----- Original Message -----
From: "david buchanan" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 12:57 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] The Color of Perception
Dan, Carl and all MOQERS:
Hello, and thank you.
Carl said:
...Like Don's dog dish, the concept of "red", much like the concept of
"dog dish" exists as a thought form, not as a reality. Does it change
when we experience it directly? Our concept of it might. We might see
that the car is in fact of the shade we describe as "fire-engine red"
rather than as "daker, more maroon." Is that important? I don't know.
We have to deal with each other directly, if we correspond, and meaning is
important in that context. i.e. is Don's dog dish round or square? Is
it's physical manifestation even relevant?
dmb says:
I'm not quite sure what the idea is here, but it reminds me of a
quasi-famous thought experiment. It is designed to make a person think
about the difference between concepts and empirical reality.
Let's say there is a physicist who knows everything there is to know about
visible light, the whole color spectrum and electro-magnetic waves in
general. Let's say she is a specialist. She has devoted her entire life to
the study of "red", so that in addition to her work in physics she also
learns everything she can about the meaning of "red" in history,
literature and art too. She studies and reads and reads and studies for
fifty years. The whole time, however, she has been living in a single room
with no colors of any kind. She's never actually seen red. Her television
and computer are black and white. No paintings. No plants. In her
experience there has never ever been anything but black and white and
shades of grey and yet, let's say, in terms of physics and other
conceptual understandings she is the world's foremost experts on the color
red.
Now imagine that after 50 years she walks outside of her black and white
world and she sees robins, roses, fire trucks in living color for the
first time.
Now the question is, what is the difference between direct experience and
abstract knowledge? What does that "expert" really know about red before
leaving that sense-deprived world of books and abstractions? What she was
missing was the "qualia" of red, the actual quality of phenomenal
experience for which "red" is a general abstraction.
A fairly flippant answer would be that before she left the room she had an
SQ knowledge of "red" and after she had a more DQ knowledge of it.
Everything she knew about the color was derived from factual data about the
color, i.e. from someone else. She had no personally acquired data about
the color because she had no experience of it. Ostensibly, if she was such
an expert on it, she would have become aware of the cultural contexts
involved. She would know that valentine candy was red, and have the context
of it, but would it mean anything to her beyond that? In other words, if
she got on the phone, she would know enough to order "red" candy to be
delivered to someone she wanted to send a gift to for valentine's day. She
would have the right context, but would it mean anything to her? I think it
would. She would know she was doing the right thing, and making the right
choice by choosing "red" for the candy. This is important, I think. I am
trying to put this discussion into the context of a thinking machine. I
don't remember if it was Matt or Mark who had the PhD in Biotechnology, but
it got me thinking. How could we create a machine that "knew" what a banana
tasted like? We could program in charts of sweetness and tanginess and
certain qualities expressed, such as gasses that came from the banana to the
point that the machine could match up the various qualities, consult it's
various charts, etc. and come to the conclusion that, yep, it's a banana.
It still wouldn't "know" what a banana tasted like, but would it matter?
What difference would it make as long as it could pick out the banana from
the fruit basket? Ever had one of the little square candies that come in
various flavors? There is one that purports to be banana. I don't think it
tastes much like a banana, but most would agree that it was
banana-flaovored. It's an "almost, but not quite" situation. We have the
ability to make minor leaps like that whereas a machine might not. Would it
be possible to create a machine that could? Would that "leap" be what makes
us conscious?
I extrapolated to human experience. Okay, to make a smart machine, they
design a series of if/then statements and create a decision tree. "if" x
exists, "then" y results. "if" the value in box 1 is added to the value of
box two, "then" the result is x. Do humans do this? I think they do, to a
point. A newborn baby is a clean slate. As it grows, it learns, "Stove"
equals "Hot" therefore, touch stove = burned fingers. Burned fingers =
pain. Pain = bad. The human child then makes the leap that "Hot = bad."
It then grows further to order a steaming cup of coffee that warms it up
nicely on a cold winter morning. This may be the difference with the woman
physicist in her black and white room. What happens when she walks out of
her room and directly experiences "red?" Does she go, "Yep, just what I
thought it would be?" or does she have a sense of epiphany? Interesting
exercise.
Not only are there a thousand shades of red, the feelings associated with
"red" infinitely complex. Sirens and firetrucks, valentines candy and
diaper rash, blood and hookers, anger and bulls. As The Clash pointed out,
Castro is red, which is a color that will earn the spray of lead. This
cultural symbols don't make any sense to a person who hasn't seen red. I
mean, "red" is not just jiggling the retina in certain way. It's not just
a subset of the whole electro-magnetic spectrum. For animals like us,
"red" means heat, meat, sex, injury, fruit, daybreak and all sorts of
intensely meaningful things. No wonder it catches the eye. The idea or the
word "red" could never capture all that. Reality overflows with meaning.
Abstractions and generalization simply for the sake of convenience but
real red, the kind you know NOT from a book, just isn't the same.
I agree. Then there comes the problem. Humans have the ability to "learn"
from someone else. We're able to hear about an incident when someone is
stung by a jellyfish. They learn that it's extremely painful, so they avoid
jellyfish. They don't stop to wonder if TO THEM being stung by a jellyfish
results in a state of blissful euphoria, they just accept that a jellyfish
sting is painful. It's a survival thing, I think. Of interest, every
generation has to learn it all over again. We have no "racial memory" that
anyone has been able to establish concretely. Yet we continue to accept
judgements based on information that our parents received from their
parents, etc. The only one I know of who didn't do that was DeCartes.
Supposedly, he started by challenging every concept he knew. My question
upon reading that was to wonder if that is even possible. If the questions
themselves are based on preconceived concepts, are the answers valid? His
most famous deduction was based on a faulty syllogism, IMHO. He said,
"cogito, ergo sum." This was the result of the statement: "God exists. I
know God exists. In order to know that God exists, I must be thinking. In
order to think, I must exist." The problem here is the emperical existence
of God. He couldn't prove that, therefore the rest of it falls apart.
There is no absolute way to prove that any of us are actually thinking. Our
whole existence may be a fig newton of our imagination.
dmb:
Who was it that said, "there must always be a discrepancy between concepts
and reality"? I think this question about "red" is one way to look at that
discrepancy. It's classic stuff by now. I mean you can find this
hypothetical expert of "red" discussed by the professionals and such. This
question of "qualia" is a way to engage some of the cutting edge questions
about consciousness and mind.
I want to do this one as a seperate message.
Carl
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