I ask the hard question because he keep stating that pain and color occur with appropriate brain activity. If the hard problem isn't solved then it is a logical possibility that color and pain doesnt necessarily occur with brain activity. It might occur with any type of computational process, like in a robot.Because you keep asking the hard question. We don't have an answer to it.
All I am explaining is what the science shows; that pain and colour are percepts that occur when there is the appropriate brain activity; they are not mind-independent properties of knives and pens. — Michael
You keep confusing what is lost in translation with what is irrelevant to the situation. I don't need to know about how you feel about your loss to know where to find where they are buried. I don't need to know where they are buried to know how you are feeling about losing someone you love because I have lost loved ones too, so I understand what you are feeling. Why do we even have words the refer to mental states if something is lost when using them? How do you even know what is lost, if anything, without knowing the contents of another's mind when telling them about your feelings?Heavy emphasis of "partially." Words aren't useless. They are massively important to communicate with one another. Words are an interpretation of mental states into symbols. The mental states stay behind and the symbols do the best they can to project one's thoughts to another. Much is lost in translation. — Hanover
If the information about the damage comes from tactile sensors rather than reflected light in its camera eyes, does that qualify as pain? — Harry Hindu
Is arguing about semantics that interesting? — Lionino
Except when we say that the pen is red we are not (ordinarily) saying that the pen has a surface layer of atoms that reflects light with a wavelength of ~700nm. — Michael
e.g. when we explain variations in colour perception, such that some see a white and gold dress and some see a black and blue dress — Michael
the colours they see are mental percepts — Michael
1. If the black and white colors on TPF did not exist, then I would not be able to read posts.
2. But I can read posts.
3. Therefore, the black and white colors on TPF do exist. — Leontiskos
There is one side insisting that red is the experience that we have of red and the other side that red is the thing that causes the experience, for several pages now. — Lionino
We mean that the pen has a property of redness, and the specialist is simply explaining what that property is constituted by (i.e. it is constituted by light reflection of a certain wavelength). — Leontiskos
So you want to say something like "the pen is red, but not actually red". This is enough to convince me that your account is mistaken. And shows well the sorts of word games you will play in your metaphysics. — Banno
Which brings us, as many will have foreseen, to Kant. It was Kant who persuaded philosophy that one can be, simultaneously and without contradiction, an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. That is, it was Kant who gave us the idea that there is a way of saying the same sort of thing as real live sceptics like Aenesidemus used to say, namely, ‘The knowing subject contributes to what is known,’ which nevertheless does not impugn the objectivity of the judgements in which the knowledge is expressed. Where Aenesidemus would cite the empirical factors (jaundice and the like) which obstruct objective knowledge, the Kantian principle that objects have to conform to our understanding is designed to show that our judgements are validated, not impugned, by the contribution of the knowing mind. But Kant can make this claim, famously difficult as it is, only because in his philosophy the pre-supposition link is well and truly broken. ‘The stove is warm,’ taken empirically, implies no philosophical view at the transcendental level where from now on the philosophical battle will be fought. Empirical realism is invulnerable to scepticism and compatible with transcendental idealism.47
In this way, with the aid of his distinction of levels (insulation de iure), Kant thought to refute scepticism once and for all. The effect, however, was that scepticism itself moved upstairs to the transcendental level. — Burnyeat, The sceptic in his place and time, pp. 343-4
I just read Myles Burnyeat's, "The sceptic in his place and time," (quoted here). His topic is "insulation": that whereby one insulates philosophical claims from everyday claims and everyday claims from philosophical claims. I think Michael is the premiere representative of insulation on TPF. — Leontiskos
There is no color in light. Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus. This distinction is critical for understanding neural representations, which must transition from a representation of a physical retinal image to a mental construct for what we see. Here, we dissociated the physical stimulus from the color seen by using an approach that causes changes in color without altering the light stimulus. We found a transition from a neural representation for retinal light stimulation, in early stages of the visual pathway (V1 and V2), to a representation corresponding to the color experienced at higher levels (V4 and VO1).
People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive.
One of the major problems with color has to do with fitting what we seem to know about colors into what science (not only physics but the science of color vision) tells us about physical bodies and their qualities. It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess. Oceans and skies are not blue in the way that we naively think, nor are apples red (nor green). Colors of that kind, it is believed, have no place in the physical account of the world that has developed from the sixteenth century to this century.
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Physicists who have subscribed to this doctrine include the luminaries: Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, Newton, Thomas Young, Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz. Maxwell, for example, wrote:
"It seems almost a truism to say that color is a sensation; and yet Young, by honestly recognizing this elementary truth, established the first consistent theory of color. (Maxwell 1871: 13 [1970: 75])"
This combination of eliminativism—the view that physical objects do not have colors, at least in a crucial sense—and subjectivism—the view that color is a subjective quality—is not merely of historical interest. It is held by many contemporary experts and authorities on color, e.g., Zeki 1983, Land 1983, and Kuehni 1997.
That's not the sense of redness that is our ordinary, everyday conception of colour. — Michael
Our ordinary, everyday conception of colour is that of the mental percepts that light stimulating the eyes causes to occur — Michael
All I am doing here is explaining what the science shows... — Michael
The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive.
How can I experience colour!? What if I never experienced red colour, and you asked me for a red pen? I would feel a big feeling of anxiety in my chest because I would not know what to hand you. But I know that pens are for writing. Why do you want it red? Choosy boy. — javi2541997
There is no external red. At best, there is an external object that elicits a phenomenal state of red. Just like pain. There is no external pain. At best, there is an external object that elicits pain. — Hanover
has a property of redness — Leontiskos
Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? — Leontiskos
If the information about the damage comes from tactile sensors rather than reflected light in its camera eyes, does that qualify as pain? — Harry Hindu
What I mean by information is the form pain takes and the form colors take and the form smells and tastes and sounds take in your consciousness. What I mean by information is the aboutness that your sensory impressions take in that your sensory impressions are not the pen or the injury, but ABOUT the pen and the injury. When you feel pain are you not informed that you have an injury? When you see the red of the apple are you not informed that the apple is ripe? You can be informed about being injured in other ways by sight as you pointed out, but the sensory impression you experience is dependent upon the type of sense that is being used - your nerve endings in your skin vs your eyes.What do you mean by "information"? Are you referring to the chemical neurotransmitters like glutomate that are released and sent to the brain? They, themselves, are not pain. The experience of pain occurs when there is the appropriate neural activity in the insular and secondary somatosensory cortexes, which usually occurs in response to these neurotransmitters, but direct electrical stimulation of these cortexes without any preceding tactile sensor involvement also causes pain. — Michael
I should point out that when I stub my toe, I feel the pain in my toe, not my head. — Harry Hindu
‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’ would be almost too much for a Pyrrhonist to swallow. — Post on Indirect Realism
Why do we even have words the refer to mental states if something is lost when using them? — Harry Hindu
If I made it to the grave sight after telling me how to get there nothing was lost in translation. If I say "I understand how you feel" when you tell me how you feel nothing was lost in translation. — Harry Hindu
Then how do you not confuse a stubbed toe with a headache? — Harry Hindu
Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? (Note that your word "elicits" already tells us that there is an external basis for differing color perceptions.) — Leontiskos
I should point out that when I stub my toe, I feel the pain in my toe, not my head — Harry Hindu
Consider 2 sets of computer code, one that projects an image of a white pen on the screen and a second that projects a red pen on the screen. Which code is white? — Hanover
The idea here seems to be that we first state that the pen is red, and then we learn something about the way the eye or the mind processes color, and we then conclude that our statement must have been false. This is a very odd idea. It involves the strange notion that our statement must have been opposed to what we went on to learn. — Leontiskos
Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code. — Leontiskos
Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code. — Leontiskos
Do you think that pens do not really exist, and the mind is just projecting them? That there is no difference between a dream or a hallucination and reality? — Leontiskos
I'm not sure what "aboutness" has to do with anything being discussed here. — Michael
In this analogy, the code is the noumena and the color is the phenomenal. — Hanover
The point being that there is no reason to claim any property on the noumenal. The pen and the perception of the pen need bear no relationship to one another. — Hanover
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