I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are communicable and which are not, and I realized all communication relies on some pre-existing shared framework.
It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone whose never seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and dimensionslity would likewise be incommunicable to someone who had no experience with moving in, or through, space. Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common system of units and measures. So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but strings. It is only when a bit string is combined with some processing that meaning can be shared. The reason we can't communicate "red" to someone whose never seen it is we would need to transmit a description of the processing done by our brains in order to share what red means to oneself. So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just qualia, but anything at all, when there's not already common processing systems between the sender and receiver, of the information. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUhC%3Dq%3D1t6mQzo%2BLLZCOrpXFK9etNojhQ-hgb%2BZaE2wr0A%40mail.gmail.com.
