Seeing red

[emjay]

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.

Provisional certainty, lol, Emjay.  Provisional.  "If" - 'then".  

The only way it could be, with reference to our perceptive apparatus and the nature of that which we percieve..or the only way it could be in toto..as in all perception of consciousness everywhere must be like our own?  Just looking for clarity so I don't fly off on a tangent.

RE: the bunnies..I don't know how I would defend the statement that enhancing the range of their color vision amounts to a whole new form of perception, personally.  It doesn;t seem to have added a whole new form of perception...I was under the impression that rabbits could already see...and indeed could already see in color.

It still comes across as certainty tho And that's cool - it gives me confidence the way you talk about this stuff; it's nice to know that there are some people out there with clear, solid ideas about the nature of consciousness. So I wanted to say thank you for that - since I came here, you've strengthened my atheism enormously... as have many others, in different ways. Before coming here I was a wishy-washy atheist with a lot of things left unresolved and unaddressed... a lot of doubts still in place ...after leaving Christianity some 15 years ago or more but in the space of less than a year on this site, all that has changed. So in the awards if there was a category for Best Atheist Influence you'd be a front-runner for me, along with robvalue for his unwavering confidence, and ironically some of the Christians for their transparent and crappy arguments for Christianity

I'm sorry, I still don't know what you're trying to ask that I haven't already answered (or tried to) Not that 'all perception of consciousness everywhere must be like our own' but rather that all systems the same as ours - and therefore with the same constraints - would produce the same sort of experience of consciousness, but as per the bunnies or different kinds of animals entirely, any difference in the system means a whole different set of constraints, and therefore a different expression of the variable states and relationships in their perception.

I guess I didn't phrase that very well re the bunnies. Not a whole new form of perception per se - not as in acquiring a whole new mode/channel of perception - but just a substantial change to their experience of colour... so a change to their perception of their perception is kind of what I meant Kind of like, as a rough and inaccurate analogy, if all we could see in was black and white it would be a dramatic change, for us, if we could suddenly see in full colour. Basically in us, cones come in three varieties, tuned to detect red, green, or blue light. But in these rabbits only two of the varieties are present, I don't remember which.. so red and green, red and blue, or green and blue. And this experiment essentially added the missing type, and thus massively expanded the range of colours they could discriminate.