What are Colors?

[Jason Resch]

Brent,

You often focus the problem of qualia on the problem of color. I just finished writing up my view of what colors are and thought I should share it with you (as well as the wider group for comment):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-O2pXXJkht8gYOho55ctl1c7vJ8NRKd/view?usp=sharing

Note that this PDF contains some thoughts on other kinds of qualia (such as pain and flavor), but  if you want to jump to the section on color, you will find it on pages 53-73.

I would be grateful for any feedback you and others have to share.

Jason

[Brent Allsop]

Thanks Jason,

Wow, 73 pages.  Ambitious.

It will probably take me a bit to get through it all.

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[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Feb 7, 2025, 6:36 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Jason,

Wow, 73 pages.  Ambitious.

It will probably take me a bit to get through it all.

Thanks. It's probably only 20 real pages, it's a narrow column blog post in landscape. 😊

Jason

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-ons-epQmce%2Bso5M_x3oUk5mjtbYzCJmMsT1CTo7qNnvY5Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Allsop]

 

Hi Jason,

 

Lots of interesting and insightful stuff about complex relationships and complex multi-dimensional spaces, opposite colors and so on...

 

The piece only seems to talk in a (to me mistaken) functionalist way.  Examples include:

·         “a prescription for how they emerge”

·         “give rise to them”

·         “what do these parts of the brain do to generate color experiences?”

·         “The outputs of these brain parts must be integrated with”

·         “Discriminations upon discriminations bubble up through the layers of your mind.”

 

In my opinion, to resolve this issue one must think like:

·         What do you build [colored scenes] out of?

·         What is it that has a specific color?

·         The colors themselves (not the output of) must be integrated”

·         You find or discover colors; you don’t generate them.

·         A discrimination of a color is something different from the color itself.

 

While it is true the colored scenes ‘emerge’ from colors.  There must be some factual elemental level from which all this stuff is built out of.  If the colors also arise, what do they arise from? You can’t get something from nothing.

 

I can’t understand your argument.  That if a highly complex composite set of qualia is considered as a single quale, how does this explain anything?  Seems to me you are still trying to get something (a solution to the binding problem) out of nothing... What is all this built out of, and what is the mechanism to make a bunch of different qualia into a single quale?

With a relationship, there must be some things which are related.  A relationship, without something to be related to, doesn’t make sense.  You seem to only talk about the relationship, which is still interesting.  But the things in the relationships are something different, entirely.

In the Smell section you claimed:

“Smell is the only sense where our brain’s neurons come in contact with what is sensed.”

I think this is wrong.  Just because we bring the thing we smell or taste into our nose/mouth doesn’t change the following:

·         The senses in the nose transduce the chemical odorants into neuronal signals like any other sense.

·         Smells of odorants can be inverted.  For example, dog crap must ‘smell’ very differently to dogs (they love it) than it does to humans (they hate it).

·         We don’t have direct awareness of anything in our nose.  It is all in our knowledge of our nose, in the center of the bubble world in our brain, at a significantly different location from our actual nose.

·         After lots of neural processing specific smell knowledge is rendered into consciousness.

 

You have lots of brilliant and insightful stuff about relationships, the multi-dimensional color spaces, and so on, but to me this is all just easy, though admittedly complex, problems.  It doesn’t shed light on the simple impossibly hard problem which is the difference between a redness quality and the word red.  To me, all this stuff you talk of distracts from the true, simple, hard problem.

In my opinion, there is one simple question we must ask and be able to simply factually demonstrate:

"Which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a description of redness?"

 

 

Here are some minor issues I noticed:

·         “The sweetness of heavy water indicates the presence of neurons”  I believe it should be the presence of “extra neutrons”?

·         relate to each another.  Should be relate to each other?

·         “which sits between between the retina and the visual cortex.”

 

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CA%2BBCJUiw8Zs0NsUQ3wBNuGc0QRW5SgFbMRBFNq3qCU5b3V2G1g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 9:59 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Hi Jason,

 

Lots of interesting and insightful stuff about complex relationships and complex multi-dimensional spaces, opposite colors and so on...

Thank you very much Brent. I appreciate you taking the time to read it and to respond with such a thorough and thoughtful reply.

 

The piece only seems to talk in a (to me mistaken) functionalist way.  Examples include:

·         “a prescription for how they emerge”

·         “give rise to them”

·         “what do these parts of the brain do to generate color experiences?”

·         “The outputs of these brain parts must be integrated with”

·         “Discriminations upon discriminations bubble up through the layers of your mind.”

Your assessment is correct. This is written from a functionalist perspective.

In the article from which this document is an excerpt, this part follows after an explicit statement that the following analysis will use the assumption of functionalism to try to explain some of the mysteries of consciousness. You are apt to pick up on this from the style of writing and word use.

 

In my opinion, to resolve this issue one must think like:

·         What do you build [colored scenes] out of?

This I recognize as the intrinsicist frame, where intrinsic properties of the substrate (the what) determine qualities of experience.

The functionalist view changes this slightly, to ask not "what must it be made from?" but rather "what must it do?" It's a subtle but important distinction. It shifts the focus from an analysis of the materials to an analysis of the processes.

·         What is it that has a specific color?

·         The colors themselves (not the output of) must be integrated”

You accept computational binding of primitive qualities. I imagine this is how you see color mixtures like magenta and cyan being formed, in addition to entire scenes in the visual field.

If computation can play such an important role in the composition of a conscious state, is it that much of a further stretch to believe it may also have a role in forming primitive qualities?

·         You find or discover colors; you don’t generate them.

What about the non-spectral colors? Colors such as magenta, tan, white, brown, gray, pink. These colors don't exist on the physical color spectrum.

Then there are human tetrachromats who can see 100 million colors (where trichromats only see around a million). They have an extra primary color.

Tetrachromats have no additional chemicals in their brains that trichromats don't have. The only difference is in their retinas which, on account of being able to make further discriminations, send a more complex information stream down the optic nerve.

If this more complex information stream is the only difference in what their brains get, and the more complex processing is the only difference in what their brains do, then the perception of the new colors they see must be an artifact of the altered process, rather than some extra chemical found within their brains.

·         A discrimination of a color is something different from the color itself.

I would agree there is a distinction here. But I would stress that discriminability is the central property and feature of color. It must be immediately knowable to us that red is different from green for red and green to have any value as colors.

 

While it is true the colored scenes ‘emerge’ from colors.  There must be some factual elemental level from which all this stuff is built out of.  If the colors also arise, what do they arise from? You can’t get something from nothing.

I agree that there must be something elemental, but I don't think it must necessarily be a physical/molecular/material thing. For example, it could just as well be a relational/informational/computational thing.

Then we might go about looking to identify what sort of relations can always be found whenever there is an experience of redness.

 

I can’t understand your argument.  That if a highly complex composite set of qualia is considered as a single quale, how does this explain anything?  Seems to me you are still trying to get something (a solution to the binding problem) out of nothing... What is all this built out of, and what is the mechanism to make a bunch of different qualia into a single quale?

In my view consciousness is awareness of a particular knowledge state. This knowledge state may be something simple or more complex.

There is no real problem of binding in functionalism/computationalism because the conscious state is identified with the functional or computational state of the system, rather than any particular part(s).

I would say the binding problem is more serious of an issue for neural correlate or intrinsicist theories, which makes qualia out to be aspects of parts of the brain that are spatially and temporally dispersed.

With a relationship, there must be some things which are related.  A relationship, without something to be related to, doesn’t make sense.  You seem to only talk about the relationship, which is still interesting.  But the things in the relationships are something different, entirely.

Think of a two chess sets: one made of marble and the other made of wood. If the pieces are arranged in the same way on both boards all the relationships are preserved and are identical between the two sets.

There are still things to be related. For the wooden board, it the relationships are between the wooden pieces. For the marble board the relationships are between the marble pieces.

What the pieces happen to be made of, however, is irrelevant to the fact that on each board, white is two moves from check mate, that black castled queen side, or that whites queen is on square C3.

These facts are independent of the material substrate as they are higher level, abstract properties and relations.

I think color is like that.

If so then it doesn't matter if you use neurons or silicon, the same qualities may be created by appropriate relationships between states of processing and information (independent of what is used to represent that information or perform that processing).

In the Smell section you claimed:

“Smell is the only sense where our brain’s neurons come in contact with what is sensed.”

I think this is wrong. 

Perhaps I should rewrite this to be more clear. The neurons of the olfactory bulb are actually part of the brain itself. This is different from our other senses like vision, sound, touch, and taste, where the nerves that do the sensing exist outside the brain and relay the signal down a nerve fibers into the brain. For the sense of smell, there is no nerve fiber connection, it's neurons that are already in the brain sensing the odorants.

Just because we bring the thing we smell or taste into our nose/mouth doesn’t change the following:

·         The senses in the nose transduce the chemical odorants into neuronal signals like any other sense.

Agreed, there is still a translation into what is just a nerve signal.

·         Smells of odorants can be inverted.  For example, dog crap must ‘smell’ very differently to dogs (they love it) than it does to humans (they hate it).

Certainly. Agreed.  To flies, shit smells good.

·         We don’t have direct awareness of anything in our nose.  It is all in our knowledge of our nose, in the center of the bubble world in our brain, at a significantly different location from our actual nose.

·         After lots of neural processing specific smell knowledge is rendered into consciousness.

I am curious what you think about smell. You often say the problem of qualia is just a color problem, but are not tastes and smells just as hard to explain (possibly harder)?

 

You have lots of brilliant and insightful stuff about relationships, the multi-dimensional color spaces, and so on, but to me this is all just easy, though admittedly complex, problems.  It doesn’t shed light on the simple impossibly hard problem which is the difference between a redness quality and the word red.

I think I explain why this problem is insoluble. In addition to the points I raised in the "incommunicability of qualia" document you saw earlier, in this document I explain why color is a closed structure: colors have relationships to other colors, but not to any non color thing.

There's no way then, to take a color and convert it to words, nor to take words and have those define a particular color. We are limited to mathematically defining the internal structure of that closed space, but this cannot tell anyone what red is like.

  To me, all this stuff you talk of distracts from the true, simple, hard problem.

In my opinion, there is one simple question we must ask and be able to simply factually demonstrate:

"Which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a description of redness?"

Do you allow for processes within the set of "all our descriptions of stuff in the brain" ?

 

 

Here are some minor issues I noticed:

·         “The sweetness of heavy water indicates the presence of neurons”  I believe it should be the presence of “extra neutrons”?

·         relate to each another.  Should be relate to each other?

·         “which sits between between the retina and the visual cortex.”

Great catches, thank you!

Jason 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-ontfF2UAG_hCPOCdCvAf-H%2BWg%2BA-siH_FgoMkNwPTffaRA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Jason,

On Tue, Feb 11, 2025 at 6:35 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 9:59 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Hi Jason,

 

Lots of interesting and insightful stuff about complex relationships and complex multi-dimensional spaces, opposite colors and so on...

Thank you very much Brent. I appreciate you taking the time to read it and to respond with such a thorough and thoughtful reply.

 

The piece only seems to talk in a (to me mistaken) functionalist way.  Examples include:

·         “a prescription for how they emerge”

·         “give rise to them”

·         “what do these parts of the brain do to generate color experiences?”

·         “The outputs of these brain parts must be integrated with”

·         “Discriminations upon discriminations bubble up through the layers of your mind.”

Your assessment is correct. This is written from a functionalist perspective.

In the article from which this document is an excerpt, this part follows after an explicit statement that the following analysis will use the assumption of functionalism to try to explain some of the mysteries of consciousness. You are apt to pick up on this from the style of writing and word use.

 

In my opinion, to resolve this issue one must think like:

·         What do you build [colored scenes] out of?

This I recognize as the intrinsicist frame, where intrinsic properties of the substrate (the what) determine qualities of experience.

The functionalist view changes this slightly, to ask not "what must it be made from?" but rather "what must it do?" It's a subtle but important distinction. It shifts the focus from an analysis of the materials to an analysis of the processes.

·         What is it that has a specific color?

·         The colors themselves (not the output of) must be integrated”

You accept computational binding of primitive qualities. I imagine this is how you see color mixtures like magenta and cyan being formed, in addition to entire scenes in the visual field.

I see magenta, cyan, and other false colors like yellow more as simply different chemicals (or different whatever) the brain uses to render different subjective knowledge to compute with.  But this is just a falsifiable hypothesis.  It may well be that what we consider to be colors are computationally bounded sets of required other colors/chemicals/processes.

 

If computation can play such an important role in the composition of a conscious state, is it that much of a further stretch to believe it may also have a role in forming primitive qualities?

·         You find or discover colors; you don’t generate them.

What about the non-spectral colors? Colors such as magenta, tan, white, brown, gray, pink. These colors don't exist on the physical color spectrum.

Then there are human tetrachromats who can see 100 million colors (where trichromats only see around a million). They have an extra primary color.

Tetrachromats have no additional chemicals in their brains that trichromats don't have. The only difference is in their retinas which, on account of being able to make further discriminations, send a more complex information stream down the optic nerve.

I would argue the difference is also in the visual cortex.  An achromatope (only sees black and white) simply doesn't render the chemicals it has into subjective knowledge the way tri or tetrachromats do.

Yes, absolutely.  I think we agree on most everything, just some minor differences in our POVs.  I've very much attempted to communicate to functionalists exactly this.  I just wish any functionalist would provide any credible example of a process that could produce a simple redness patch of knowledge, and how this would differ from a grenness patch of knowledge.  What do we tell experimentalists to look for?  I would very much like to replace glutamate and glycine with something like this.  Especially since functionalism is clearly the most popular consensus, and the way most people think about all this stuff.  I could better communicate to my target audience, if I could have such an example instead of glutamate / glycine.

Perhaps you could suggest a way to rewrite this question so functionalists would know I also mean what you are talking about as a possibility?  It's not a hard problem at all, we just need to demonstrate an answer to this simple question.

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CA%2BBCJUi444TKTCe1P_UuKoXGyzFS7%3DSAgKa622jeMESGWVpLVg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 11:43 AM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jason,

On Tue, Feb 11, 2025 at 6:35 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 9:59 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Hi Jason,

 

Lots of interesting and insightful stuff about complex relationships and complex multi-dimensional spaces, opposite colors and so on...

Thank you very much Brent. I appreciate you taking the time to read it and to respond with such a thorough and thoughtful reply.

 

The piece only seems to talk in a (to me mistaken) functionalist way.  Examples include:

·         “a prescription for how they emerge”

·         “give rise to them”

·         “what do these parts of the brain do to generate color experiences?”

·         “The outputs of these brain parts must be integrated with”

·         “Discriminations upon discriminations bubble up through the layers of your mind.”

Your assessment is correct. This is written from a functionalist perspective.

In the article from which this document is an excerpt, this part follows after an explicit statement that the following analysis will use the assumption of functionalism to try to explain some of the mysteries of consciousness. You are apt to pick up on this from the style of writing and word use.

 

In my opinion, to resolve this issue one must think like:

·         What do you build [colored scenes] out of?

This I recognize as the intrinsicist frame, where intrinsic properties of the substrate (the what) determine qualities of experience.

The functionalist view changes this slightly, to ask not "what must it be made from?" but rather "what must it do?" It's a subtle but important distinction. It shifts the focus from an analysis of the materials to an analysis of the processes.

·         What is it that has a specific color?

·         The colors themselves (not the output of) must be integrated”

You accept computational binding of primitive qualities. I imagine this is how you see color mixtures like magenta and cyan being formed, in addition to entire scenes in the visual field.

I see magenta, cyan, and other false colors like yellow more as simply different chemicals (or different whatever) the brain uses to render different subjective knowledge to compute with.  But this is just a falsifiable hypothesis.

I think we can falsify this right now. Humans can perceive a few million colors. But there are only a few tens of thousands of molecules in the brain (using the number of genes and proteins in the genome as an upper bound).

I think the only way to explain this is that combinatorics is in play. There must be some unique combination of something (be they proteins, neuron firing rates, etc.) they specifies the perceived color.

  It may well be that what we consider to be colors are computationally bounded sets of required other colors/chemicals/processes.

 

If computation can play such an important role in the composition of a conscious state, is it that much of a further stretch to believe it may also have a role in forming primitive qualities?

·         You find or discover colors; you don’t generate them.

What about the non-spectral colors? Colors such as magenta, tan, white, brown, gray, pink. These colors don't exist on the physical color spectrum.

Then there are human tetrachromats who can see 100 million colors (where trichromats only see around a million). They have an extra primary color.

Tetrachromats have no additional chemicals in their brains that trichromats don't have. The only difference is in their retinas which, on account of being able to make further discriminations, send a more complex information stream down the optic nerve.

I would argue the difference is also in the visual cortex.  An achromatope (only sees black and white) simply doesn't render the chemicals it has into subjective knowledge the way tri or tetrachromats do.

Color blind monkeys were given a gene therapy that only was applied to their retinas (it was not applied to their brain). After a few weeks these monkeys gained the ability to distinguish colors they couldn't distinguish before.

In my view, a new signal pattern was being sent by the retina down the optic nerve. After the brain rewired itself appropriately to handle and process this new signal and take advantage of the new discriminations it's retinas were able to make, the monkeys began to see full color vision and their qualia changed.

I don't think this story can be explained by the visual cortex handling new kinds of chemicals.

To better accommodate the functionalist view, perhaps you could reword the question to something like:

"Which of all our descriptions of entities (be they stuff or processes) in the brain is a description of redness?"

Or:

What objective aspect of the brain is (or accounts for) the subjective experience of redness.

  I just wish any functionalist would provide any credible example of a process that could produce a simple redness patch of knowledge, and how this would differ from a grenness patch of knowledge.

I've given you examples in the past, but I will try again in a new way:

A process of discrimination that results in a the identification of a point in a six dimensional structure, organized as a two dimensional grid (the visual field), composed of elements (pixels which) are 4-dimensional, containing a 1 dimensional depth parameter, and a 3 dimensional color parameter. Further, each color has associations to all previous objects ever seen having that color, and every color is marked by varying degrees of similarity and dissimilarity defined by the organization of the 3-D color space.

If you find a system that does this, I wouldn't automatically rule out it having a color experience. But as I say in the document, if you want a full complete human color experience, you may need the function of the entire human brain.

I think you still are viewing functionalist answer to color in terms of your intrinsicist lens, where you think there is a green function like sqrt() and a red function like exp(). This is not how I view it. The ultimate solution I think is closer to what Gerald Edelman says, where information states only have their proper meaning in the context of all the other parts of the brain. It is more a top-down holistic view of what a conscious state is, rather than a bottom up atomistic view.

  What do we tell experimentalists to look for?  I would very much like to replace glutamate and glycine with something like this.  Especially since functionalism is clearly the most popular consensus, and the way most people think about all this stuff.  I could better communicate to my target audience, if I could have such an example instead of glutamate / glycine.

I think the thing to look for is a set of functions and processes which mirrors the structure of our awareness and discriminative ability.

Perhaps you could suggest a way to rewrite this question so functionalists would know I also mean what you are talking about as a possibility?  It's not a hard problem at all, we just need to demonstrate an answer to this simple question.

Let me know if you think my previous examples are helpful.

Jason 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-onv%2BCqz2c5R45ac%3DZGoFvxjkpGg0FwiS9Lg0B%2B6mFrFYqA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Jason,

Yes, these examples are helpful.  You make some profound arguments.

I'm working to re-integrate all this stuff into my thinking.

Thanks for your continued patience and thoughtful support.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CA%2BBCJUgRDuZzFX945vW%2BfDKum7WLgQuHRyfxugMqkJyOjKhsdA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 5:39 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jason,

Yes, these examples are helpful.  You make some profound arguments.

I'm working to re-integrate all this stuff into my thinking.

Thanks for your continued patience and thoughtful support.

Hi Brent,

You are most welcome and I appreciate your kind words. The other day I thought of another example you may find useful.

I was thinking that if we use the analogy of the chess board again, red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another, as isolated entities, for the same reason that if we took a particular square out of a chess board, say e3, for example, then this lone square would no longer be e3. It no longer has all the relations it previously possessed when it occupied that particular position on the board.

So I think it could be with colors. The raw color redness, needs to occupy a particular position within color space to be counterposed with other similar and dissimilar colors, otherwise it has no meaning or properties as a color.

If this is true, then there is no unique function for red and unique function for green, rather there is some function involving color spaces, and identifying positions in that space which bear distinct (and distinguishable) relationships to all the other positions in that space.

Jason 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-onssXOfSaA31D-0cZYR2654jgE-zT1cDdfE%2B3YA4YYf1dQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Gordon Swobe]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 5:26 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

So I think it could be with colors. The raw color redness, needs to occupy a particular position within color space to be counterposed with other similar and dissimilar colors, otherwise it has no meaning or properties as a color

I think I can get behind this idea in principle. I imagine a conscious entity with no experience whatsoever except the sensation of greenness. Our Mr. Green has no senses except vision, and only of a particular frequency of light representing green. He cannot close his eyes or see other shades of green or even see objects or shapes. 

Mr. Green’s experience is confined to greenness and greenness and only. Would he understand what it means to see green? No. In fact, he would know what it means to see anything at all. As far as he knows, he is blind.

-gts

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[Brent Allsop]

Hi Jason and Gordon,

FYI, I'm CCeing Stathis to see if he also agrees with Jason on this issue.

Jason is talking about "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another", then Gordon says: "I think I can get behind this idea in principle.".  then it appears to me that Gordon then argues why he can't "get behind this idea" providing the powerful idea of the possibility of Mr. Green.

Jason, there is a certain meta level where I agree with what you are saying.  I agree that Green, alone, wouldn't have a lot of meaning.  But that doesn't mean that Gordon's Mr. Green isn't possible to engineer, or that it is possible for someone to experience on color, and nothing else, as you seem to be asserting.

We think of people who suffer from achromatopsia only experience black and white.  But it is entirely possible to engineer people (or naturally from birth) to be green and black, instead of white and black. and many other possibilities.

One of Dennett's 4 attributes of Qualia includes:

2. intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.

Which wouldn't be true if "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another"

I could go on and on with many more powerful arguments.

Jason, have Gordon and I converted you from your incorrect thinking that it is possible that "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another"?

If you really still think it is possible to not experience redness, alone, with no other color experience then how about we start a topic on this on Canonizer, where Gordon and I, and I expect most other experts, point out how your thinking along these lines is in error?

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAJvaNPmBuHid3BpxeKadpZH3Q6CGc8fpTzmQuGSoj0uFKKnm4w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 8:46 AM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jason and Gordon,

FYI, I'm CCeing Stathis to see if he also agrees with Jason on this issue.

Jason is talking about "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another", then Gordon says: "I think I can get behind this idea in principle.".  then it appears to me that Gordon then argues why he can't "get behind this idea" providing the powerful idea of the possibility of Mr. Green.

Jason, there is a certain meta level where I agree with what you are saying.  I agree that Green, alone, wouldn't have a lot of meaning.  But that doesn't mean that Gordon's Mr. Green isn't possible to engineer, or that it is possible for someone to experience on color, and nothing else, as you seem to be asserting.

I think Gordon and I were saying slightly different things, but I found I agreed with Gordon's example.

To clarify, I was claiming that if you isolated the coordinates of greeness in the color space, and took that thing off and out of the color space, then you would no longer possess greenness. Just as if you took a square out of a chess board, it would no longer be a square of a chess board. It would just be a piece of wood, having no "chessness" about it. Likewise if you eliminated all but greenness from the colorspace, shrinking it down to just one point, and erasing all the others, then you're left with just a meaningless point, and you lose all "colorness" aspects and properties of greenness.

Gordon's example is slightly different. He postulates someone whose entire visual field is a constant green color. But in being constant it loses all informational capacity, there is no discrimination, and therefore no information. The person is as blind in seeing only green as someone who sees only black. In being constant, no other neural groups in his brain find any value with wiring with the visual cortex, whose constancy might as well be dead. So no other parts of his brain are stimulated by his visual cortex and he might not even be able to describe or feel his constant green explain experience.

I view Gordon's example as different from mine, but but a valid and essentially true observation: That there is no information in constants.

We think of people who suffer from achromatopsia only experience black and white.  But it is entirely possible to engineer people (or naturally from birth) to be green and black, instead of white and black. and many other possibilities.

This is where I might point out a caveat. If someone's colorspace is confined to essentially one dimension then they are only experiencing a "color line" not a "color space". To engineer someone that sees a green monochrome that person would still need to possess a full three dimensional colorspace in order to provide them a monochrome scene whose pixels are confined to the line through colorspace composed of only shades of green.

But this raises Gordon's point: if this line is all that person has ever experienced, is it really still a line in a space, or does it reduce to only being a line, as those unused neurons get repurposed for other things (perhaps providing more contrast discrimination as colorblind people seem to have), and then would it be meaningful for that person to distinguish green monochrome from grayscale? Or does this distinction become as meaningless as a truly blind person from Mr. Green?

One of Dennett's 4 attributes of Qualia includes:

2. intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.

Which wouldn't be true if "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another"

Qualia display their intrinsic properties to the experiencer, but this doesn't mean that qualia don't ultimately depend on elements which have their own relational properties.

Again from my chess example, a certain square has an intrinsic "e3-ness" about it, but this very "e3-ness" is itself defined by its relational stance to all the other squares each of which have their own distinct coordinates.

I could go on and on with many more powerful arguments.

Jason, have Gordon and I converted you from your incorrect thinking that it is possible that "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another"?

To be clear I am not arguing that one can't have a pure greenness or a pure redness experience. What I am saying is that red and green are part of what is ultimately a larger structure. They are parts of it, and so both red and green together must be parts of this structure or else it is not a structure that enables the perception of redness or greeness. This is what I mean when I say they can't exist independently, because this structure (which includes both) is (I argue) required to experience either.

If you really still think it is possible to not experience redness, alone, with no other color experience then how about we start a topic on this on Canonizer, where Gordon and I, and I expect most other experts, point out how your thinking along these lines is in error?

As my previous paragraph explains, this is not what I am arguing for. I am arguing against elemental greenness and elemental redness as standalone entities that meaningfully exist outside of a higher level structure (such as a color space). This says nothing about what kinds of experiences are possible, it only limits what kind of mind designs are suitable for the mind to experience redness or greeness.

Jason 

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[Brent Allsop]

OK, good.  Thanks for the clarification.  I think we are in complete agreement.

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 9:03 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 8:46 AM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jason and Gordon,

FYI, I'm CCeing Stathis to see if he also agrees with Jason on this issue.

Jason is talking about "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another", then Gordon says: "I think I can get behind this idea in principle.".  then it appears to me that Gordon then argues why he can't "get behind this idea" providing the powerful idea of the possibility of Mr. Green.

Jason, there is a certain meta level where I agree with what you are saying.  I agree that Green, alone, wouldn't have a lot of meaning.  But that doesn't mean that Gordon's Mr. Green isn't possible to engineer, or that it is possible for someone to experience on color, and nothing else, as you seem to be asserting.

I think Gordon and I were saying slightly different things, but I found I agreed with Gordon's example.

To clarify, I was claiming that if you isolated the coordinates of greeness in the color space, and took that thing off and out of the color space, then you would no longer possess greenness. Just as if you took a square out of a chess board, it would no longer be a square of a chess board. It would just be a piece of wood, having no "chessness" about it. Likewise if you eliminated all but greenness from the colorspace, shrinking it down to just one point, and erasing all the others, then you're left with just a meaningless point, and you lose all "colorness" aspects and properties of greenness.

Gordon's example is slightly different. He postulates someone whose entire visual field is a constant green color. But in being constant it loses all informational capacity, there is no discrimination, and therefore no information. The person is as blind in seeing only green as someone who sees only black. In being constant, no other neural groups in his brain find any value with wiring with the visual cortex, whose constancy might as well be dead. So no other parts of his brain are stimulated by his visual cortex and he might not even be able to describe or feel his constant green explain experience.

I view Gordon's example as different from mine, but but a valid and essentially true observation: That there is no information in constants.

We think of people who suffer from achromatopsia only experience black and white.  But it is entirely possible to engineer people (or naturally from birth) to be green and black, instead of white and black. and many other possibilities.

This is where I might point out a caveat. If someone's colorspace is confined to essentially one dimension then they are only experiencing a "color line" not a "color space". To engineer someone that sees a green monochrome that person would still need to possess a full three dimensional colorspace in order to provide them a monochrome scene whose pixels are confined to the line through colorspace composed of only shades of green.

But this raises Gordon's point: if this line is all that person has ever experienced, is it really still a line in a space, or does it reduce to only being a line, as those unused neurons get repurposed for other things (perhaps providing more contrast discrimination as colorblind people seem to have), and then would it be meaningful for that person to distinguish green monochrome from grayscale? Or does this distinction become as meaningless as a truly blind person from Mr. Green?

One of Dennett's 4 attributes of Qualia includes:

2. intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.

Which wouldn't be true if "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another"

Qualia display their intrinsic properties to the experiencer,

This is the most popular way to think and talk about color qualities, but I think this functionalist way of thinking and talking about qualia is the only reason everyone thinks there is a 'hard problem'.

The cartesian theater idea was once a very popular way to think about consciousness.  

At least most intelligent people, today, no longer think this way.  But saying 'Qualia display their intrinsic properties to the experience' is just as much a fallacy.   Qualities are intrinsic subjective properties of our knowledge.  They don't "display" themselves to any homunculus or anything,  We just compute with them or are directly aware of them together with everything else in our subjectively bound set of phenomenal qualities that make up any unified conscious experience.

I predict that once we discover what qualia are, (nobody thinking this way will eve help with this) and are engineering phenomenal systems that have qualia (including systems with only greenness.... and many other qualities that no human has every experienced before).  they will look back on people that think and talk this way as the cause of our lack of progress in this field for so long, resulting in false delusions like there is a 'hard problem' of consciousness..

Similar to the way we think of people in Galileo's time who thought in geocentric, instead of heliocentric ways were idiots, slowing the progress of human intelligence.

All the stuff you are talking about here is true and important, but it is all part of the easy problems of consciousness.  We won't discover what a redness quality, alone is, until we start thinking about it in the right isolated stand alone way.  Once we start thinking of redness in an isolated way, and start looking for only this, in the brain, we will quickly discover and demonstrate what a redness quality is.  And this will falsify all but the one true theory of consciousness, and explain all the other so called 'hard problems' of consciousness.

 

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[Gordon Swobe]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 6:46 AM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jason and Gordon,

FYI, I'm CCeing Stathis to see if he also agrees with Jason on this issue.

Jason is talking about "red and green may not be able to exist independently of one another", then Gordon says: "I think I can get behind this idea in principle.".  then it appears to me that Gordon then argues why he can't "get behind this idea" providing the powerful idea of the possibility of Mr. Green.

I was arguing why I can get behind the idea and agree with Jason that colors may not exist independently of one another.

I would argue similarly for sounds. Imagine a person whose only experience is the sound of middle C. Does this musical tone exist outside of its relation to other tones? I would say it does not. 

-gts

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[Brent Allsop]

Hi Gordon,

As I was saying to Jason, I agree with this.

But to me, the important thing is, we need to isolate the elemental parts that make up all this stuff you, and especially the functionalists only focus on.  We should be asking questions like, can we engineer a CPU that can experience only redness, another that can experience only greenness, and another that can experience the two together (along with a middle C?) as a single experience.

Of course these machines won't be very intelligent at first, but to discover what redness is like, you need to isolate it and focus on only what is changing, when a single pixel in the visual field is changing from redness to greenness.  Or how does neuralink stimulate the brain, to produce a single pixel of redness.  Right now with artificial visual stimulation which directly stimulate the visual cortex, all they can get are white 'sprites'.  They need to figure out what is required to get a single pixel of both redness and greenness, before they can get people to experience color vision with artificial retinas.

Once we discover what redness is, this will revolutionize computation with newly engineered phenomenal systems.  But we can't get there till we discover what redness is, and how it is subjectively bound to greenness.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAJvaNPnxMF%3D2WJ%3DGKUiS-BNE1xqTpg%2Bikd0SnmWPsKm2sUu5xg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 5:06 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Gordon,

As I was saying to Jason, I agree with this.

But to me, the important thing is, we need to isolate the elemental parts that make up all this stuff you, and especially the functionalists only focus on.  We should be asking questions like, can we engineer a CPU that can experience only redness, another that can experience only greenness, and another that can experience the two together (along with a middle C?) as a single experience.

Of course these machines won't be very intelligent at first, but to discover what redness is like, you need to isolate it and focus on only what is changing, when a single pixel in the visual field is changing from redness to greenness.  Or how does neuralink stimulate the brain, to produce a single pixel of redness.  Right now with artificial visual stimulation which directly stimulate the visual cortex, all they can get are white 'sprites'.  They need to figure out what is required to get a single pixel of both redness and greenness, before they can get people to experience color vision with artificial retinas.

I don't think it's any big mystery what is required. The methods used to stimulate neurons are crude and stimulate a bunch of nearby neurons at once. If there were greater finesse that enabled the simulation of single neurons in the visual cortex, then we could in principle trigger specific color experiences.

Jason 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-onvmSF4g_ByXjmcu5QGTwS%3DQkv4ujDZx6e%3DY4h-1aeYMRg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Allsop]

Yes, exactly!!

This is exactly what needs to be done.  The University of Utah, who developed the "Utah Array", the Brain Gate consortium who uses the "Utah Array", Neuralink and other groups are pushing exactly at doing exactly this, and they have made quite a bit of progress.

But nobody is thinking of this in any other way than a qualia blind way.   Everyone works as if redness is out there, not something they need to discover in the brain.

Once someone does find a way to stimulate the brain, to produce a single redness or grenness pixel, that will be the discovery of what redness is.  That discovery will falsify all but the one true camp in the theories of consciousness topic.  And I predict once they discover that they will soon demonstrate how color pixels are subjectively bound, that will usher in a new type of phenomenal computation engineering and mind brain interfaces.

Oh, and did I say everyone would finally know the true color of things (including colors of functions if you must, not the false colors of the way things seem) and most everyone will agree there is no more so called 'hard problem'

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CA%2BBCJUgmqT%2BfyUHQ_DsKQa0_Q-ztsk2F4JSAJ%3DY1MVuixx6yDQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 6:14 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, exactly!!

This is exactly what needs to be done.  The University of Utah, who developed the "Utah Array", the Brain Gate consortium who uses the "Utah Array", Neuralink and other groups are pushing exactly at doing exactly this, and they have made quite a bit of progress.

But nobody is thinking of this in any other way than a qualia blind way.   Everyone works as if redness is out there, not something they need to discover in the brain.

Once someone does find a way to stimulate the brain, to produce a single redness or grenness pixel, that will be the discovery of what redness is. 

Let's say we find a particular neuron that when we stimulate it causes a person to say:

"I see a flash of red in the top left quadrant of my field of view".

Of course, between the stimulation of that neuron, and the person uttering those words, there are billions of other neuron firings, e.g. representing bidirectional connections and activity between the visual cortex, memory centers and language centers.

So in finding this neuron that when activated causes all this downstream neural activity, have we really identified redness? Is it in that one neuron we stimulated, or is it somewhere downstream? Consider: there is a neuron (attached to a photoreceptor) in the retina that when stimulated will cause someone to see a speck of red in one spot in their visual field. But few would say this neuron firing in the retina is the experience of redness.

Jason 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-onsHyefOr8%3DAhdr3rVMeRiNzdS4WymJEEvd3JAuaLz0Urw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Gordon Swobe]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 3:06 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Gordon,

As I was saying to Jason, I agree with this.

But to me, the important thing is, we need to isolate the elemental parts that make up all this stuff you, and especially the functionalists only focus on.  We should be asking questions like, can we engineer a CPU that can experience only redness, another that can experience only greenness…

No, as I see it, we cannot engineer a CPU (or a hypothetical person) to experience only redness.

I'm saying that our senses are engineered by natural selection to detect distinctions between colors and between qualia generally. In the theoretical case where there are no distinctions to perceive, there are no perceptions.

-gts

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAK7-onvmSF4g_ByXjmcu5QGTwS%3DQkv4ujDZx6e%3DY4h-1aeYMRg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Jason,

We can already mostly do this, by stimulating red light (L for long wavelength light detectors) detecting cones in the retina.  The person will experience a pixel of red at that point in his visual field.  When I talk about isolating a pixel of redness, I'm finding the furthest downstream neuron, or set of neurons, that is responsible for that pixel, while nothing else can be removed without that pixel of redness ceasing to exist.

Or developing the ability to observe enough neurons firing to see a single pixel change from redness to greenness, and being able to observe the only neurons that are what is responsible for that single pixel changing from redness to greenness.

The way you, and all functionalists think about it is there isn't any such thing, nor will we ever be able to find it.  You think it is this infinitely complex thing that nobody can ever comprehend.  That is the only reason people think there is a 'hard problem'.   My prediction is that someone will finally find and isolate the minimum required for what a single pixel of redness is.  They'll demonstrate how simple it really is, have the ability to cause pixels of red experience in brains, have that one pixel easily switch to greenness, and everyone will look back at all you functionalists and think, boy, did they lead us astray down ain infinitely complex and unnecessary rat hole.  while the whole time it was right there in front of us, once we stopped observing things in a qualia blind way, and once we simply started just looking for redness, or seeking to understand 

"Which of all our descriptions of stuff, (um I mean entities be they stuff or processes if you really want to make it more complicated and 'harder' than necessary) in the brain is a description of redness?"

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CA%2BBCJUhC4zJVe_Z8SQ0TZw4erh_ASZF%3DofiOvcUuH5E%2Bcm0wwA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Allsop]

I apologize Gordon,

I guess I should refrain from commenting on most of what you say, as I clearly don't understand how you think.  You seem to be a direct realist, but claim you aren't, I just don't get how anything like that works.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/the-important-questions/CAJvaNPkU3MroYnnNAd9MHE7T2h0%2BvocMRMKJ2BrLMgib%3DDsp5w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 10:37 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jason,

We can already mostly do this, by stimulating red light (L for long wavelength light detectors) detecting cones in the retina.  The person will experience a pixel of red at that point in his visual field.  When I talk about isolating a pixel of redness, I'm finding the furthest downstream neuron, or set of neurons, that is responsible for that pixel, while nothing else can be removed without that pixel of redness ceasing to exist.

Or developing the ability to observe enough neurons firing to see a single pixel change from redness to greenness, and being able to observe the only neurons that are what is responsible for that single pixel changing from redness to greenness.

The neurons that are not active during a red experience, and how the red-active neurons are connected and related to the others, could have as much to do with the experience of redness as the neurons which actively fire during a red experience. For instance:

"On the basis of these considerations, we can say how, in this framework, the quale corresponding to the sensation red should be conceived of: The pure sensation of red is a particular neural state identified by a point within the N-dimensional neural space defined by the integrated activity of all the groups of neurons that constitute the dynamic core. The quale of the pure sensation of red corresponds to the discrimination that has been made among billions of other states within the same neural reference space. While neurons responding to the presence of red are certainly necessary for the conscious experience of red, they are clearly not sufficient. The conscious discrimination corresponding to the quale of seeing red acquires its full meaning only when considered in the appropriate, much larger, neural reference space. By this same argument, if the same neuronal groups responding to red were firing precisely in the same way but were functionally disconnected from the core, such firing would have no meaning and no associated quale.

This view differs radically from the “atomistic” or “modular” approaches we discussed earlier in this chapter. According to our hypothesis, perceiving the redness of red absolutely requires a discrimination among integrated states of the entire dynamic core, and it can never emerge magically out of the firing of a single group of neurons that are endowed with some special local or intrinsic property. By the same token, our hypothesis can account for why the firing of other neuronal groups, such as those responding to blood pressure, does not appear to “generate” any subjective experience or quale. Such neuronal groups, we propose, are not part of the dynamic core, which means that changes in their firing make a difference only locally, not in the context of a huge N-dimensional space allowing for billions of discriminations."

-- Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness" (2000)

What this is saying is that if you took the neurons which when active, are associated with a red experience out of the brain, isolated them, and independently stimulated them, it would not produce a red experience, for a red experience (as consciously perceived by a human) is known to be an aspect of vision, which is different from sound, and smell, and touch. If you isolate these red-related neurons and stimulate them, there would be no knowledge that this is a color rather than a sound or a smell. Higher level structures distributed throughout the brain are needed for that kind of discrimination.

 

The way you, and all functionalists think about it is there isn't any such thing, nor will we ever be able to find it.

You advocate for a return to the identity theory of consciousness, which was often summarized by equating the experience of pain as the firing of C-nerve fibers. Since these two events (the pain, and the firing of C-nerve fibers always occurred together, identity theorists argued there was an identity between these two events, that they were the one and same event.

Functionalists haven't abandoned looking for what it is that is identical with a particular quale, but through an acceptance of multiple realizability, came to see the important identity as one of processes, rather than one of particular physical or material events.

 

  You think it is this infinitely complex thing that nobody can ever comprehend.

I do believe the human brain, in its full detail, is beyond human comprehension, but I don't think qualia are beyond human comprehension. They are merely subjective knowledge states. Any processes that is aware of something is conscious, and will have a private subjective experience that can't be shared, because one must be that process to have be possess that particular subjective knowledge state.

 

  That is the only reason people think there is a 'hard problem'. 

The hard problem, as stated by Chalmers, is to answer the question of why particular material organizations have conscious experiences. I think the answer is that consciousness (a state of knowledge) is a logically necessary property for processes that express certain classes of behavior. For example, anything that is reactive to things in their environment must possess some knowledge of entities in its environment, and this necessitates (or rather it is) consciousness.

 

 My prediction is that someone will finally find and isolate the minimum required for what a single pixel of redness is.

I think what you are pursuing is the problem known as the "neural correlates of consciousness," which seeks to link particular neural activity with certain qualia or states of consciousness. This is a separate problem from that of the hard problem.

 

  They'll demonstrate how simple it really is, have the ability to cause pixels of red experience in brains, have that one pixel easily switch to greenness, and everyone will look back at all you functionalists and think, boy, did they lead us astray down ain infinitely complex and unnecessary rat hole.  while the whole time it was right there in front of us, once we stopped observing things in a qualia blind way, and once we simply started just looking for redness, or seeking to understand 

"Which of all our descriptions of stuff, (um I mean entities be they stuff or processes if you really want to make it more complicated and 'harder' than necessary) in the brain is a description of redness?"

It sounds good in principle, but it is not as easy a question as it might first appear. Consider these vexing complications:

1. Is redness for person A the same as redness for person B?

2. Are there multiple physical/material/functional ways two individuals can experience the same redness?

3. When person A refers to redness, how do we know they mean the same thing as when person B experiences redness?

4. Does the language, experience, upbringing, density of photoreceptors in the retina, affect how one experiences redness?

5. Is redness experienced the same between dichromats, trichromats, and tetrachromats?

Jason

 

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