COLOUR

[ruby sparks]

So if a bird is conditioned to compare tow photic intensities and successfully accomplishes that task it's doing it's doing it consciously? No. Of course not. It is trained to get reinforcement for using it's capability to be conditioned to do so. Since humans are fools, they'll work for grades, which they do for the opportunity to be conditioned to do the same things bird do for seeds. Not conscious in either case, just flexing a wing so to speak.

Your claim justifications were discarded with those of Wundt before the turn of the nineteenth century. The difference between self report and conditioned response is the difference I laid out in example in my previous response on pain.

Obviously you're having problem distinguishing between self initiated act and recruited act/machine response. A well trained pilot learns to reach and activate a control efficiently over many trails. She doesn't think about what she's doing when she performs the task efficiently. She just executes a learned activation response. We do learning because thinking and invoking consciousness every time we perform operations results in too many failures and never becoming proficient.

In fact some have written that we are not conscious of what we do much of the time we are awake, that learned and well conditioned activities control much of what we do during wakefulness. The work of which I'm aware come from studies of military and industrial studies on such as  Situation awareness,  Cognitive load, and well trained complex task performance

?

The pain and colours that are being self-reported by humans are consciously experienced by them.

I'm not sure why you're still doing conditioning, automaticity and several other things.

Can we get back to the OP?

 

[fromderinside]

Those I trained were not self reporting they were sensing The point is they were conditioned to sense through learning a task to the point of doing it automatically. Sense data are collected as part of a protocol to which they have been well overtrained. Since a proportion of the trials are no signal one can verify against physiological measures whether they are actually consciously reporting, much less, self reporting.

I had a candidate observer who kept suggesting that I include a choosing operation interval in every trial. If I had done that then I'd have defeated the purpose of over training an individual to follow a protocol. Obviously you are one of those who would suggest as this pain psychophysiologist had done. He treated with surgically altered monkeys so he didn't have to consider getting past conscious obstacles to gathering sensory information.

I'm trying to get you to recognize the difference between what you see as self reporting and delivering a conditioned response about sensory state.

Self reporting requires individual to choose whether to report or no. In following psychophysical protocols they volunteer they will to follow instructions setting aside thinking about what they sense. To accomplish this result we overtrain the observer. We make them sensory detection experts. As such they are just reporting what they sense.

Why? Does one wait until one decides a starting pistol has sounded to begin running? No. One is trained to the situation. One initiates running tasks as soon as a sound is heard. Waiting until one knows it is a gun noise would put her half to one second behind those who just got off when sound was sensed prior to any conscious treatment of the sound.

There are so many examples of people behaving like machines that humans choose to employ the machine behavior approach for almost all likely situations. We don't process sub vocalizations after we learn to read, we don't judge what type of chewing we will employ when we cut meat and place it on a fork and deliver it to the mouth which we open, all without thinking about them. Why because we aren't self reporting we're eating.

All the behaviors above started with sense. We use conditioned behaviors which we learn through a process starting with self reporting and ending with reading and eating without self reporting. The same goes for overtraining to psychophysical protocols.

The wikis I presented should inform you about the process of going from self anything (conscious behavior) to conditioned response (conditioned behavior) without the need for conscious intervention.

All this is important to addressing OP.

 

[ruby sparks]

Those I trained were not self reporting they were sensing The point is they were conditioned to sense through learning a task to the point of doing it automatically. Sense data are collected as part of a protocol to which they have been well overtrained. Since a proportion of the trials are no signal one can verify against physiological measures whether they are actually consciously reporting, much less, self reporting.

I had a candidate observer who kept suggesting that I include a choosing operation interval in every trial. If I had done that then I'd have defeated the purpose of over training an individual to follow a protocol. Obviously you are one of those who would suggest as this pain psychophysiologist had done. He treated with surgically altered monkeys so he didn't have to consider getting past conscious obstacles to gathering sensory information.

I'm trying to get you to recognize the difference between what you see as self reporting and delivering a conditioned response about sensory state.

Self reporting requires individual to choose whether to report or no. In following psychophysical protocols they volunteer they will to follow instructions setting aside thinking about what they sense. To accomplish this result we overtrain the observer. We make them sensory detection experts. As such they are just reporting what they sense.

Why? Does one wait until one decides a starting pistol has sounded to begin running? No. One is trained to the situation. One initiates running tasks as soon as a sound is heard. Waiting until one knows it is a gun noise would put her half to one second behind those who just got off when sound was sensed prior to any conscious treatment of the sound.

There are so many examples of people behaving like machines that humans choose to employ the machine behavior approach for almost all likely situations. We don't process sub vocalizations after we learn to read, we don't judge what type of chewing we will employ when we cut meat and place it on a fork and deliver it to the mouth which we open, all without thinking about them. Why because we aren't self reporting we're eating.

All the behaviors above started with sense. We use conditioned behaviors which we learn through a process starting with self reporting and ending with reading and eating without self reporting. The same goes for overtraining to psychophysical protocols.

The wikis I presented should inform you about the process of going from self anything (conscious behavior) to conditioned response (conditioned behavior) without the need for conscious intervention.

Ok, and very interesting, but that is one particular type of investigation in which you have gone to great lengths (eg overtraining) to try to eliminate certain parameters from the behaviour. Anyone who agrees that consciousness is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg already knows at least in principle about such things as conditioned or reflexive behaviour, automaticity, non-conscious processes, subliminal perception, procedural memory and so on. Furthermore, anyone who, like me, does not believe in free will, is fully committed to everything, in the end, being automatic in any case, including mind.

But none of it says anything about what's going on when conscious awareness is present, and things like pain and colour are self-reported, including in many other psychophysical experiments and indeed those outside psychophysics. So instead of saying 'consciousness and self-reporting are irrelevant considerations here', why don't you just say, 'they are not relevant for some of my particular investigations into certain types of automatic responses'? Obviously, if you are investigating and entraining non-conscious responses, you are merely yourself choosing not to investigate other aspects of perception.

All this is important to addressing OP.

How? It seems to me to be an interesting but slightly separate topic.

Cases of where stimuli do not reach consciousness do not seem to say anything much about when they do, which is a lot of the time, because colour and pain and sound are routinely conscious experiences. You only have to open your eyes or stick a pin in yourself to discover this.

And suppose a racing car driver learned to respond reflexively to a green (for 'go') light at the start of a car race. It would still seem to say nothing about whether the greenness was a property of his perception instead of a property of light (which is the OP issue).

 

[fromderinside]

Suppose a racing car driver learned to respond reflexively to a green (for 'go') light at the start of a car race. It would still seem to say nothing about whether the greenness was a property of his perception and not a property of light. Nor does that special case and other cases (of where stimuli do not reach consciousness) seem to say anything much about when they do.

Now is the time to reconnect to the nature of receptor mechanisms. If green light impacts a green receptor and that is all that is registered by the overtrained observer are we not now in the position of treating machines? And wouldn't one expect that machine senses green under these conditions? After all we did - well evolution made the choice - choose a green sensitive receptor for the machine to capture a particular narrow band of photic energy associated with the color green.

I sense green has been bagged since it's attributes have been preserved.

Given that strong argument I freely admit that if one senses green with green processing receptors and green is important to surviving then it makes sense that consciousness would mark such a sensed phenomena as green.

From my catbird seat it's clear you need to present argument why such isn't so.

 

[ruby sparks]

Suppose a racing car driver learned to respond reflexively to a green (for 'go') light at the start of a car race. It would still seem to say nothing about whether the greenness was a property of his perception and not a property of light. Nor does that special case and other cases (of where stimuli do not reach consciousness) seem to say anything much about when they do.

Now is the time to reconnect to the nature of receptor mechanisms. If green light impacts a green receptor and that is all that is registered by the overtrained observer are we not now in the position of treating machines? And wouldn't one expect that machine senses green under these conditions? After all we did - well evolution made the choice - choose a green sensitive receptor for the machine to capture a particular narrow band of photic energy associated with the color green.

I sense green has been bagged since it's attributes have been preserved.

Given that strong argument I freely admit that if one senses green with green processing receptors and green is important to surviving then it makes sense that consciousness would mark such a sensed phenomena as green.

From my catbird seat it's clear you need to presen targument why such isn't so.

It's not an unusual argument at all and is a position held by many if not most experts on colour perception. I granted in the OP that it couldn't be proved one way or the other. What I have said is that there do not seem to be any flaws in the reasoning, in other words that it has extensive explanatory power. You are not saying anything to counter or even undermine that. As such, the paradigm 'colour is a property of mind not of light' is fully intact and at this point unchallenged.

As I said, the brain (or just the organism, even a plant) could detect wavelengths, for instance, and that's all it would need to detect and discriminate. I would say that that, or some similar property, such as photons, is in fact all it seems to detect, that that is the more robust, parimonious and coherent explanation. Your saying the redness, for example, is 'already out there' is to me the superfluous claim and more of a stretch. I think it also has more problems, such as the perception of colours that aren't actually there in the wavelengths, and/or perception of colours when there is no light at all, or indeed the absence of colours when the wavelengths are hitting the eye. In other words, there is a lot of supporting evidence for the claim that colours are properties of mind, and your position is somewhat unusual, as illustrated by your additionally saying that pain isn't a property of mind either, but already exists in the stimulus itself. That bird has no wings.

If green light impacts a green receptor and that is all that is registered by the overtrained observer are we not now in the position of treating machines? And wouldn't one expect that machine senses green under these conditions?

A sensor of any sort, animal, vegetable or mineral, only has to detect the wavelengths, for example. The wavelengths themselves don't need to have the property 'redness', in fact it seems they do not, and it also seems unnecessary.

 

[fromderinside]

All of your posturing brings us right back to what is the value of consciousness, or instinct, or intuition as constructs beyond they serve to pump our sense that we are special, a conceit actually. Remove consciousness and there is no need to self report, to imply a homunculus, or any of that other fiction used across the ages to justify human uniqueness.

Try for a moment considering the notion that it is important to project a sense of now, no more, to make us work with all we have to produce action. Nowness is not real it's constructed from what we process, just a convenient fiction for process in which we are part of the action.

Instead move on to study of process rather than attempt to explain by building and hanging on to the fictions of consciousness, intuition, instinct. All those substitute notions, propped up rationalized justifications, will simply fade into equations of processes of behavior. To call something material only requires that specific properties of specific electromagnetic energy are materially identifiable and useful. It's a categorical thing.

It comes down to green is real because it is produced by taking specific energy transduced by receptors capable, by their sensitivity to those specific frequencies, of processing it continuing the chain of physical species. It is sensed and perceived as green because the transduced signals identifies the fact that we use specific energy to carry out behavior profitable to our continued existence. Green in material to humans and other color sensitive animals. In other words color is both information and consistent relevant physical phenomenon.

Puff, puff, bucky unwound.

'nuff sed?

 

[fromderinside]

Two more things.

Light is just part of the EM spectrum and the EM spectrum is just part of the energy spectrum. Should we deny them being material because they are just what we living things can sense and use. Of course not. Physics would be ruined.

Rainbows and prisms yield spectra that are discernibly different across their EM range because of interactions with other physical conditions. Are they not material. Everybody sees them without training. They are reliable and consistent in their look and structure. We know they will break out the way they do because of their wavelengths.

You set up a structure that is convenient to your subjective rational view. It's not really verifiable by scientific methods even though I can see the sense of my argument in material terms consistent with what we know about energy without your hand waving rationalizations.

 

[ruby sparks]

For the umpteenth time I'm not saying anything is immaterial. I have no idea where you got the idea that I am, but you do need to stop banging on about it because every time you do, I think you just haven't even grasped what the claims are. Generally speaking, you are not addressing what I said, you are repeatedly loading it up with baggage like that of your own.

Regarding removing consciousness, you don't even need to do your experiments for that. As I said, non-conscious processes are already well understood and it is accepted that a lot of cognition does not require consciousness. To repeat, that says nothing at all about consciousness or about cognition when it is present. If you are on a mission to erase consciousness from consideration generally it appears to be pointless because all you are doing is choosing not to investigate it. It is even dubious as to whether your experiments are in fact removing consciousness or merely getting approximately close to doing that, whereas other forms of investigation do manage to remove it further from consideration. Physiological changes can be detected and measured for stimuli that don't even cross the threshold into consciousness at all for example. Whereas psychophysics is dealing with perceptions that not only enter into consciousness but have to be reported, even if only in a basic or automatic way, by the conscious subject. Denying that psychophysics essentially relies on self-reporting of conscious experiences is like trying to run away from your shadow. For goodness sake you even said it yourself a few pages back:

She's reporting that she heard, saw, felt, smelled, or tasted or became aware something happened.

You seem to be ok saying 'she' is reporting. If the word 'self' bothers you, it needn't. I believe the human sense of self is an illusion. I only use it here in the basic sense that 'the organism itself' is reporting. 'The machine itself' even, given that I believe humans are machines, and moreover, machines for which everything happens automatically, in the final analysis.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

More to the point, and setting all the above aside, you are still not coming up with any reason at all to undermine the OP claims. It's an unresolved issue, but it would at least be an interesting discussion if you could make points that dealt with it or challenged it. I'm open to hearing them. Even Newton said 'the rays themselves are not coloured'. It's not an unusual claim at all and is taken to be the case by many experts. Ok, not you. But you're not advancing your case merely by insisting the rays are coloured. Everything you have described would function just the way it does if other properties of the rays were detected. Them being coloured is a superfluous additional conjecture. I would even call it a potential illusion, similar to the illusion that objects such as strawberries are coloured.

And in particular your claim about pain being in the stimulus itself, which you haven't revisited since making it, despite me bringing it up several times, still seems awry.

 

[fromderinside]

Going to keep it real.

I said pain sense is about reporting information of harmful material conditions at the skin organ. The particular sensations are reports about information of harmful sources interacting with the skin organ. Consequences whether it be tissue damage due to thermal events, destruction or renting of skin barrier, localized pressure pressure, tissue deformation, etc. are being reported. We call the whole experience pain even though what one receives is mechanical data about what is distressing the skin. Pain is not 'ouch'.

By 'stimulus itself' I mean the particular sensation surrounding a particular event reflects the nature of the harm inflicted. As with any other sense the sensation becomes more particular over time and amount of information received.

With regard to the OP

Claim 1: objects are not themselves coloured, they do not have colour.

Claim 2A: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

Claim 2B: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon of consciousness only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

I convincingly pointed out that we materially respond to color by having particular receptors providing particular information about particular photic EM energies (frequency bands/green) through which we make decisions and act providing material species fitness advantage. We have through evolution, by processing such information, made color material. This is true regardless of how you try to recast in terms your model of consciousness intervening variables. Secondly, material conditions yield rainbows which reflect local conditions and are visible as such by most species with color vision.

Your pooh poohs not withstanding color materiality is amply demonstrated. It's not my fault you try to cage the discussion within the illusory construct of consciousness theory which, when I point that out, irritates you somehow.

You should try to defend your claims rather than whine about my incessant demonstrations of failures of your embrace of some intervening consciousness model and obvious validity of evident material existence of relation between EM wavelength processing with specific activity and evolution.

 

[ruby sparks]

I said pain sense is about reporting information of harmful material conditions at the skin organ. The particular sensations are reports about information of harmful sources interacting with the skin organ. Consequences whether it be tissue damage due to thermal events, destruction or renting of skin barrier, localized pressure pressure, tissue deformation, etc. are being reported. We call the whole experience pain even though what one receives is mechanical data about what is distressing the skin. Pain is not 'ouch'.

By 'stimulus itself' I mean the particular sensation surrounding a particular event reflects the nature of the harm inflicted. As with any other sense the sensation becomes more particular over time and amount of information received.

But none of that addresses the relevant issue here, which is whether the sensations we are talking about are in the brain, instead of being in the stimuli.

I know what you said about pain because I can go back and read it. You explicitly said that it was incorrect to say that pain was not in the stimulus (electricity in that case). That is a highly unusual claim. I am not sure I have ever heard it before. Whatever your model is, if it obliges you to say that (which it did) then I think you should question your model.

With regard to the OP

Claim 1: objects are not themselves coloured, they do not have colour.

Claim 2A: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

Claim 2B: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon of consciousness only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

I convincingly pointed out that we materially respond to color by having particular receptors providing particular information about particular photic EM energies (frequency bands/green) through which we make decisions and act providing material species fitness advantage. We have through evolution, by processing such information, made color material. This is true regardless of how you try to recast in terms your model of consciousness intervening variables. Secondly, material conditions yield rainbows which reflect local conditions and are visible as such by most species with color vision.

Your pooh poohs not withstanding color materiality is amply demonstrated. It's not my fault you try to cage the discussion within the illusory construct of consciousness theory which, when I point that out, irritates you somehow.

You should try to defend your claims rather than whine about my incessant demonstrations of failures of your embrace of some intervening consciousness model and obvious validity of evident material existence of relation between EM wavelength processing with specific activity and evolution.

Ok, as with all your posts so far, none of that actually addresses the relevant issue regarding colour.

And there you go again, with the materiality straw man. I have lost count of the number of times I have said that materiality of colours, even if they are brain sensations and not properties of light itself, is not what is in dispute here and can be set aside. It's obvious from your repeated reference to materiality, and indeed from other non-relevant issues you keep bringing up, that you are not understanding what is specifically being claimed.

To clarify: in the first instance, as with pain, it is primarily about where the properties are, not what sort they are, albeit a discussion about that could be had separately. My own view is that the sensations are material, even if not yet fully understood. I say that because I don't subscribe to the ontological category 'immaterial'.

 

[ruby sparks]

Ok so I will try to undermine my own claims about colour.

Rather than use the analogy with pain, which may not be an equivalent phenomenon, I will use an analogy with something else, shape.

While it is true that our perception of shape (and form) is a phenomenon that occurs in the brain, it seems much easier to say that shape and form also do exist in the outside world.

If that is agreed, then it becomes a matter of whether colour (and/or sound, flavour or odour) are like shape and form, and not like, for example, pain, which appears to be only a brain sensation.

I myself can't think of any way of deciding on that, but the analogy with perception of shape and form does seem to allow for the possibility, in principle, that colour does exist outside of brain sensations, at least inasmuch as shape and form do.

Locke distinguished shape from colour by saying that the former is a primary property and the latter is a secondary one. Locke lived in the 1600's so I am not sure if we can rely on his taxonomies. But we can still ask what are the main differences between the two. One difference is that the former can be perceived in more than one way (we can see a shape and we can touch or handle it). Perhaps this adds some degree of reliability or verification to our saying shape exists outside our brains. This supporting evidence is not available for colour.

 

[fromderinside]

So. The rock can be moved. OK. Let's discuss your last paragraph.

I disagree that color color does not exist outside our brains. Any object that has shape must have color since one can not distinguish through other than touch shape without the presence of light. Touch requires contact with presence of object for one to feel. Light also provides any observer in the physical world with the sense of sight cues about an object's existence beyond shape such as warmth and color. Color signals warmth at a distance in things that are seen as yellow, orange, red, white or blue. Certainly one would not need touching something or even be near enough to feel warmth to know it was harmful because it was hot. One cannot infer a depression in a shape from a distance without using one's sense of light and dark which is no more than using color. In no way are the above different from touching the object beyond the fact that one need not physically contact the object to sense them.

I'm certainly not going to argue that contact sensing is real while remotes sensing is mental. Light provides cues to shape and utility through light-dark value and color value without requiring one to actually come in contact with the things sensed. At a distance is the only thing that keeps one from rationally presuming color is in the world. If it weren't would plants and animals differentiate in accordance with differences provided for sensing.

Thanks for bending.

 

[Treedbear]

I think that shape, like color, is also strongly based on perceived relationships as interpretted by the brain. What we call shape is an inferred property of objects. Sure there are material objects of matter that appear in the form of solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But what it is we call shape is the mind's interpretation. Not a true fact but an abstraction. The only problem is that in order to describe something that abstraction is all we have.

 

[ruby sparks]

I disagree that color color does not exist outside our brains. Any object that has shape must have color since one can not distinguish through other than touch shape without the presence of light. Touch requires contact with presence of object for one to feel. Light also provides any observer in the physical world with the sense of sight cues about an object's existence beyond shape such as warmth and color. Color signals warmth at a distance in things that are seen as yellow, orange, red, white or blue. Certainly one would not need touching something or even be near enough to feel warmth to know it was harmful because it was hot. One cannot infer a depression in a shape from a distance without using one's sense of light and dark which is no more than using color. In no way are the above different from touching the object beyond the fact that one need not physically contact the object to sense them.

I'm certainly not going to argue that contact sensing is real while remotes sensing is mental. Light provides cues to shape and utility through light-dark value and color value without requiring one to actually come in contact with the things sensed. At a distance is the only thing that keeps one from rationally presuming color is in the world. If it weren't would plants and animals differentiate in accordance with differences provided for sensing.

You could be right. On the other hand, all of the above as regards visual perception can be fully explained without recourse to colour (and even light and dark) other than as a brain experience.

Please appreciate that I am not trying to defeat the claim that colour exists outside our brains. All I am saying is (a) that my preferred model is that it is only a brain sensation, and not in the world outside, and (b) that this can fully account for everything about it. That does not mean that colour does not exist outside our brains. There is no point in us going loggerheads over who is right.

 

[ruby sparks]

I think that shape, like color, is also strongly based on perceived relationships as interpreted by the brain. What we call shape is an inferred property of objects. Sure there are material objects of matter that appear in the form of solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But what it is we call shape is the mind's interpretation. Not a true fact but an abstraction. The only problem is that in order to describe something that abstraction is all we have.
View attachment 26720

As I see it, it would be possible to say that everything, including shape, form, length, colour, pain, time, causality, etc etc etc is only a representation of what seems to be 'out there'. As such, yes, shape may not actually exist in the world. I have read of theories in physics for example that the universe is a 2D hologram. I'm not saying it is. Alternatively, the universe may be some sort of probabilistic quantum event. Or it may be information. I do think our conceptions of the world (by which I mean mine and those of most people) are still intuitively Newtonian, and as such possibly out of date.

That said, I still think it would be harder to make the case that there are no such thing as walls, for example, even if we agree that they may not actually be coloured.

And whatever the universe is, I would venture to say that our representations of it must be fairly accurate and reliable in a functional sense at least, or else we would not survive very long. Try driving what merely seems to be your car over what merely seems to be a cliff, for example, even in a 2D hologram universe, if that's what it is.

 

[fromderinside]

You could be right. On the other hand, all of the above as regards visual perception can be fully explained without recourse to colour (and even light and dark) other than as a brain experience.

Please appreciate that I am not trying to defeat the claim that colour exists outside our brains. All I am saying is (a) that my preferred model is that it is only a brain sensation, and not in the world outside, and (b) that this can fully account for everything about it. That does not mean that colour does not exist outside our brains. There is no point in us going loggerheads over who is right.

All you have for your view is association with name.

Obviously what we see, feel, hear, etc. is derived from physical energy interacting with our NS.

It takes a leap to then, because names we conceive and apply to what we sense, that the sensations from which those names are derived must also be derived as mental sensations whole cloth.

Mental sensation? How far are you going to parse to find something other than processing activity associated with transduction of environmental energy by the brain as reason for saying it's mental.

We know that what falls upon our sensors is to close approximation the best these sensors can convert what they receive in to neural information which neurons thereafter processes. The fact is that perception most always is found to reflect physical presence and activity.

Apparently you think that because the human comes up with verbal descriptions and names that what is being named are also not transduced statements of physical conditions. No they are purely mental creations of mind during consciousness.

Couldn't resist.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Oy.

Primary brute facts:

1. Brains create/update/maintain/animate (at least one) ongoing “analogue” of the entire body, referred to as a “self” or “I.”
2. Brains create models of the external world based upon information constantly bombarding and gathered by the body, which is ultimately nothing more than a highly complex sensory input/output device.
3. Brains superimpose the animated analogues into these models in order to help them determine optimal, strategic navigations of the external world prior to acting within the external world.
4. Selves are imbued with autonomy, but also directly experience autonomy due to the fact that they “move” (are placed) from “virtual” model of the external to variations of the model of the external ten trillion times per nano-second every nano-second, which they are not “told” are models or that they are external, as there is no need for the brain to imbue that information to the analogue/animated selves (and would actually contravene their purpose).
5. Nothing the self—the “I” the “us” the “we”—experience is ever anything other than brain created (aka, “psychological”).
6. All that means is that the “I” is illusory, but the body/brain is not.
7. When the brain fails or malfunctions, the “self” likewise fails or malfunctions.

End of mystery.
.

 

[fromderinside]

....and comes the "self" to the BS pile. An "explanation" in search of a reason for being supported by a construction that is actually composed of a conceit called "awareness" presumed to be "complete" another conceit. Nothing about human processing ever results in an internal "reconstruction" of the whole.

Position tracking remains distinct from sensory and perceptual time unified processes. These remain distinct and callable from outcome models based on other sense models. Fields of association for some aspector another of this or that now experiences are set up which provide basis for other partial coordinating and/or referencing processes.

A simple example would be a trade between perception of a click with information about what is going on over there as one orients toward the sound of a twig breaking and a growl being uttered by the wolf who stepped on the twig. Both are are needed to sort out localizing and determining threat response else one would be food all the time. Yet one only has one hearing system. Click receives priority for head turning while audible intelligence is required for threat determination. So rather than processing one and suppressing the other the processing of sensations are reordered so both can be processed as relevant to detection and threat assessment.

One jumps from one process to another to stitch together an ongoing event covered by several out of synch sensory processing chains in a timely enough way to manage to cope. There isn't a single model of anything. There are several processes ultimately chained together to present, after the fact, after each process has done it's job, to latch on to as an impression of real time - actually after the fact - experience. We would never survive if complete models were operating theater.

 

[ruby sparks]

You could be right. On the other hand, all of the above as regards visual perception can be fully explained without recourse to colour (and even light and dark) other than as a brain experience.

Please appreciate that I am not trying to defeat the claim that colour exists outside our brains. All I am saying is (a) that my preferred model is that it is only a brain sensation, and not in the world outside, and (b) that this can fully account for everything about it. That does not mean that colour does not exist outside our brains. There is no point in us going loggerheads over who is right.

All you have for your view is association with name.

Obviously what we see, feel, hear, etc. is derived from physical energy interacting with our NS.

It takes a leap to then, because names we conceive and apply to what we sense, that the sensations from which those names are derived must also be derived as mental sensations whole cloth.

Mental sensation? How far are you going to parse to find something other than processing activity associated with transduction of environmental energy by the brain as reason for saying it's mental.

We know that what falls upon our sensors is to close approximation the best these sensors can convert what they receive in to neural information which neurons thereafter processes. The fact is that perception most always is found to reflect physical presence and activity.

Apparently you think that because the human comes up with verbal descriptions and names that what is being named are also not transduced statements of physical conditions. No they are purely mental creations of mind during consciousness.

Couldn't resist.

I don't think I disagree with anything much you said there.

We can easily agree that as you say, what falls upon our sensors is to close approximation the best these sensors can convert what they receive into neural information which neurons thereafter processes, and that perception most always is found to reflect physical presence and activity, and that brain sensations are (physical, material) transductions of environmental energy, or information (something physical, whatever it is) and so on and so forth. None of that is in dispute between us.

But again, it doesn't seem to be addressing what I'm saying, and in some ways may even misrepresent it.

For example, what I basically said in the particular post you replied to was that regardless of which of us is right and which is wrong (which I doubt we can decide for sure) objects or light of themselves being coloured is fully redundant to explanations. If you disagree about that statement specifically, please explain on what grounds you disagree with it.

If you don't disagree, I would have thought that your generally reductionist approach (the thoroughness of which I very much admire) would lead you to want to weed out apparently superfluous considerations.

And if you want to reply that you think I'm the one retaining superfluous considerations, not you, at least be sure that you aren't misattributing something to me, such as that I'm arguing against materiality or saying something about self, conscious guiding, agency, or consciousness generally, that I'm not actually saying.

 

[ruby sparks]

Oy.

Primary brute facts:

1. Brains create/update/maintain/animate (at least one) ongoing “analogue” of the entire body, referred to as a “self” or “I.”
2. Brains create models of the external world based upon information constantly bombarding and gathered by the body, which is ultimately nothing more than a highly complex sensory input/output device.
3. Brains superimpose the animated analogues into these models in order to help them determine optimal, strategic navigations of the external world prior to acting within the external world.
4. Selves are imbued with autonomy, but also directly experience autonomy due to the fact that they “move” (are placed) from “virtual” model of the external to variations of the model of the external ten trillion times per nano-second every nano-second, which they are not “told” are models or that they are external, as there is no need for the brain to imbue that information to the analogue/animated selves (and would actually contravene their purpose).
5. Nothing the self—the “I” the “us” the “we”—experience is ever anything other than brain created (aka, “psychological”).
6. All that means is that the “I” is illusory, but the body/brain is not.
7. When the brain fails or malfunctions, the “self” likewise fails or malfunctions.

End of mystery.
.

Welcome to our little coronavirus-free cul-de-sac. I hope you are well. I'm very sorry to hear about you losing your job. Genuine sympathies. If it's any minor consolation, you're far, far from being alone. I'm self-employed in a currently non-essential occupation and seeing no money coming in or the prospect of it in the near future. But overall I'm very happy, because I can self-isolate very easily, haven't caught the little bastards yet, and can thus afford to waste time here on largely unimportant philosophical chinwags.

The OP is not meant to go as far as to explain or describe self, or even consciousness in general. It's meant to be less ambitious and very specific. Primarily, it's about the location (or locations) of phenomena such as for example 'redness'. Are they in objects, in light, or only in brains?

I myself quite strongly prefer the model in which 'redness' is only in the brain, but in the end, I am saying the issue is unresolved, and possibly unresolvable. At most all I can say is that the model I subscribe to seems to be a valid one because it has good explanatory power about colour (albeit it lacks a full explanation of 'what conscious sensations are').

But it is possible that colours, as well as being brain sensations, are also 'out there' (in light for example) at least inasmuch as, say, objects such as walls, chairs, strawberries and mountains are (shapes and forms in other words). I am not ruling it out. The question there is whether colour is like those, or more like pain, which I would claim is not 'out there' in the stimuli that cause it in the brain. In fact the more I think about it, pain would have been a better example of the sort of phenomenon I am trying to explore vis-a-vis location. But colour is arguably more interesting, because it seems less resolved.

I'm pretty much ruling out that colour is in objects (such as the ones I listed). I'm less convinced it's not in light, but I'm quite strongly inclined to think it isn't. I do claim that it being in light itself is fully redundant to explanations, which I feel at least somewhat weakens the case for it being so, even if only on grounds of parsimony. But, if I admit that I can't claim to understand or explain what conscious sensations are, I equally have to admit that I might not be understanding something about colour being in light itself.