Motorneurons.

There is a cause, and an effect. Contact with C-fibers at a sufficient level is the cause. Pain is the effect. They cannot be the same thing, right? So, we're off to a racing start.
Now, we already understand that pain signals travel through the body via the spinal cord to the brain, where the brain receives the data (think Chinese Room) and looks up the appropriate sensation to deploy to the perceiving mind. And, again, for some reason this isn't landing: it is often completely wrong in what it deploys, making it quite obvious pain is not in the effected area. It is caused by the affected area, but hte pain itself need not actually correlate with the injury. Or a part of the body at all, it seems.

There is no room here for a position other htan that pain is a sensation subsequent to an event in the area it is supposed to draw our attention to. Its almost regular failure to do so accurately is clear enough to me.

I did. You are continually incapable of exchanging ideas. Ignorance is not a virtue, Constance. Just say you don't understand, or haven't read into something. It's much easier for everyone.

You seem spectacularly uninformed about the country you live in. Talkback radio level. Why would your views deserve respect when they are so lacking in content? — apokrisis

I take it you're an asshole cyclist then? Hehehe. Showing your hand rather obviously here, given what I said was an anecdote, not a political essay.

NZ could have just got on with its big infrastructure investments like Auckland light rail, Lake Onslow pumped hydro, the new Cook Strait ferries it had already ordered. — apokrisis

No it couldn't. Obviously.

Do you know anything about NZ's actual past or present, let alone how badly it is handling its future? — apokrisis

Yes, but it appears perhaps you dont? FTR, I hate New Zealand. It's an awful country in almost all ways except landscape. You wont get me to care.

You think roads and carparks are cheap national investments? — apokrisis

This makes no sense in response to what I've said.

You want public infrastructure as good as it used to be? — apokrisis

I said nothing of hte kid. WTF?

Not the current story of both centralising the decision and then pushing the cost and delivery back onto local government. — apokrisis

This is the only efficient way to get large projects done in a country so devoid of intelligence and sense-making leadership.

Then there will be accidents and delays to public transport — Ludwig V

Our public transport is a laughing stock and large for this reason - I've been stuck behind cyclists and been alte for work many, many times on a bus, but we're not allowed to blame cyclists because there's an utterly bewildering number of uneducated weirdos who think that regulating anything is genocidal.

That siad, our trains fucking suck too.

Yet we made symbols or writing systems to help them understand what is red. — javi2541997

Because the experience is not in the objects viewed. It is in the mind. This is why a Blind person can adequately assent to an audio symbolic representation of 'red'. And, to the degree they can, they are almost certainly wrong. We could never know, though.

If the best scientific description of an object places color as a brain construct, then we should deny the pen itself is red if we want to side with the educated community as opposed to those who've not truly considered the issue. — Hanover

:ok:

given up their own freedom of movement in favour of that of machines they have created. — unenlightened

I can't grasp what you're saying. This is plainly not true.

they just convey the idea that something, its exact nature unspecified, is happening when I am not looking — Apustimelogist

I have probably misapprehended you then, but this seems like more a comforting thought than something which can be 'objectively known'. Banno's cups notwithstanding.

if the pain happens exclusively in the mind, how does a burn on your finger hurt your finger and not your foot? — Lionino

I have directly answered this, here and elsewhere. If it is not landing, I apologise. But restating a question I have answered doesn't help me much.

You can't know. Your brain creates the illusion because it has to, for evolutionary reasons, to ensure you see to the injury - and is often wrong in quite obvious ways. The pain is not in the injured area. This isn't even a controversial take. It is how pain works, empirically. The idea that the pain is in the injured area suggests that it would hurt whether there was a mind or not. That is plainly dumber than a doornail. If this isn't your suggestion, you're not being sufficiently clear for me to response adequately, i don't think.

We know this is not a language perception, this red-qua-red, and no one will gainsay this. — Constance

False. Plenty are colour realists and believe the colour red exists outside the qualia Red. We are having this exact discussion elsewhere.

It would help if you didn't erroneously decide that Continental Philosophy is worthwhile, and Analytical not, if you're going to take up analytical discussions. The Continentals have nothing but disdain for taking thinking seriously.

Yes, that may be true.

I think something we could probably agree on though is that your description of the last lets say 10 weeks indicates that Trump's voters rely on spectacle. The election cycle is not one (in this sense). So, either he pulls a Jan 6 (don't bother arguing with this, but to clarify, I do not think he incited anything on that occassion) properly, or he doesn't get a look in. And even in the former case, I think he'd just be arrested for it given he isn't in office.

I think it's going to be quite clear that Trump cannot run again in '28. He'll be in his 80s, and the hypocrisy would be too much, if nothing else. I also just htink he's run his course (speculatively). He's declining even among those who try to take the 'view from nowhere' and give hte devil his due. I was essentially in that position, but it's now clear with Biden out of hte running that Trump is simply not an electable character once octogenerial. You can kind of get away with what he's doing as the more spritely candidate - and he doesn't have the wit of Regan to pull it back in his favour. His actual politics don't seem to matter that much to that group voting for him.

Also, fucking hell. Discussing the elections of the '20s (as oppsoed to 90s/00s/2010s) is spinning my head.

You seem to be under the impression NZ is going to magically become rich in the next few years.
These are the same delusional takes of the Greens. Sanguine to the point of stupidity.

In the meantime, anything that encourages more cyclists and bus passengers, less motorists in SUVs, is a step in the right direction so far as urban planning is concerned. — apokrisis

It is not at all a step in the right directly for a city as spread-out as Auckland. This also ignores the blatant risks shared cycleways present. Cyclists are some of the least respectful people I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with on the political front. No one gives a flying fuck if you get good feelies from cycling to work and snorting at drivers. No. One. Cares. Sit down.

Again, this is blatantly false. Your gears are spinning but not making the connection. — Banno

I think the exact reverse is true.

"the colour red" is not anything but the experience of Red. Otherwise, you're talking about a symbol. And there are many symbols which we use the word Red to refer to. But using the word Red to refer to a colour has my position relatively vouchsafed against the issue you're trying to push in here.
Again, the issue is acknowledge, it just has nothing to do with referring to the colour Red rather than "a Red X". You are plainly missing this distinction in service of pretending word games matter to what we're talking about. And again, so this cannot be missed - the connection has been made. It is not an obstacle.

If I convinced someone that I was raised to call what they mentally apprehend as Red as Blue, we would still come to terms. Because when refering the colour, the symbol isn't relevant. It's relevant when you want to connect something else to the colour such as when you say "hand me that Red pen".

That's my feeling lol.

Some here have failed to see this. — Banno

I do not think this is the case. The complaint (using that word mildly) you're making, and the 'confusion' you seem to want to point out isn't a confusion. IF your point is that the conversation being attempted is not apt due to the issues you see with the language, that's also fine - but I would disagree. It hasn't been missed - I don't think it's a problem for the discussion.

This is now extremely off-track. The colour Red is not anything else but hte experience of hte colour - so either we're dealing with purely self-reportage, in which case, who cares - this is a dead end - or we're trying to figure out why those reports, in almost every case, seem to agree. This is likely because 'red' is a sensation which language can approximate with reference to other things. This means that calling something 'Red' is a helpful fiction - similar to my comment in the other thread. It has nothing to do with whether or not the object contains or doesn't contain what our mind assigns Red to.

I can't take either seriously because I don't have a vantage point from which to determine . — frank

That's fair. Can you elaborate on how you feel i've missed the Geiger counter? And in waht way? Genuinely a bit lost lol - i did respond to that exchange a couple of times.

to the way we use the word "red", and hence to the place of red in our dealings with the world, than can be accounted for by the simplistic assertion that red is one of various purely mental or neurological phenomena. — Banno

You're having a separate conversation. This is not a thread about linguistics.

Yep. — Banno

Respectfully, not enough to understand what you might mean here. An attempt to respond: Okay, well I would assent to most of what you've said about the every-day use of the word Red.
Not sure how that relates to the wider discussion here though. That understanding of the word being multiply-used is taken as an observable phenomenon. It doesn't seem to me this is capable of betraying a discussion around whether or not the colour Red is a mental percept. Or being particularly relevant - more of a "Yes, and?" type of statement.

What's the problem? — apokrisis

You have not been on roads where this is the case, have you?

Or to NZ in general? hehe

How can you tell it happens inside the lung and not inside the intestine? — Lionino

You can't. You can infer based on a pretty nifty evolutionary trick of pain signalling through neurons. But pain signals get mixed up all the time and we perceive pain incorrectly as to the injury that caused us to feel any pain at all. I've given a few examples. Feelings of pain are patently not occurring inside the injured area for two reasons:

1. The above - pain signals are not apodictic indicators of anything; and
2. An injured body part doesn't 'feel' anything. The perceiving mind does.

Of course it is to do with truth. But you can't say that because it undermines your antirealism.

The cup is in the dishwasher. — Banno

Again, a bare assertion.

It has nothing to do with truth. You have described why not consistently questioning our apprehensions is helpful for washing cups. All good my friend.

Ok. There's no reply to that, it's so far off track. Central to the experiment are reports of colours seen. — Banno

It's directly on track, for the discussion - but you're right, there is no response. If what you're trying to point out is that my use of 'Red' runs up against this, because we're relying on self-report. Yes. Yes, that is the point. Red doesn't obtain other than as an agreement between self-reports and so is instantiated only in the experiences we are agreeing about. Clear?

You can't live without it. Indirect realism inevitably opens up into global skepticism. It's an unsolved puzzle. — frank

This is, to me, a complete and utter cop-out. YOu seem to accept that indirect realism is actually hte case, but that we have to pretend direct realism. This is, I would think, the position of indirect realists in geenral? Not the debate here, but that struck me as odd.

But the argument being presented by Michale, Amadeus and perhaps yourself has the pretence of being scientific. — Banno

Which, as far as defeating the notion of Red being 'out there', it is. The discussion you're having (which is a bit muddled and equivocal - might be hte point, though) is about how we use the word Red. Fine. That's not what Michael and I are getting at. We're talking about the colour 'red' as-experienced. That has been clear for pages and pages.

Then you render your position unfalsifiable? Or you classify Subject 1001 as abnormal?

You see, it's not only about biomechanics because it involves the subject's report. This is the bit that goes unrecognised in the "mental percept" account. — Banno

Ok, this clarifies what you're trying to say which I very much thank you for.... But this is just a silly as the previous version.

It is about Biomechanics. Otherwise, your TE is pointless. If it were about self-report the first 1000 are unreliable anyway.

What are we to make of this? Will we be good scientists and acknowledge the theory falsified, because Subject 1001 reports that they see blue? Or are we going to say instead that Subject 1001 is mistaken? — Banno

You would investigate a biomechanical reason for this. If V4 firing causes X cascade in the brain(resulting in the 'Red' experience, that is to say) for all other subjects, then subject 1001 is an anomaly and we would be bad scientists for thinking they were mistaken as opposed to different. Is what we're calling V4 the same

And yet there are red pens. — Banno

This is bare assertion; the responses to it going ignored. Hand waved, if you will.

To point out that red does not "exist" in "the" mind. — Banno

Red doesn't 'exist'. It consists in an experience we've termed Red. That this is a purely mental phenomenon doesn't disappear because you've chosen slightly less rigid language.

That seems to apply equally to C4 fibres and pain as well as V4 and seeing red. — creativesoul

Yes. I cannot fathom how this, if taken as true, allows Banno to pretend Red is in the pen. It isn't even part of hte process that gets us to Red, in this context.

Now the word "red" is no longer in books, on paper, spoken aloud for everyone to hear, or on our screens... it exists only in the mind. — creativesoul

This seems to be the (honestly, stupid) mis-interpretation Banno is running with. Its a bizarre one, and not hte position being put forward.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure exactly what you are saying. Too many dots. — Ludwig V

Incredulousness. It's utterly insane that cyclists are legally allowed in bus lanes. Utterly bewilderingly dangerous - and it encourages cyclists to blame everyone else.

Huh. Interesting.

I'm unsure why this is written this way. This is actually encouraged in standardized Police-led cycling classes in Primary schools because children cycling on the road is an utterly deranged thing to push. This was true when I took those classes in 1996 and was true when my son did in 2017. Well see when my step son gets them next year. It may be that the wheel diameter regulation is to capture this.

Both law firms i've worked at are not under the impression this is an illegality LOL. Fair few fines being handed out for this in Wellington though (no surprises).

We can firm it up. There are true statements about unobserved things. "The cup is in the dishwasher" is true, even though we can't see the cup.

So if asked where the cup is, I'll say "It's in the dishwasher" rather then "I last saw it when I closed the door on the dishwasher, but I've no idea where it is now, or even if it still exists. You might try looking inside the dishwasher to see if it reappears". — Banno

This isn't anythign to do with truth, but practicality. Taking those words as true is helpful.

I see no contradiction in what you quoted of me in this post. — Apustimelogist

That's a shame. The two phrases are in direct contradiction.

you are addressing something vastly different to what I have written. — Banno

No, that doesn't seem to be hte case. It seems to be hte case that you're not really understanding what Michael and I have said in response to your position.

If you had just said "yes" in response to my question, it would have been clear. But given your response here, it remains to be seen whether you're even understanding the point.

"Red" does not exist outside the mind. This is true whether or not you take 'Red' to refer to "a" thing or "multiple" things. It isn't "out there", regardless.

In any case, I was trying to have you commit to a position on "Red" which is an apt thing to want you to do. If you position boils down to "Well, it doesn't matter - use it how you use it" then why are you here? If your position is that Red is something other than a mental experience of an "actual" thing then I would want to know what on God's Green Earth you could be referring to, given that Red is not mind-independent?

I did? Where? I'd like the context. — Banno

This is also what I got from you, so it's highly likely you misspoke if that's not your intention. Given I quoted you exactly saying colour words are used to refer to multiple things, this cannot be a failure of understanding or a confusion on our part. What do you refer to when saying "red"?

Why shouldn't we use the same word to refer to multiple, different things... indeed this seems to be exactly how colour words are used. They refer to multiple things that are quite different. — Banno

Is this to say you understand (if not accept) that Red the epxerience and Red the frequency range (if you insist on muddying hte water) aren't the same thing?

If so, the blatant confusion this is causing to erudite thinkers such as we'me (lmao) over something as simple as what Colour is should be reasno enough

Why do you trust a Geiger counter to tell you the local level of radiation? — Michael

Michael is now being slightly obtuse, but I think it's because he has answered this:

The experience resembles the cause. The reading of a Geiger counter does not resemble being irradiated.

Pretty clear Trump wont win now.

I do think, though, that it's pretty clear it's not Kamala winning but Trump leaning into all his worst aspects - as if that were the way to win an election smh. Even his voters probably prefer someone cogent, but dangerous, to someone intransigently irrational (and dangerous). And that's just perceptions - im sure the reality is worse for both.

therefore if direct realism is true then indirect realism is true — Michael

Haha, I'm not quite sure this is the conclusion that is required here - I think he's pointing out that it's likely neither are the whle story. But this was very, very funny.

I really don't like mine, so It's hard to comment but I have an (i take to be) intrinsic, unshakeable love for Ireland. I am Irish, but I've never lived there - just visited. Odd.

There should be even more pressure than there is already to separate pedal cycles from cars and other lethal heavy machinery. That's also just common sense. — Ludwig V

Here in NZ, cycles are legal on footpaths (we have a massive, shit-headed Green Lobby here that are insufferably stupid) and .......................................................... bus lanes.

That is exactly what I said you said. It is the exact same claim: You cannot infer anything objectively. So i take the inference, but you cannot add that its in an 'objective way' on the end - which is what I clarified and objected to.

you cannot know the intrinsic nature of the world but you can infer that the world indeed does exist when you are not looking at it. — Apustimelogist

What creates the depth perception of pain inside your lungs instead of a pain inside your bowels? — Lionino

You quoted from the comment which is, in almost it's entirety, a response to this:

the direction of stimulation is extremely influential on how we perceive the stimulus. Throwing one's voice is a good example of where this is writ large - despite there being no voice coming from the direction one perceives (when on the receiving end!) - that is what one perceives. We can even be tricked about hte direction stimulus is coming from. Not being able to locate an itch is another perfect example. "I can't put my finger on it" has developed out of this experiential norm. — AmadeusD

You could add phantom limb sensation to this as an exemplar of why it's totally wrong to think the pain is either occurring, or derived from, the cells you are perceiving to be hurt. They are injured. Not painful. Your mind creates the pain to alert you to the injury - and is very, very often inaccurate. Hell, seeing blood can increase the level of pain in an injury.

so too are there distinguishing properties of red and white images, and also distinguishing properties of the two sets of code that generates those different images. — Leontiskos

Those distinguishing features are not colours and we cannot accurately map them, other than standardized terminology such as ranges of frequency. It says nothing for their quality or how they have the mind (usually) spitting out a certain colour experience. "not knowing" isn't hte same as "knowing it's not".

Understanding the correct cause doesn't dispel the illusion. It becomes predictable. We can now predict when we will experience a mirage based on certain environmental conditions.

What I find so odd is when someone makes these scientific explanations, like frank did above, as if that somehow makes what we experience questionable, when science is based on empirical observations. — Harry Hindu

I'm finding it hard to tell whether you're partial to an indirect, or a direct conception of perception. But, given my own position i'll respond to what I see:

The first part: Fully agree. Understanding that C fibres fire, travel to the brain, and hte brain creates an illusion of "pain in the toe" rather than "signals from the toe being translated to pain to ensure I address the injured toe" has nothing to do with whether there is pain "in the toe". There plainly is not.

However, these are scientific explanations: The way pain works shuts down the option of direct perception of it. Hanover has made a similar point, and also noted that it just goes ignored - hand-waved away instead of confronted.

The science of perception, optical physiology, psychology and (in this context) the mechanics of pain fly in the face of a 'direct perception' account. It isn't even coherent, which has been shown several times. I personally find it helpful to continue the discussion, because it helps to streamline and economize responses to clearly inapt descriptions of experience. Intuitive, yes, but as helpful as folk psychology in understanding what's 'really' going on.

BUT, even with ALL of that said, if the point is that perception is necessarily indirect, then science can only get us so far. Observations are all we have - and I think Michael and I hit a bit of a curvy dead end with this issue. But, personally, I'm happy to just say science is the best use of our perception in understanding regularities of nature. Not much more could be said, unless we're just going to take the socially-apt chats about it at face value for practical reasons. In that case "science is objective" makes sense - but is just not true.

When you dream or hallucinate seeing a colour, you have the experience, but you don't see anything, and that's why they're called dreams and hallucinations. — jkop

I want to try to clarify this before responding - your position is that despite hte experiences being (at times, anyway) indistinguishable, they are not both experiences of colour?

I need this clarified, as currently, what you've asserted is bare nonsense. Your description actually supports the idea that colour does not reside in the object, but that, even so, you require an object to instantiate the colour? Are you saying the brain "records" colour from objects and replays it to itself while dreaming? Because... Ha...ha?

I would suggest the risk of designing your life oblivious to the dangers of lethal moving machines probably influences the over-all attitude toward accommodating cars.

Why not? — Apustimelogist

Perhaps you missed the aim with that quoteset - I'm sorry if it was insufficiently clear. I was trying to clever lol. I'll remove the quotes and just assert the position I think you're committed to, so the response is 'direct'.

"An inference which you've made about the world based on repeated experience can directly translate to a conception of the world in an objective way"

To me, this is plainly untrue (I think the problem in 'the thinking' is the same in the below example, which obvs ill get to lol). You cannot "objectively" infer anything, from anything. All you can say is "this is the best assumption available". No apodicticity or veridicality in it (although, I understand that by accident, you might still be 'correct').

If you have a mere inference about some proposition about 'the world' out there, you do not have any objective way to ascertain the accuracy of your inference. This is where Science is supposed to step in - but lets not open that can. But two examples I've raised for different reasons elsewhere are tides/waves and shadows. You can't accurately infer the shape of the object which caused a shadow from the shadow. You can accidentally be right, but the angles of light, the angle of hte object, the shape of hte surface, any intermediary issues like bright light or coloured light will affect the image you receive

If the tide near you has gone out, you might be about to drown. You couldn't know by inference. You'd naturally infer "Oh, the tide's gone out" or perhaps "Oh, the tide's gone out at a weird time" but that gives you no objectivity as to whether a Tsunami is coming.

As to the second comment, it really does depend what you're asking. It could be more like "Why do people take fire to exist?" Which is easily answerable (im sure I don't even need to do it for you).

Or, you could be asking why people are certain that fire exists. That one is more awkward, but probably because the benchmark for certainty is not the benchmark for apodicticity. Being certain means "beyond a reasonable doubt" not "beyond a logical possibility" and it is entirely logically possible fire does not exist (at least not in the form we take it to, let's say). Certainty just means you aren't questoning your position. Apodicticity means your position cannot be questioned on logical grounds (think law of identity).

I don't hold that Fire doesn't exist, but i am very, very much open to it not actually being in the form we perceive. It may be that fire is colourless to many animals, for instance, and only our perceptual apparatus allows us to essentially go "BIG HOT RED BAD LEAVE NOW". We have plenty of evolutionary ways to explain why we are how we are - including why we perceive colours, shapes and difference in general the way we do: Survival. There's nothing objective in this and I think Hoffman is at the very least, thinking about hte right things in this area. Pretending we know apodictically what's going on leads to dictators lol (that is genuinely jest, but i suppose there's something in it).

I don't really know what you're getting at here. China is not a very atheist country, at all.

In absolute numbers, China has the largest number of atheists in the world. There are countries with a larger percentage of atheists but the actual number of individuals is always a lot smaller. — Tarskian

Then your claim was misleading. 14.3% of China is Atheist according to those numbers you gave.
The top five countries for atheist begin their ranges at 65%(Japan) upward to 85% (Sweden).

I'm not trying to jump down your throat - but you need to be careful when you make claims like that. China cannot be even vaguely thought of as an atheist country.

What is being rejected here is not the physiology. What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives. — Banno

No, it doesn't do that at all and that's also entirely irrelevant to what is, at base, an empirical question. Is a wavelength of light the colour we perceive, when we don't perceive it?

Obviously not. Additionally, several physiological descriptions of light and sight, coupled with the knows facts of perception, fly entirely in the face of your position including those provided by Michael [url=http:// ]here[/url]

You're obviously free to reject them, but there is an extremely steep uphill battle for anyone claiming the experience of red is the wavlength of light which triggered it. To such a degree that I would call you Sisyphus.

Having

an inference — Apustimelogist

made about the world translate to a conception of the world ..

in an objectuve way. — Apustimelogist

Hmmm, I'm not sure I can accept this position.

At the same time, knowing that there exists a certain thing in the world doesn't mean one has to know the intrinsic nature of that thing, in the same way that someone might know fire exists but not know what fire is. — Apustimelogist

Non sequitur with the fire part. That's because the underlined is not true. To claim that you know that something exists does entail knowing something about it's intrinsic nature (i.e non-illusory for instance) as best i can tell.