Seeing red

[emjay]

Hiya Benny, I was hoping you'd drop by    

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 think a different system could indeed have the same phenomenal experience, even as a response to different stimuli, because with that colour synesthesia - where people see letters and numbers as colours - something like that could already be happening... along with all the examples given of animals that perceive things the same way but with a different sense - dogs smelling weight and bats seeing sound as Rhythm mentioned earlier. It definitely appears that certain types of perceptions could be considered standard, in that they consistently appear to represent different types of data. And that does address one of the questions I've had in that once something is encoded in a neural network it just essentially becomes a number with nothing to say that this part of the brain is for colour or that part of the brain is for sound... so though we can name areas of the brain for their function - the visual cortex for instance - from the perspective of the network itself there is nothing so say what type of data a given neuron will represent. So in other words it appears to me that once sensory data enters the neural network it becomes uniform in its physical representation inside it, with nothing to specify it's source (ie what it represents in the outside world). So all that's left from my perspective and the perspective of my theorising is an enclosed and interrelated network of values that has essentially been cut off from its source and therefore could represent anything. And something like colour synesthesia would, in my view, probably be manifested in this network as a change/addition of 'wiring' and thus a change in the relationships represented by the network. So that's why I think consciousness has to be about representing those values and relationships, and can only be about that, because that's all that's left. And if colour for instance consistently appears then it suggests that it could be a standard way of representing certain values/relationships or patterns of values/relationships in the system. And the question becomes if is standard, why/how is it standard? My suggestion was that it was the only way to meet the constraints of the network... to represent differences and similarities of values and the relationships between them, with perception becoming more vivid - i.e. differentiated... different states represented - the richer the interconnectivity and differing values in the system. But that still doesn't answer the question of why it would be the only way unless it is something like you suggest, an underlying reality, so thanks for that... it's very interesting

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.

I've always wondered about that, whether whole galaxies or indeed the entire universe could be conscious, because to me it's all about the system, not the underlying hardware i.e. there's nothing special about neurons as information carriers, and there are indeed certain relationships manifested in nature - gravity for instance - that could play a part in creating system structure on such a large scale. But going off on one there, sorry about that

I can get on board with what you're saying. That colour for instance could be a way of representing a certain scale of normalised values... so that no matter what the size of the organism or what it was measuring it would stand a chance of getting a piece of the (colourful) action if its normalised values fell within that range. And the same principle for other perceptions. So yes, I agree that they could be universal experiences, tapped into, relatively, by different organisms in response to different scales of stimuli. That would fit in with what I've been saying in the sense of consciousness modelling the values and relationships in the network... because the values in a neural network are normalised... that was the uniformity I was referring to... so it doesn't matter what outside data is measured, or at what scale, because neurons themselves will do the job of normalising that data down to a range of values expressed by the frequency of firing.

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.