Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Well, this is not really different than say a photon leaving the sun and being absorbed by an atom in a rock on Earth.

No it isn't...and yet you think there's mind there, somewhere, somehow.....  While we can, in edge cases, do without a great deal of our nuerons, there's no reason to believe that a single nueron has mind, let alone that a "single body transmitting or receiving a photon" has mind.  You seem to realize this yourself, deciding instead to call it "a primitive perception".  Well, a camera has a little bit -more- than a primitive perception - of the type described.  Why do we lapse back into "mind" in our conclusion?  Are we talking about the sort of "mind" that a camera possesses...is that the sort of "mind" that's intrinsic to all matter?  Meh, you can have it.  I call that material interaction, information.  Photons hitting rocks don't seem to produce the phenomena we're discussing when we discuss mind.  

Keep in mind that this was a speculative exploration, GIVEN the assumption that mind is purely physical-- an assumption I don't normally make.  So I'm not trying to reinforce my normal world view, but to examine the physicalist position from more angles and in more detail.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what complexity of structure is required to support qualia.  Let me put it this way:
1)  There is nothing called mind except at the macro level-- mind only "spawns" when you hit a certain critical mass of processing;
2)  It's a spectrum-- the simplest kind of processing represents the simplest kind of mind-- so in this case, just as the human brain is made of large structures, sub structures, and microstructures, the human mind would be composed not just of ideas, but would be a composition of atomic "idealets."

My point is that if you don't think the SIMPLEST data processing represents the simplest mind, then at what arbitrary level of complexity would you draw it?  Arbitrary lines in the sand aren't really good either in science or in philosophy, IMO.