RE: Seeing red
January 13, 2016 at 10:48 pm
(This post was last modified: January 13, 2016 at 10:56 pm by bennyboy.)
Since this is my kind of thread, I guess I should step in and say something. 
First of all, let's state explicitly that all of this is hypothetical-- Rhythm, you are asking us to imagine whether one experience is or isn't similar to another, and on at least two different levels: 1) that it must be knowable that something which SEEMS to experience actually does, i.e. that other people aren't philosophical zombies, etc.; 2) that even given (1), we accept at least the hypothetical possibility that identical states COULD be reproduced.
Clearly, neither is the case. We cannot establish that any physical system, human or otherwise, actually experiences qualia, instead of just seeming to. And while we can imagine it, we know that we will never, ever be able to exactly reproduce a brain or its state down to QM perfection. Appeals to evidence fail, automatically, on both sides: at best, we can arbitrarily decide to what degree our evidential requirements may be stretched until we discard the evidence as being insufficient.
Why is this important? Because we have to ask not only whether two identical systems can have the same experience, but whether a DIFFERENT system could have the same experience, possibly even not in response to the same stimuli. This is important because if so, both physical systems have been adapted to perceive an underlying reality-- redness-- though in fact the qualia of redness exists nowhere in the universe (at least in the sense that you can directly measure it).
I'd like to speculate on another idea, but with regards to sound. It seems to me that very small or very large animals' experiences would be red-shifted or blue-shifted relative to ours. For example, I'd expect a very small animal to be able to perceive high frequencies, but unable to perceive low frequencies (at least as sound) because of the different size of the receiving mechanism and different "speeds" of brain processing. In other words, what for me is a very high-pitched whine (a mosquito's buzz) might be for that mosquito a rhythmic pulse rather than a high-pitched whine. A super-galactic being (i.e. a being made of of a gazillion galaxies) might experience the rotation of collections of galaxies as a gravity-wave hum, while we, obviously, couldn't hear anything (or possibly even measure it).
The same goes for organisms that can see very high frequencies of light, or very low ones. I'd imagine that a tiny organism would be sensitive to higher frequencies of light, where as our super-galactic being would care little for white light and much more for light of very long wavelengths, which would be much less susceptible to friction over long distances and therefore "carry" better. But I think to that being, such wavelengths would be center-normalized, i.e. experienced much as we experience say green. i.e. the super-galactic being wouldn't know that it was experiencing things infinitely slowly (relative to us).
Here's another example. An intergalactic being, if it is an evolved organism, might experience whole galaxies as "sweet," depending on their configuration, and others as "sour."
If true, this would indicate to me that redness, or mid-range-humness, or sweetness, etc. might be universal experiences, but subjectively experienced by different organisms in response to different scales of stimuli. In other words, the experiences are symbolic representations of relative experience much more than they are of things and their properties. They would be ideas, independent of scale in time or in space, and dependent only on the subjective experience of each individual organism.
So I think a more interesting question about bats is this: Do they experience blood as sweet (i.e. that ideal foods are represented by similar qualia among all organisms)? Or is there a unique "bloodness" taste that we will never be able to appreciate?
And here's the problem. We can't know. Because while pragmatic assumptions about humans, brains, and correlations betweed reported experience and brain function are fun, they shed absolutely no light on the nature of experience beyond that of humans.
First of all, let's state explicitly that all of this is hypothetical-- Rhythm, you are asking us to imagine whether one experience is or isn't similar to another, and on at least two different levels: 1) that it must be knowable that something which SEEMS to experience actually does, i.e. that other people aren't philosophical zombies, etc.; 2) that even given (1), we accept at least the hypothetical possibility that identical states COULD be reproduced.
Clearly, neither is the case. We cannot establish that any physical system, human or otherwise, actually experiences qualia, instead of just seeming to. And while we can imagine it, we know that we will never, ever be able to exactly reproduce a brain or its state down to QM perfection. Appeals to evidence fail, automatically, on both sides: at best, we can arbitrarily decide to what degree our evidential requirements may be stretched until we discard the evidence as being insufficient.
Why is this important? Because we have to ask not only whether two identical systems can have the same experience, but whether a DIFFERENT system could have the same experience, possibly even not in response to the same stimuli. This is important because if so, both physical systems have been adapted to perceive an underlying reality-- redness-- though in fact the qualia of redness exists nowhere in the universe (at least in the sense that you can directly measure it).
I'd like to speculate on another idea, but with regards to sound. It seems to me that very small or very large animals' experiences would be red-shifted or blue-shifted relative to ours. For example, I'd expect a very small animal to be able to perceive high frequencies, but unable to perceive low frequencies (at least as sound) because of the different size of the receiving mechanism and different "speeds" of brain processing. In other words, what for me is a very high-pitched whine (a mosquito's buzz) might be for that mosquito a rhythmic pulse rather than a high-pitched whine. A super-galactic being (i.e. a being made of of a gazillion galaxies) might experience the rotation of collections of galaxies as a gravity-wave hum, while we, obviously, couldn't hear anything (or possibly even measure it).
The same goes for organisms that can see very high frequencies of light, or very low ones. I'd imagine that a tiny organism would be sensitive to higher frequencies of light, where as our super-galactic being would care little for white light and much more for light of very long wavelengths, which would be much less susceptible to friction over long distances and therefore "carry" better. But I think to that being, such wavelengths would be center-normalized, i.e. experienced much as we experience say green. i.e. the super-galactic being wouldn't know that it was experiencing things infinitely slowly (relative to us).
Here's another example. An intergalactic being, if it is an evolved organism, might experience whole galaxies as "sweet," depending on their configuration, and others as "sour."
If true, this would indicate to me that redness, or mid-range-humness, or sweetness, etc. might be universal experiences, but subjectively experienced by different organisms in response to different scales of stimuli. In other words, the experiences are symbolic representations of relative experience much more than they are of things and their properties. They would be ideas, independent of scale in time or in space, and dependent only on the subjective experience of each individual organism.
So I think a more interesting question about bats is this: Do they experience blood as sweet (i.e. that ideal foods are represented by similar qualia among all organisms)? Or is there a unique "bloodness" taste that we will never be able to appreciate?
And here's the problem. We can't know. Because while pragmatic assumptions about humans, brains, and correlations betweed reported experience and brain function are fun, they shed absolutely no light on the nature of experience beyond that of humans.
