On Apr 5, 2021, at 11:48 AM, Brent Allsop <[log in to unmask]> wrote:CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
############################Hi Deepak,
CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
So, when someone loves a particular redness, till they are 14, are you saying that the redness quality, itself, has changed? Or are you saying that possibly an experience like just before he turned 14, he experienced a loved one getting hit by a truck, resulting in red blood everywhere, so now, when he experiences that same redness quality, all those memories tend to be computationally bound, and THAT is why he is no longer loves that particular redness?DL: As informed reasons, could be explicit or could very much be implicit.
Yes. If there is a change in redness experience, in any way, that change must have some objectively observable change that is the change we experience. And once the subjective and objective are connected, we will always be able to know, both subjectively and objectively, whether it has changed, or not. Everything else is at a higher level, which you seem to be focused on, and has nothing to do with finding out which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a description of redness. This explains our different approaches and what we model, each of us not gaining much utility from the other.
Our brain has a visual knowledge system, into which 3D colored knowledge can be rendered. Each voxel element of this knowledge can be thought of as an intrinsically colored Lego block.DL: Agreed
There are various ways of rendering these Lego blocks into this knowledge. When you dream of a strawberry, your subconscious is causing or doing the rendering of the phenomenal knowledge of the strawberry. When you look at a strawberry, your perception system is rendering the same knowledge of the strawberry, based on the stereoscopic data coming from the eyes.DL: Agreed
But imagining, can’t get knowledge rendered into this visual knowledge system. Try as you might you can’t produce a redness quality, purely from imagination (2) when your eyes are closed. When you imagine or recall redness, from memory, something different, entirely, is bound into your conscious knowledge. There must be something that is this recollection of redness, which can also be bound into conscious knowledge, but it is much less phenomenal than redness, itself.(2) DL: Disagreed. Imagination does not limit to that which exists, and is not only a reconfiguration of the known. All imagination is cantilevers into the unknown, which are then proven correct or demolished. But the beauty of imagination is that it requires no causal link to existing knowledge. While examples are uncountable - let me give the one that concurs with the redness example you are quoting. A British scholar postulated the existence of tetrachromats (women, with four types of cones instead of three) which gives them the capability to see in 100 million shades instead of 1 million. It took 40 years, but such women are discovered. So their redness is completely different from all the rest of us. They see 99 million more colours! Our capability is 1% of their's to see colours & shades. Logical deductions, sometimes complete arbitrary objects, phenomena can be imagined which may or may not exist subsequently. But your idea that everything imagined is a mere reconfiguration of the which is known. Isn't really so.
All I am saying is that you can't produce an actual redness experience (like when you look at a strawberry, or dream of redness) when your eyes are closed, no matter how powerful your imagination.DL: As informed above, I can imagine shades of red that I have not experienced. This is the power of both deduction & induction.Also, you seem to be saying that a normal trichromat can simply 'imagine' the color the tetrachromat can experience (you say see, which is completely ambiguous, and you don't 'see' when you are dreaming...), which is most extreme from the colorness qualities he can experience, which is of course isn't so, at all.DL: No, I am not sure whether a trichromate can imagine colour shades of tetrochromats. It is a very deep question you have asked. I will take time, think about it, read about it and then come back with my own view on the subject.
You can't imagine redness, with your eyes closed, and no matter what you do, a trichromat can't 'imagine' a new color he has never experienced before.DL: I can not only imagine redness but even change it, mix it with multiple different colours to deduce various shades with eyes closed, including 'projecting' certain colours that I might have not seen, but I can imagine inductively.On the trichromat imagining shades of tetrachromat's - as informed, I am not sure. Will think about it.
After I sent this, I realized I was saying it all wrong, so all this is a good point. Of course, we can imagine experiencing a colorness quality we have never experienced before (call it grueness) , of course we can know the wavelength of light people may use grueness to represent, and we may even be able to describe whatever it is that has that grueness quality in their brain (whether dreaming of grueness or perceving something reflecting grue light). There must be something all of the emagining knowledge is represented by, but it isn't anything close to actual grueness. Absolutely none of that enables you to 'emagine' or produce a grueness experience in any way, enabling one to say: "oh THAT is what grueness is like.
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