Seeing red

[emjay]

@Jörmungandr

I just thought I needed to interject that this thread has always been about qualia... hence 'Seeing red'. And me, Benny, and Rhythm have certainly been talking about it for most of this thread. My position is that we may as well be philosophical zombies because every aspect of behaviour and mind is accomplished and represented in the brain, and therefore that mental phenomena is redundant and unnecessary, and only mirrors/represents the underlying neural network and the states, relationships, and abstractions it represents. But it's still a puzzle how all that translates into mental phenomena and what mental phenomena is. And that's what we've been discussing, each with our different viewpoints... Benny as (some sort of ) idealist/'ambiguist', Rhythm as comp mind, Chad as dualist, and me as NN/comp mind but tending much more towards neural networks in this thread because that's what I understand the most. And I started this thread specifically hoping to hear from Rhythm and Benny because we've enjoyed these sorts of discussions in the past. This thread's been the only thing on my mind for the last few weeks and I'm thoroughly enjoying the discussion and seeing the different viewpoints because it's really helping me deal with the hard questions that still crop up sometimes despite the NN doing everything in my view. As usual it feels like a goldmine of insight in this thread... and the more you talk (or write), the more you discuss, the more ideas you generate... it's all good and so I see my own theories evolving as the thread progresses. So for me this is not about defending my theories but evolving them. If all it is is defence then I won't learn anything new. And the ultimate aim is to put the hard questions to bed once and for all. Mental phenomena may be superfluous according to my viewpoint but it nevertheless exists in some sense... it still hurts like hell if I stub my toe. But this is just me... I started the thread but where it goes and what everyone else takes from it is up to them.

And I'd just like to say thank you for your input in this thread as well It's been very informative and has helped me clarify my own position a lot, which is quite similar but there were certain things I hadn't thought about until you brought them up and made them concrete in my mind. And I think my theories on perception are quite similar to yours and I suspect that they will tend towards yours even more as things progress

But I would just hope that we could keep this friendly and productive on all sides, because that was what it was meant to be, but again that's just me.