Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not talking about eyes.  I'm talking about the brain.

You're asking why you can't see, with your brain, colors that your eyes can't see........because in this case..they don't exist.  It's the same answer for those colors that -do- exist which you can't see anyway.  The answer is, to me..obvious.  Your color qualia is based upon your sensory systems ability to perceive wavelengths of lights...it uses your eyes to do this, and so it's range for color is naturally defined by the range of operation of the eye - this is the list of variables which are valid operants for further work.

Too much ad-hom or metacommentary.

An ad hom is when I tell you that you;re wrong because of some insult I sling about you.  I've done no such thing, so learn what the term means or just avoid using it.

I think you haven't realized yet that I shifted gears about three days ago and I'm trying to establish in purely material terms what systems or functions of systems constitute "idea" and more importanly what systems don't and why.  This is why I'm talking about DNA-- it seems to me that DNA represents an idea of a person, and Jorm disagrees.  What say you?

I say that you haven't shifted gears at all.  I think, and we've already discussed this, that to determine what is and what isn't an idea, first, you're going to need a definition that can distinguish between an idea and a rock and dna.   If you aren't working with that, at the least, you don't have a chance to find what you're looking for.

I also want to know what, physically, represents an idea: what is it, how does it work, how do you identify one?

I think that ideas are logical statements (more properly -many- logical statements) generally associated with biological computational systems, in my opinion, reducible to states.  I can tell you how this is achieved in principle, I can show you how it's achieved in practice, but I cannot demonstrate to you that this is how we do it, and no one has that explanation. We're still debating the ethics of the sorts of experiments that might really give us insight into the workings of our minds.