Seeing red

[emjay]

There is no difference, computationally, between numbers and colors.  You prefer color, you make disparaging remarks about 1's and 0's, but understand that this is only your bias speaking.  The terminator would scoff at our ridiculous "colors", instead preferring it's beautiful, rich, and incredibly specific binary data set.  In any case, when a bitmap is fed to a moniter it produces an image identical to our experience of them.  We're not -so- different in effect, even if we are different in method.  What is on the moniter is what your "humunculous" would see.  Seems to me that the bitmap is a wonderful rough analogue for our form of visual perception.

There is no reason to think that patterns which can be -and are- handled with binary everytime you take a picture would be lost if they were not encoded "in color" as we experience them.  Most cameras, already operating on a binary format at their most fundamental level, are already capable of both detecting and retaining patterns better than the human eye, better than the human mind.  Your contention -must be- false because there already -are- forms of perception different from our own.  You don't need eyes to see color, and frankly, our eyes aren't the best way to determine color in the first place.  Try a spectrometer?  Our eyes exist as they do not because that is the only way to represent the data field, or even the best way, simply that it was -a- manner in which it could be achieved, given the material available to the system.  That there are so many different types of eyes, and sensory structures in general are found represented in life (and so many analogs n digital) should tell you that there are myriad ways to skin a cat.

Good enough, not best, not only.

Thanks Rhythm I always appreciate your input on these sorts of questions - you're the only person I've met who seems to be absolutely certain about all this stuff, so you really help ground me when I go off on one

You're very right - the monitor output is what the homunculous would see and it's not required - processing would continue even with the monitor turned off and it's not as if the pattern recognition occurs on the monitor and is fed back to the system (that would be some form of dualism)... the monitor is not required at all except for benefit of a homunculous. I think that got a little bit lost in translation, including in my own head The patterns are not lost at the computational level - in this case the bitmap/monitor turned off level - indeed I never thought that at all because it's the neurons themselves that detect patterns... that's what they're for. So I didn't mean to imply that the pattern recognition happens at the monitor level.

What I was trying to suggest was that at the monitor level in order to represent the different states of variables, they have to be exactly that - different. So if colour 123 appeared on the monitor the same as colour 456 then the patterns found at the computational level would be lost at the perceptional level, which I supposed to be a mirror of it except in a different form (perception). And if there is a similarity at the computational level it has to be preserved at the perceptional level to maintain the mirror... so on the monitor colour 123 would be different from colour 124 but similar in appearance.

So that's what I meant really, that in order to represent perceptually all the different variable states required in consciousness - not just colour but everything that comes together in consciousness; the whole of vision, sound, pain, memory, imagination - they are constrained in such a way that they all have to be different but similar when necessary. After all, the different modes of consciousness do indeed feel like different 'channels'... you can experience all these aspects at the same time - pain at the same time as sound and vision for instance - because their channels do not overlap... they're sufficiently different from each other so as not to interfere with each other.

So what I was suggesting was that perhaps the way we experience consciousness is the only way it could be to accommodate the different variable states that need to represented but at the same time maintain the similarities and relationships between variables. That consciousness as an emergent property of the system/brain (rather than designed) is in the business of representing the differences between variable states whilst maintaining their relationships and similarities, in the only way it can. That a system with different variable states to integrate would find a different perceptional state that met the constraints.

So for instance, Chadwooters said earlier that different people experience the colour yellow differently as a result of different distributions of cones in their retinas. That would fit with this idea because the addition or subtraction of cones directly affects the data fed into the system, and therefore the constraints of the system. And somewhere I read about an experiment with rabbits. Rabbits can only see certain colours usually but they experimentally, somehow, added cones to them and suddenly they were able to see colours as we do... in other words it seems as if you can just plug in a cone and suddenly you've got a whole new form of perception. And it might even fit in with things like I think it's called 'colour synesthesia' or something like that... sounds experienced as colours etc in people with brain damage or different wiring - and thus different constraints and relationships between variable states.