There's obviously more to pain than language use. — frank

Not just that, pain determines language use. Pain is one of the things that show what words like "good" and "bad" mean.

Scientists find woman who sees 99 million more colours than others

Newcastle University neuroscientist Dr. Gabriele Jordan, recently announced that she has identified a woman who is a "tetrachromat," that is, a woman with the ability to see much greater colour depth than the ordinary person.
...
According to Discover Magazine, in 2007, Jordan, now at Newcastle, developed more powerful methods for identifying women with tetrachromatic vision. She chose 25 women all of whom had a fourth cone and tested them for tetrachromatic vision. She identified one woman tagged cDa29, who got all questions designed to detect an extended range of colour vision correct. Jordan told Discover Magazine: “I was jumping up and down." After 20 years of search she had finally found a true tetrachomat.
Discover Magazine reports that Jay Neitz, vision researcher at the University of Washington, believes that all women with four cones have potential for tetrachromatic vision but most need to develop or awaken the ability. Neitz said: “Most of the things that we see as coloured are manufactured by people who are trying to make colours that work for trichromats. It could be that our whole world is tuned to the world of the trichromat.”
Neittz also suggested that the natural environment may not have sufficient hues of colours to harness the full potentials of tetrachromatic vision. He said that people with four cones may be helped to develop full tetrachromatic vision if they regularly visit a lab where they are exposed to vision experiences that will help then develop the cognitive skills to identify a richer variety of hues.
An intriguing question that arose was: How does cDa29 see the world? She was unable to communicate her experience to the researchers in much the same way as it is impossible to describe the experience of red to a dichromatic person. Jordan says: “This private perception is what everybody is curious about. I would love to see that.”

______________________________________

So all the men here are colourblind, and an estimated 88% of the women.

'The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.'
Robert Louis Stevenson.

Pain is a thing, an aspirin is a thing. The world is so full of a number of things, of different kinds. What are we getting so hung up about?

It's just that the assumption that pain is a thing is misguided. — Banno

If it isn't a thing, what is it?

Reincarnation and eternal life are just wishful thinking, and the religions that exploit such beliefs are con tricks.

I've read it all twice and thought about it. You may be right that the sentence needs to be read in context, but I don't understand the context.

Ever been knocked out or had a general anaesthetic? Our conscious experiences are due to our brains. If they are aren't working, no conscious experience. So enjoy life now because when it's over it's over.

I don't know if this will help you all, but it is fascinating. One point that particularly interested me: the researchers said that they believed the therapy almost immediately restored colour vision, but it took the monkeys weeks to realise they could now see new colours.

________________________________________________________________________

Colour blindness corrected by gene therapy

Treated monkeys can now see in technicolour.

Researchers have used gene therapy to restore colour vision in two adult monkeys that have been unable to distinguish between red and green hues since birth — raising the hope of curing colour blindness and other visual disorders in humans.

"This is a truly amazing study," says András Komáromy, a vision researcher and veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. "If we can target gene expression specifically to cones [in humans] then this has a tremendous implication."

About 1 in 12 men lack either the red- or the green-sensitive photoreceptor proteins that are normally present in the colour-sensing cells, or cones, of the retina, and so have red–green colour blindness. A similar condition affects all male squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus), which naturally see the world in just two tones. The colour blindness in the monkeys arises because full colour vision requires two versions of the opsin gene, which is carried on the X chromosome. One version codes for a red-detecting photoreceptor, the other for a green-detecting photoreceptor. As male monkeys have only one X chromosome, they carry only one version of the gene and are inevitably red–green colour blind. A similar deficiency accounts for the most common form of dichromatic color blindness in humans. Fewer female monkeys suffer from the condition as they have two X chromosomes, and often carry both versions of the opsin gene.

"Here is an animal that is a perfect model for the human condition," says Jay Neitz of the University of Washington in Seattle, a member of the team that carried out the experiment.
Computer test for colour blindnessThe monkeys were trained to touch a screen when they saw coloured patches.Neitz Laboratory

Neitz and his colleagues introduced the human form of the red-detecting opsin gene into a viral vector, and injected the virus behind the retina of two male squirrel monkeys — one named Dalton in honour of the British chemist, John Dalton, who was the first to describe his own colour blindness in 1794, and the other named Sam. The researchers then assessed the monkeys' ability to find coloured patches of dots on a background of grey dots by training them to touch coloured patches on a screen with their heads, and then rewarding them with grape juice. The test is a modified version of the standard 'Cambridge Colour Test' where people must identify numbers or other specific patterns in a field of coloured dots.

Colour coded

After 20 weeks, the monkeys' colour skills improved dramatically, indicating that Dalton and Sam had acquired the ability to see in three shades (see video). Both monkeys have retained this skill for more than two years with no apparent side effects, the researchers report in Nature1.

Adding the missing gene was sufficient to restore full colour vision without further rewiring of the brain even though the monkeys had been colour blind since birth. "There is this plasticity still in the brain and it is possible to treat cone defects with gene therapy," says Alexander Smith, a molecular biologist and vision researcher at University College London, who did not contribute to the study.

"It doesn't seem like new neural connections have to be formed," says Komáromy. "You can add an additional cone opsin pigment and the neural circuitry and visual pathways can deal with it."

Do you think a piano feels something when you press the keys?

It is only recently we have discovered the importance of formative years in shaping a child's viewpoint. — Corinne

Francis Xavier, the founder of the Jesuit order, said "Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man". It became a sort of motto of this organisation. He died in 1552.

I will argue that it is essential to put this sentence in the context in which it was written to see what makes it meaningful ( — Antony Nickles

I'm willing to try to understand your point. Is the above your point?

So understanding has to do with perceiving meaning? What do you mean by, "perceive"? Is the computer not perceiving certain inputs from your mouse and keyboard? Does it not perceive the meaning of your keystrokes and mouse clicks and make the correct characters appear on the screen and windows open for you to look at? — Harry Hindu

Thanks very much for this Harry.

No, the computer is not perceiving inputs in the way you and I perceive things. Press a finger against the back of your hand. You feel a sensation. When you press a key on the computer keyboard, the computer doesn't feel a sensation.

Shall we try to agree on this before we move on to the rest of your ideas?

I'll be in my room.

Indirect speech acts (Wikipedia!)

In the course of performing speech acts we communicate with each other. The content of communication may be identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be communicated, as when a stranger asks, "What is your name?"

However, the meaning of the linguistic means used (if ever there are linguistic means, for at least some so-called "speech acts" can be performed non-verbally) may also be different from the content intended to be communicated. One may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter ...!", or one can promise to do the dishes by saying, "Me!"

One common way of performing speech acts is to use an expression which indicates one speech act, and indeed performs this act, but also performs a further speech act, which is indirect. One may, for instance, say, "Peter, can you close the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he will be able to close the window, but also requesting that he does so. Since the request is performed indirectly, by means of (directly) performing a question, it counts as an indirect speech act.

An even more indirect way of making such a request would be to say, in Peter's presence in the room with the open window, "I'm cold." The speaker of this request must rely upon Peter's understanding of several items of information that is not explicit: that the window is open and is the cause of them being cold, that being cold is an uncomfortable sensation and they wish it to be taken care of, and that Peter cares to rectify this situation by closing the window. This, of course, depends much on the relationship between the requester and Peter—he might understand the request differently if they were his boss at work than if they were his girlfriend or boyfriend at home. The more presumed information pertaining to the request, the more indirect the speech act may be considered to be.

Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example, if a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and the other replies, "I have class." The second speaker has used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection.

This poses a problem for linguists, as it is confusing (on a rather simple approach) to see how the person who made the proposal can understand that his proposal was rejected. Searle suggests that the illocutionary force of indirect speech acts can be derived by means of a Gricean reasoning process[18]; however, the process he proposes does not seem to accurately solve the problem[citation needed].

In other words, this means that one does not need to say the words apologize, pledge, or praise in order to show they are doing the action. All the examples above show how the actions and indirect words make something happen rather than coming out straightforward with specific words and saying it.

Could you all go and talk somewhere else please?

there are parts of language, things we do with words, for which the meaning is not given by the referent, but is instead found in the role these utterances and scribbles play in our day to day lives? — Banno

The councilors refused to allow the protestors to hold their demonstration because they advocated violence.

The councilors refused to allow the protestors to hold their demonstration because they abhorred violence.

Here's the relevant bits — creativesoul

That was both cool and super, I learned something, thank you!

Morse code was devised by one conscious individual, for use by other conscious individuals. The genetic code developed due to unconscious forces.

The term "code" is used literally with something like Morse code, but metaphorically with something like the genetic code.

Morse used the (metaphorical!) codes in his brain and the other aspects of his consciousness to create a non-metaphorical "actual" code which involved sending electrical pulses through a wire.

With the genetic code there's only the metaphorical level, no conscious designer. The same is true of the bacterium. I found that such a beautiful revelation, that we can explain what looks like conscious activity through purely unconscious (chemical) means.

I don't understand your motivation in wanting to say that Morse code and the genetic code are equivalent.

Are you being disingenuous Olivier? [not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does]

Do you understand the relevant difference between Morse code and the genetic code, or would you like me to explain it to you?

Do you think Morse code emerged naturally? Can you see the difference between the way Morse code emerged and the way the genetic code emerged?

In your initial post you said:

Under my below definitions, for example, a virus is alive. So, if you do not regard a virus as a living being then you have to point out exactly where/how my definition is flawed, and argue why a virus is inanimate matter.

So in order to come up with a definition which is not flawed, one would need to know already whether a virus is alive or not; one would need to know the true definition of life. You're asking your readers to come up with a better definition than yours, but that would require them to know in advance what the correct definition of life is, or to put it another way, it would require them to know in advance whether crystals or viruses are alive.

You try to suggest that you are pursuing the scientific method, but that would require your hypothesis to be falsifiable. Your hypothesis is "A virus fits the correct definition of 'alive'". But this can only be confirmed or falsified if we already know the correct definition.

This is a philosophy forum.

How do you think it developed Olivier, really?

How is the translation tool's understanding different than a brain's understanding? — Harry Hindu

It doesn't have any understanding. It doesn't perceive the intended meaning, it doesn't perceive anything. It isn't equipped to perceive anything.

Semantics, meaning, is not intrinsic to the physics of my PC. The semantics is ascribed, in this case by me, when I tell it how to translate words and phrases.

The translation tool often produces quite spooky results, it certainly looks like it understands to a naive observer, but it's easy to see that it doesn't understand when you allow it to translate on its own without my intervention (which I never do in practice).

There's a very interesting paper here on the limits of machine translation: http://vantage-siam.com/upload/casestudies/file/file-139694565.pdf

One of the author's conclusions is that "linguistic meaning is derived from the role things and people play in everyday life". I said something about this above, using the word "good" and the translation of machine assembly instructions as examples.

If the translation tool's understanding was the same as mine, as you seem to want to believe, then machine translation would be as good as human translation. But it isn't!

So if the genetic code was written by God (or some alien race), then it is actual coding, but if it is the result of random variations, then it is not actual coding. By this reasoning, you cannot know if the genetic code is an ‘actual code’ or not, because you don’t know who wrote it. — Olivier5

How do you think it developed Olivier, really? How do you think the bacterium's ability to swim up a chemical gradient developed, really?

I do hope you'll consider what I said about definitions before you waste any more time and effort. If you're trying to correctly define "action", you will need to know in advance what the correct definition is.

We can’t synthesise the mechanism from scratch yet, which means we are still guessing how it might work. Note that all the flagella have to paddle in the same direction, so the process involves some uniform sense of spatial direction, which ain’t easy to do with mere chemistry. — Olivier5

Well I'm afraid you haven't quite understood the description of what the bacterium is doing. The (to me) astonishing truth is that the bacterium does swim in the direction of the higher concentration of attractant chemical, it does achieve this entirely by means of biochemistry and biophysics, and we're not guessing how it works, we know precisely how it works, it's set out in those papers.

But this is just nitpicking. More importantly, how would you propose that we differentiate « real codes » from « unreal codes »? Is the genetic code not real, and why? — Olivier5

The genetic code is not "actual coding", coding here is again a metaphor, the whole amazing thing happens by what you call "mere chemistry". "Actual coding" takes place in the way you describe for the colour coding of a map, it's an activity which requires the involvement of conscious agents with the cognitive capacity to make use of symbols.

Hi Sir Philo,

There's a serious problem with seeking a correct definition like this. In order to know if you have found the correct definition, you need to know already what the correct definition is.

Frankish, who we've been talking about in another thread, says that we don't have qualia, but we do have experiences. So he thinks there's a distinction. But I've given up trying to understand why. Hope that helps.

Instead, the brain is handling particular kinds of "experiential information" - visual, tactile, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, etc.

But that then becomes a dualistic framing of the situation because he is talking about qualia and all the metaphysical problems that must ensue from there. — apokrisis

This is the introduction to Searle's 2004 book Mind, A Brief Introduction.

INTROD U C T I O N
Why I Wrote This Book
There are many recent introductory books on the philoso-
phy of mind. Several give a more or less comprehensive
survey of the main positions and arguments currently in
the field. Some, indeed, are written with great clarity, rigor,
intelligence, and scholarship. What then is my excuse for
adding another book to this glut? Well, of course, any
philosopher who has worked hard on a subject is unlikely
to be completely satisfied with somebody else’s writings on
that same subject, and I suppose that I am a typical
philosopher in this respect. But in addition to the usual
desire for wanting to state my disagreements, there is an
overriding reason for my wanting to write a general intro-
duction to the philosophy of mind. Almost all of the works
that I have read accept the same set of historically inherited
categories for describing mental phenomena, especially
consciousness, and with these categories a certain set of
assumptions about how consciousness and other mental
phenomena relate to each other and to the rest of the world.
It is this set of categories, and the assumptions that the
categories carry like heavy baggage, that is completely
unchallenged and that keeps the discussion going. The
different positions then are all taken within a set of
mistaken assumptions. The result is that the philosophy of
mind is unique among contemporary philosophical sub-
jects, in that all of the most famous and influential theories
are false. By such theories I mean just about anything that
has “ism” in its name. I am thinking of dualism, both
property dualism and substance dualism, materialism,
physicalism, computationalism, functionalism, behavior-
ism, epiphenomenalism, cognitivism, eliminativism, pan
psychism, dual-aspect theory, and emergentism, as it is
standardly conceived. To make the whole subject even
more poignant, many of these theories, especially dualism
and materialism, are trying to say something true. One of
my many aims is to try to rescue the truth from the
overwhelming urge to falsehood. I have attempted some of
this task in other works, especially The Rediscovery of the
Mind, but this is my only attempt at a comprehensive
introduction to the entire subject of the philosophy of
mind.

____________________________________________________________

There's also this: Why I Am Not A Property Dualist: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~paller/dialogue/propertydualism.pdf

Whether the bacterium is conscious or not is hard to decide empirically. I am ready to assume it is not conscious in the common meaning of this word (human of course), but it’s an assumption. — Olivier5

Bacteria swim towards chemical attractants. They need to move towards the higher concentration of an attractant, which means keeping track over time whether the concentration is higher where they are now than where they were some time ago. This is how it works:

The changes in MCP conformation that inhibit CheA lead to relatively slow increases in MCP methylation by CheR, so that despite the continued presence of attractant, CheA activity is eventually restored to the same value it had in the absence of attractant. Conversely, CheB acts to demethylate the MCPs under conditions that cause elevated CheA activity. Methylation and demethylation occur much more slowly than phosphorylation of CheA and CheY. The methylation state of the MCPs can thereby provide a memory mechanism that allows a cell to compare its present situation to its recent past.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(02)01424-0.pdf

The chemotactic swimming is a result of rotation of flagella at speeds of ca. 18,000 rpm, and it is powered by the proton motive force. Flagellar motors are reversible in nature, helping to change bacterial tumbling into directional swimming by reversing the flagellar rotation from clockwise to counterclockwise. An environmental stimulus, e.g., light, oxygen, chemical, etc., is sensed by a receptor and signals in the form of two-component regulatory systems are transmitted to the flagellar motors, which then move in the required direction.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC134409/

We understand the entire process of swimming towards the attractant at this level of detail. We know that the attractant chemicals react with chemicals in the cell, setting off a chain of reactions which eventually cause the flagella to rotate in such a way that the bacterium swims in the direction where the concentration of attractant is increasing.

When you know the full explanation for the bacterium's behaviour, it's just too much of a stretch to say "oh yeah, also it's conscious". There's just no reason to think it is.

The point I am trying to make is a little bit like what people call ‘color coding’. When one wants to represent, say, altitude on a map, one can do so with a set of colors associated to a set of altitude intervals. The colors code for altitude. Similarly, one could say that in vision, colors code for wavelengths. Tastes in the mouth code for certain chemicals in the food, etc. Qualia are symbolic in nature. — Olivier5

In the case of colour coding on a map, a conscious human devises the code and a conscious human interprets it. One thing stands for or symbolises another. We might call this "actual coding".

The cornea and lens refract light into a small image and shine it on the retina. The retina transduces this image into electrical pulses. This can be called coding, but that's a metaphor. It's not "actual coding".

I was responding to Olivier's use of the word "symbol". Let's try to focus on that for now.

The symbols are to point at certain parts of the experience. — khaled

Can you explain where and what these symbols are? Olivier says that colours are symbols. How do colours point at certain parts of the experience?

If you are the translator then why do you need a translation tool? Where do the translations reside - in your brain or in you tool? If you need to look them up in a tool, then the understanding of that particular translation is in the tool, not in your brain. — Harry Hindu

I don't need the translation tool Harry, I can do the translation on my own, the tool just saves me typing. When I come across a word that isn't in my Translation Memory I add it to the memory, together with the translation. Then the next time that word crops up I just push a button and the translation is inserted. The translation tool doesn't understand anything.

These are all unfounded assertions without anything to back it up. What are conscious experiences? What do you mean by, understand? — Harry Hindu

A dictionary definition of "understand" is "perceive the intended meaning of". Another dictionary says "to grasp the meaning of".

What do you think conscious experiences are?

The subject perceives the object through a symbolic representation...

... This physiological apparatus uses symbols. I’m not talking of articulated language here, but of the symbols that colors and tastes are. — Olivier5

I wonder if you could explain in broad terms how this works? Where colour is concerned, my understanding is that light of a certain wavelength reaches the eye, initiating a series of electrochemical impulses which eventually result in the experience of seeing a colour. The process can be described exhaustively in terms of electromagnetic radiation, electrochemical impulses and the like. It seems to me that there isn't anything left for symbols to do.

Of course we're not yet able to explain the part where the electrochemical impulses are turned into experiences, but we can explain the entire process whereby a bacterium for example responds (without conscious experience) to the presence of a particular chemical in its environment. Here again, once the process is described in terms of chemical reactions and so on, there doesn't seem to be anything left for symbols to do.

One of my translation agency customers told me he is now receiving texts translated by DeepL from his customers, with a request for the language to be improved. Meanwhile he has freelance translators sending in translations made with DeepL which they claim to have translated manually.

I'm puzzled as that would be exactly my point. Neurons and synapses can't be understood except as prime examples of the irreducible complexity of semiosis. — apokrisis

Just a misunderstanding then.

Searle says the brain doesn't do information processing: https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%20Brain%20a%20Digital%20Computer%20-%20John%20R.%20Searle.pdf

Page 34.

Neurons, synapses, that kind of thing.

It is very easy to head back into these kinds of confusions — apokrisis

I don't think I was confused. The physics of analogue computers and digital computers is not related to the physics of consciousness.

Neural network architectures, or even the analog computers that came before digital computers, are more embracing of actual physics. — apokrisis

Is that right? I thought a neural network was just a program running on a digital computer. And no analog computer has any connection with the physics of consciousness either.

The problem was that it makes that criticism very plainly, but doesn't then supply the argument for life's irreducible complexity that makes the counter-position of biology so compelling. — apokrisis

Searle frequently talks about the biological nature of consciousness, he refers to his position as "biological naturalism". It's not unreasonable for him to leave the biology to the biologists.

Do you have a special interest in tools for machine translation Olivier?