From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 00:54:56 MDT
Brent Allsop wrote
>> Many people agree with Dennett that you'd endup up having to change
>> all of a person's unconscious and conscious associations before the
>> "effs" would be valid.
>
> First off, let me ask you a question. What is it that these
>"associations" are made between? At the fundamental level
>there has to be something that does the representing of
>conscious information that can be associated with something
>else, what is this?
Now I am guilty of not perservering with your paper,
HTML version: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/qualia.htm
MS Word version: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/qualia.doc
it's still on my to do list. But anyway, to continue the
discussion, you ask
1. What is it that these "associations" are made between?
I don't know. Here is the closest that I can come to
answering: they are made up of billions of neurons
that affect how the whole machine moves and even thinks.
(Sorry - I know that's not the level you want, but it's
as close as I can come. I think that my answer goes some
distance towards helping understand our difference. See
my next answer, please.)
2. At the fundamental level there has to be something
that does the representing of conscious information,
[something] that can be associated with something
else, what is this?
Okay, when you say "does the representing", I have to
ask "to whom?". Do you want to retort "to me!", to the
I that I am!"? You appear by the above kind of statement
to be asserting that there is a disconnected subsystem
that is the viewer in the Cartesian theater. That's the
"you", and the effs are presented to it.
Whereas, I think that "salty taste" per se does not exist.
There exists "salty taste to Brent Allsop" and "salty taste
to Lee Corbin", but nothing generic. Now why is this?
Okay, imagine that we are looking at the one hundred billion
neurons. Some salt hits my tongue. A huge flurry of neurons
slowly start to become engaged. There is (I believe) no
demarcation line that could conceivably be drawn within
that flurry of neurons such that on one side you have
"salty taste" and on the other side "Lee Corbin". It's
all Lee Corbin. All your Lee Corbin are belong to us.
Ahem. Also, as Dennett says, seeing red will turn out to be
something like area #57 gets activated in resonant mode #75.
But when *your* area #57 goes off, it's just not "like"
when my area #57 goes off, because they're just too dissimilar.
My area #57 has huge links all over the 100 billion other
neurons that (subjectively) shade the meaning of red to an
enormous, ENORMOUS degree. To take an extremely crude example,
suppose that our subject always talked to his beloved father
in a red room. The color red is now completely intermingled
with a huge number of other thoughts, feelings, nuances. It's
completely hopeless to think that "my red" and "his red" can
be successfully effed.
>No matter how many different things you happen to cognitively
>"associate" with the taste of salt, it will always remain just
>that: salty. You can use it to represent anything you want...
So let me ask, is "salty" to a dolphin the same as "salty" to
humans? If yes, well, that's absurd, because I can slowly
work my way down to a paramecium. If no, then, what forces
all human beings to be the same?
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:07:56 MST