Seeing red

[bennyboy]

You aren't actually seeing anything when you dream, you're equivocating, but that's okay because I know what you mean.  You sometimes hear sounds that you've never heard before, you think?  Do you think you hear sounds above or below the human range of hearing when you hear these dream sounds?

First of all, with regard to seeing-- the hell I don't. In some dreams, I'm body-aware: I have the sensations of sounds, touch and sight and they are coordinated just as they are in waking life. I look through my dream-eyes, not knowing that I'm dreaming, and I see stuff, no less than I do in waking life.

As for sound-- that's an excellent question, since it's an exact parallel to my question, and I don't know the answer. I suspect if I was thinking about this question WHEN I was very tired or on LSD or something, I probably would think I had that experience-- but the same might go for the sense of alternate light frequencies as well.

I've told you what I think they are, as specifically as the context calls for (we could talk about chemistry and anatomy of neurons, if you like?  How a neuron could "do logic".).  I couldn't locate one for you anymore than I could locate a specific IO on an un-familiar board by looking at it.  In principle I should be able to find any given IO if I have a map of the board, but when it comes to human beings we're pretty sure that the "board", if you will, is not a standard model manufactured to identical specs in every human being.   We see common regions doing what appears to be common tasks, that;s about as far as we've gotten, thusfar.

This is less a workable theory, then, than an expression of your already-held belief system. Basically, you are as guilty of borrowed concepts as you say I am: you're borrowing words from our traditional dualistic view of mind, and then trying to apply things like "consciousness" or "ideas" to a physical system. You say an idea is a physical thing-- fine, show me one. Show that they exist in the sense that you say they exist. Give me some evidence.

Keep in mind, now, that I'm trying to play ball. I sincerely want to know what an idea is in your physical world view, and you keep using words about mind, neglecting the physical mechanism you say are involved, but insisting rather that mind is matter just 'cuz that's what you already believe.

Asking them to "think red apple" is also useful, particularly in that regard, you seem to think it would be a problem...but why?

The problem is that you are relying on the subjective report of a person in order to establish an "objective" understanding of mind. That being said, I think maybe we will one day have enough data logged about "redness" and other forms that a computer WILL be able to tell what a person is thinking about. I guess we'll see?

We could learn alot more if we could dice their brains into tiny pieces while -maintaining their function- and then begin damaging them neuron by neuron to see what "blinks off" in their experience as we do so

I'm not certain that we would learn that much from an individual human. In an artificial neural network, or in a computer (as you've already talked about in a sense), you might have Windows running on two computers, but the state structure of chips could be so radically different that you could never really compare the two.