On 4/9/2021 3:31 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Apr 9, 2021, 4:23 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
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On 4/9/2021 4:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 9 Apr 2021, at 02:40, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
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<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.
They could in some sense even feel the surfaces with such sonar: is
the surface smooth or rough, hard or soft, etc. Sound reflects
differently from different types of surfaces. Would they feel these
surface differences as colors, or would it feel more like tactile
sensations of one's immediate surroundings?
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.
I read about this experiment recently. One apparent difference was
that the blind students fitted with this array were dismayed that when
they learned that in looking at erotic images with this device they
were not stimulated in the ways as their sighted peers.
In the ways as /their sighted peers using the array/?
Perhaps the array was too low resolution, or perhaps the brain's
tactile wiring isn't connected to the other parts of the brain in the
necessary ways as the visual processing centers are.
Some 30% of the cortex is dedicated to processing visual stimuli
whereas only 8% is used for tactile stimuli. I would have to imagine
then that the resulting qualia could not be the same, though with the
right bandwidth, sufficient cortex, and similar interconnections it's
less obvious that identical qualia could not be achieved.
Of course. But if they had been using the array from birth their brain
would probably have developed differently.
Brent
I think there have been experiments where researchers wired the optic
nerve into a monkey's auditory cortex, and after a while similar
structures to the visual cortex appeared, and I think the monkey
behaved as though it could see.
Jason
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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