That's explained in the articles out there about this: — Sapientia

These explanations, unless I am missing something in them, more or less amount to "your brain turns this reality into this appearance" -- but that doesn't tell me how they determined the image of the strawberry -- in reality -- is actually grey.

So, in context A the brain makes such and such color stay constant, and here in context B the brain is doing that same thing but we're exploiting it to make these gray-green pixels appear red. Alright. But 'the brain did it' is more or less 'there's a black box between where reality is grey, and after the black box the appearance is red. We know this because of the blue sky is contaminating our perception and our brain corrects for that, and here it's just doing that same thing' -- but so it seems to me, the brain drops out of this story pretty easily. What exactly is the brain doing to the gray reality to make it appear red? "correcting the color to what it should be, were it a natural object outside" seems to be what they're saying. But it's not a natural object outside. It's an image on a computer screen. So it seems to me that the believers in gray are sort of misinterpreting exactly what's before their eyes because of their fascination with brains.

After all -- how do we determine that reality is gray other than just looking at the individual pixel? But if the pixel is not the same thing as the strawberry image, then... we are actually looking at two different things.

And the image of the strawberries appears red. Which is, more or less, how we usually determine the color of something. It's certainly how we assign colors to the electromagnetic spectrum.

What if it is? That's not necessarily a fallacy. Either way, there is no red in either the pixels or the picture of the strawberries, so you're still wrong. — Sapientia

That is exactly a fallacious inference. From the SEP:

The fallacies of composition and division occur when the properties of parts and composites are mistakenly thought to be transferable from one to the other. Consider the two sentences:

Every member of the investigative team was an excellent researcher.
It was an excellent investigative team.
Here it is ‘excellence’ that is the property in question. The fallacy of composition is the inference from (a) to (b) but it need not hold if members of the team cannot work cooperatively with each other. The reverse inference from (b) to (a)—the fallacy of division—may also fail if some essential members of the team have a supportive or administrative role rather than a research role.

While a whole may have the same property as a part, such as a chairs leg being made entirely of wood and a chair being made entirely of wood, it is not that the chair's leg is made entirely of wood which makes the chair made entirely of wood -- but rather, whether or not the chair is made entirely of wood.

So, yes, they can have the same properties. But that one has such and such property does not mean that the other has such and such property -- and so that would be a problem if that's the underlying argument, since it's at least not valid.

You can't infer one from the other. At the very least, if we are to infer one from the other, it'd be nice to know how this inference is safe in this instance. I'm not one for claiming that informal fallacies are devestating to arguments, or anything. They just point at where we might be making a mistake, or at least could clear up what we do precisely mean.


Or, like I said, perhaps I'm just dense and I just don't understand how else this image-argument gets off the ground. I could certainly be painting myself into a corner. But then I'd at least ask how it is you determined the reality is gray.

Your argument can only work if you confuse appearance and reality, but that's not something that I'm willing to do.

Eh, I'd say that appearance/reality is a distinction which simply designates inferior/superior with respect to belief. So designating a belief as appearance is kind of the same thing as saying "I don't believe it is real", and designating a belief as reality is kind of the same thing as "I believe it is real" -- or true.

That isn't to say that appearance is reality, note. I certainly don't believe that. But rather I doubt the distinction sets out an ontological truth. (Also, I'd note here that I don't think the topic of perception reveals much about the nature of reality, either -- maybe the nature of perception, but not reality vs. appearance)

What's more, I'd say that what I'm saying is more along the lines of the question "How do we determine such and such?", and so is more geared towards an epistemic approach rather than an ontological approach. Not to be naive and think that we can abandon ontological commitments, but only to say this is the framing I'm attempting -- since we determine the color of some named image, be it strawberry platter or pixel, by looking at it, the rest follows rather easily. It seems to me that if the strawberry images are not red, then there must be some means of determining this in reality, no? What means are those?

I mean, "the brain did it" is all well and good, but if it's doing its thing, then what are we doing to determine the color? Do we just ask the brain? An obtuse question, yes. But I'd say that this is exactly the sort of weird talk you result in when we assign causal power, and almost a kind of pseudo-agency, to our brain.

Whether I'm fine with anti-realism depends of how that's defined. — Sapientia

Anti-realism and realism are well defined and don't need to be redefined, or we end up with endless semantic disputes that go nowhere. Color is real if it's mind-independent, and anti-real if it's not.

Compare with dreams. Some cultures have thought that when you dream, you go somewhere else. That it's an experience of something real. But we understand dreams to be mind-dependent.

Also compare with shape. We say shape is a property of objects, not of perception. Idealists might disagree, but at the very least, color is understood to be objective and not relative to the perceiver.

It seems to me that if the strawberry images are not red, then there must be some means of determining this in reality, no? What means are those? — Moliere

Your argument exposes that this can't be about simple emergence via compositional interactions. But in talking about a digital pixel display - designed to fool the brain in that precise fashion - then it does start to seem that composition is somehow the right register of thought.

To simplify the story, we should think of the world simply having some wavelength peak of reflectance at some point of the environment. Let's call that X. And then from the get-go, the brain - speaking down at the very front line in the ganglion cells in the retina - are already making a more complex computation. They never see this X. They are already seeking a comparison with other (remembered) values. So X is being compared to Y. Or more generically (that is dichotomously, as in opponent channel processing) X is being compared to not-X.

So the situation is Kantian or semiotic from the neural get-go. We don't see X, the thing in itself. We are already into a response that is the sign representing the psychological "fact" of a contrast. We don't see some pixel scale strength dollop of some particular physical wavelength. We have already crossed the "epistemic cut" and are representing purely some difference that makes a difference - the experience of seeing X in terms of that meaning we are not seeing not-X. That is, we are seeing what we see in terms of an actual contrast with a remembered context or conception. Raw input has already been transformed into pure sign or signal at the first neurological step.

So now we have a story where ordinary visual judgements are made ecologically - we apply everything we know to interpret the scene. And this state of "best fit" conception acts all the way top down to frame our neural responses.

An isolated ganglion cell gets a ton of outside help to make up its mind. The wider brain can see that this is a plate of strawberries in a weird light. It shouts at the ganglion cells, that (using the chat about grey and teal pixels being used here) the grey or low level white actually should be understood as a relative absence of the dominating teal hue and so - by logical implication - a suppressed presence of redness.

The point again is that the brain never sees anything real directly. The world just doesn't have that kind of contextuality in which wavelength peak X is meaningfully an absence of every other wavelength possibility. That comparison - the one that turns a meaningless variation into a difference that makes a difference - depends entirely on the existence of the further thing of a memory-based comparison, a response by an observer who says that the facts have to be either a "this" or a "that". Either the world is X or not-X in terms of our private modelled realm of signs.

So what I am arguing against is any kind of colour realism. And talk of higher level emergence from the collective interactions of composite parts is still going to create the question of what colour are the pixels really.

Instead it is comparisons (counterfactual constraint or forced symmetry breakings) all the way down. Even grey is about the comparative absence and presence of "black" and "white".

This extends to talk about qualia. When we talk about the redness of red, we are repeating what is happening down at ground level on a grand scale. We are stripping away the levels and levels of conception or context that give the "computations" of the brain/mind their ecological validity. We are just saying pay attention to what it feels like to be "seeing red". And that strips away from qualia talk the backdrop truth that what is really going on is that we are (just as much) seeing a mental state of not-green (which more complexly is itself either a dominating presence of red wavelength light, or - another way to see not-green - a relative absence of blue-yellow channel activity).

1. Why must the perception of an object's colour and the [actual] object's colour be the same? Or, why can't I say the grey in that picture appears red to me? By insisting I cannot say this, are you saying I'm lying? — Benkei

I don't think it must be so, only that it seems we are deviating from what we normally do in this particular case if we are saying the strawberry image is, in reality, grey.

2. Why shouldn't I incorporate what we scientifically know about "red" into the definition of "red"?

Because there is no scientific knowledge of 'red' -- there is a loosely designated region of the electromagnetic spectrum assigned 'red' on the same basis that everything is assigned 'red', by its appearance.

3. Why shouldn't I apply a descriptive definition to "red" to my experience?

I'm not sure I understand this question.

4. Is this just a matter of definition/semantics? If I define red as what I experience as red unless it turns out that a spectrometer tells me it isn't because it does not have an emphasis of wavelengths between x and y, then by definition the strawberries aren't red.

I don't think it's just definitions and semantics. If you stipulate a definition then of course we can all respect that definition within some conversation.

But it would just be a stipulated definition based on what red looks like.

Also, it would be interesting to see what the spectrometer actually did say. If that's how you're using "red", then we would at least have to use one in order to actually determine whether the image is red.

5. What is red? (e.g. what's your definition).

It's a color. The red one ;). It looks like this:



Though that is not an exhaustive set of examples.

Thanks for the post. Giving me some food for thought.

I sort of suspected that Kant might come up, given the Kant-esque nature of cog-sci.

I'm not sure exactly how Kant would carry over to the discussion of perception, though. It's not something he really discusses. Or even to what extent, either. Like, color could be a product of the brain, right? But that doesn't necessarily mean there are color-concepts of the mind which impose themselves on intuition. It could be a part of intuition, but even more than that, if it's just 'in the brain', as you note, it wouldn't really be all that Kantian. Colors would just be accidents, and I'd infer that they actually do look different for each of us, in the same way that we have different behaviors which result from various brain functions (behaviors which are products of judgment, at least -- not heart beats and such).

There is definitely a lot of relevance here for the question of qualia, I agree. A lot of my hesitancy is probably based on that. It seems to me that the frame is this weird notional information-centric ontology -- notional because it's not fleshed out, at least from what I can tell (in general, not you in particular -- I may have trouble following you sometimes, but you do at least seem to be consistent ;) ). And that said beliefs about mental processes and a presumed sort of faith in emergence are what give these sorts of inferences from this image their persuasive "umph". And I'd say that these beliefs are fairly acceptable, but I don't believe them myself.

For myself, I think I'm drawn to what you call here:

. When we talk about the redness of red, we are repeating what is happening down at ground level on a grand scale. We are stripping away the levels and levels of conception or context that give the "computations" of the brain/mind their ecological validity. We are just saying pay attention to what it feels like to be "seeing red". — apokrisis

"stripping away the backdrop truth" -- because I'm rather uncertain that the backdrop truth is, well, actually true given its Kantian backdrop. It seems to me that a Kanti-esque approach to these phenomena provides a frame of interpretation that is interesting, but will likely suffer from similar problems that Kant's philosophy does. One such problem would be the over-emphasis on the power of judgment with respect to experience, as is revealed by such language as 'the brain talks to the ganglion' -- it's very similar to 'the faculty of the understanding connects to a schemata which brings the concepts into intuition'. In a way it makes sense, but then it also seems like you're cutting yourself off from the very thing which you had previously known in order to explain how it is you know it.


Hrm hrm hrm. Kind of just rambling here at this point. Still thinking it over.

I experience the strawberries as looking red from a non close up view. I experience the strawberries as looking grey when I zoom in very close on the pixels. A scientist with an instrument measuring the wavelength of light coming from the strawberry would measure the same wavelength from both close up, or far away.

I think the confusion arises from asking types of questions like "what colour is the strawberry really", "what colour is the strawberry independent of mind".

The confusion arises from thinking of the strawberries colour as something existing outside of human perception.

The strawberry appears different to the viewer under different conditions. The scientist measures the same length of light coming from the strawberry under these various conditions. Does this present a problem? Do these NEED to be reconciled? Only if you think the way the strawberry appears to you is directly related to the wavelength of light (as measured by the scientist) the strawberry emits.

My view is these are two different domains, one is phenomenological, the other scientific. The problem only arises when trying to reconcile the two under a single domain. Perhaps they're just separate, and need no attempt to reconcile the apparent contradiction (the strawberry appears different even though the scientist measures the same wavelength).

People seem to have the view that red objects are those that emit x wavelength of light. But this seems to conflate the scientific domain (of measuring wavelength) with the phenomenological domain of how things appear in our visual fields. Probably part of the confusion arises from the word "red" meaning different things under the two domains and yet are used as if they're interchangeable.

I experience the strawberries as looking red from a non close up view. I experience the strawberries as looking grey when I zoom in very close on the pixels. A scientist with an instrument measuring the wavelength of light coming from the strawberry would measure the same wavelength from both close up, or far away. — dukkha

Sure, but what colour is grey? In primary school art class we could make greys and browns by mixing all sorts of colours. Grey might be defined as black (whatever colour that is) mixed with white (which is every colour), but "grey" is a very ambiguous colour. So the grey in the picture, no doubt, has red in it.

Now, put a wash of blue on the grey, and surroundings. The blue is lost in the grey, and that's what you see when you zoom in close up to the grey. You see grey. When you zoom out, the blue in the surrounding area creates a contrast with the grey, bringing out the red which is in the grey. The point being, that mixed colours, such as grey, look different under different conditions,

I sort of suspected that Kant might come up, given the Kant-esque nature of cog-sci. — Moliere

Kant is a familiar reference point. But my argument is more properly Peircean or biosemiotic.

Colors would just be accidents, and I'd infer that they actually do look different for each of us, in the same way that we have different behaviors which result from various brain functions (behaviors which are products of judgment, at least -- not heart beats and such). — Moliere

Of course we can't compare our experiences to know that your red is my red. in that final analysis, there is a brute lack of counterfactuality that thus winds up in an explanatory gap. But quite a lot of telling comparisons can be made on the way to that ultimate impasse. So for instance everyone sees yellow as the brightest hue, and also doesn't see brown as the blackish yellow it really is. And that phenomenological commonality is explained in complete fashion by the known (rather jury-built) neurological detail of the visual pathways.

So in the end, our yellows might indeed be different as experiences. Yet we can track the story right down towards this final question mark and find that similar neuroscience is creating similar mental outcomes. Thus we are not getting a strong reason for the kind of doubt - the talk of the purely accidental - that you might want to introduce to motivate a philosophy of mind argument.

And that said beliefs about mental processes and a presumed sort of faith in emergence are what give these sorts of inferences from this image their persuasive "umph". — Moliere

I'm trying to be quite clear that talk of emergence is very much reductionist handwaving most of the time. It is taking the idea of physical phase transitions - the idea of properties like liquidity emerging as a collective behaviour at some critical energy scale - and treating consciousness as just another material change of that kind.

But I am arguing the exact opposite. I am saying there is a genuine "duality" in play. The brain is a semiotic organ and so it is all about a modelling relation based on the play of "unphysical" signs. So material physics isn't even seeing what is going on. No amount of such physics could ever produce anything like what the brain actually does by just adding more of the same and relying on some kind of collective magic.

Of course physics does self organise and that kind of emergence is a really important correction to physicalist ontology. But semiosis is yet another story on top of that again.

"stripping away the backdrop truth" -- because I'm rather uncertain that the backdrop truth is, well, actually true given its Kantian backdrop. — Moliere

Ah well. Forget any mention of Kant then. This is Peirce so "truth" is pragmatic. We have already shifted from requiring that the world be represented in some veridical fashion. We are now viewing cognition in the way modern neuroscience would recognise - modelling that is ecologically situated, coding which is sparse, perception that is only interested in the degree to which uncertainty can be pragmatically minimised.

Why does the eye only have three "colour" pigments when evolution could have given us as many as we liked? Less is more if you already have in mind the few critical things you need to be watching out for.

One such problem would be the over-emphasis on the power of judgment with respect to experience, as is revealed by such language as 'the brain talks to the ganglion' — Moliere

Neuroscience has a ton of more technical jargon. But it is a basic fact of neural design that every neuron has hundreds of times more connections feeding down from on high than it has inputs coming up from "the real world". So just looking at that anatomy tells you that your prevailing state of intention, expectation and memory has the upper hand in determining what you wind up thinking you are seeing.

If you know pretty much exactly what should happen in the next instant, you can pretty much ignore everything as it does happen a split second later. And thus you also become exquisitely attuned to any failures of the said state of prediction. You know what requires attentive effort in the next split second - the hasty reorientation of your conceptions that then, with luck, allow you to ignore completely what does happen after that as you have managed now to predict it was going to be the case.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely.

In your terminology, that seems a hell of a lot of judgement in relation to a tiny fraction of experience. It is just that we don't really give much weight to how much we both routinely predict successfully, and also discount unthinkingly as too crazy to even consider (although we can pull them out conceptually at any time as I just did).

So again, that is why I stress this extra constraint of ecological validity. Philosophy of mind does have a habit of stripping it away as it searches atomistically for a foundation of qualia. Yet it is the pragmatic relation that a mind has with the world that is central to accounting for the mind causally.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely. — apokrisis

Interesting. I can see how much of our awareness is all about what doesn't work, like Heidegger's broken tool analogy. We are most aware of that which did not go as planned. That which does go as planned is ignored immediately or soon after. I do not spend time thinking about what it was like to press the letter "a" key on my keyboard, but I do spend more time thinking WHEN i REALIZE i ACCIDENTALLY PRESSED THE CAPS LOCK KEY.

Yet I find it hard to believe that you were actually subconsciously predicting all these insane possibilities as you mentioned. That would require a hell of a lot of energy, would it not? What use would it be for the subconscious to go through all these possibilities - and how do you know your subconscious is, in fact, running through them? It's subconscious!

Yet I find it hard to believe that you were actually subconsciously predicting all these insane possibilities as you mentioned. — darthbarracuda

My point was the opposite. These were all things I could be consciously conjuring up, but then in fact I am effortless ignoring. Just being aware at a general background level of "being in my familiar room" is enough to suppress a vast amount of craziness.

In dreams, of course, we aren't plugged into a real setting and so the imagination does run riot in just that way. The lack of an ecological or situated state of mind means there is no organised state of constraint to suppress the perceptual invention.

Again, this goes back to the top down logic of systems, where the way things work is by the creating of states of constraint that narrow and shape degrees of freedom. So at any moment, it is possible I could be imagining anything. But the more I'm plugged into some actual place with its affordances and the kinds of things natural to the situation, the more constrained my state of mind will be.

So the contrast is with the input/output model of a computer where a vision of the world is thought to be constructed in jigsaw like fashion by the elaborate gluing together of a multitude of sensory data points. The view gets constructed by figuring out the details from the bottom up.

Instead now I start with a head full of every kind of possibility and start to limit that in a top down fashion so it is reasonably predictive of what is likely to happen next in terms of some flow of sensory elements. I generate the idea of the room from memory and so pretty instantly will notice anything that sharply deviates from my forward model of it.

The strawberry appears different to the viewer under different conditions. The scientist measures the same length of light coming from the strawberry under these various conditions. — dukkha

The disconnect is the other way around. We still think we see red even though there is now no actual "red" wavelength light being emitted.

So the brain corrects for the missing light by being able to imagine perceptually what the same scene would look like under ordinary light.

But the upshot is the same. The point is that the world has no colour anymore than a chemical has a taste or an air vibration has a noise. So if we are understanding the world in terms of neurally constructed qualia, then what kind of thing are they really?

My answer is we have to think of them as signs or symbols. Colours, noises, tastes and other qualia are encodings of physical energies.

Now most people don't take that as much of an answer. But it is not as if the physical energies are much less mysterious once we start to delve scientifically into the reality of material being. We soon discover that we haven't really shaken off our qualitative impressions of the world when we try to imagine light as little wriggly lines of something.

So the same applies to the mental side of the equation. Scientifically, a generalised theory of signs - that is, semiotics - is going to have to be the best way of making sense of phenomenal experience.

These explanations, unless I am missing something in them, more or less amount to "your brain turns this reality into this appearance" -- but that doesn't tell me how they determined the image of the strawberry -- in reality -- is actually grey. — Moliere

It says that this is because it consists of grey pixels. There is no specific wavelength on the spectrum for grey, but something is grey when all wavelengths are absorbed at roughly the same percentage.

So, in context A the brain makes such and such color stay constant, and here in context B the brain is doing that same thing but we're exploiting it to make these gray-green pixels appear red. Alright. But 'the brain did it' is more or less 'there's a black box between where reality is grey, and after the black box the appearance is red. We know this because of the blue sky is contaminating our perception and our brain corrects for that, and here it's just doing that same thing' -- but so it seems to me, the brain drops out of this story pretty easily. What exactly is the brain doing to the gray reality to make it appear red? "correcting the color to what it should be, were it a natural object outside" seems to be what they're saying. But it's not a natural object outside. It's an image on a computer screen. So it seems to me that the believers in gray are sort of misinterpreting exactly what's before their eyes because of their fascination with brains. — Moliere

No, the brain doesn't drop out of the explanation. And it doesn't need to be a natural object outside, so that criticism is based on a false premise that was never part of my argument. And I'm not the one misinterpreting the grey strawberries as red, that's what you're doing. That's the common misinterpretation that is shown to be erroneous, and to which you're clinging, despite the scientific evidence to the contrary.

After all -- how do we determine that reality is gray other than just looking at the individual pixel? — Moliere

With science. What you describe above determines appearance. You can conflate that with something else, but that would be erroneous/misleading.

But if the pixel is not the same thing as the strawberry image, then... we are actually looking at two different things. — Moliere

Of course they're two different things, and that is utterly irrelevant. The strawberry image is not a single pixel, it is a whole bunch of pixels. Point out as many differences as you like, but, as I have argued, colour is not one of them.

And the image of the strawberries appears red. Which is, more or less, how we usually determine the color of something. It's certainly how we assign colors to the electromagnetic spectrum. — Moliere

I've already addressed those first two sentences. They are irrelevant, since they don't support your conclusion. I accept both of them, yet reach a different conclusion.

And I doubt your last sentence. What do you mean by that? That's about wavelengths, language, and categorisation. A colour blind person could understand it enough to determine colours if he had the right tools to determine wavelengths. What's missing would be the kind of colour perception - the "what it's like" - that we have. But that's not objective: it is not a part of the object.

That is exactly a fallacious inference. — Moliere

The fallacy of composition is an informal fallacy, so whether or not something counts as this fallacy is not strictly about form, but relates to the content, and there is more room for disagreement. If you see here, for example, it states that it is not always fallacious, but we must be cautious in making inferences of this form. There are clear examples, and possible examples which are not so clear and may be contested, or even widely rejected as valid examples of this fallacy.

Not all arguments of this form are fallacious, however. Whether or not they are depends on what property is involved. Some properties, such as lasting less than an hour, may be possessed by every part of something but not by the thing itself. Others, such as being bigger than a bus, must be possessed by the whole if possessed by each part.

One case where it is difficult to decide whether the fallacy of composition is committed concerns the cosmological argument for the existence of God. This argument takes the contingency of the universe (i.e. the alleged fact that the universe might not have come into being) as implying the existence of a God who brought it into being. The simplest way to argue for the contingency of the universe is to argue from the contingency of each of its parts, as follows:

(1) Everything in the universe is contingent (i.e. could possibly have failed to exist).

Therefore:

(2) The universe as a whole is contingent (i.e. could possibly have failed to exist.

It is clear that this argument has the form of the fallacy of composition; what is less clear is whether it really is fallacious. Must something composed of contingent parts itself be contingent? Or might it be that the universe is necessarily existent even though each of its parts is not?

Another controversial example concerns materialistic explanations of consciousness. Is consciousness just electrical activity in the brain, as mind-brain identity theory suggests, or something more? Opponents of mind-brain identity theory sometimes argue as follows:

(1) The brain is composed of unconscious neurons.

Therefore:

(2) The brain itself is not conscious.

It is certainly difficult to see how consciousness can emerge from purely material processes, but the mere fact that each part of the brain is unconscious does not entail that the whole brain is the same.

And the very thing that we're discussing here - that, for example, it is acceptable to conclude that a chair is green if all constituent parts of the chair are green - has been argued by philosophers like Nelson Goodman, who called such features "expansive" features, and Frans van Eemeren, who argues that these features are limited only to features that are absolute and structure-independent.

While a whole may have the same property as a part, such as a chairs leg being made entirely of wood and a chair being made entirely of wood, it is not that the chair's leg is made entirely of wood which makes the chair made entirely of wood -- but rather, whether or not the chair is made entirely of wood. — Moliere

I know that! I'm not making that fallacy! That's either a straw man or a red herring. If all of the parts are made of wood, then the chair is made of wood. Do you disagree?

So, yes, they can have the same properties. But that one has such and such property does not mean that the other has such and such property... — Moliere

It doesn't necessarily mean that. I knew that already. You're preaching to the choir and missing the point.

You can't infer one from the other. At the very least, if we are to infer one from the other, it'd be nice to know how this inference is safe in this instance. I'm not one for claiming that informal fallacies are devastating to arguments, or anything. They just point at where we might be making a mistake, or at least could clear up what we do precisely mean. — Moliere

That's good to know. I think I've already explained this to some extent, and that the extent to which I can explain it is limited, so I think that it's mainly down to you to explain how what I've said is allegedly false or fallacious.

I've acknowledged a number of the differences that you've pointed out, but not in terms of colour, except insofar as appearance is concerned. None of these differences are relevant with regards to the colour of the strawberries, as far as I can tell.

There is a shared property between the parts and the whole, and the whole has the same property because the whole is an arrangement of the parts, and nothing about that arrangement effects the property such that it no longer applies. That last part is not true of uncontroversial examples of the fallacy of composition, but it is true in this case. Although if you're confused about appearance and reality, you might think otherwise.

Eh, I'd say that appearance/reality is a distinction which simply designates inferior/superior with respect to belief. So designating a belief as appearance is kind of the same thing as saying "I don't believe it is real", and designating a belief as reality is kind of the same thing as "I believe it is real" -- or true.

That isn't to say that appearance is reality, note. I certainly don't believe that. But rather I doubt the distinction sets out an ontological truth. (Also, I'd note here that I don't think the topic of perception reveals much about the nature of reality, either -- maybe the nature of perception, but not reality vs. appearance) — Moliere

Okay. But if we're saying that wavelengths or whatever are real - which is the assumption that I'm working under, and which will be agreeable to many - and if we're talking about colour in terms of wavelength or some related scientific description, then it makes sense to say that what we're talking about in such cases is reality. And similarly, with regards to any appearance which seemingly conflicts with this reality, if we're categorising that in contrary terms, then it'd make sense to say that this is not real. Furthermore, if we're attributing properties, and we accept the aforementioned, then we should do so accordingly in the right way, by attributing appearance to the subjective and property to the objective, rather than attributing appearance to the objective, as some people in this discussion seem to be doing by making certain kinds of statements which lack clarity and precision.

What's more, I'd say that what I'm saying is more along the lines of the question "How do we determine such and such?", and so is more geared towards an epistemic approach rather than an ontological approach. Not to be naive and think that we can abandon ontological commitments, but only to say this is the framing I'm attempting -- since we determine the color of some named image, be it strawberry platter or pixel, by looking at it, the rest follows rather easily. It seems to me that if the strawberry images are not red, then there must be some means of determining this in reality, no? What means are those? — Moliere

Okay, I don't have a problem with that epistemic approach, but it does seem naive to end up with that common means of determination which has been demonstrated to be erroneous in at least some cases, as with the strawberries.

I think I've answered those questions in other parts of this reply, so I refer you back to those parts.

I mean, "the brain did it" is all well and good, but if it's doing its thing, then what are we doing to determine the color? Do we just ask the brain? An obtuse question, yes. But I'd say that this is exactly the sort of weird talk you result in when we assign causal power, and almost a kind of pseudo-agency, to our brain. — Moliere

We become conscious of certain things as a result of our respective brains. We see the grey strawberries as red, and, typically, our initial reaction is to think that they are in fact red. I don't think we need to get caught up in the so-called hard problem here, if that's what you're getting at.

Kant is a familiar reference point. But my argument is more properly Peircean or biosemiotic. — apokrisis

Cool.

Of course we can't compare our experiences to know that your red is my red. in that final analysis, there is a brute lack of counterfactuality that thus winds up in an explanatory gap. But quite a lot of telling comparisons can be made on the way to that ultimate impasse. So for instance everyone sees yellow as the brightest hue, and also doesn't see brown as the blackish yellow it really is. And that phenomenological commonality is explained in complete fashion by the known (rather jury-built) neurological detail of the visual pathways.

So in the end, our yellows might indeed be different as experiences. Yet we can track the story right down towards this final question mark and find that similar neuroscience is creating similar mental outcomes. Thus we are not getting a strong reason for the kind of doubt - the talk of the purely accidental - that you might want to introduce to motivate a philosophy of mind argument. — apokrisis

Hrmm, not purely accidental I wouldn't think, but accidental. Some people's judgments happen to align, after all -- one could think there is regularity to be found based on some grouping. But as judgments differ from various persons as we can observe by means of the behaviors which are the results of judgment, and color is an experience of judgment, it wouldn't be a function of mere doubting but rather a fair inference from our explanatory frame that we do, in fact, see different colors. If what we are saying is true about color, then there is no explanatory gap -- it is the most sensible thing to believe. (though it does bugger the more functionalist notion of the brain which seems predominant -- at least on its face)


There's another reason why similar neuroscience could be creating similar mental outcomes -- the other flaw of Kant's philosophy, which whether we are Kantian or not these sorts of arguments do seem to follow this form of argumentation, is the transcendental argument.

So we have a gray image with a particular teal chosen to make the gray strawberries red. This is after having asked what are the possible conditions of experience -- the experience being this notion of color constancy. The brain adding colors to appear constant is the necessary conditions for colors remaining constant, or in this case, not doing so. We see that colors are constant(generally) and modified(when exploited) in experience, therefore this precondition is necessary.

But we can come up with other possible pre-conditions which explain the pheneomena. As a for instance, we might say that it is not the brain which judges and adds colors to experience, but the mind which does so. We know this to be so because we actually do see the same colors -- at least the same hues (as you note, yellow is the brightest hue for all of us). This explains the seeming regularity of experience better than reference to an embodied organ which differs from person to person. This organ, like the heart and the lungs and the skin, is certainly necessary for mental activity. Modifying it modifies mental activity. But it is not the best explanation for experience (one way of parsing the transcendental argument is that it's kind of the pre-cursor or model to abduction, hence my use of the term 'best explanation')

However, if we all agree to the same pre-conditions, then all the phenomena start becoming support for the pre-condition -- when, in fact, the pre-condition was meant to explain the phenomena. So this would be another reason why similar neuroscience could be creating similar mental outcomes -- mere agreement on the proper pre-conditions for such and such phenomena.

I'm trying to be quite clear that talk of emergence is very much reductionist handwaving most of the time. It is taking the idea of physical phase transitions - the idea of properties like liquidity emerging as a collective behaviour at some critical energy scale - and treating consciousness as just another material change of that kind.

But I am arguing the exact opposite. I am saying there is a genuine "duality" in play. The brain is a semiotic organ and so it is all about a modelling relation based on the play of "unphysical" signs. So material physics isn't even seeing what is going on. No amount of such physics could ever produce anything like what the brain actually does by just adding more of the same and relying on some kind of collective magic.

Of course physics does self organise and that kind of emergence is a really important correction to physicalist ontology. But semiosis is yet another story on top of that again. — apokrisis

OK, cool. We are definitely in agreement here. Though my doubts in emergence were more produced by seeing how arguments for emergence fall to all the same arguments against dualism (in particular the argument about how these two planes interact -- emergence is very hand-wavey on this front, moreso than even the early pituitary-gland positing dualists ;)). And since most emergentists were anti-dualists, it just seemed an inconsistent position since emergence is mostly motivated by trying to find a non-dualist solution to the mind-body problem.

Ah well. Forget any mention of Kant then. — apokrisis

Cool. Though I'm not sure that K's theory of truth was at issue here as much as his theory of cognition which seems to be in play.

This is Peirce so "truth" is pragmatic. We have already shifted from requiring that the world be represented in some veridical fashion. We are now viewing cognition in the way modern neuroscience would recognise - modelling that is ecologically situated, coding which is sparse, perception that is only interested in the degree to which uncertainty can be pragmatically minimised.

Why does the eye only have three "colour" pigments when evolution could have given us as many as we liked? Less is more if you already have in mind the few critical things you need to be watching out for.

Seems to me this is difficult to explain along evolutionary lines, at least immediately, because the way our species happens to see differs from the way other successful species happen to see. Also, while vision has evolutionary advantages for a land-dwelling species in an environment flooded with light -- or I can see how that makes sense at least - that doesn't mean that the three-color vision we experience is evolutionarily related. It could have been a bi-color, for all we can tell, and the tri-color vision just came along for the ride, or was sexually selected for, or was a random mutation and a seismic event wiped out those with bi-color vision.

It's all rather speculative, no?

Neuroscience has a ton of more technical jargon. But it is a basic fact of neural design that every neuron has hundreds of times more connections feeding down from on high than it has inputs coming up from "the real world". So just looking at that anatomy tells you that your prevailing state of intention, expectation and memory has the upper hand in determining what you wind up thinking you are seeing.

If you know pretty much exactly what should happen in the next instant, you can pretty much ignore everything as it does happen a split second later. And thus you also become exquisitely attuned to any failures of the said state of prediction. You know what requires attentive effort in the next split second - the hasty reorientation of your conceptions that then, with luck, allow you to ignore completely what does happen after that as you have managed now to predict it was going to be the case.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely.

In your terminology, that seems a hell of a lot of judgement in relation to a tiny fraction of experience. It is just that we don't really give much weight to how much we both routinely predict successfully, and also discount unthinkingly as too crazy to even consider (although we can pull them out conceptually at any time as I just did).

So again, that is why I stress this extra constraint of ecological validity. Philosophy of mind does have a habit of stripping it away as it searches atomistically for a foundation of qualia. Yet it is the pragmatic relation that a mind has with the world that is central to accounting for the mind causally. — apokrisis

I don't think I'd object to much here. We certainly can be oriented by judgment, and sure, this way of talking is a simplification. I'm not really interested in defending homuncularity or mere introspection or finding an atomistic basis for the mind. And I wouldn't discount judgment, I'd just note that our experiences are structured by more than judgment. Or, even more than this, that judgment is a learned habit taught by our environment -- which is predominantly social. Is it any wonder that an Enlightenment era philosopher interested in explaining the presence of scientific knowledge in light of an abstract philosophical puzzle, when describing the mind, put judgment as the focal point for said mind? Not at all.

Judgment is useful in non-social environments too, to be sure. Learning how to judge, and further how to make adjustments to said judgment, can reap many rewards. But I'd say that the structure of experience, as much as judgment plays a part in our behavior and functions, differs from this.

I'm off to work. I'll get reading and replying this evening.

Anti-realism and realism are well defined and don't need to be redefined, or we end up with endless semantic disputes that go nowhere. Color is real if it's mind-independent, and anti-real if it's not. — Marchesk

Then, as I argued in the discussion I created on whether truth is mind-dependent, I'll argue that colour, as I have defined it, is not mind-dependent, but more like rule-dependent. Rules depend on mind for creation, and for being comprehended, but not for persistence and not for application, so in the latter sense, they're mind-independent. Categories are related to rules, may be rule-based, and seem similar enough for my argument there to work here as well.

So, given the above, I'm a realist.

Compare with dreams. Some cultures have thought that when you dream, you go somewhere else. That it's an experience of something real. But we understand dreams to be mind-dependent. — Marchesk

Sure, dreams are mind-dependent. Dreams are real, the experiences are real, the contents are not. I really did have a dream last night, in which I experienced all kinds of things, but what I dreamed was not real. I didn't really fly around like a superhero.

Also compare with shape. We say shape is a property of objects, not of perception. Idealists might disagree, but at the very least, color is understood to be objective and not relative to the perceiver. — Marchesk

Again, that's fine with me. But that doesn't mean that they're right (or wrong). To make that assessment, you'd have to start by analysing what they mean.

I don't think it must be so, only that it seems we are deviating from what we normally do in this particular case if we are saying the strawberry image is, in reality, grey. — Moliere

We are, but that's the point. It emphasises the fallibility in what we normally do.

People seem to have the view that red objects are those that emit x wavelength of light. But this seems to conflate the scientific domain (of measuring wavelength) with the phenomenological domain of how things appear in our visual fields. Probably part of the confusion arises from the word "red" meaning different things under the two domains and yet are used as if they're interchangeable. — dukkha

I think that one key to understanding the view that red objects are those that emit x wavelength of light, and the reason why it is not a conflation in the way you say that it seems, is that, as you yourself say, it is a view about what red objects are (rather than how things appear). One simple distinction, and the superficial problem seems to vanish. That such talk is about what red objects are should give you a clue about what is meant by "red". Would a charitable interpretation assume some kind of naive realism whereby these two domains are confused? On the contrary, that's what is being argued against.

So we have a gray image with a particular teal chosen to make the gray strawberries red. This is after having asked what are the possible conditions of experience -- the experience being this notion of color constancy. The brain adding colors to appear constant is the necessary conditions for colors remaining constant, or in this case, not doing so. We see that colors are constant(generally) and modified(when exploited) in experience, therefore this precondition is necessary. — Moliere

I really don't think that the brain is "adding colors". I think that's a mistake, thinking that the brain is adding red. I believe the red is there, as part of the mixture within the grey. I would say that the brain "subtracts" or otherwise tries to account for the teal, because it appears like there is a lens of teal between the eyes and the strawberries. So the teal is subtracted from the grey, and we can see the red within the grey.

Scientifically, a generalised theory of signs - that is, semiotics - is going to have to be the best way of making sense of phenomenal experience. — apokrisis

What have semiotic theories achieved so far in that respect?

Instead now I start with a head full of every kind of possibility and start to limit that in a top down fashion so it is reasonably predictive of what is likely to happen next in terms of some flow of sensory elements. I generate the idea of the room from memory and so pretty instantly will notice anything that sharply deviates from my forward model of it. — apokrisis

What does it mean, exactly, when you say you start with a head full of every kind of possibility? Do you mean to say that literally every sort of possibility is "implanted" in our heads, or do you mean that the brain merely has the capability to conjure up endless possibilities? As in, the power to actualize these events already makes these events "existent" in some sense?

If we look at the brain, we see it is limited in many respects. It has a certain size, a certain organization, a certain amount of processing power and capabilities. I cannot imagine ten thousand stars, all I can imagine is a very large amount of stars of indeterminate quantity. There legitimately is a limit to how much I can do.

How would something like you're describing evolve in the natural world? From where would the mind come from? From my perspective, a bottom-up view, while perhaps not being entirely sufficient, has leverage here. Consciousness evolves from lesser awareness to more, all in the name of efficiency. You said "less is more", but in my opinion it should be "more is more" so long as efficiency and adaptability are maintained within some set threshold.

This explains the seeming regularity of experience better than reference to an embodied organ which differs from person to person. — Moliere

So by your dualistic reasoning, every congenitally blind person ought to report imagining colours, every congenitally deaf person would still imagine noises, every teetotaller would still know the feeling of drunkenness, etc. After alll, something may be missing in terms of inputs to drive brain activity but we all partake in the one mind substance, right?

It could have been a bi-color, for all we can tell, and the tri-color vision just came along for the ride, or was sexually selected for, or was a random mutation and a seismic event wiped out those with bi-color vision. — Moliere

Well the usual speculative evolutionary story goes that mammals generallly did go bicolour or dichromatic and red-green colour blind because they were night creatures during the dinosaur era. Then primates added a pigment to allow for sharp red-green discrimination. And a reasonable reason for that was so they could spot ripe fruit in dense foliage. Which would happen to be a good example of evolving a sign detector to read the signs being made by other parts of nature.

Judgment is useful in non-social environments too, to be sure. Learning how to judge, and further how to make adjustments to said judgment, can reap many rewards. But I'd say that the structure of experience, as much as judgment plays a part in our behavior and functions, differs from this. — Moliere

So what does your "judgement" entail as a neurological concept? It does seem to imply a hard dualism of observer and observables. It does give primacy to acts of attentive deliberation where I am pointing out how much is being done automatically and habitually, leaving attention and puzzlement as little to do as is possible. So talk of judgement puts the emphasis in all the wrong places from my anticipatory modelling point of view. Just the fact that judgements follow the acts strikes another bum note if the impressions of present have already been generally conceived in the moment just prior.

Well in neuroscience it has led to this almost crazy obsession with the possibility that cells are talking to each other in codes of electrochemical pulses. I mean what are these guys smoking? ;)

What does it mean, exactly, when you say you start with a head full of every kind of possibility? — darthbarracuda

I hesitate to give the usual answer, but since you insist, I mean vague possibility. So a state of informational symmetry that could be broken a countable vast number of ways.

Possibility doesn't have to be an ensemble of distinct states like marked balls in a bag. Instead it can be a state or relatively unformed indistinctness out of which distinct possibilities are forced into counterfactual definiteness as the hand reaches in to grasp for some thing.

ou said "less is more", but in my opinion it should be "more is more" so long as efficiency and adaptability are maintained within some set threshold. — darthbarracuda

But I'm not the one trying to impose a monotonic dynamic on the discussion. I am simply trying to correct for that tendency to privilege bottom up construction in telling the story of nature. So I have no problem that there is both construction and constraint, each being fully expressed. That is in fact what full blooded holism demands.

And note how you make consciousness synonymous with in the moment attention. My definition of being mindful extends to include habitual level awareness. So that is the diachronic view of the holist. Memory, or the whole weight of a life of experience, is "doing" the "being conscious". We grow a close modelling fit for the world and so in the moment, only tiny tweaks need to be made to tat running state of mind. Again this is in complete contrast to computational thinking where every moment is a new state of information to be data processed so that it generates some mental representation.

So when I say less is more, I mean the fewer tweaks needed, the better the running model. The less attention needs to fix, the more powerful it becomes as it is being now very narrowly devoted to whatever turns out to be the remaining focus of uncertainty.

This actually shows up physically in comparative neurology. Chimps are smart, but we are smarter. So who do you think devotes more primary visual cortex to the tiny central focus of vision? It is because we are better at predicting the contents of our peripheral vision that we can justify devoting more neural resource to whatever needs to be the centre of our attention. Tunnel vision becomes wired in because we are more successful at ignoring the world in general.

To try to make things clearer, the computational view does the regular atomistic thing of imagining existence to be based on some level of fundamental stabilty. So that is where computational models of mind go wrong - they expect the neural code to be some kind of simple compositional deal.

But semiotics - to boil it down - takes the opposite metaphysical position of basing everything on a presumption of fundamental instability (what folk used to call the edge of chaos, or criticality).

So top down regulative constraints work because the underlying material reality is exactly on the point between breaking down and reforming. It is poised in a condition of maximum instability. Which is how a little nudge, an infinitesimal push, can tip the physics one way or the other.

That explains how mental states - as systems of signs, habits of interpretance - can interact in ways that pragmatically connect with the goings on of the material world. The world is poised at its tipping point, not stuck in some undynamic rut from which it would be impossible to budge.

So that regulation of material instability is what semiotic theory can explain. That is its metaphysical paradigm in a nutshell.

In neuroscience, computationalism still dominates. Folk know neuron spikes are some kind of code. But generally, they don't then have a clear way of relating that to a coherent model as they are still thinking that the activity must be computational and so based on some ground of "hardware" stability.

Even in biology, the full force of a semiotic shift in thought is only just beginning. It is only in the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to actually view cellular processes at the level of the nanoscale molecular machinery.

Life is matter poised on the point of falling apart and yet nudged to keep going, continually reforming, by a (genetic) system of signs. Thus the organic can be defined in contrast to the mechanical in terms of this foundational thought - semiosis is the regulation of fundamental instability.

No, the brain doesn't drop out of the explanation. And it doesn't need to be a natural object outside, so that criticism is based on a false premise that was never part of my argument. — Sapientia

I think we're miscommunicating a bit here. To be fair, your argument was a google search. What I mean by 'drops out of the explanation' is that all that is said is we have reality on one side, and appearance on the other, and two claims about both. When asked how reality becomes appearance, the answer is 'the brain did it, just like it does with other objects to keep the color constant under different light conditions' where the main example was a blue sky.

My question is -- what does the brain do to reality to make the appearance? But the answer is "it makes the appearance appear like the appearance appears, different from reality" -- which just masks the mechanism I'm asking after.

And I'm not the one misinterpreting the grey strawberries as red, that's what you're doing. That's the common misinterpretation that is shown to be erroneous, and to which you're clinging, despite the scientific evidence to the contrary.

With science. What you describe above determines appearance. You can conflate that with something else, but that would be erroneous/misleading.

I'm grouping these just as a side note, because it will take us pretty far astray.

A basic view of science:

Science is little more than a collection of arguments about certain topics. There are established procedures in place for certain sorts of questions, there are established beliefs due to said process, but in the end it's a collection of arguments about certain topics on what is true with respect to those topics.

At least, as I see it. We don't science it -- we make an argument. An argument, in this context, can of course include experimental evidence. But said evidence must, itself, be interpreted to make sense.

So really I'm just asking after the arguments in play. What does the scientist say to make his case convincing to yourself? What convinced you?

I've already addressed those first two sentences. They are irrelevant, since that don't support your conclusion. I accept both of them, yet reach a different conclusion. — Sapientia

I think this is addressed later in your posts.

And I doubt your last sentence. What do you mean by that? — Sapientia

I mean that when Newton placed prisms to diffract light from the sun into a spectrum that the red part of the spectrum which came out of the prism was called 'red' not because it was had a larger wavelength and such was proven, but rather because the light was red.

If all of the parts are made of wood, then the chair is made of wood. Do you disagree? — Sapientia

No, that makes sense to me.

Though if all the parts are made of wood, and some parts are painted green while others are painted yellow, then it wouldn't make sense to say that the chair is green. :D

In fact, what if the chair had a sticky reprint of the pixel-image we're discussing? Just to make it closer. Then, what color would the chair be?

Although if you're confused about appearance and reality, you might think otherwise. — Sapientia

I'm thinking this is probably where we diverge the most, then. We seem to be in agreement on both the fallacy of composition and whether or not it has merit depends on the circumstances. If, in fact, the image is gray and appears red then certainly I am wrong.

So really it seems we're more in disagreement on determining which color is the real color, and which color is the apparent color.

Okay. But if we're saying that wavelengths or whatever are real - which is the assumption that I'm working under, and which will be agreeable to many - and if we're talking about colour in terms of wavelength or some related scientific description, then it makes sense to say that what we're talking about in such cases is reality. And similarly, with regards to any appearance which seemingly conflicts with this reality, if we're categorising that in contrary terms, then it'd make sense to say that this is not real. Furthermore, if we're attributing properties, and we accept the aforementioned, then we should do so accordingly in the right way, by attributing appearance to the subjective and property to the objective, rather than attributing appearance to the objective, as some people in this discussion seem to be doing by making certain kinds of statements which lack clarity and precision. — Sapientia

Cool. This is much closer to what I'm asking after.

I think this condition: " if we're talking about colour in terms of wavelength or some related scientific description,"

is likely the culprit of disagreement. Electromagnetic waves are real, as far as anything in science goes. But photons, nor atoms, have any color whatsoever. This is not an attribute of the individual parts of what we are saying causes the perception of color. Certain (regular, obviously, as you note about gray not being a regular wave) wavelengths of light correspond with our color-perceptions. But the color is not the electromagnetic radiation.


Color is -- to use your terminology -- subjective. I'd prefer to call it a first-person attribute not attributable to our physics of light, which is a third-person description of the phenomena of light rather than objective/subjective, myself.

Okay, I don't have a problem with that epistemic approach, but it does seem naive to end up with that common means of determination which has been demonstrated to be erroneous in at least some cases, as with the strawberries. — Sapientia

Cool. Then I think we're more or less on the same page in terms of the terms, at least :D

Whether such and such a demonstration is erroneous seems to be the major point of disagreement.

I don't think we need to get caught up in the so-called hard problem here, if that's what you're getting at.

Responding to this in reverse order because I think the latter point is more important:


I don't think we need to get caught up in the hard problem either. I wasn't really trying to go there, but it does seem related to the topic at hand. But it seems like we've managed to pair down our disagreement to one of "how to determine such and such", so there's no need to get into it.

We become conscious of certain things as a result of our respective brains. We see the grey strawberries as red, and, typically, our initial reaction is to think that they are in fact red. — Sapientia

Honestly, while brains are certainly a part of the picture of human consciousness -- I wouldn't dispute this -- we just don't know how we become conscious. Either there is no such thing in the first place, in which case there is nothing to explain, or if there is such a thing then we don't know how or why it's there.

We are, but that's the point. It emphasises the fallibility in what we normally do. — Sapientia

I think this is covered at this point. Let me know if you disagree.

I really don't think that the brain is "adding colors". I think that's a mistake, thinking that the brain is adding red. I believe the red is there, as part of the mixture within the grey. I would say that the brain "subtracts" or otherwise tries to account for the teal, because it appears like there is a lens of teal between the eyes and the strawberries. So the teal is subtracted from the grey, and we can see the red within the grey. — Metaphysician Undercover

I believe that the strawberry-image in the picture is red. But what that says about this or that theory of color or perception, I'm less committed on. I really don't know what I believe there -- I'm just following the arguments where they go.

So by your dualistic reasoning, every congenitally blind person ought to report imagining colours, every congenitally deaf person would still imagine noises, every teetotaller would still know the feeling of drunkenness, etc. After alll, something may be missing in terms of inputs to drive brain activity but we all partake in the one mind substance, right? — apokrisis

Not necessarily. Cognition of mental phenomena could depend upon physical inputs, after all -- and then, also, just because there is a single-mind that does not then mean that we are all one. The identity of a person -- from their physical body up -- is constructed out of the raw stuffs of the world. One mind-world -- multiple people within the mind-world.

Brains are salient to individual identities in such a world, so it's not entirely off base to be looking at brains -- that would be one part of the physical-world, after all -- it's just not the whole picture, in accordance with this line of reasoning.

So what does your "judgement" entail as a neurological concept? It does seem to imply a hard dualism of observer and observables. It does give primacy to acts of attentive deliberation where I am pointing out how much is being done automatically and habitually, leaving attention and puzzlement as little to do as is possible. So talk of judgement puts the emphasis in all the wrong places from my anticipatory modelling point of view. Just the fact that judgements follow the acts strikes another bum note if the impressions of present have already been generally conceived in the moment just prior. — apokrisis

Hrrmm, I wouldn't disagree with much of judgment being on "auto-pilot", actually. One can consciously judge, of course, but judgment is just the application of concepts to particulars, or the powers of the mind. That doesn't mean it has to be something I consciously do. It just means that the mind is a disciminating-machine, marking differences on the basis of concepts. Actually, your description of visual perception is pretty much what I mean by judgment -- the ganglion, to use the brain-theory of the mind, is judging the light coming in, and is already discriminating from the beginning.

I can see how such language could be confusing. I'd say that while we can pause to consciously consider and judge our mental processes, that the majority of the time they are beyond awareness and not thought too much about -- so, while I'm doing my thing, or focusing on this or that, my mind is judging, i.e., discriminating between particulars, making distinctions (or recalling distinctions learned, also often subconsciously, to further judge/discriminate between particulars and make sense out of what is just too much to take in total while still making sense)

On this front I don't think we have much to disagree on, to tell the truth.

Brains are salient to individual identities in such a world, so it's not entirely off base to be looking at brains -- that would be one part of the physical-world, after all -- it's just not the whole picture, in accordance with this line of reasoning. — Moliere

But this is just being inconsistent - choosing dualism or some ill defined brain functionalism depending on which front you are currently mounting a defence.

The logic remains - if dualism is true and qualia are not brain dependent, then the blind should have at least imaginative access to those qualia, despite eyes that have never functioned in a way that would produce the right neural circuits. And you shouldn't be able to zap the V4 colour centre of the brain and produce then a loss of colour qualia as a consequence.

I can see how such language could be confusing. — Moliere

It'd be less confusing to say we prejudge on the whole. And still less confusing to say we positively predict. Conceptions are schemata, to make use of the good old fashioned cogsci borrowing from Kant. We have mental templates to which the world is already generally assimilated. Post hoc judgement is reserved then for where the schema prove to need tailoring.

My question is -- what does the brain do to reality to make the appearance? But the answer is "it makes the appearance appear like the appearance appears, different from reality" -- which just masks the mechanism I'm asking after. — Moliere

The way you phrase this again says you find it natural to think about the mind as representational - the cogsci paradigm which is being replaced by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology (or return, if we are talking gestalt dynamics and even the founding psychophysicists).

And that is my point about the paradigm shift represented by semiotics. Representationalism presumes that a stable reality can be stability pictured and so stabily experienced - begging a whole lot of questions about what could ever be the point of there being the observer essentially doing nothing but sitting and staring at a flickering parade of qualia painted like shadows on the cave wall.

But give that observer a job I say. Observation - defined in the general fashion of semiosis - is all about stabilising the critically unstable. So minds exist to give determination to the inherent uncertainty of the material world. If matter is a lump of clay, minds are there to shape it for some purpose.

And uncomfortable though it may seem, the science of quantum theory says observers are needed to "collapse" the inherent uncertainty of material nature all the way down. Existence is pan-semiotic.

Somehow we now have to honour that empirical fact in a way that makes Metaphysical sense. Most folk agree we can't claim that "consciousness" solved the quantum observer problem. But quantum foundationalism does think that some notion of information, contextualism and counterfactuality will do so - which is another way of talking about semiotics.

So I'm talking about a sweeping paradigm shift. The systems view is about how existence has to founded on the primal dynamism of material uncertainty becoming regulated by the sedimentation of informational constraints.

Heraclitus summed up the understanding already present in Greek metaphysics - existence is flux and logos in interaction.

And the mathematical exploration of what that could mean is still being cashed out, as with the return of bootstrap metaphysics in fundamental theory - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170223-bootstrap-geometry-theory-space/

The logic remains - if dualism is true and qualia are not brain dependent, then the blind should have at least imaginative access to those qualia, despite eyes that have never functioned in a way that would produce the right neural circuits. And you shouldn't be able to zap the V4 colour centre of the brain and produce then a loss of colour qualia as a consequence. — apokrisis

I'm not so sure about that. What about other creatures? Non-controversial examples of other creatures which have vision and demonstrate intelligent behavior I mean. It seems to me if your reasoning holds then any deviation whatsoever should disprove dualism. But why would I want to defend something which is so clearly and easily refutable by a wealth of counter-examples?

I mentioned color-blindness before, and I'll mention it again. It seems to me that the color-blind look at the same red in a different way. I don't think that perception necessarily displays every aspect of the world.

For the congenitally blind I could see it going either way. Wouldn't it depend on exactly which side of the divide the qualia are on, for example? And why can't qualia only be perceived if one has both the right mind-stuff and the right body-stuff? What if the perception of qualia just is two proto-conscious bits on each side of the divide lining up?

Perception doesn't have to be veridical and univocal for dualism -- dualism would just explain the apparent similarities of experience, since there would be a shared structure of mind.

Besides, I am mentioning this only to show the weakness in transcendental argumentation -- it's valid, but it's far from certain. Often enough what ends up happening is that counter-examples get counted as support in one theory, and vice-versa. The counter-examples just take on a different m

eaning depending on which transcendental conditions we decide are more likely.

And one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, after all ;).

It'd be less confusing to say we prejudge on the whole. And still less confusing to say we positively predict. Conceptions are schemata, to make use of the good old fashioned cogsci borrowing from Kant. We have mental templates to which the world is already generally assimilated. Post hoc judgement is reserved then for where the schema prove to need tailoring. — apokrisis

Sounds good to me. I agree with this general notion of cognition, then, let's say?

I still think it is ratio-centric, but I don't think ratio-centric thinking has to be somehow directed by an individual -- it can all take place 'under the hood' of awareness.

Seems we are good here to me. The only thing I'm questioning is whether this under-the-hood cognition is what results in the structure of experience. It seems to me that it's more a learned habit, something taught by the environment, something which can be trained and honed for, but likewise, can be diminished and taken apart.

So rather than it being a model of either the mind or experience, it's just something the mind can do, and it's just a part of what shapes our awareness of experience.

Hope that helps.

The way you phrase this again says you find it natural to think about the mind as representational - the cogsci paradigm which is being replaced by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology (or return, if we are talking gestalt dynamics and even the founding psychophysicists). — apokrisis

I think we'd have to think of the mind as representational if we believe that in reality the strawberry we see is gray, while in appearance it is red -- at least to some extent. Here I'm just trying to engage the argument as it is presented, not necessarily endorsing this view of things. As I noted to Sapientia, I don't think this distinction is very useful to perception, but there has to be some engagement at some level otherwise we'll just end up talking past one another, it seems to me.

And that is my point about the paradigm shift represented by semiotics. Representationalism presumes that a stable reality can be stability pictured and so stabily experienced - begging a whole lot of questions about what could ever be the point of there being the observer essentially doing nothing but sitting and staring at a flickering parade of qualia painted like shadows on the cave wall.

But give that observer a job I say. Observation - defined in the general fashion of semiosis - is all about stabilising the critically unstable. So minds exist to give determination to the inherent uncertainty of the material world. If matter is a lump of clay, minds are there to shape it for some purpose.

And uncomfortable though it may seem, the science of quantum theory says observers are needed to "collapse" the inherent uncertainty of material nature all the way down. Existence is pan-semiotic.

Somehow we now have to honour that empirical fact in a way that makes Metaphysical sense. Most folk agree we can't claim that "consciousness" solved the quantum observer problem. But quantum foundationalism does think that some notion of information, contextualism and counterfactuality will do so - which is another way of talking about semiotics.

So I'm talking about a sweeping paradigm shift. The systems view is about how existence has to founded on the primal dynamism of material uncertainty becoming regulated by the sedimentation of informational constraints.

Heraclitus summed up the understanding already present in Greek metaphysics - existence is flux and logos in interaction.

And the mathematical exploration of what that could mean is still being cashed out, as with the return of bootstrap metaphysics in fundamental theory - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170223-bootstrap-geometry-theory-space/ — apokrisis

Sounds neat to me. I don't endorse a representational view of mind, personally. But I'm also uncertain to what extent mind even actually overlaps with experience, personally. I sometimes get to thinking that experience is sort of its own thing -- and that our minds are first collective, and second individual -- there is a pre-existing mind to our birth, one generated by the social interactions of our peoples (sort of like distributed cognition and extended mind, as one could conceive of the scientific project, but less structured or intentional or teleological), which in turn generates our sense of self (usually through a mixture institutions -- the family, the church, school, work), and an individual contact with this more general structure. This individual contact and sense of self is what combines to form our personal mind, which in turn is what directs awareness, but does not generate experience. Rather, it directs awareness of said experience. Or perhaps at this point we could be said to have some agency in the affair and could claim we direct our awareness of experience, if only in part.

But the mind thing isn't making model things of the experience things, so it's not representational. Rather, there's a kind of flow or seepage between the two

Just laying that out there to make some of my statements clear. It's worthwhile to explore the arguments because my notions are quite hazy, merely intuitive, un-argued for, and not really worth considering and certainly not ready to be lain out in argument or for persuasion, and only worth mentioning to make my other statements in this discussion clear.

I'm not so sure about that. What about other creatures? — Moliere

What about them? If I could look at the world through the eyes of a cat, I wouldn't expect to experience trichromatic vision. Just the same as I wouldn't through the eyes of a colour blind human.

It seems to me that the color-blind look at the same red in a different way — Moliere

They might look at the same wavelength energy in some sense, but we know that there is no counterfactual sensory judgement taking place, such that they see red and not green. And my argument is that experience is nothing but a concatenation of such base level acts of discrimination. Physical values have to be converted to symbolic values in which an antagonistic switching off a neural response is as telling as switching that response on. Now both 1 and 0 have meaning. Absence means as much as presence, whereas back in the real world, there is only the presence.

And why can't qualia only be perceived if one has both the right mind-stuff and the right body-stuff? What if the perception of qualia just is two proto-conscious bits on each side of the divide lining up? — Moliere

You are advocating Panpsychism it appears. For some reason the right wiring of a complex brain adds something different. The complexity of the patterns being woven lines up all the protoconsciousness to create not just bare mentality but mental content.

Yet that is still a mystical tale as the protoconsiousness remains itself rationally unexplained and beyond empirical demonstration. From a theory point of view, it is a hypothesis is not even wrong.

I sometimes get to thinking that experience is sort of its own thing -- and that our minds are first collective, and second individual -- there is a pre-existing mind to our birth, one generated by the social interactions of our peoples (sort of like distributed cognition and extended mind, as one could conceive of the scientific project, but less structured or intentional or teleological), which in turn generates our sense of self (usually through a mixture institutions -- the family, the church, school, work), and an individual contact with this more general structure. — Moliere

I certainly agree that the self-conscious human mind is socially contructed. The ability to introspect in an egocentric way, rationalise in an explictly logical fashion, reconstruct an autobiographical past, etc, are language-based skills that we learn because they are expected of us by the cultures we get born into.

So that is part of the semiotic story. Adding a new level of code - words on top of the neurons and genes - allows for a whole new level of developmental complexity.

Qualia are perceptual qualities and so are a biological level of symbolisation. Even a chimp will experience red due to a similarity of the circuits. But only humans have the culture and language that makes it routine to be able to introspect and note the redness of redness. We can treat our brain responses as a running display which we then take a detached view of. Culture teaches us to see ourselves as selves...having ideas and impressions.

So the point then about the red strawberries is that there is also still the actual biological response that can't be changed just by talking about it differently. And this shows that the biological brain itself is already a kind of rationalising filter. We never see the physical energies of the world in any direct sense. The world has been transformed into some yes/no set of perceptual judgements from the outset. It is already a play of signs. And so the feeling of what it is like to be seeing red is somehow just as much a sign relatiion as the word "red" we might use to talk about it with other people.

If you are a physicalist, you want to somehow make redness a mental substance - a psychic ink. And if we are talking about colour speech, we are quite happy that this is simply a referential way of coordinating social activity or group understanding. The leap is to see perceptual level experience as also sign activity - a concatenation of judgements - not some faux material stuff.

The mind is a modelling relation with the world. And after all, it should feel like something to be in that kind of intimate functional relation, right?