On 4/9/2021 4:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 9 Apr 2021, at 02:40, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 4/8/2021 12:38 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Hi Telmo,
Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the
problem. I think you are right about there being some connection
between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.
I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
1. Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared
and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or
the height of Mount Everest
2. First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or
experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee
sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable
knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount
Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding
physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology
of numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and
eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of
conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even
size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes
between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back
to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between
first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of
red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the
number*5*as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia,
would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the
redness of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the
shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their
brains process the symbol in the same way.
I think you exaggerate the problem. Consider how bats "see" by
sonar. I think this is quite communicable to humans by analogies.
That will communicate the third person aspect, but not the qualia itself.
When a blind person has a tactile array placed in their back and
attached to a video camera, they learn to see. I sighted person can
have the same tactile array and video camera and also learn to see thru
it. On what grounds would you deny they experience the same qualia via
the video camera. And then you can ask the sighted person how or
whether the qualia of the two kinds of sight differ...or you could do
the experiment yourself.
And submarines have sonar which produces images on screens. Is
redness communicable? My father who was red/green color blind had to
guess at the color of traffic lights or just watch other cars when he
first started to drive around 1928. But he understood the concept of
color because he could tell blue from red/green. And later, traffic
engineers adjust the spectrum of traffic lights so that he could tell
the difference (they also started to put the red at the top).
Yes, in practice there is not much problem, which explains the lack of
interest in the mind-body problem, but this does not help to solve the
conceptual issue.
It is a bit like saying that in practice GR and QM works very well, so
that we lost our time when trying to get a coherent theory of all
forces. It depends if we are interested in foundational issues and
understanding or in practical applications, I guess.
If all the practical problems can be solved, the "foundational issues"
are reduced to armchair philosophizing. There's a reason theology fell
into disrepute. I see work on foundational issues as theory that will
help guide the practical solutions.
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