So all we can really say is that we experience Neural Activity not Physical Light.

Why say that we experience either? The story you are telling (and incidently it is just a story, not an argument) is a familiar one to me, it's just a more detailed account of the story that the blog page I linked to in an earlier post claims is ultimately incoherent.

Why? For me, the research is constrained to the fundamental case - the results from the fundamental case will have consequences for all cases based on that foundation.

And what about my observation that "red" is as ambiguous as most English words, and your approach ignores all but one of its possible meanings?

My interest is in the fundamental metaphysics of the theory of vision that Klinko is outlining and whether it reveals any such thing as the "hard problem" that he is talking about, and indeed whether it is even a coherent theory. All the other uses of "red" that you are talking about are metaphorical/otherwise derived from the use of "red" to describe a visible property of the surface of objects (which is far from being an unusual use of the word) so I ignore those other uses on the grounds that for my concerns, they are irrelevant.

What makes it go from being mistaken to self-deception? For that matter, what makes it either?

Your opinion?

I mean, she was right after-all.

Well, it certainly is my opinion that John's mother is deceiving herself, and the mistake she is making is not taking seriously evidence that ought to be taken seriously. You seem not to share that opinion, so perhaps - as in many cases of philosophical argument - we've arrived at a clash of intuitions. Of course, you might try to push the line that John's mother is not deceiving herself concerning the belief that John murdered Janet, but rather the belief that Johncould have murdered Janet and then start giving some counter-factual analysis of self-deception in terms of possible worlds - for all I know David Lewis has already done this. So in the end, perhaps the truth of falsity of the belief involved in self-deception might be argued to be an important concern.

When we talk about deception, particularly when we talk about someone deceiving an other, there are elements which make it what it is

However, even if my intuition about truth or falsity being a side issue in self-deception is misguided, I still insist that self-deception is not correctly modelled along the lines of one person deceiving another (although it would not be too hard to think of an example of one person deceiving another into believing a truth). John's mother is doing something wrong, she is making a mistake - ignoring evidence - that she, as a rational person, ought not to have made. Self-deception, in this sense, is as much (if not more) a moral issues as it is a metaphysical one.

So, deceiving oneself is always being mistaken, but not the other way around.

This might be right, but care needs to be taken to understand where the mistake lies. Deceiving yourself that some proposition P is true (or false) does not require that the mistake be about whether P is true (or false). In the example I gave John's mother believes that John did not murder Jane, and she is not mistaken about that because John really did not murder Jane, yet she is deceiving herself. If there is a role for mistake in that example it is her mistake of not taking the evidence stacked up against John seriously.

Lots of Americans hold the view that all politicians lie.

Even those who hold the view that all politicians lie probably do not find it acceptable that they should do so, so the deceiving politician can still be deceitful on my account - your counterexample seems misguided.

Rational process can involve putting certain kinds of logic to use. Para-consistent logic qualifies. Para-consistent logic holds that a statement can be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense. This logic has the ability to render any statement either true or false.

Do you see the problem?

Not really, but then perhaps there isn't a problem to see. First, paracconsistent logics do not render any substantive non-logical statement either true or false, they are just formalisms of different types of logicial consequence. Furthermore so-called true contradictions, even if acceptable within a paraconsistent logic, are limited to a special range of propositions (involving vagueness and the use of the truth predicate for instance). So the relevance of the existence of paraconsistent logics is unclear to me in the context of self-deception - particularly since on my account the truth or falsity of the belief concerned need not be relevant (as in the example I gave). Of course, if someone who appears to be self-deceiving were suddenly to start justifying their belief by quoting theorems from paraconsistent logics, then perhaps one would have to revisit the claim that they were deceiving themselves, but it would depend what belief they were trying to justify. You would need to give me a fleshed out example for me to see the real problem you are getting at.

"Red" is perhaps giving too much leeway to veer off the metaphysical point that Klinko is trying to hammer home. Let's go with "cadmium orange" instead.

There never is any kind of Seeing in the sense that we think we understand it. There is always only Detection.

But this is precisely the claim that needs arguing for, not assuming. You are telling a story about vision that may or may not lead to a hard problem, but you have provided no argument that your account of vision that leads to that problem is correct - including, by the way, the pretty brute realism that underlies it.

So it seems clear that the process that produces the Red in the two different cases must be the same.

Again, just assumptions. What if I insist that in the one case what is produced is the seeing of something red and in the other the mere representation of something red? In that case the processes are different.

So self deception is when one doesn't do what another thinks they ought?

There is something wrong in being self-deceptive, one is doing something one should not be doing. Note that there is a difference between one person being deceitful to another and one person simply deceiving another (magicians deceive people, but when they do so, they are not being deceitful). What in general that is added to deceptive behaviour in order to make it deceitful is that some social norms of acceptable behaviour are being violated. Self-deception retains from deceitfulness that aspect of its being wrong, and since that is based on social norms it would follow that when one is deceiving oneself it involves going against what others believe one ought to be doing/have done. Solitary self-deception probably makes as little sense as solitary rule following.

As for a criterion, let me have a stab at one (there may be others): refusal to engage in a rational process that one is aware exists, that one can engage fully in and where that refusal is motivated by the fact that it may undermine a cherished belief (might need to add that an alternative rational process is engaged in which provides - perhaps superficial - support for the cherished belief).

And I do for the moment at least stand by the idea that the truth or falsity of the cherished belief need not be relevant as to whether a person is engaging in self-deception. Suppose John is accused of murdering Janet. John's mother believes that John did not murder Janet. The evidence is stacked up against John - video surveillance, finger prints, motive, means, opportunity etc. Rather than examine the evidence for what it is, John's mother insists that she knows her Johnny, he's a gentle boy that she brought up and would not harm a soul and so he did not murder that man-eating Janet. Now, suppose that John really did want to murder Janet, and on the day in question went with malice of forethought to her appartment to kill her. Arriving there, Janet is already butchered, so John flees the scene after accidentally leaving some top quality finger prints, and is caught on camera entering and exiting the building. John's mother has a true belief that her son did not murder Janet, but she's still engaging in self-deception - at least arguably. Of course, unpacking the example might expose it as not showing what I think it shows, but examples have to start somewhere.

Is that a distinction with a difference in this context?

Can't mistakes be blameworthy when the person who makes the mistake should have known better?

As I understand it, a self-deceiver is confronted with a choice to pursue a difficult line of reasoning which he/she suspects (but does not know) might lead to reassessing a cherished belief, but instead of following that line of reasoning finds comforting, probably superficial, reasons for ignoring that line of reasoning and just continuing to maintain the cherished belief. The truth or falsity of the cherished belief might not necessarily matter, incidently, maybe the belief that the self-deceiver cherishes is in fact true (constructing an example might be interesting - I'll have a think about it) but the self-deceiver is (arguably) at fault from the rational perspective for not having engaged in the ignored reasoning process. The thing about self-deception that is important is that at some level it is rationally blame worthy, there is something the self-deceiver should do but does not do, and this conception I am offering at least allows for the self-deceiver to be blamed in that way.

It makes intentional self-deception impossible.

Why? The process I described looks intentional, but does not seem to involve any contradictions.

I think our disagreement, then, is that for me self-deception exists as I described, but does not involve lying to oneself if we consider lying to oneself only on the model of one person lying to another. I agree that lying to oneself conceived on that model is just not coherent, it involves a contradiction. However, that needn't make self-deception impossible.

If it takes talking about one person as though they were a plurality of different selves in order to make sense of lying to oneself, it seems to me that it makes better sense to abandon the notion altogether and learn to talk about the same situations in better ways...

That seems along the right lines to me. The "splitting of selves" approach (I think it goes by the term "psychological partitioning" in the literature) only makes sense if one tries to force self-deception into the model of one person being deceitful to another. In those cases the key point is that the deceitful person both believes/knows something to be the case and intends that the other should believe the opposite is the case. Self-deception does not seem like that to me, it is more like having a suspicion that something you wish to be true may not be true, but rather than pursuing the chain of reasoning that will decide the issue for you, you give yourself (perhaps bad) reasons for not pursuing that chain of reasoning.

But the direct realist usage conforms precisely to the main dictionary definition under which (in the example given on the link you gave) lips are red - i.e. physical objects in the world - and specifically their surfaces - are red. I'm struggling to understand what you think is particularly sophisticated or unusual about the direct realist idea that redness is a visible feature of the surfaces of physical objects.

Self-deception - which I presume is the focus of this thread - is perhaps best not modelled on the binary relation of A deceiving B (even where A and B are the same person). After all, I could deceive myself without engaging in self-deception - an example, suppose I am in the army on a shooting range, and I am charged with camoflaging targets. I do the job so well that even I cannot tell the targets from the bushes. I've deceived myself, but it's not a case of self-deception. Someone earlier in this thread mentioned the idea that self-deception (lying to oneself) is more akin to giving yourself bad reasons for not pushing yourself to the end of a chain of reasoning that will definitively reach a conclusion you do not like. That seems right to me and doesn't involve too much metaphysical nonsense about split selves etc.

So you do not accept that photons impinging on a human retina give rise to seeing things? :chin:

It depends what you mean by that question. Are you asking me whether I am a metaphysical realist about photons? If that is the question then the answer is "no". However, even if I were a metaphysical realist about photons and I accepted that they played a causal role in seeing things in the world, it would not be relevant to the issue since the things that one ends up seeing under that causal account could still be instances of redness out there on the surface of objects - nothing other than those surfaces need be red.

you have been much cleverer than I first thought. You have crafted an alternative definition for "red" that defines it as an intrinsic property of objects out there in the real world.

Not really - right from the beginning my use of the word "red" corresponds precisely to the way it is used by the position known as direct realism in the philosophy of perception, and direct realism is supposed to be the default position of common sense - nothing particularly sophisticated or clever about that.

An instantiation is created dynamically, which would seem to support the notion of 'red' being a human thing, existing only in human minds

What I mean by "instantiation of red" is just "instance of red" i.e. a datable locatable occurence of a property. In that sense, mass is instantiated wherever there is a physical object, and since I presume that for you mass is not a human-dependent property, then you would still owe me an argument to show that red nevertheless is a human-dependent property.

Yes, because red derives from humans and the way we see and perceive things.

We use "red" to describe em radiation within a certain range of wavelengths because in standard cases where objects are taken to be reflecting radiation in that range we usually see that they have red surfaces. But it is, nevertheless, the object's redness - existing independent of us - that we see in those cases. At least, once again I underline this point, nothing that anybody has so far argued requires me to think of things in any other way than that.

The first and most obvious response that occurs to me is: if all humans are completely removed from the Physical Universe, does 'red' remain? I.e. is 'red' human-independent? It doesn't seem so to me.

And if I say, "Yes, red would remain in the absence of human beings" what is your argument to prove me wrong?

Also let us get something clear, insofar as so-called visible light is electromagnetic radiation, nobody sees light. The so-called visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum is based on the idea that when we see colour on the surface of an object, it is because that surface is reflecting electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength falling within a certain band. Even if we became sensitive in some way to electromagnetic radiation that falls outside of this range (e.g. to x-rays) we would never see x-rays. What we see are things located in space. Electromagnetic radiation - if it exists as anything other than a theoretical device - exists only in the spaces between us and the things we see.

Hello - yes, that's right: my position is that red is first and foremost a feature we discover, by sight, as part of the world. When I genuinely see a red snooker ball, there is an instantiation of the property red right out there in the world - consitutive of the visible surface of the snooer ball - and I see that instantiation of red. Electromagnetic radiation may play a role in explaining how I get to see that instantiation of red, but I do NOT see electromagnetic radiation and electromagnetic radiation is only derivately coloured. Furthermore, as a sighted person, my concept of "the world out there" is grounded precisely on the basis of seeing such instantiations of colour.

Regarding whether or not seeing a red snooker ball involves representation, my inclination is to say no. The red snooker ball is just there before me, no need for any representation. Dreaming or imagining or having a mental image of a red snooker ball do involve representation. So, for me, there is a significant difference between dreaming/imagining/remembering on the one hand and seeing on the other.
@Pattern-chaser You tallk about the "world out there" - how do you think you arrived at that concept other than seeing things "out there", and how would you see things out there if they did not have colour? A colourless world cannot be compared to a blank screen.

Obviously there are things that no one knows.

Do you mean to say that there are things which 1) are the case and which could be known, but which 2) no one currently knows? I presume not, since that would quickly lead to those unknown things being facts. So, how do you fill out the idea of a "thing that no one knows"? Are you a realist about such things?

You still have to convince your opponent that in cases (1) or (2) that there is any occurent instance of redness that a person is aware of when a person has a mental image of a red snooker ball or dreams about a red snooker ball. In both cases the person imagining/dreaming might be thought of as representing the existence of a red snooker ball, but representation of a red snooker ball can be accomplished without the vehicle of representation actually being red. After all, I can represent a red snooker ball with the words "red snooker ball" but those words are not red. In case (3), of course, there very definitely is an occurent instance of redness of which the person is aware and it is the redness of the very snooker ball that the person sees.
From this kind of perspective you are just inventing pseudo problems.

For me the Redness of the Red is just as Red in 2 and 3.

So now red itself can be red? Can it also be yellow or blue?

I've been trying to understand this sub-thread by adopting the (scientific) perspective of an objectivist philosopher.

That is the source of your confusion I think - the scientific perspective you are trying to adopt is incoherent. It requires on the one hand that red actually be a visible surface property of objects in the world that provide the basis for all empirical evidence (how would a world of colourless objects provide us with any visual evidence for any scientific hypothesis?) and on the other that red is only a feature of electromagnetic radiation (and thus something that is not a visible feature of surfaces of objects).

The points you make about human beings having a metaphorical use for the word "red" may well be true, but when I make a purely visual observation that a snooker ball is red, I'm not being metaphorical, and I am not talking about the frequency of electromagnetic radiation either.

For now we have to assume these things exist or we will get nowhere.

If the only way to motivate a problem is to make unargued assumptions that lead to that problem, then there is good reason to be suspicious of the unargued assumptions.

Let me have one last stab at explaining myself, although I thought my last reply to @Pattern-chaser put it as clearly as possible. Consider the following three phenomena:
1) Having a mental image of a red snooker ball.
2) Having a dream of a red snooker ball.
3) Seeing a red snooker ball.
I am in no way shape or form denying that such phenomena as these exist: people engage in mental imagery, people dream and people see. The specific assumption (and an assumption is all that it is at the moment) I am bringing into the spotlight and challenging is that those three phenomena share a common factor over and above the bare fact that they are about a red snooker ball. You and Pattern-chaser appear to believe that there is such a common factor, but have provided no arguments for agreeing with you. Furthermore, you both also appear to be suggesting (again, suggesting and not arguing) that redness is really only a feature of this supposed common factor. Why should anyone join you in so assuming if doing so at best just leads to problems that can be otherwise avoided, and at worst involves the kind of incoherence that the blog page I linked to indicates?

In ordinary language 1) "if that were true, then I'm a monkey's uncle" and 2) "if that were a fact, then I'm a monkey's uncle" are pretty much equivalent, which makes it look like identifying something as a fact and describing it as true might amount to one and the same thing. What, though, is the something thus described/identified? It cannot be a fact in these kinds of cases, since the use in 1 and 2 is counterfactual. So we might suggest statements as doing the job. But then it looks as if we are allowing in (2) that statements can sometimes be identified with facts, rather than being thingsmade true by facts.

@Ron Besdansky Perhaps "Meno" would be a better introductory text?

Mea culpa - the reply was for @TheMadFool's question concerning Quine's idea that names can be converted to predicates.

Redness is being used to describe the human experience of seeing something that is red.

In this statement lies the crux of the issue: At one and the same time you imply that "something is red" (i.e. the something I might see in the world around me) and on the other that the experience (of seeing something that is red) is red. Presumably you are using "red" in two distinct senses here: let "red1" apply to snookerballs and other things in the world, "red2" apply to these things you are calling "experiences". The opposing view is that there are not two such meanings, that there is only one meaning for "red" and it is the one we use when we say that snooker balls are red. If these things you are calling experiences were also capabely of being red in that unitary sense, then one ought to be able to put one of these experiences next to a snooker ball and say something like "look, they are both the same colour". But clearly, whatever these things you are calling experiences are, that is not something one can do with them. So, you seem to be forced to reject the unitary view of what "red" means, and are left with "red1" applying to things in the world like snooker balls, and "red2" applying to whatever these things called experiences are. Maybe when you earlier tied "red" to a surface-reflectance property, you meant red1. (Note that the relative metaphysical/epistemological/logical priority of red1 and red2 is not yet in question, the use of numerals is there just to indicate a supposed difference, not a supposed priority of any kind).

What you have to do now, though, is convince your opponent that these things you are calling experiences actually exist at all. Your opponent is happy to accept that snookerballs and all sorts of other visible things exist and can be red1. Let's be very clear about this: your opponent here is specifically NOT denying that people see red1 snookerballs and that they can be perfectly wellaware of the fact that they are seeing red1 snookerballs when they do so. They are instead challenging the assumption that when people do see red1 snookerballs that there are any entities (in any world whatever) called experiences that need to be appealed to and that can be red2. How are you going to convince your opponent to the contrary? You cannot just say that it is obvious that there are such things and that they are red2, since the only obvious thing for your opponents is that there are people, red1 objects, and that the former can sometimes see the latter.

Typically philosophers that would be sympathetic to your kind of view have attemtped to show that in giving an account of what it is for a person to see a red1 snookerball, one just has to appeal to things of the kind you are calling "experiences" and that these things must be red2. However, establishing that kind of position requires argument and should not simply be assumed. Typically the arguments that are used to so establish it are arguments from perceptual error, but those arguments are very definitely not watertight. So far in this thread there has been no argument given that there must be such things.

Can you explain what that means?

You'd need to read up on Quine's writings on ontological commitments and how to avoid them to get the details. Basically, Quine's idea was that the "ideal" language of metaphysics should have no singular terms such as names or constants, and consist just of variables, quantifiers, predicates and rules of logical inference.

T: Trump=POTUS and P: POTUS=Trump.
You talk about meaning being added by carrying out the change of position from T to P, so let us assume that meaning is indeed added. What a proposition expresses is its meaning and different meanings can be expressed only by different propositions. If T expresses one meaning and P expresses that meaning + some added meaning, then P expresses a different meaning to T and so is a different proposition. Different propositions, under propositional calculus, can take truth values independently of each other, so T <-> P is not a tautology in this case and so they are not logically equivalent.
Logical equivalence does not always lead to identity, or at least not straightforwardly - the connection is complex. A coin's head exists if and only if a coin's tail exists, but a coin's head is not a coin's tail, so that a coin's head exists must express a different proposition than that a coin's tail exists. Of course, I'm making the fatal error of treating exists as a predicate here, may Kant forgive me.
@TheMadFool I seem to remember that old fraud Quine suggesting that one could turn proper names into predicates (maybe in "On What There Is"?): "Socrates" becomes "the unique Socratizer" or some such nonsense.

I've just been reading through the posts on this topic again and I think @MetaphysicsNow made a point you seem to be evading. The last definition of "measurement" you gave was

the act or process of ascertaining the extent, dimensions, or quantity of something;

Ascertaining is an intentional activity engaged in knowingly in order to arrive at some specific piece of knowledge about something, so measurement under your definition is an intentional and conscious activity, and there is still a total lack of argument that it is being performed when I or MetaphysicsNow or you or anybody recognises intelligent behaviour. Recognising that X is present does not need to involve intentionally engaging in any activities to determine the extent, dimensions or quantity of X. Let me ask you a question: when I recognise intelligent behaviour, what are the intentional conscious activities I engage in to determine the extent, dimensions or quantity of intelligence? I certainly do not administer any kind of written IQ test.

If I am missing a distinction of any importance it is not between a human seeing the colour red and a machine "measuring" electromagnetic radiation. The issue is what do I, as a human being, see when I see an instance of redness. I certainly do not see electromagnetic radiation. You earlier equated redness with a kind of relectance property of the surface of objects (presumably the visible surfaces of objects, by the way, and try making sense of that concept whilst keeping colours inside your head). Go ahead and make that identification if you like, but note that this surface-reflectance property is also NOT electromagnetic radiation. So, even if what I see when I see an instance of redness is an instance of that surface-reflectance property you are talking about, redness is right out there in the world, not inside my head. At least, no one has yet provided any argument on this thread to establish otherwise, just a bunch of assumptions. There have of course been many philosophers that have tried to argue that colour cannot be out there in the world, Locke for one, although I doubt he was the first, and often they appeal to existence of various kinds of perceptual error/relativity to do so, and if you want to start analysing such things as the argument from illusion or the argument from hallucination and what they may or may not prove, I'm happy to engage.

To take the experience of seeing colour out of the world, and into the viewer's mind (where it belongs) is not the same as taking colour out of the world.

Agreed, but it is not the experience of seeing colour that the kind of account of vision SteveKlinko sketches threatens to remove from the world, but colour itself. Help yourself to whatever surface feature of objects you want to identify with colour - in your post you identify it as a certain kind of reflectiveness - if I insist that experiencing an instance of the colour red and experiencing an instance of that kind of reflectiveness are one and the same thing, any argument that removes instances of the colour red from the world removes instances of that kind of reflectiveness from the world as well, and the blog post I linked to argues - at least as I understand it - that that would be an incoherent idea.

The blog site is specifically targetted at the account of colour vision you sketched out and does not deal with dreams at all. As regards dreaming, the claim that anyone sees anything in a dream needs arguing for, not just assuming. Dreaming might involve mental imagery, sure, but it remains an unargued assumption that seeing involves mental imagery. After all, I can have mental images of things far distant when I am looking at things standing right in front of me.

Appearance-talk, at least some appearance-talk, probably is derivative from is-talk, but I'm not sure that kind of ordinary language analysis does anything more than brush the real issue under the carpet. If I am standing in front of a whiteswashed-wall and I say it is yellow, but you and everyone else around says it is white, and lets assume we are all being sincere, I might end up yielding and saying "okay, the wall is white, but it sure as hell appears yellow to me". The question then arises is in virtue of what does the wall look, specifically, yellow to me when even by my own admission the wall itself is white? That's the kind of question that pushes Sellars, and some others in his wake, to a dual-aspect account of vision where belief accounts for all the cognitive aspects, and an adverbial analysis is given for all the sensory aspects (even in the case of veridical vision).

If there is a distinction between propositional attitudes, on the one hand, and something's appearing visually to one to be a certain way, on the other, then an account purely in terms of inclinations to assent to or withold assent from propositions ignores the distinction. The problem with insisting that there is no such distinction and thus to reduce (in a sense) perceiving to believing/disbelieving tends to show up when trying to account for perceptual error -i.e. not the mere withholding of full assent to a proposition, but a genuine belief, based on vision say, that something in the environment is a certain way visually when it in fact isnot that way. In those cases, the pressure to move from "something appears to be F" to "something actually is F" remains. Sellars, as far as I recall, acknowledgges this and moves towards a kind of adverbialism where the "sensory" element of perception that is "over and above" mere cognition becomes objectless, but that account of the sensory aspect of perception has always seemed to me to fail to do justice to the sensory objectful nature of seeing the environment around us.

All you have to do is rub your eyes and you can see Lights. So we know that even that very external mechanical stimulation of the Visual system can create a Visual effect. Stands to reason that more direct probing inside the Brain will produce all kinds of Auditory, Visual, and Memory experiences. I thought this was realized by Science decades ago and is pretty much common knowledge by now.

I don't think it is common knowledge, more like common jumping to conclusions. The picture you go on to paint in the subsequent part of your response seems like it might be based on the kind of conceptual confusion that this blog article hints at and that @Janus also seem to have had in mind in his earlier remarks. Take visible features like colour and shape out of the world in which objects like brains and retinas and snooker balls exist and it becomes impossible to say anything coherent about that world at all.