Seeing red

[bennyboy]

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.

When I dream, I can definitely see the color red, despite the fact that I'm not using my eyes. And when I hallucinate sounds, I sometimes hear sounds that I know I've never heard before-- they are completely simulated or created. It could be that the sounds are based on patterns that I HAVE heard before, but it certainly doesn't seem that way.

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 have my definitions, but they've fallen by the wayside, despite being pretty textbook definitions of the word. So I want to know what YOU think an idea is, specifically. What specific physical structure or function are we talking about, and how do we know when we've encountered 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.

Okay, in your theory, what kind of states are we talking about, and how would you recognize one in practice without already knowing it to be an idea (i.e. by telling someone to think about a red apple)?