How are you so sure? — Shawn

Did you have an example of one?

But, I'm focusing on sentient computers. — Shawn

Of which there are none. Except in every sci-fi work of fiction I guess.

Did you misunderstand? I was saying that humans with conscious intent write the programs. The computer runs the program without consciousness or intent.

I completely agree with you, it was just a composition error that I forgot to mention it. — fishfry

Hah. Wasn’t expecting that comeback! :rofl:

Have you ever checked out Howard Pattee on the “epistemic cut”? He makes the best hard-nosed physicist’s case for the difference between life as a process vs machines.

Another theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, used category theory to say something similar in a mathematically abstract way.

Both provide the rigorous basics of what I’m arguing,

@Wayfarer

a dog knows, through its own sort of common sense, that it cannot leap over a house in order to reach its master. It presumably knows this as the directly given meaning of ‘houses‘ and ‘leaps’ — a meaning it experiences all the way down into its muscles and bones.’ — Steve Talbott

Yep. And this context can’t be just “represented”. It has to be lived all the way down in that physically embedded sense.

What biological intelligence involves is the ability regulate physical instability (in pursuit of gaining personal advantage). Computation, by contrast, needs to exist in a world that is already physically stable in ways that let it compute. It has no regulative capacity. So it needs a power cable and everything else supplied.

On the other hand, there is a reason why neural approaches to computational architecture seem to hold some promise of biological realism. That is what gets the AI folk excited.

But what that shows is that even a tiny bit of that biological realism is a powerful improvement on a purely mechanical/informational notion of computation. A Bayesian architecture implements something that is better equipped to regulate the uncertainty of a natural environment.

The argument against conscious machines is then that neural nets can only add a little of that biological realism. There is no believable plan for extending it down to the level of muscle and bone - or rather, chips and power supplies.

So existing computation is basically nothing like biology. That means even just adding a touch of biology makes for something impressive. But the difficulty is that computer science is trying to add back the world - the lived in context - from the top down when biology builds its “machine” from the ground up.

Biology is founded in the regulatory possibilities that nature provides at the quasi classical nanoscale of physical processes. That is the uncertainty (of energy releasing and structure forming chemical reactions) that life is able to “mindfully” harness.

Recreating what life already does - produces conscious humans - becomes a redundant exercise given the overwhelming difficulty of reinventing the same nanoscale organicism in silicon, or whatever.

But that hardly matters once we forget about recreating human consciousness and switch to what a machine-expanded human consciousness is going to look like once “neural AI” has really had its impact on the way we live our lives.

Imagine two engineers back in the 1800s. One says one day they will be able to make a biologically realistic horse. And here’s my first metal and clockwork contraption as a starter on that.

The other says, one day you will have driverless Uber pods. And here is my own first metal and clockwork contraption as the start of that journey.

It is clear that consciousness can arise (some like to say emerge) from piles of atoms; specifically, in living creatures made of meat. It may be that consciousness can ONLY arise in bags of meat, but it's more likely that it could arise in some other kind of substrate as well.

I do believe that. — fishfry

You can say you believe it because you have already presumed that life is made of “meat”. You have skipped straight over the issue of how that meat ever actually had life before it arrived in your frying pan.

What is it that made the meat alive before it ever got bagged and put on display at the supermarket?

Answer that and you might have a reason to believe that consciousness has anything to do with particular physical “substrates” rather than particular biological processes.

It would be possible in principle to set out on a deterministic process of mechanically identifying every possible idea, — Pfhorrest

I think the hole in your argument is that creative thinking involves both this deductive reasoning (from the general to the particular), but more importantly, that inductive leap from the particular to the general.

We have to hazard some guess as to a deeper principle that may account for a variety of outcomes - a pattern generator that then generates the patterns.

And that step involves a kind of non-computational insight where instead of using information, we are seeking to erase it. What can we do without, rather than what do we have once we have crunched every possibility?

That is what biological brains find easy to do. A Bayesian style of reasoning where we make guesses about the information that would reduce our uncertainty. We are looking at the world and trying to model the deeper processes generating its ever changing variety.

Biological brains aren’t geared for deductive reasoning at all. What you describe as a mechanical process of computing every outcome of some formal language is indeed only something that came on to the evolutionary scene when humans developed grammatical speech as a cultural learnt habit.

What is a program? — Shawn

A set of instructions written by someone with conscious intent for a machine lacking such a capability.

Do you think it is true that consciousness can arise from Generalized or non-Generalized Artificial Intelligence? — Shawn

My summary is that I don’t say it is impossible that machinery could be “conscious”, but we have to recognise why standard notions of computation aren’t even starting down the path to mimicking the biological processes involved.

In biology, the mind is an information process in the sense that there is an organism trying to model the world. The organism wants to "be in that world" so as to control it - regulate all the physical processes that count towards being alive.

So the simple argument is that to be conscious, computational hardware would first have to crack the problem of being alive. The hardware would have to be an actual self in the world in the sense of regulating the very physics which is producing its organismic state of being.

Normal computational hardware doesn't live in the world at all. It gets fabricated. It gets plugged into a wall socket. It gets given information already determined in its form by whoever decided what counted as meaningful input. It is just a machine blindly executing a program. It can do "anything" because nothing it does has to be meaningful in terms of maintaining its physical existence.

So a lack of biological realism leads on to a lack of neurological realism.

Generalised AI may well be useful machinery in a human setting. Its blind pattern matching can be applied to world problems that are meaningful to us.

But it would be nothing like "consciousness", just like it is nothing like "living".

I’m just telling you what I believe — NOS4A2

But beliefs without a rational basis apparently. Well that was already clear. :up:

So it makes no sense to assert that there are only three colors that a human eye can see. It's just that our eyes are more or less sensitive to certain wavelengths. — Harry Hindu

I’m trying to keep things simple. Sure the photoreceptors respond to a range of energies. But still, that energy is being sampled by three pigments with three peak sensitivities. And those photoreceptors are wired up in a logically antagonistic fashion to turn their energy responses into neural information.

So the energy reflected off surfaces is some characteristic spectra. Often a wide band of frequencies, but with some distribution peak. Say that spectra has an exact match that maximally triggers the red cone and positively suppress the green. Then we will see pure red.

Or we might just be observing the extremely narrow spectra of a red LED, tuned to deliver only energy at the peak wavelength. Again the experience will be pure red.

But note that we only see red. A single frequency stimulus is indistinguishable from the broad band stimulus. So you can’t say we are really seeing the frequencies at all.

We are seeing that a cone absorbed enough energy to fire. Somehow. And any green cones not only absorbed less, but through inhibitory cross talk, were actually silenced. Meanwhile the yellow-blue channel is silent due to a lack of triggering energy so not creating an experienced hue mix like orange or purple.

A clear signal is experienced. The sensation of red. And that’s it so far as the underlying wavelengths go.

Most colours in nature do come from surfaces that reflect a wide range of frequencies. So we see those drab and earthy mixtures that come in many shades, but aren’t that distinctive. Then a rainbow splits white light into bands of frequency. That makes for narrower energy peaks and you start to get a cleaner response in terms of the four primary hues and their simplest intermediary mixes. Keep narrowing and you get whatever triggers red with the least possible admixture.

So sure. All frequencies contribute to a cone’s response as energy. But the information is constructed at the ganglion level from the computations of three pigments and their peak sensitivities. The world gets left behind. It gets left behind to the extent that the computation creates a fourth virtual pigment to act as the yellow cone needed as the opponent partner to the blue one.

That shows you how the computational logic trumps the physical energies in telling us what colour - or reflectance properties - some surface has.

It is a tricky business. But energy has to be translated into information the brain can understand. It has to be encoded. Thus an epistemic cut is required.

The decisions and actions begin and end in the self and nowhere else. — NOS4A2

I note you carefully steered clear of my last question. How are you defining "just"?

So unless you are simply happy to keep chanting propaganda slogans, can you supply the argument that backs up this opinion.

Why is this something you merely say rather than something I ought to believe?

So, the overriding veto is almost instantaneous, and barely conscious. Then, we can construct more elaborate reasons for our behavior after the fact. — Gnomon

Yep. That is the social side of the equation. We must always be able to offer the world some good reason for our actions.

So there is the dilemma. Our brain is designed to just act. It figures out what to do while it is figuring out what is happening. The two things are part of the one integrated process.

And yet society hovers over us demanding we take thoughtful responsibility for those actions/decisions/choices. It sets an impossible standard for control where no detail could have escaped our attention.

The brain is evolved to minimise the need to attend. Society demands attention at every possible step.

Hence freewill as the ultimate paradox so far as many are concerned.

With all due respect, this merely tells me that you have not thought very deeply about social resistance and its ramifications. — JerseyFlight

Wrong.

You are probably an American, — JerseyFlight

Absolutely wrong.

which means you are part of a young political system — JerseyFlight

Sadly also absolutely wrong.

you manifest a complete ignorance of any form of class awareness in your consciousness. — JerseyFlight

Screamingly, laughably wrong.

I will not debate this with you because I have more important things to do with my time, — JerseyFlight

Like being wrong every time you make a claim?

...but what I will do is discuss Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, if you are serious. (That means you need to read the book). — JerseyFlight

That would be a better plan on your part. Why not put forward a sensible OP based on your reading of that and see who wants to engage - be a member of your intellectual club.

But so far your ranting doesn't inspire hope.

Psychasthenia can especially make free will hard to understand — Gregory

Disruption of that mid-brain habit vs frontal brain attention axis I was talking about?

Compulsions are the urge to emit stereotyped actions patterns. Anxiety is about attention not being able to focus on "what matters".

That reflects another dichotomy in that attention can be directed either towards some focal "endogenous" course of action (the dopamine-mediated pathway, to be simplistic), or towards a vigilant state of seeking the right such focus - an exogenous or norepinephrine-mediated pathway.

So disruptions to the smooth execution of the habit~attentional system - the automatic vs voluntary behaviour distinction - are explainable by the same neurobiology.

The usually missed part is the two levels of processing are designed to work seamlessly together. We only notice any conflict when this seamless integration breaks down. Or when it is teased apart in some artificial experimental set-up.

Non-conformity nearly always seems to come at a social price. — JerseyFlight

Think it through. How could one even define "social" except to the degree that individuals are in some kind of conformity?

Collections don't have to be made of things that are all the same. Indeed, they have to be all different - at least as instances of something - otherwise their could be no "collection" as such.

But to be a collection, we are saying the differences don't make a difference. The degree of non-conformity is acceptable, within bounds, for the purposes of that particular collection.

So the social price of non-conformity is that you are free to do anything you want, so long as it doesn't break that constraint of collectivity. At worst, society is going to be indifferent to your difference.

If instead you disrupt the conformity of the society in a way that appears to improve its functioning at that collective level, then you will be celebrated. Your non-conformity will become part of a new conformity. The collective can learn and adapt its own definition.

There is a natural dynamics to groups. Complaining about it at a general level ain't going to change it. Instead it is up to you to get heard - and risk that indifference. Or if you make too much of a pointless ruckus, the club might physically move to eject you of course.

Even indifference has its limits. Being anti-social is different from merely being non-conformist in an open society.

But I think Michael Shermer made a pragmatic point : accepting that Neuroscience has revealed that even the behavior of rational humans is motivated primarily by emotional subconscious processes. — Gnomon

More correct is that it reveals that habit can be overridden by attention.

The decision to push a button at some particular moment is a habitual act - the mechanics of the motor act can be handled by the mid brain in less than a fifth of a second.

But as part of moving a finger, the feeling of moving that finger must be communicated widely to the sensory parts of the higher brain. Otherwise we would be shocked by the feeling of our finger suddenly moving of its own accord - shades of Dr Strangelove.

That forewarning of what we are in the middle of intending to do does provide a brief opportunity for frontal attentional processes to intercept and countermand. There is free won’t that can catch the act, the rising impulse, and block it.

So the brain is set up to act habitually as its basic mode - just emit behaviours in a learnt fashion without deliberation. And that is fine because all our habits have proven themselves as generally sensible and correct over time.

But then we have attentional or deliberative levels of processing that can inform and even override the simple emitting of stereotyped action patterns. If we are paying attention, we can even detect some rising impulse early enough to suppress is.

So any “willing” had this complex but rational temporal structure.

Unfortunately we talk about freewill and consciousnesses in ways that reflect too little of that actual rational complexity.

Since liar sentences can be formed in natural languages, then the linguist must provide a semantics for these sentences (on the assumption they are meaningful). But we cannot give such a semantics for such sentences, despite their being meaningful. This is a reason we need an alternative to the concept. — Kornelius

I would argue that nothing needs replacing, but an extension is required. A missing element of meaningful assertion has to be recognised.

The liar paradox arises because of self reference. The assertion lacks an object as it only involves the subject itself. There is no epistemic cut - a division in which a claim is being made about something and so the relationship is a semiotic or formal sign-based one.

A way to illustrate this is imagining a sheet of paper half red and half green. What colour is the boundary then separating the two halves? Is it red or is it green? Both or neither?

Logic collapses, the LEM can’t apply, because the boundary is not some third thing - a separate position from which the two surfaces could be described. The boundary can’t treat either as object, yet seems to treat both as object, while being in fact always subject in being the limiting part of both/either.

So an epistemic cut is a necessity. Semantics demands a world divided into subject and object. Then logic can work.

(Of course there is then the issue of whether the world actually “has” such divisions in and of themselves. Or whether the epistemic cut is something “we” add so as to render the world manageable by a logical calculus.)

It seems to me that more distinctions we can make, the more information we have, and the more information we have, the better decisions we can make. — Harry Hindu

But it is easy to evolve extra photo pigments yet even as many as three Is unusual in large brain mammals. However dragonflies can have 30.

So evolution seems to say more is not necessarily better in this case. Maybe it is like science. The more you can predict from the least number of measurements seems like a good indication you have a great theory.

The experience isn't what is socially constructed. Babies experience colors before learning how to use colored scribbles to refer to those experiences. — Harry Hindu

This is a meta distinction. When folk talk about qualia, they are now talking about the experience of experiencing. Rather than just doing, it is now a rational exercise in contrast and compare.

Those three components aren't just in an on/off state. They are stimulated in varying degrees — Harry Hindu

Sure. A “red” ganglion cell collating the information will have some baseline neutral rate of firing and fire harder depending on the degree of redness and slow it’s firing right down to the degree instead of greenness present. So “off” isn’t just a signal of no red. It is a signal of green. Hence afterimages.

Our minds are part of the world and color is part of our minds, therefore color is in the world. — Harry Hindu

That is trite. My whole argument is about how to make physicalism work and avoid having to take the usual Cartesian route. And you are failing to respond to the particular way I resolve the issue - a properly biological form of “information processing”.

I accept the rule of law but only where it is just. — NOS4A2

What’s your definition of “just” then? For example, is it just for the law to impose a duty of care on you as a driver so that you could be charged with criminal negligence for injuring someone in an accident?

t have you read David Gamez?, — darthbarracuda

Only the bit you posted. I generally agreed with that. My position is that the primary/secondary distinction is a matter of degree as all perceptual qualities are psychological judgements or semiotic signs, never the Kantian thing in itself.

As I always stress, that is so by necessity. The brain can’t model the world in informational terms while it remains physically entangled in the world as some kind of entropic event. There has to be what Howard Pattee calls an epistemic cut. And that is so for biology or life in general. It is a “law” of theoretical biology if you like.

Uncanny has the link to knowing that I wanted. — Banno

Vagueness is better as it speaks to what we don't know. And even that to which may be unknowable or undifferentiated.

Uncanny just means strange and unsettling. Are you thinking it is a term logicians use?

Of course intentionally infecting others with disease is a serious crime ...
But there is no right to not be infected by others, — NOS4A2

So you accept the rule of law then? On what basis?

And when it comes to rights, doesn't jurisprudence usually say rights come with duties? For instance -

Every duty of the person must be the duty towards some person, in whom the right is vested and conversely every right must be against some persons upon whom a duty is imposed.

Your thoughts on this two-way street?

the linguistic topology becomes... uncanny. — Banno

The technical term you were searching for is "vague".

Didn't know Dr Jay Neitz talked about tetrachromic vision. — TiredThinker

He did the genetics and was searching for test candidates who had expressed two variants of the "red" photopigment gene.

The way that the developing retina could wire itself up and make use of whatever genetic variety got expressed was of course of clinical significance. For example, if you could make use of that to fix colour blindness by injecting the missing gene.

For whatever reason the golden ratio is most desirable. — TiredThinker

Neurobiology would want to seize on the regularities or invariants of the natural world.

I mentioned Fechner's Law as an example of how the brain latches onto proportional difference rather than actual difference - a log relation that makes perceptual judgement "scale free".

So we can recognise a tiny elephant the size of a fly as easily as a huge elephant as big as a mountain. The brain already stabilises the world in terms of what it really wants to extract - object identity. An elephant just strikes us as the same thing when seen at any size. The perceptual system has already filtered out the actual size because our recognition processes have built in a scale free memory representation.

The golden ratio is then perhaps something we have a similar built in sensitivity to. We can see even and symmetric patterns of growth because our neurobiology has already homed in on what is the most regular features of our environment. That makes it easy to pick out departures from such norms.

These things are more complex than colors, but we can make conclusions about them outside of particular contexts. Am I right? — TiredThinker

I certainly agree. (Although colour perception is perhaps the most fiendish of the sensory processes. It's complexity is significant.)

There seems to be a relation of sorts anyway; implications of "a bridge" might shed light on other things. — jorndoe

There’s definitely a bridge in my book. But it is neurosemiotic. Ain’t no one wants to talk about that. :wink:

So, it's not so much that "my red is the same as yours", more that there's enough interactional stability that we can find coherent ways to talk about it. — jorndoe

I agree that this is a critical point, but it may not touch the fundamental point - at least so far as the Hard Problem is framed.

It is really important that colour experience is socially constructed through language use. We all learn to talk about red as "that experience of redness we all share".

That is, the qualia problem is based on red being a primary kind of mental quality. That is the way we learn to talk about it. Yet also, when do we ever just "see red". We are always seeing some shade of red, with some texture, some shape, some actual surface and situation.

To really show what we might mean, we can pull out a red crayon, point to a red post box, flourish a paint sample. We will present the redness as something all of its own - a discrete mental quality - by exhibiting it on a flat and untextured surface in clear white light with no shape or even meaning to distract us from the contemplation of the "pure experience of red".

This carefully stage managed state of mind is what the language of red presumes. And yet a whole philosophical economy gets built on it as the prime example of the mind~body problem.

Shapes and sounds and other sensations can be seen as just straight representation of the world (even though they are not at all). We can imagine a computer doing shape recognition or sound identification because the patterns are in the stimulus.

But the philosophy of mind conversation always circles back to its best possible example - not even the mixed hues like turquoise and brown, but red and green, blue and yellow.

And yet the primary hues are never found in nature except in some kind of embedding context of shape, texture, luminance, etc. (Or as display colours used by animals as explicit signals.)

So a kind of con is always going on here. (Even though I most reluctantly agree this doesn't finally dissolve the Hard Problem entirely. One can't just wish it away. One must continue to work on it. :grin: )

You have an expert understanding of the issues. What are your own thoughts on the prime puzzle of qualia?

Why is red experienced as red?

That is, we can say so much about why red isn’t blue, and red is as un-green like as it gets. All the available neurobiology of opponent channel processing and such like gives us a physicalist explanation of hue difference - an ability to contrast and compare.

But red still winds up having an identifiable quality that seems fixed (disregarding “grue” and other philosophical attacks on that). It is irritating but physicalism finally gives out at the final step when we would want to account for the ineffability of red as the actual qualia that it is for us.

Pragmatically, one can defend physicalism on the basis that we need differences that make a difference to motivate a casual explanation. There has to be a change in state, a contrast, to even get the businesses of an explanation going. The Hard Problem arises at the edge of inquiry where there just is no differences that are available. At which point we must fall silent. And that is better than treating the Hard Problem as a philosophical “gotcha” - the collapse of the entire physicalist project.

But still. The redness of redness must tantalise. Do you have any position on this?

While we might agree to disagree about its colour, that would be more problematic for its mass. — Banno

Even judgements of weight are deeply psychological - secondary qualities - as shown by Weber-Fechner’s Law. We experience the proportionate difference between two weights rather than their absolute difference.

If we experienced weight as it “actually is”, a 2kg difference would always feel like 2kg, whether it was 4kg in one hand and 6kg in the other, or 50kg in one and 52kg in the other.

The more you dig into psychophysics, the more psychological or “subjective” even the primary qualities become.

You will never guess who co-wrote a classic paper on weight judgements.

Peirce made the argument that sensation is all about the perception of difference rather than sameness. It is indirect from the get go as it relies on contrast.

Reasoning involves mediation, and this mediation requires that the object be not given in contemplation. This thesis is exemplified by Peirce through the case of tactile perception, where feeling a piece of cloth actually requires the comparison of different moments of the experience of the piece of cloth and the comparison is achieved by moving one’s hand over it:

17 EP1: 15.
A man can distinguish different textures of cloth by feeling; but not immediately, for he requires to move his fingers over the cloth, which shows that he is obliged to compare the sensations of one instant with those of another.17

For Peirce, cognition, at every level, is always the product of inference, and the basic structure of rational thought is already at work, albeit unconsciously, in sensation. Empirical research in this context is used to illustrate and support a radical philosophical thesis: that all knowledge is mediated and the product of some previous cognition; and that to talk of an absolute start or first cognition is both intellectually and perceptually unintelligible.

https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1006

It seems like shape provides one bit of information while the color provides a different bit. — Harry Hindu

Colour reveals the surface and so helps you see the shape.

Imagine you had a bag of toy animals all in the same green plastic. You have to sort them fast and find the turtle by its shape.

Now imagine the same bag but now the turtle is red.

The shape is enough information. But shapes all seem to bleed into each other - because the shape is what’s “real” about the object. We see “shape” in all its infinite variety.

Colour by contrast is much more abstract because the discrimination is based on just three opponent channel processes. For hue, the brain is making a binary judgement of red or not-red. And if it’s not-red, it’s green. The same with blue vs yellow and dark vs bright. Mix the three binaries and you can still get a million discriminable states. But that on-off switch at the heart of perceptual judgements is why different hues leap out in a way that shapes are less able to.

Shapes are 3D. We have to decode that turtle from all sorts of angles. Real shapes are often mobile. We have to recognise our cat even curled in a ball. But surface reflectance is 2D and so simpler to decode from any angle.

So the argument is that we see colour not because that is what is there in the world. Rather that once having evolved an eye that could resolve shape with a lens, then adding binary reflectance judgements on top started to chop the visual world into automatically delineated chunks of surface. Much better than a bag of green toys even if we have the sharpest vision for seeing their shapes.

Red becomes orange at around 480Thz. Wether we use the word “red” or “orange” for a 480Thz light might be a matter for contention. That we are talking about light at 480Thz, less so. — Banno

Might want to check on colour constancy before going too far down that dead end.

They can't see a factor of 100 more colors than trichromic without literally that many more cones. — TiredThinker

You may be right. I'm just going on the literature of the time and my conversations with those doing the research, such as Dr Gabi Jordan and Dr Jay Neitz. It was 20 years ago.

I know you can't "prove" that one person's red is the same as the next person's. But is it conceivable that the brain tries to keep sensory sensations efficient as the collection of wavelength information itself? — TiredThinker

This is in fact an issue of basic philosophical import as it forces us to change our whole thinking about what "minds" are for.

We think of them as being about the brain wanting to know reality as it really is. And so the mind is a mental picture, a representation, of what is "actually out there".

But it is the opposite. The mind is a reduction of a pattern of physical energy into an "umwelt" or system of sign.

Colour as we experience is not real. It is not what specific wavelength frequencies "look like". Colour is a response to the world in terms of a series of discriminatory steps that produce a signal. Evolution is designing us so that we immediately recognise the plum is not an orange. We don't have to taste it, bite it, or squeeze it. A surface reflectance makes it completely distinct as one or the other.

Evolution doesn't care about the actual hue we experience. And so it is not even trying to ensure we all have the same exact experience in the privacy of our heads. That may be the case, but it isn't even necessary.

What evolution needs is that a difference just pops out. We instantly identify shapes and objects because they are a surface of "all the same colour". Or at least have a pattern and texture that reveals itself as a coherent story in terms of hue.

This is the exact opposite of the usual naive realism that people expect - where because colour is something we talk about so much, it is somehow basic to a proper representation of the world.

But the brain is all about understanding the world in terms of its meaning. So we want to see the world as a story of recognisable things. Colour vision is just a step of that larger process. We can decompose complex visual scenes to notice the "redness of red", the "turquoise of turqoise". But that in itself is not something important or evolutionarily meaningful.

Is turquoise blue or green? If you try the same shade of that on a number of people, you can get different answers, suggesting small differences in neurodevelopment can make actual differences.

We might all know blue from green. And then on the border between the two, jump in different directions in terms of which is the primary hue.

People can have different colour perception in each eye. Damage from rubella could put a yellow cast on the sight of one eye for instance.

Tetrachromic people have more distinction in the yellow/green parts of the spectrum. Like I said more color information can maybe lead to more exact information, — TiredThinker

Single cone vision – monochromacy – gives us 200 shades of "gray". Dichromacy – having a long wave and short wave cone – gives us a blue-yellow spectrum that swells our visual experience to about 10,000 distinguishable shades. Trichromacy, adding a red-green opponent channel, multiplies the number of shades to several million.

Several million discriminable shades of reflectance is enough to keep even an interior decorator happy.

Tetrachromacy should have hundreds of millions. More than we would need surely. Evolution would favour the more efficient approach. Birds and bees have a use for extra photopigments up at the UV range. There was an evolutionary demand it would seem

It is also said the color blind people (2 fully functional cones) can see camouflage better than normal visioned people. But that is likely a matter of needing less brain power to identify with less vision. — TiredThinker

Or the fact that camouflage was designed to confuse their three-pigment system.

As far as how the brain and eye works your best bet is to use a visual aid like youtube. — turkeyMan

I spent a lot of time studying it as science, thanks.

Our eyes and brains interpret frequencies. — turkeyMan

But our eyes and brains interpret a world of objects. If representing actual frequency were so important, why would the eye sample the world at just three wavelength peaks?

Evolution could produce a vast array of photopigments. But it seems to want to use as few as possible. Explain that.

Cameras see your red as my red however i suppose its possible i see red as blue and you and a friend of yours sees red possibly as someone elses yellow. — turkeyMan

But cameras see those colours because they are also designed to capture light using three "pigments" with the same very narrow response curve. We designed that wavelength selectivity into them so we would get a result that was tailored to our neurobiology.

Get real close to any TV screen. The only colours you can see are the three different LEDs.

Where did all the pinks, yellows, turquoise and a million other discriminable hues go? They aren't in the actual light being emitted by the screen. What now?

And to the degree we all share the same neurobiology, it is at least more plausible than not that our inner experience is going to be the same. We have that weak argument.

Then we can make a stronger argument in terms of our ability to discriminate hues - to be able to say the same thing in picking out the reflectance properties that make one surface vividly unlike another.

I often see physicists say things like "we discovered some math that helps with problem so and so" and stuff like that. — Gregory

It is a particular branch of maths these days. Symmetry theory.

Although of course it used to be mostly geometry as you might expect. The maths of spatial relations.

Then geometry was found to have algebraic description too. Calculus helped to capture actions in time.

Symmetry groups finally emerged because symmetry breaking is what happens to reveal a world of particles once you have some kind of geometric description of nature that unfolds as a cooling~spreading manifold.

So it is not really a big surprise. Maths grew out of the everyday utility of modelling the everyday world in terms of "form". Spatial form, or geometric relations in Euclidean space, was the everyday starting point.

And the fact that maths has turned out to stay useful no matter how many different avenues it explores should tell us that the universe is itself in some sense a "mathematical operation". A process of mathematically-structured evolution.

Higher level of maths are created by relaxing constraints. Non-Euclidean geometry arose out of geometry by relaxing the constraint that parallel lines can never meet (because the world is perfectly flat). If you permit space to be curved (making flatness a special case), then you can see reality with greater generality.

In my opinion absolutely everything can quantified. — turkeyMan

That's key too. No point having a theory if it doesn't have measurements.

To speak loosely at an intuitive level (invoking a pseudo-teolology), it's a misnomer that the color visual system is attempting to reconstruct wavelengths, or model the wavelengths of light. Our color visual system apparently does not care one iota what the wavelengths really are, and why should it? What our visual system seems to focus on, instead, is recognizing and distinguishing objects. — InPitzotl

Here is someone who knows what he is talking about! :strong:

This is bang on. It is not about seeing "colour" as it is in the world. Reflectance is simply a valuable property to make things in the world "pop out".

The appealing idea is that primates re-evolved red-green hue discrimination after shifting back from a nocturnal to diurnal lifestyle. If you want to see ripe fruit in distant trees, the three pigment visual system looks well designed to make that kind of discrimination as effortless as it could be.

So colour is primarily about making quick sense of shapes - discriminating the reflectance properties of surfaces and so being able to see through to the objects that might have that particular kind of surface.

Those have been around for a long time as well. — creativesoul

You’re doing a lot of shoulder shrugging here. Sure I characterise the divide in caricature terms - woke vs redneck. But then people are caricaturing themselves in that regard. That is how you know it is identity politics rather than the real political discussion that needs to be had.

From my distanced view, that particular stand-off is just a symptom. Even a diversion.

Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion at least feel like attacks on "the system". BLM had its specific target before it all blew up into confused general posturing - the concrete aim of "defund the police" as the other way of saying "fund the social system".

The US problems of a pandemic, historic racism and economic inequality are three different things. Yet they have all be stirred into the same confused stew, at least from what Fox and CNN tell me. And then there is another problem in a president being allowed to trample over every political norm.

To me, that is what a confused nation looks like. It is why I would take a measured approach that tries instead to understand what is "really going on" as historical trends.

If we understand the logic of the thermodynamic imperative, we can see what kind of world fossil fuels needed us to create. One willing to remove all the internal constraints on maximising entropy production. Hence eventually, neoliberalism.

I offered up fracking as a concrete example. It makes no sense to burn so much investment capital to squeeze that tight oil out of the ground. So why is it happening? Well it makes perfect entropic sense. And it makes perfect geopolitical sense in a world economic system so distorted that the US can suddenly cherish an "energy independence" that isn't now renewables based. And so distorted that foreign wealth feels it has little better option than to double down on dollarisation. Any US dollar-denominated investment can lose money, but not as much money as investments in every other currency if world economy tanks.

So the US could be fixed at every level of the problems I outlined. But that is the kind of systematic political project where people are gathered around the same table as interest groups fighting their own corner, yet also bound to arrive at some mutual arrangement by the end – a new balance that could stick.

All the huffing and puffing about ethics and morality is quite pointless unless it is anchored to the reality of life as it happens.

the repetition is tedious. — Banno

But you keep avoiding direct questions.

What kind of answer did you think the OP wanted? Were not its language and concerns explicitly neurobiological? — apokrisis

As well as those of others.

Does the same go for Locke's primary properties?
— Forgottenticket