Seeing red

[JuliaL]

<snip> in other words every person's unique environment (from their perspective ie like the transporter example) leaves physical, structural traces in the brain, at the level or synaptic strengths and at higher levels as a result of genetics and plasticity. So yes, I agree that everybody has a unique experience of consciousness at that level... different memories, different tastes, beliefs, habits etc. But I would say that certain structures in the brain are sufficiently similar across individuals, as a result of genetics and evolution, that certain aspects of conscious experience - eg vision itself - are experienced the similarly in most individuals, and that being due to the relatively fixed structural and relational organisation of those aspects of the system... ie relatively fixed constraints in those domains. But even those constraints can be changed, as with the bunnies and the extra cones, or with brain damage, and end up changing the perceptional nature of the experience because the relationships and input data to be modelled have changed. I wasn't arguing that we're all the same at all, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. And I know there's no way to prove that everyone else in the world is not a philosophical zombie/simulation and therefore that I'm making assumptions about other people's experience that I can never truly know about, but I have to make those assumptions for my theories.

I think we're in full agreement that it is reasonable to infer that the high degree of similarity in brain construction and physiology among humans should result in a proportionally high degree of conscious experience (with the usual caveats that we're not vat brains.) I'm pretty sure that my experiences are pretty much like yours.
Somewhere though, brain construction in other species is going to have diverged enough that what they think is going to be pretty different. What is going on in the 'mind' of a cuttlefish that is showing courtship signals to a female on one side while threatening competing males away on the other side? I think any accurate speculation would be entirely coincidental.