It could be a problem is you choose to take it as a problem. We usually don't. If someone is in pain, say we can see a person is missing a finger or they got hit by a car, we take it to be serious and reason that if the same thing happened to us, we would react in the same manner.

Sure, we can't know for certain (anything in the empirical world) if my red is your blue. But strangely, this issue is rarely (if ever) brought up in regard to sound. If I hear someone sing a song I like, no matter how out of tune it may be, then I will be reminded of the song and think to myself ah yes that's Led Zeppelin or whatever.

So, we assume they are hearing the same song as us. I don't think sound is qualitatively more important than sight so far as our senses go. That is, I don't see why color should be a problem, but then sound is not. — Manuel

The issue I was looking at is how "redness" gets its meaning. Are the truth conditions for "It's red" internal (by which I mean subjective data)? If so, it seems that assumes we all have the same or similar experiences.

If we don't have the same experiences, couldn't we still behave as if we do? Each of assumes this, but it never shows up in social interaction. This would mean that the truth conditions for "It's red" are external. I think the issue I'm talking about applies to all the senses.

I was thinking more along the lines that I was describing Kant's transcendental idealism, which, per Google's AI function "is a philosophical position that states that the mind structures the data our senses receive from the world, meaning that the world as we experience it is dependent on the way our minds work." — Hanover

I think it's both. The idea that a thing is a bundle of properties is Hume's Bundle theory. Kant, who was inspired by Hume, goes further in undermining Locke by pointing out that space and time are also built into cognition, they aren't things we learn through experience. So among the "millions of pieces of data we use to then form it into a conscious state of the tree" is an innate spacio-temporal setting, with associated causes and effects.

I'm of the position that the pen is an amalgamation of sensate properties, underwritten by noumena. — Hanover

This is Hume's phenomenalism, and I agree with it. There's nothing in the visual field that says: tree. Tree is an idea.

Correct. Red is not a property of extra-mental (or mind-independent) objects but is a subjective affection which arises from a combination of our innate cognitive capacity and the powers (or properties) objects induce in us. — Manuel

Is it a problem that we don't know if the world induces the same subjective data in each of us? Is that unverifiable? What we know for sure is that "red" plays a part in social interaction.

Okey dokey

Well, as a nominalist I don't buy into universals — Michael

Universals are part of the way we speak. Nominalism is a particular explanation for it, not a basis for rejecting the idea altogether.

The theory you described says speech about color and other sensations refers to percepts. This assumes that we all have very similar experiences. You're saying that our ability to talk about these percepts hinges on this similarity.

A challenge to this view is that the similarity that is supposed to be the basis for the way we speak isn't verifiable. What we do verify is the outcome of social interaction that includes color speech. What's your view of that?

Yea, I'm not arguing against you. I'm just analyzing the two opposing viewpoints, looking at the assumptions involved. It's about where universals come from. In a way, it's about where language comes from.

The cause of the percept "transcends" the individual, sure. And we all agree that stubbing one's toe is painful. But pain is nonetheless a mental percept, not a mind-independent property of toes or the table leg. — Michael

You don't want to talk about the black percept? Why not?

Ask the same question about pleasure and pain. — Michael

Pain is like color. It comes in a bunch of types: stabbing, dull, electric, etc. We rate it from 0-10 and all that. So if I experience a stabbing pain and rate it at 4, this is a 4-stabbing percept, right? It's the same one everybody else experiences as 4-stabbing. 4-stabbing transcends the individual.

It talks about "different individuals view[ing] the same image ... reported it to be widely different colors" and "different individuals experienc[ing] different percepts when observing the same image of the dress".

Different percepts entail different reported colours because color nouns ordinarily refer to those percepts, not the light emitted by the computer screen.

It is a fact that I see white and gold and others see black and blue because it is a fact that I experience white and gold percepts and others experience black and blue percepts. — Michael

You're saying that when I experience black, I'm experiencing an example of black. Everybody who has ever experienced seeing black has had their turn with this same thing: black percept. Right? It's something that transcends the individual?

Walz speaks Mandarin. I guess that will be handy. Still wish it was Shapiro, tho

I love my black job.

It's been 12 minutes for God's sake. How much time do you need? — Hanover

I got a robot lawnmower. If you get one, don't get the cheapest one. It gets stuck in the mulch, so I have to watch it. Other than that, it does a good job. Sort of.

I'll have to think about this for a while.

No, it's a scientific fact. There's a whole bunch of studies on the matter, such as Exploring the Determinants of Color Perception Using #Thedress and Its Variants: The Role of Spatio-Chromatic Context, Chromatic Illumination, and Material–Light Interaction. — Michael

Look at that article's abstract. It starts by talking about what people see, then it switches to what people reported seeing. It's straddling internalism and externalism, so it can't be used to support either side.

The word "experiences" refers to experiences, so why can't the word "colours" refer to a subset of experiences? — Michael

Did you get the internalism vs externalism thing I explained? Color internalism is where experience is primary and language use emerges from common experience. That isn't verifiable.

Color externalism doesn't dictate how we speak, it just says that speech is primary because it's the only verifiable common ground.

And again, the use of the nouns "white", "gold", "black", and "blue" in the sentence "some see white and gold, others black and blue" when describing the photo of the dress is referring to differences in colour experiences, not differences in the computer screen's micro-structural properties or light emissions.

Do you agree or disagree? — Michael

Ugh... the "some see white, others see black" is philosophical spaghetti. It seems to be using white and black as objective entities, but it's simultaneously talking about subjectivity. We need to bury that sentence in the desert.

I haven't denied this. I've only argued that our ordinary, everyday understanding of colours is an understanding of colour experiences, not an understanding of atoms absorbing and re-emitting various wavelengths of light, and that our ordinary, everyday use of colour words refers to these colour experiences. — Michael

You're saying that color language is based on shared color experience. Our common ground in experience is what allows us to use color words to point to objects, right? We could call this color internalism, that each person has access to the same common ground from which language arises.

Someone could argue that since experience is inaccessible to the public, we don't know if we have common ground in experience. The only common ground we can verify is in the way we use language to accomplish things. This would be color externalism. It says language use is primary, and people borrow from that realm when they talk about their own experiences.

How do you answer the externalist?

That depends on what you mean by know. If you mean certainty, then sure; we can't know what each person is experiencing. If you mean a true, justified belief, then we might know what each person is experiencing, e.g. if their experiences are in fact similar to our own. — Michael

I'm saying if we look at the consequences of these two:

1. Everybody has similar experiences of color
2. Everybody has unique experiences of color

If it's 1, then color language can refer to both subjective and objective accounts. If it's 2, then color language is valuable for pointing to things, but not useful for talking about individual experiences.

Neither one allows us to dispense with talk of experience, though.

I don't understand what you mean. Is there a "standard" pain? A "standard" pleasure? A "standard" sour taste? — Michael

The standard I'm talking about only shows up if we posit experiential dissonance. I ask Bill if he's having a stabbing pain. He says yes, but he's experiencing what Sally would call a dull pain.

So wait, we may not need a standard. We just evacuate all the terms of meaning and say we don't know what each person is experiencing?

it stands to reason that our colour experiences are broadly similar in most cases. — Michael

It stands to reason. But there's a lurking problem with saying we have different color experiences. It implies an underlying standard, right? When we talk about the dress, we say some people see blue, and others see white. <-- That very statement is using color in an objective sense, as if there's a standard blue kept in a vault in Paris or something. It may be that we can't escape talking about color in objective terms at least to some extent. Maybe this comes back to the underlying requirement of communication itself. We have to assume a common ground. If it's not actually there, that's fine, but we have to behave as if it is. Do you agree with that?

The OP had an interesting argument. He or she was saying that when we speak objectively about color, this is based on the assumption that we all have the same experience of the color spectrum, so that when I tell you to pick out blue light, you're able to do that because your experience of blue is the same as mine.

Then the OP points out that this assumption may be false. We may not be having similar experiences, although we've each learned to use "blue" to point to the same things. He or she is saying that since this uncertainty exists, we have to conclude that color experiences are unique to each individual.

So this is supposed to allow us to reject the argument that color is nothing beyond words used for pointing.

That is literally all i have read about the guy - he's hypocritical and incredibly biased in (essentially) bigoted ways; that he is incapable of carrying the mantle of VP or P as a result of his political leanings and inability to reach/speak to/engage with Women, POC and other Minorities. Every article that has come across any of my SM or non-social media has been either a comedic attack or a "He's going to be the end of America" type of nonsense.
And definitely some of those earlier claims are true - his PR skills are terrible. But to take all of this serious to judge him as a human being, based on this source of information, is bizarre. The film, btw, has been universally panned by all non-right-wing media for roughly these reasons (you can tell, because Close and at times Adams are praised as "despite" the film lol which might be fitting). — AmadeusD

I haven't seen any of that. I mostly get info from the NYT, the WSJ, and Politico. I'd say narrow down input to only sources that at least try to present an unbiased account. You usually have to pay for that.

Well no, this is the unchartiable, childish and ultimately misleading version of things the media likes to put out. His claim isn't "democrats don't have children" anymore than "deplorables" was an actual claim to be applied to every Republican or MAGA-adjacent person. It clearly wasn't, and Hilary unfairly suffered for her lack of precision imo. I wouldn't call the current situation 'unfair' because you're right, he's had several chances to even back out of that thing - but the same mechanisms are at play. They want you angry and incredulous. I'm not really defending him, to be clear. I don't know him. I'm aware he's an awful politician and it's a shame he's running with Trump, amongst all else to deplore there. But it truly is bizarre to see the exact same industry being treated completely differently when they spin different sides of the same coin (i,e two-party politics/politicians) - particularly when I know most of the posters here are far, far more intelligent than to allow what is clearly, and inarguably an industry which does not thrive on accuracy, truth or verdicality but clicks and views. — AmadeusD

As I said, I'd back far away from new sources that want to play on your emotions. Just junk all that wholesale.

By, i would imagine, being much more than shallow, biased, media-driven versions of his personality and life presented to you. — AmadeusD

The media hasn't presented him as shallow and biased. Neither his book nor the movie in which his grandmother is played by Glenn Close give the that impression, so I don't know what you're talking about. I think he's a moron because he's had an abundance of opportunities to turn the "catlady" thing around and he won't do it. This is the hill he's willing to die on: Democrats don't have children. In other words, he's no where near as bright as we expected him to be when he was chosen.

If Vance actually graduated, what's curious to me is how the hell did his dumbass get out of Yale? — 180 Proof

Exactly.

It turns out Vance is a moron. How did he get into Yale?

I should be the one to apologize, I just meant to add some rhetorical flourish, not impune anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:smile: :up:

Funny enough, I've been working on a novel that involves people stuck in an infinite house. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does the infinite house symbolize something? I never see all of the second house in my dreams.

Rather I would frame it like this: "our experiences don't always correlate with the enviornment the way we think they do under 'normal' conditions." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with that.

However, we can certainly extrapolate from biology and neuroscience that a Boltzmann brain would need to exist in some range of ambient temperature, atmosphere, etc. in order to produce anything like say "5 seconds of human experience." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're saying it seems reasonable to us that it would need the kind of environment we have. We can't really go further than that. We don't know exactly what's required for the existence of experience because we don't understand how it happens in the first place.

I think it would help to look at the nature of necessity. If you want to say that X is necessary to Y, you can't argue that it is because nobody has ever seen the two separately. Just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it won't happen tomorrow.

Stating that X is necessary to Y is a strong assertion that would require showing why they can't exist separately. In the case of consciousness, that would require a working theory of consciousness. That doesn't exist right now. All you can do is say that you doubt this or that about consciousness. Leave necessity to trivial issues.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be comical or ridiculous. I was just saying that my experience doesn't have to reflect interaction with my environment. I have long had a recurring dream about a house that opens up into another house. Though I've experienced being in this weird house multiple times, it doesn't exist. My environment at the time was my bedroom. It appears that experience was generated by my brain.

The conclusion is just that interaction with the environment isn't necessary for experience. If it was, I wouldn't be able to have that dream. I wasn't trying to argue that a brain in a void can have experiences. There was a fair amount of what you said that I could have engaged, I just didn't want to do one of those posts where I'm responding to each sentence you wrote. That kind of discussion gets complex and off topic.

I guess it would help me to go back to what your point was. Were you saying that body and environment are logically necessary to experience? If by that you mean that a brain needs a power source in order to function, then that's fairly uncontroversial. If your point was that experience can't take place without bodily interaction with the environment, that doesn't appear to be true. It happens every time you dream, it's happening to people who have received chemical paralytic drugs, it's happening to people who are locked in. The burden would be on you to show that bodily interaction is necessary to consciousness.

I have yet to see a good argument why color is "mental precept" all the way down, but presumably shape and size are not. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's got the weight of science behind it. The brain generates experience out of a flood of diverse data. Do you have an opposing version of that story?

The point was that you don't need a biological body. In the case of the supporting apparatus, it would be right to say it's necessary for the life of the brain. It's providing the brain's power source. It's not part of what the brain is doing, though. If you think it is, how? How is it part of consciousness?

In English it's pretty common to apparently directly equate them, as when we say the tea is cold. But in other languages, it would be that the tea has coldness, or that the coldness is upon the tea

I am not t sure how these are supposed to be counter examples. They still ascribe the property to the thing. Is there a language that does not ascribe color, heat, tone, or taste to things but only to subjects? I am not aware of one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They describe a relationship between the property and the thing. That allows us talk about a property like redness as something separate from an object. When we notice that the red apple is black under a red light, we realize that this property belongs to the whole setting that includes the object. And it turns out that the story of redness also includes functions of consciousness and experience. I think you were touching on that with the Perl quote, that it appears that experience is a holistic symphony that we subsequently analyze, dissect, placing the pieces on a table like a dismantled clock.

The danger here is to take pieces of the dismantled clock and imagine that we're grasping a firm foundation from which to philosophize. As long as we remember that, we can divide the symphony up however we like. It's legit to concentrate on experience itself. That's what a large chunk of phenomenology is doing. Experience is what we know directly. All else is dubious. It's one way to approach the issue, right?

What experiences will someone on ketamine have if they are instantly teleported to the bottom of the sea, the void of space, or the surface of a star? Little to none, their body and brain will be destroyed virtually instantly in the first and last case. The environment always matters. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. If John is dead, John won't be experiencing anything. Does this mean we can't talk about the experiences John's brain creates while he's still with us?

Or suppose the building they are in collapses and a support beam runs through their chest but their brain is left pretty much unharmed? Same thing. Without the body and the enviornment the brain cannot produce experiences — Count Timothy von Icarus

We'll rush John to the hospital and put him on ECMO. He actually doesn't need a heart, lungs, or kidneys now. We'll provide a kind of IV feed so he doesn't need a digestive system. We'll just float his nervous system in a gel. We don't do this because it would just be a short term horror movie, but we could. And the brain would create experiences because that's just what it does. It doesn't need anything from the outside.

The brain doesn't produce experience "on its own," or "alone." Producing experience requires a constant flow of information, causation, matter, and energy across the boundaries of the brain and body. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's not true. You don't need a body, as previously described.

No, I think I get it. You said that movies cannot be funny, the lemons are not sour, and that apples cannot be red. Presumably waterfalls cannot be sublime, sunsets beautiful, noises shrill, voices deep, etc. This is precisely what Lewis is talking about.

I just don't think this separation makes any sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sorry to butt in, but I think if you're approaching this from ordinary language, you should keep in mind that languages vary in how they express the relationship between objects and their properties. In English it's pretty common to apparently directly equate them, as when we say the tea is cold. But in other languages, it would be that the tea has coldness, or that the coldness is upon the tea. It's native to English to treat properties as transient and objects as permanent, but that just doesn't show up as overtly as, say, in Spanish.

Experience only emerges from brains in properly functioning bodies in a narrow range of environments and abstracting the environment away so as to locate these physical processes solely "in" brains or "brain states," is simply bad reasoning. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about the experiences of people on say, ketamine? Their experiences are in some way "in the language" of earthly life, but they're definitely not reflecting anything in the person's environment. Those experiences appear to be created by the brain alone.

They were. four shootings and several alleged sexual assaults in the span of weeks. — NOS4A2

Plus they looted several Walmarts, sneaking away with large amounts of baby diapers.

Trump killed 14 people in South Dakota.

Their constituents took over entire cities, and burned many to the ground, including laying siege to the whitehouse — NOS4A2

That's because Democrats are always heavily armed.

Bad faith can only get you so far. — NOS4A2

Ain't that the truth?

The Trumpsters are pretending that it is a matter of fairness — Fooloso4

Maybe. NOS is really good at evasion. I'm trying to learn how he does it so I can do it. The first step is to reject something obvious, like the meaning of "rigging.". Then when your opponent hands you a definition of the word, you pick up something extraneous in the definition. The goal is to drag the victim into the weeds, puzzling over stuff that has nothing to do with the original issue. Then you ask them a question about what they think. "Do you think it's fair that cats are so dependent on humans? I mean, do you?"

Cool stuff.

I already stated why so think it was unfair. — NOS4A2

Ok, I missed it. Tell me again why you think there was cheating.

That’s wrong. The question at the end of the sentance indicates I was asking you a question. — NOS4A2

So you have no evidence of unfair practices, rigging, or cheating. Why did you assert it? Did you dream that there was some cheating?

Who lied, and about what? Give us facts we can check.

He probably was sharp when Schumer said that. 80 y.o. dudes don't go into dementia like falling off a cliff. Even those closest to him might just suspect at first.

Do you think it’s fair to the millions who voted for Biden in the primaries? — NOS4A2

So let me get this straight. The primary voters chose Biden, then Biden said he wasn't going to run. Now you're verklempt over the disappointment the voters must feel about that. Is that correct?

Do you think it’s fair to lie about Biden’s abilities up until the moment they couldn’t lie about it any more? — NOS4A2

Who lied, and about what? Give us facts we can check.

It’s unfair to replace a candidate from a race because you’re losing, especially against the will of the voters, and it’s dishonest and fraudulent to say you’ve done so for any other reason as Joe Biden and his surrogates did. — NOS4A2

It would be unfair if the Republican party wasn't capable of doing exactly the same thing if they so chose. Since the parties are following the same rules, it's fair.