Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[The Grand Nudger]

I get that it is a faculty of our organism to distinguish certain phenomena. The reason I brought color into the argument was to show the irreducibility of qualia.

Right, but I don't think that it does, or that if we were to use color to make that argument red would be the strongest candidate.  

Using machines or something, we can measure the dimensions of a mushroom in the wild. We can determine that the mushroom is x centimeters high/wide etc. And this measurement, even though it is done by a machine, will more-or-less line up with the average person's perceptions of it. So, in the case of dimensions there is a 1:1 reducibility with the perceived phenomena and reality.

We can also measure colors with a spectrophotometer...and find the same thing - that the measurements will line up with the average persons perception of it.  Some accuracy is a common assumption of selective explanations for conscious experience.   We get that our native equipment is flawed, but if redness weren't a thing it would be hard to explain why it's such a solid indicator of ripeness in fruit or the coming doom of winter.  We don't think that flowers are mimicking.... our mental state .....when they entice us and others to spread their genetic material by doing color.  

Not so with color. With color, there is a 1:1 reducibility between 700 nm wavelengths of light and what we see as red. That is not a complete 1:1 reduction. Our minds "add" something to our perceptive experience that DOES NOT EXIST in the real world-- a "red" quality to all wavelengths of light within certain parameters. It has help from the eye. It has help from the brain (the entire rest of the process may take place in the brain). But remember, there is no color outside of our conscious experience. That means there cannot be a 1:1 reducibility between the perceived world and the natural world as far as redness goes. (The only correlation is that some non-red things --wavelengths of light-- get represented as red.)

There's no color outside of our experience like there is no current outside of our meters like there are no centimeters outside of our rulers like there's absolutely none of that or anything else, in our experience, meaningfully outside of our minds..... in this way.  I don't think it's a particularly good objection (to anything....) no matter how many times it's repeated, but particularly in the context of functionalism and an explanation of mind or qualia. 

To be fair to the functionalists, they actually don't want to ignore the mind completely. Functionalism arose to combat theories of mind (like behaviorism) who seemed to altogether deny the mind's existence. Functionalism wanted to "add a few thin layers of mind back in," so to speak. Functionalists want to say that qualia are a function of the organism's perceptive faculties. After all, there's no sense in an organism having a pain response system, unless it hurts.

Pain, in the functionalist view, is whatever causes attentive behaviors towards bodily damage. That could be different species to species, machine to machine - and it may even be that there are phenomenal concepts absent between groups of real or hypothetical beings.  We don't think that ants can be in pain, and wouldn't expect a sentient ruler to "see red" even if it could measure wavelengths of light...for example....and this is why the existence of a phenomenal concept in one example and it's absence in another is not really any demonstration that the contents only exist in their minds or are not meaningfully representative of their external environments. We just don't all come equipped with the same stuff - and it shows.

There is a reason I think functionalism is a solid theory. Since I have direct apprehension of consciousness, I reject those theories that try to dismiss it as an illusion. Functionalism doesn't quite do this. In fact, where I'm at as far as the metaphysics goes is between functionalism and [some better theory]. So I kind of "default" to functionalism, but find it dissatisfying. Of course, I would like a more comprehensive explanation of mind's existence. (Wouldn't we all.)

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Pain may be the better example for qualia. There is no "pain" out there in the world (outside of our experience of it).

The functionalist would tell you that there is pain anywhere that anything is making anything else hurt, ofc. In this sense..and I think you'll appreciate this..qualia may not reduce to brain states specifically even for a functionalist, and even if human qualia does.

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But the mind-body problem itself may not. I mean, there is a mystery there, isn't there? 

You tell me..what's the mystery?  All available evidence seems to indicate that the thing we've been calling mind is very much body.  Plenty of mysteries about that body....but a mystery about some mind-body problem? You sure that's not an example of folk intuition, itself?