Hi James,


On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 5:14 PM James Lyons-Weiler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I define it as the wavelength of light detected at 700 nm by a spectrometer, and whichever culturally accepted normative label 
 word or thought label attributed to the perception associated with that wavelength.  From an evolutionary view, the inversion problem is ad-hoc, beyond anything we would expect in individuals with common ancestry, requiring unfounded suppositions and assumptions.

We’ve gone over all this multiple times on this list, but you must have missed all that.  Here you are defining both “red” and “redness” as synonyms, according to the same wavelengths of light.  In other words, you use “one word for all things red”.  We define any language that uses one word for all things red as 'qualia blind' simply because that language cannot bridge the explanatory gap with statements that define them to be different things like: "My redness is like your grenness, both of which we call red".


Also, Red / Green color-blind people, for example, represent both red and green things with the same intrinsic quality.  That is what makes them red/green color blind.  It could be either your redness or your greenness, or something qualitatively different, entirely.  Either way, they at least represent either red or green with something different than someone who is not red/green color blind.  So, any claim against diversity of qualia based on genetics and such is proven wrong by facts like this, to say nothing of achromatopsia, where you represent everything with only black and white.


 It also lies and outside of the realm of testable hypotheses, and so I would consign it to intractable imponderables and is something I would prefer to not define a theory of mind in reaction to or base one upon.


One of the key attributes of Representational Qualia Theory is its falsifiability, or that it can be verified.  Take the easiest to falsify sub camp “Molecular Materialism”, for example.  As I’ve said many times, it predicts something like science will be able to prove that nobody will be able to experience redness without glutamate, and everyone will always be able to directly experience glutamate’s intrinsic qualities, as the same redness.  If someone experiences redness, without glutamate, theory falsified.  In that case, you keep trying other theories, till you find the one that can’t be falsified, which proves it is that camp’s predictions about qualia which is a description of redness.

 

If science verifies that glutamate = redness in that way, this will verify Molecular Materialism, and falsify all the competing camps, like the still well supported Substance Dualism, the still most popular functionalism camps, and all the others, since none of them will be able to produce a redness experience without glutamate.

 

And that would result in only the 1. weakest form of effing the ineffable, where if you observe you using glutamate to represent red with, and me using glycine, to represent red with, you will then be experimentally objectively justified making an effing of the ineffable statements like: “My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call red.”

 

There is also the 3. Strongest form of effing the ineffable, as portrayed in the movie Avatar.  If you had a  neural ponytail like that, which could do computational binding of knowledge in multiple brain hemispheres, like the corpus callosum can do between our two hemispheres (as predicted will be possible by V.S. Ramachandran back in the 90s), when you hug a loved one you would experience all of the experiences, not just half.  Or at least as much as you wanted to share.  In other words, if your partner’s red and green was inverted from yours, this would become immediately obvious once you directly experienced their inverted knowledge, together with your non inverted knowledge, as one composite gestalt or one merged composite qualitative experience.



 
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