Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

Since this is my kind of thread, I guess I should step in and say something.

Welcome aboard...lol.  Shall we dance? Imma crunch this up so that your more interesting question doesn't get lost in the dross.

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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.;

Sure.  If it seems like we (or anything else) experience...it's difficult to posit that we don't.  Particularly given our limitations in that regards..."seems" is all we've got to go on. 

2) that even given (1), we accept at least the hypothetical possibility that identical states COULD be reproduced.

Sure, because I don't make special exemptions for experience.  I expect that in all hypothetical games of hypothetical mousetrap...the trap will fall in a similar manner when you trigger the mechanism.

Clearly, neither is the case.  We cannot establish that any physical system, human or otherwise, actually experiences qualia, instead of just seeming to.

You say clearly as though you can establish something...directly before saying that you cannot establish something.  If you dispute that I experience qualia...or we dispute that a dog experiences qualia, this discussion is DOA.  You don't -seem- feel the need to dispute that I have qualia..because I seem to, as does a dog.  We can only go with what we've got.

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.

My expectations are not based upon a reproduction in evidence, but my un-willigness to make any special pleading argument about that which -is- in evidence.

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).

The qualia seems to exist in your skull, which does, as far as I'm aware, reside in the universe.  

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.

It's not just the size of the ear that counts.  The speed of processor is not the only factor...you've failed to account for buffering and executive summary.

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).

Regardless of the above...that may be true for reasons other than it's size or the speed of it's processing, sure.  

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).

I think that you've far exceeded what your already flawed assumptions above could possibly infer...but all of that may still, nevertheless, be true.  

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."

Hardly a stretch, less exotic life on our own planet -seem- to experience things in a manner that we would describe similarly.  The language is stretched a bit...but we go with what we've got.

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.

Our experiences -seem- to be subjective assessments of objects or quantities, sure.   The last part of that think I'd need an incredible amount of clarity and elaboration on before I'd feel comfortable commenting. 

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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?

I can tell you what we commonly perceive as sweet in a strawberry.  Acidity.  I can tell you what it is we're tasting when we taste blood as well..iron.  If we took a look at a bats taste buds...we might be able to get some more info on that in the case of the bat but we'd still have to wonder what with the differences in our brains. To put it bluntly, I expect a bats experience to be divergent from our own....but similar to the experience of other bats.

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.

When some other creature behaves in a manner recognizable to us in regards to a situation or stimuli recognizable to us..and also just so happens to share similar sensory structures with us.....I'd say we're doing more than groping in the dark.  Our own experiences could only be so useful...but I think that it's more than a little bit disingenuous to call them useless.  I don't expect a dogs qualia to be a mirror image of my own (I don't even expect yours to be)..but I know it's close enough for us to go hunting..together, to plot and scheme against the poor games life, together...he understands both the goal and the process.   If we were experiencing something entirely different and in no way analgous........that would be awfully hard to explain...don't you think? All of this, mind you, with the understanding that dogs can smell atomic weight (precisely what makes them so useful in context)...which must be a phenomenal contributor to their qualia which is greatly reduced in my own relative experience. I, on the other hand....must seem nearly precognitive to my dog because my qualia includes a much better developed ability to predict the animals decisions than he possesses. He knows where they are... I know where they're going..and we're -both- hunting "them". We both seem to agree upon what a deer is.

His nose and my big brain are a winning combination, unless you happen to be delicious and made out of meat. Our experience in the hunt simply -could not- be identical...but it also can't be completely and utterly dissimilar. Or at least the entire situation falls into absurdity and null values if it is. What a fantastic chain of unreasonable coincidence, that we manage to pull off so reliably.