Seeing red

[emjay]

I don't know why you'd jump from an unexplained disparity in perception to dualism or theism...........or that the brain had nothing to do with consciousness.....even if you -did- have examples.

So are you saying that you believe that if hypothetically a human was cloned, right down to the atomic level by say a Star Trek transporter, that the perceptions would be or could be different? If they could be different then how could you possibly relate the brain to experience, either as a producer of experience or in an emergent sense of mirroring the state in some way... if the same system produced different 'results' (ie perceptions)?

[The Grand Nudger]

I cant rule it out.  They would diverge from, -at least- the very moment of their cloning (this assumes process perfection).  You'd have to test them awfully quick.   This, though, isn't the part that I had hoped to comment upon...rather, why we would go from an unexpected result in such a test (that, for example, two identical "consciousness systems" had divergent perceptions) to: 

"a personal god"

or

"there must be some other type of stuff".


Neither follows. Nor would such a result eliminate all previous results in which the brains involvement in experience is made demonstrably clear. That would all still be there. This is, essentially, the old "evolution is false..therefore goddidit" bait and switch.

[emjay]

Okay first thing's first, I'm not angry about anything   This is gonna be a post all about the mind and perception, particularly colour perception.

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Animals, including humans, have brains and it is highly probable but not proven that those brains produce the perceptions (i.e. qualia) that we experience. If it were not the case that brains produced perceptions it would be an extraordinary coincidence and heading into the realms of 'idealism' and suchlike. Although I'm open to that possibility for the sake of what I'm saying here I'll assume that the brain does indeed produce (or computes, or emerges from or whatever) perceptions in one way or another.

Different animals have difference sense organs and thus presumably very different perceptions of the world. It's probably beyond our imagination to conceive of what it's like for an animal very different from ourselves to perceive some aspects of the world, such as a bat or dolphin with echo location - a feature we're unfamiliar with. But it *might* be reasonable to assume that a dog, say, visually perceives the world very similar to us because it has eyes like we do. Eyes collect data about the light 'out there' and that information is processed by the brain and perception is computed that is not exactly the same as the original input. I.e. in the case of our two eyes a 3D perception is created out of two 2D input devices (eyes). So in other words the perception that is created is the result of some sort of computation.

These perceptions have no location in physical space and they are not 'made' of physical matter, yet they exist in some form because in our experience we can detect the difference between one thing and another. If I feel pain, I can feel how that changes or disappears entirely. Or I can see a blue pencil on top of a white piece of paper and can see that they are different. There are different states in these perceptions and if one thing is not the same as another then they can't both be nothing.

Perceptions are functionally useful. Colour perception makes perfect sense from a computational point of view as a means of labelling 'pixels' in parallel so that the right sorts of patterns can be detected in the world, and at the right level of abstraction. Compare trying to read words in a text document versus by looking at the binary representation of that same document. Or compare looking for patterns in a 1D array of numbers vs a 2D array.

Whether the perception of colour is equivalent to the underlying brain activity - has a one-to-one correspondence with it and thus is it - or whether it is created by it, in addition as it were, in such a way that perception itself could feed back into the system (i.e. kind of like dualism), doesn't really matter to what I'm talking about here. Personally I think it's the former but I can't rule out the latter. Or even the third possibility that it is not connected to physical brain activity at all and we're living in some sort of 'idealistic' world and/or God. But assuming it's the former, the evolutionary 'design' of a perception reflects what the brain is already doing behind the scenes... the brain is already discriminating the patterns we experience in consciousness and somehow they find representation in conscious perceptions. In other words, colour is equivalent to what the brain is doing when it processes colour neurally and computationally.

So with the background to my thinking out of the way, that leads me onto my questions. I hope you and I can agree that a banana is yellow. We both know what a banana looks like and we both know what the colour yellow looks like. But how can we both be sure that our experience of the colour yellow is the same? I don't think we can. If every yellow 'pixel' in my visual field actually showed the colour I perceive as blue and vice versa then from common social experience of the world and the objects in it, I'd label blue yellow and yellow blue. Then you and I, looking at the same banana, would both call it yellow but experience something different. But then someone could come along and ask me to compare colours. They might say 'yellow is lighter than blue'. At which point I would have to disagree, I think. It would only work if the whole colour spectrum was inverted - black became white and everything in between... then I would label the process of colours looking darker, lighter. So for instance when you said white is lighter than grey and me in my inverted world with black as white and white as black would label the visual difference between grey>black as 'lighter' when it was in fact darker.

Who knows how many other constraints there are on how we can talk to each other about colour, and catch each other out as it were about our experience of it. And each difference we can talk about is something we must first be able to detect in our own visual fields. There's already colour blindness etc which identifies when two people's experience of colour is not the same, but these constraints, and the number of them, do suggest to me that it is likely that we all experience colour roughly the same - that if we did not, the various constraints would have singled out people with a fundamentally different experience of colour. So assuming that to be the case - that we all experience roughly the same experience of colour - it becomes apparent that there are billions of brains out there all producing the same qualia in their perceptions. As an emergent property of a replicable brain that's all well and good and to be expected but as for the 'palette' how does it come to be... how is it 'designed' as it were? I wonder if it is the case that the colour qualia we 'see' is the only way to represent the data in a way that meets all the constraints of the system... that the palette we see emerges because it is the only way to differentiate, in the right ways, between the different states that are represented in the underlying neural hardware. That somehow an inverted colour world fails somewhere to meet the constraints of the actual brain-in-state and therefore does not, and cannot appear. That therefore all perception, whatever type it is, 'presents' the data in the only way it can to fulfil it's objectives.

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Any thoughts are welcome on any aspect of this

Not at all TL;DR, possibly because it touches on some speculations that I hold dear.

I'd point you to the Theory of Mind in which, per Wikipedia:

Theory of mind (often abbreviated ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own

As far as I know, this attribution comes about only via inference from observations of the behavior of others.  We conclude that they have consciousness including qualia because they observed to act as if they did.  However, there is no first hand experience to confirm this.  I could be the only conscious entity in the universe, all other claimants being simulations.

My personal belief is that others experience a shared reality with me and do possess their own personal, similar internal realities.  I believe this because I believe the experience of consciousness emerges from the sum total of brain and body neural activity in concert with the inputs received from the surrounding environment.

Even given, rather than proved, that others have a self emerging from brain activity, any two can only be similar.  Identical experiences could only happen if two individuals were of identical construction including inhabiting an identical environment. In this case, there would be not two, but one.  Clearly some qualia, being as they are acquired tastes, must be different in different individuals.  For example, I live with persons who appear to intensely enjoy eating asparagus.  I find that vegetable to taste of used motor oil and have a hard time choking it down without gagging.  This marked difference in observed behavior leads me to believe in a similar magnitude difference in internal states.

It is consistent with my beliefs that the emergence of consciousness of self is a brain function which would be strongly preserved through natural selection.  Self preservation is much easier to achieve if one recognizes there is a self to preserve.  One so endowed should, through its own motivated efforts, persist and replicate better.  I would also expect, though as stated above, cannot prove, similarly constructed brains to exhibit similar behaviors up to and including consciousness.  

But how different does a brain/body have to be that I can no longer imagine myself in its place?
Not very.  Asparagus is a case in point.
When brain construction is so different that processing can be shown through anatomy and physiology to be chiefly associated with sensors not evolved in us arboreal, fruit eating primates I'd expect internal experiences to be near totally incomparable:
Electroreception in catfish and sharks.
Echo imaging in bats and cetaceans.
Thinking with their noses as in canids (with the exceptions of pekes and pugs which aren't really dogs and don't think anyway.)
I don't think we can have anything but a vague notion that their internal realities are qualitatively different.

I would say your speculation that system constraints uniquely drive an individual's consciousness experience is true, but only trivially so.  If consciousness is a result of brain state, and at any time, brain state is only one, fully constrained, thing, then the resultant experience can be only one thing.  But I also contend that this is the best of all possible worlds because at this moment, and as far as we know, this is the best, worst and only possible world.  I've irritated people with this but I don't know if they've really followed the argument or just think I'm being a jerk.

I've only skimmed the rest of the thread.  I did like your speculation that richness of imagination was proportional to the degree of interconnectedness of the underlying data store.  I'd say it also depends on the quantity of the available data, though this could be implied in your model.  Musings about the possible relations of real objects must build from valid observations of the objects in question.  Clearly, successful religions actively discourage knowledge outside of certain limits or their mmediate control.

I have no problem with that at all. No two brains or their states are identical. Even if you did hypothetically use a Star Trek transporter/replicator to record the exact atomic state of a person in memory, destroy the original, then recreate two copies, one in the same place and the other standing next to him, the brain states would immediately diverge because of different sensory input from slightly different positions. You'd have to dump them into the same place in separate, identical parallel universes for them to be the same Every human is unique not least because the brain is a living, changing thing that changes it's own structure in response to input from the environment... 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.

[emjay]

I cant rule it out.  They would diverge from, -at least- the very moment of their cloning (this assumes process perfection).  You'd have to test them awfully quick.   This, though, isn't the part that I had hoped to comment upon...rather, why we would go from an unexpected result in such a test (that, for example, two identical "consciousness systems" had divergent perceptions) to: 

"a personal god"

or

"there must be some other type of stuff".


Neither follows.  Nor would such a result eliminate all previous results in which the brains involvement in experience is made demonstrably clear.  That would all still be there.  This is, essentially, the old "evolution is false..therefore goddidit" bait and switch.

I don't know how you've got to this, thinking that I'm trying to 'bait and switch' you First of all you can cross off "a personal god" from the above because I would not even hazard that as a possible alternative. But the second one, yes, if I could not even rely on the assumption that system X produces conscious state X... that system X in exactly the same state could produce two different perceptional states, then I would, myself, have to start thinking about other alternatives and probably give up on even trying to understand the brain and would probably end up going in Bennyboy's direction, of idealism.

[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.

[emjay]

<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.

Yeah, I don't think it's even worth trying to speculate on what it's like to be a cuttlefish... we can't imagine perceptions completely different from our own.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know how you've got to this, thinking that I'm trying to 'bait and switch' you  

Not you personally, man, lol.  Our minds play implicational games with us.

First of all you can cross off "a personal god" from the above because I would not even hazard that as a possible alternative.

You did posit it, that's what theism is. 

But the second one, yes, if I could not even rely on the assumption that system X produces conscious state X... that system X in exactly the same state could produce two different perceptional states, then I would, myself, have to start thinking about other alternatives and probably give up on even trying to understand the brain and would probably end up going in Bennyboy's direction, of idealism.

Why, how does it follow?  You will have determined that something other than brain is involved....but not that some other fundamental "stuff" exists or is necessary..or that the brain is not involved.  We already think that something other than just the brain is involved in mind, in consciousness. Neither dualism nor theism (nor idealism) are required in order to account for this..merely an environment. If I found that two identical..or lets say vastly similar structures differed greatly in their perceptions -if their structure could not account for or explain a disparity-..I would look first to environment...as you might when trying to determine why different human beings perceive things differently, or indeed have a different experience of consciousness.

[emjay]

I don't know how you've got to this, thinking that I'm trying to 'bait and switch' you  

Not you personally, man, lol.  Our minds play implicational games with us.

Phew   Trust me, I know all about the tricks that the mind can play like that, I play Mafia

First of all you can cross off "a personal god" from the above because I would not even hazard that as a possible alternative.

You did posit it, that's what theism is. 

I think it was a bad choice of words on my part. By saying "No, I don't have any examples because I don't think there are any examples. If there were, then there'd be no point in even assuming that the brain had anything to do with consciousness, and then it would be into theist, dualism territory." I was meaning that I thought it would lead to the sorts of bad arguments put forward by theists of a soul that is either completely independent of the brain or only partially dependent on it, but which in either case receive the same response from me of 'if that's the case, why have a brain in the first place?'. And that particular response is all I need to stop me ever going in the soul direction again.

But the second one, yes, if I could not even rely on the assumption that system X produces conscious state X... that system X in exactly the same state could produce two different perceptional states, then I would, myself, have to start thinking about other alternatives and probably give up on even trying to understand the brain and would probably end up going in Bennyboy's direction, of idealism.

Why, how does it follow?  You will have determined that something other than brain is involved....but not that some other fundamental "stuff" exists or is necessary..or that the brain is not involved.  We already think that something other than just the brain is involved in mind, in consciousness.  Neither dualism nor theism are required in order to account for this..merely an environment.

Okay, I think I'm starting to see what you're getting at. It wasn't at the forefront of my mind until Julia's post that the system includes the environment, which is in turn unique for everyone. I was confining my vision of the system to the brain, in the reductionistic way that I do, and although the net result is the same in the sense that I am aware of the structural changes that result from interaction with the environment, I didn't picture it in that way; of each human brain and its consciousness being the sum total not just of brain and body state but also of a life born in a particular and unique time and place in the universe and traversing a unique path through the environment it finds itself in over a lifetime. It's quite beautiful to look at it like that. And thinking about it like that, yes there could be other influences in the physical world - as yet discovered or not - that affect the system and/or consciousness.

But anyway, I need to go to bed now so we'll have to resume this discussion another day. Night night

[Neo-Scholastic]

That's not actually a problem unless you can provide an example where two identical systems produce a different experience of consciousness.........do you have examples?  

Again. Try reading Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat." It's a fairly short paper: http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/14...el_bat.pdf

[The Valkyrie]