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Hi Jason,I believe that you are alluding to what is known in Cognitive Science as the "Symbol Grounding Problem":My intuition goes in the same direction as yours, that of "procedural semantics". Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that language is an emergent feature of computational processes with self-replication. From signaling between unicellular organisms all the way up to human language.
Luc Steels has some really interesting work exploring this sort of idea, with his evolutionary language games:
I have been working a lot with language these days. I and my co-author (Camille Roth) developed a formalism called Semantic Hypergraphs, which is an attempt to represent natural language in structures that are akin to typed lambda-calculus:
So far we use modern machine learning to parse natural language into this representation, and then take advantage of the regularity of the structures to automatically identify stuff in text corpora for the purpose of computational social science research.Something I dream of, and intend to explore at some point, is to attempt to go beyond the parser and actually "execute the code", and thus try to close the loop with the idea of procedural semantics.
--Am Mi, 31. Mär 2021, um 17:58, schrieb Jason Resch:I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are communicable and which are not, and I realized all communication relies on some pre-existing shared framework.It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone whose never seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and dimensionslity would likewise be incommunicable to someone who had no experience with moving in, or through, space.Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common system of units and measures.So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but strings. It is only when a bit string is combined with some processing that meaning can be shared. The reason we can't communicate "red" to someone whose never seen it is we would need to transmit a description of the processing done by our brains in order to share what red means to oneself.So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just qualia, but anything at all, when there's not already common processing systems between the sender and receiver, of the information.Jason
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Hi Telmo,
Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the problem. I think you are right about there being some connection between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.
I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
- Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or the height of Mount Everest
- First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the number 5 as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia, would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains process the symbol in the same way.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUgWHah6t6fAoAKd7kZ6Ch%3D-WPL%2BzLwqa1J0psVrKC-oJQ%40mail.gmail.com.
On 31 Mar 2021, at 17:58, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are communicable and which are not, and I realized all communication relies on some pre-existing shared framework.
It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone whose never seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and dimensionslity would likewise be incommunicable to someone who had no experience with moving in, or through, space.Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common system of units and measures.
So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but strings. It is only when a bit string is combined with some processing that meaning can be shared.
The reason we can't communicate "red" to someone whose never seen it is we would need to transmit a description of the processing done by our brains in order to share what red means to oneself.
So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just qualia, but anything at all, when there's not already common processing systems between the sender and receiver, of the information.
On 8 Apr 2021, at 18:10, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:Hi Jason,I believe that you are alluding to what is known in Cognitive Science as the "Symbol Grounding Problem":
My intuition goes in the same direction as yours, that of "procedural semantics”.
Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that language is an emergent feature of computational processes with self-replication. From signaling between unicellular organisms all the way up to human language.Luc Steels has some really interesting work exploring this sort of idea, with his evolutionary language games:I have been working a lot with language these days. I and my co-author (Camille Roth) developed a formalism called Semantic Hypergraphs, which is an attempt to represent natural language in structures that are akin to typed lambda-calculus:
Here's the Python library that implements these ideas:So far we use modern machine learning to parse natural language into this representation, and then take advantage of the regularity of the structures to automatically identify stuff in text corpora for the purpose of computational social science research.Something I dream of, and intend to explore at some point, is to attempt to go beyond the parser and actually "execute the code", and thus try to close the loop with the idea of procedural semantics.
Best,TelmoAm Mi, 31. Mär 2021, um 17:58, schrieb Jason Resch:I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are communicable and which are not, and I realized all communication relies on some pre-existing shared framework.It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone whose never seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and dimensionslity would likewise be incommunicable to someone who had no experience with moving in, or through, space.Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common system of units and measures.So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but strings. It is only when a bit string is combined with some processing that meaning can be shared. The reason we can't communicate "red" to someone whose never seen it is we would need to transmit a description of the processing done by our brains in order to share what red means to oneself.So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just qualia, but anything at all, when there's not already common processing systems between the sender and receiver, of the information.Jason
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On 8 Apr 2021, at 21:38, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:Hi Telmo,Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the problem. I think you are right about there being some connection between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
- Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or the height of Mount Everest
- First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of numbers.
All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the number 5 as red?
If everyone in the world had such synesthesia, would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness of red?
In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains process the symbol in the same way.
More comments below:On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 11:11 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:Hi Jason,I believe that you are alluding to what is known in Cognitive Science as the "Symbol Grounding Problem":My intuition goes in the same direction as yours, that of "procedural semantics". Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that language is an emergent feature of computational processes with self-replication. From signaling between unicellular organisms all the way up to human language.That is interesting. I do think there is something self-defining about the meaning of processes. Something that multiplies two inputs can always be said to be multiplying. The meaning of the operation is then grounded in the function and processes of that process, which is made unambiguous. The multiplication process could not be confused with addition or subtraction. This is in contrast to a N-bit string on a piece of paper, which could be interpreted in at least 2^N ways (or perhaps even an infinite number of ways, if you consider what function is applied to that bit string).
Luc Steels has some really interesting work exploring this sort of idea, with his evolutionary language games:Evolving systems that can communicate amongst themselves seems to be a fruitful way to explore these issues. Has anyone attempted to take simple examples, like computer simulated evolved versions of robots playing soccer, and add in a layer that lets each player emit and receive arbitrary signals from other players? I would expect there would be strong evolutionary pressures for learning to communicate things like "I see the ball", "I'm about to take a shot", etc. to other teammates.
I have been working a lot with language these days. I and my co-author (Camille Roth) developed a formalism called Semantic Hypergraphs, which is an attempt to represent natural language in structures that are akin to typed lambda-calculus:One curiosity is that all human languages appear to be "Turing complete" in the sense that we can use natural language to describe and define any finite process. I don't know how significant this is though, as in general it is pretty easy to achieve Turing complete languages.
I think the central problem with "Mary the super-scientist" is our brains, in general, don't have a way to take received code/instructions and process them accordingly. I think if our brains could do this, if we could take book knowledge and use it to build neural structures for processing information in specified ways, then Mary could learn what it is like to see red without red light ever hitting her retina.
But such flexibility in the brain would make us vulnerable to "mind viruses" that spread by words or symbols. Modern computers clearly demarcate executable and non-executable memory to limit similar dangers.
This might also explain the apparent third-person / first-person distinction.
We can communicate through language any Turing machine, and understand the functioning of that machine and processing in a third person way, but without re-wiring ourselves, we have no way to perceive it in a direct first-person way.
Very cool!So far we use modern machine learning to parse natural language into this representation, and then take advantage of the regularity of the structures to automatically identify stuff in text corpora for the purpose of computational social science research.Something I dream of, and intend to explore at some point, is to attempt to go beyond the parser and actually "execute the code", and thus try to close the loop with the idea of procedural semantics.I have often wondered, if an alien race discovered an english dictionary (containing no pictures) would there be enough internal consistency and information present in that dictionary to work out all the meaning?
I have the feeling that because there is enough redundancy in it, together with a shared heritage of evolving in the same physical universe, there is some hope that they could, but it might involve a massive computational process to bootstrap. Once they make some headway towards a correct interpretation of the words, however, I think it will end up confirming itself as a correct understanding, much like the end stages of solving a Sudoku puzzle become easier and self-confirming of the correctness of the solution.
Is this the problem you are attempting to solve with the semantic hyper graphs/graph brain, or that such graphs could one day solve?JasonAm Mi, 31. Mär 2021, um 17:58, schrieb Jason Resch:I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are communicable and which are not, and I realized all communication relies on some pre-existing shared framework.It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone whose never seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and dimensionslity would likewise be incommunicable to someone who had no experience with moving in, or through, space.Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common system of units and measures.So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but strings. It is only when a bit string is combined with some processing that meaning can be shared. The reason we can't communicate "red" to someone whose never seen it is we would need to transmit a description of the processing done by our brains in order to share what red means to oneself.So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just qualia, but anything at all, when there's not already common processing systems between the sender and receiver, of the information.Jason
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On 9 Apr 2021, at 02:40, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:On 4/8/2021 12:38 PM, Jason Resch wrote:Hi Telmo,Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the problem. I think you are right about there being some connection between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
- Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or the height of Mount Everest
- First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the number 5 as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia, would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains process the symbol in the same way.
I think you exaggerate the problem. Consider how bats "see" by sonar. I think this is quite communicable to humans by analogies.
And submarines have sonar which produces images on screens. Is redness communicable? My father who was red/green color blind had to guess at the color of traffic lights or just watch other cars when he first started to drive around 1928. But he understood the concept of color because he could tell blue from red/green. And later, traffic engineers adjust the spectrum of traffic lights so that he could tell the difference (they also started to put the red at the top).
BrentMore comments below:
On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 11:11 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:Hi Jason,I believe that you are alluding to what is known in Cognitive Science as the "Symbol Grounding Problem":My intuition goes in the same direction as yours, that of "procedural semantics". Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that language is an emergent feature of computational processes with self-replication. From signaling between unicellular organisms all the way up to human language.That is interesting. I do think there is something self-defining about the meaning of processes. Something that multiplies two inputs can always be said to be multiplying. The meaning of the operation is then grounded in the function and processes of that process, which is made unambiguous. The multiplication process could not be confused with addition or subtraction. This is in contrast to a N-bit string on a piece of paper, which could be interpreted in at least 2^N ways (or perhaps even an infinite number of ways, if you consider what function is applied to that bit string).Luc Steels has some really interesting work exploring this sort of idea, with his evolutionary language games:Evolving systems that can communicate amongst themselves seems to be a fruitful way to explore these issues. Has anyone attempted to take simple examples, like computer simulated evolved versions of robots playing soccer, and add in a layer that lets each player emit and receive arbitrary signals from other players? I would expect there would be strong evolutionary pressures for learning to communicate things like "I see the ball", "I'm about to take a shot", etc. to other teammates.I have been working a lot with language these days. I and my co-author (Camille Roth) developed a formalism called Semantic Hypergraphs, which is an attempt to represent natural language in structures that are akin to typed lambda-calculus:One curiosity is that all human languages appear to be "Turing complete" in the sense that we can use natural language to describe and define any finite process. I don't know how significant this is though, as in general it is pretty easy to achieve Turing complete languages.
I think the central problem with "Mary the super-scientist" is our brains, in general, don't have a way to take received code/instructions and process them accordingly. I think if our brains could do this, if we could take book knowledge and use it to build neural structures for processing information in specified ways, then Mary could learn what it is like to see red without red light ever hitting her retina. But such flexibility in the brain would make us vulnerable to "mind viruses" that spread by words or symbols. Modern computers clearly demarcateexecutable and non-executable memory to limit similar dangers.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/3efb84d8-39bd-0a7e-e00e-106c44fafc8c%40verizon.net.
On 9 Apr 2021, at 02:40, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 4/8/2021 12:38 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Hi Telmo,
Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the problem. I think you are right about there being some connection between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.
I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
- Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or the height of Mount Everest
- First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the number 5 as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia, would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains process the symbol in the same way.
I think you exaggerate the problem. Consider how bats "see" by sonar. I think this is quite communicable to humans by analogies.
That will communicate the third person aspect, but not the qualia itself.
And submarines have sonar which produces images on screens. Is redness communicable? My father who was red/green color blind had to guess at the color of traffic lights or just watch other cars when he first started to drive around 1928. But he understood the concept of color because he could tell blue from red/green. And later, traffic engineers adjust the spectrum of traffic lights so that he could tell the difference (they also started to put the red at the top).
Yes, in practice there is not much problem, which explains the lack of interest in the mind-body problem, but this does not help to solve the conceptual issue.It is a bit like saying that in practice GR and QM works very well, so that we lost our time when trying to get a coherent theory of all forces. It depends if we are interested in foundational issues and understanding or in practical applications, I guess.
On 4/9/2021 4:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 9 Apr 2021, at 02:40, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 4/8/2021 12:38 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Hi Telmo,
Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the problem. I think you are right about there being some connection between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.
I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
- Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or the height of Mount Everest
- First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the number 5 as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia, would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains process the symbol in the same way.
I think you exaggerate the problem. Consider how bats "see" by sonar. I think this is quite communicable to humans by analogies.
That will communicate the third person aspect, but not the qualia itself.
When a blind person has a tactile array placed in their back and attached to a video camera, they learn to see. I sighted person can have the same tactile array and video camera and also learn to see thru it. On what grounds would you deny they experience the same qualia via the video camera. And then you can ask the sighted person how or whether the qualia of the two kinds of sight differ...or you could do the experiment yourself.
And submarines have sonar which produces images on screens. Is redness communicable? My father who was red/green color blind had to guess at the color of traffic lights or just watch other cars when he first started to drive around 1928. But he understood the concept of color because he could tell blue from red/green. And later, traffic engineers adjust the spectrum of traffic lights so that he could tell the difference (they also started to put the red at the top).
Yes, in practice there is not much problem, which explains the lack of interest in the mind-body problem, but this does not help to solve the conceptual issue.It is a bit like saying that in practice GR and QM works very well, so that we lost our time when trying to get a coherent theory of all forces. It depends if we are interested in foundational issues and understanding or in practical applications, I guess.
If all the practical problems can be solved, the "foundational issues" are reduced to armchair philosophizing. There's a reason theology fell into disrepute. I see work on foundational issues as theory that will help guide the practical solutions.
--
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On Fri, Apr 9, 2021, 4:23 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 4/9/2021 4:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 9 Apr 2021, at 02:40, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 4/8/2021 12:38 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Hi Telmo,
Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the problem. I think you are right about there being some connection between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.
I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
- Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or the height of Mount Everest
- First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the number 5 as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia, would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains process the symbol in the same way.
I think you exaggerate the problem. Consider how bats "see" by sonar. I think this is quite communicable to humans by analogies.
They could in some sense even feel the surfaces with such sonar: is the surface smooth or rough, hard or soft, etc. Sound reflects differently from different types of surfaces. Would they feel these surface differences as colors, or would it feel more like tactile sensations of one's immediate surroundings?
That will communicate the third person aspect, but not the qualia itself.
When a blind person has a tactile array placed in their back and attached to a video camera, they learn to see. I sighted person can have the same tactile array and video camera and also learn to see thru it. On what grounds would you deny they experience the same qualia via the video camera. And then you can ask the sighted person how or whether the qualia of the two kinds of sight differ...or you could do the experiment yourself.
I read about this experiment recently. One apparent difference was that the blind students fitted with this array were dismayed that when they learned that in looking at erotic images with this device they were not stimulated in the ways as their sighted peers.
Perhaps the array was too low resolution, or perhaps the brain's tactile wiring isn't connected to the other parts of the brain in the necessary ways as the visual processing centers are.
Some 30% of the cortex is dedicated to processing visual stimuli whereas only 8% is used for tactile stimuli. I would have to imagine then that the resulting qualia could not be the same, though with the right bandwidth, sufficient cortex, and similar interconnections it's less obvious that identical qualia could not be achieved.
--
I think there have been experiments where researchers wired the optic nerve into a monkey's auditory cortex, and after a while similar structures to the visual cortex appeared, and I think the monkey behaved as though it could see.
Jason
--
And submarines have sonar which produces images on screens. Is redness communicable? My father who was red/green color blind had to guess at the color of traffic lights or just watch other cars when he first started to drive around 1928. But he understood the concept of color because he could tell blue from red/green. And later, traffic engineers adjust the spectrum of traffic lights so that he could tell the difference (they also started to put the red at the top).
Yes, in practice there is not much problem, which explains the lack of interest in the mind-body problem, but this does not help to solve the conceptual issue.It is a bit like saying that in practice GR and QM works very well, so that we lost our time when trying to get a coherent theory of all forces. It depends if we are interested in foundational issues and understanding or in practical applications, I guess.
If all the practical problems can be solved, the "foundational issues" are reduced to armchair philosophizing. There's a reason theology fell into disrepute. I see work on foundational issues as theory that will help guide the practical solutions.
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