true intrinsic qualities of anything. The questions we need to ask are questions like:

Which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a description of redness?

Reference: Consciousness: Not a hard problem, just a color problem.