From: Brent Allsop (allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com)
Date: Wed Nov 26 1997 - 09:49:45 MST
Mark <mark@unicorn.com> continued:
> It's an entry in a database; tomato.red = TRUE. Everything you see
> around you is just a database, and Dennett goes to great lengths to
> demonstrate this. This is why human perception is so easily fooled,
> and why hallucinations may well change a tomato into an elephant,
> rather than swapping around bits of the visual field.
In spite of his arguments, Dennett's eliminative materialist
position is not very popular.
When I see a juicy red strawberry, there is something very
phenomenally real and 3 dimensional built out of qualia in my
conscious mind that is representing this package of sugar in my hand.
Though this representation is, in a way, data, there is no
strawberry.red = TRUE. There is a red phenomenon that represents the
fact that this package reflects 700nm light. My percept of a
strawberry just is. There is no high/low level interpretation of the
representation of the strawberry required like interpretaion of
abstract data is required. It just is my perception of the
strawberry.
> What's a database entry "really fundamentally and phenomenally
> like"?
By definition, abstract data representations ignore the actual
fundamental qualities. Typically they are fundamentally the
orientation of magnetic flux on a disk. At the fundamental level this
is what abstract models are built out of. But of course you could use
punched paper to represent the same "abstract" information even though
it is fundamentally very different. This is the meaning of
"abstract". It is one physical phenomenon being set up to model or
represent something else or some other phenomenon.
Red is fundamentally not anything like 700 nm light. It's
phenomenal qualities only abstractly represent what light is like. It
is one phenomenon modeling another. It is conscious knowledge about
something. It is so much more than a particular bit being interpreted
as the red bit being true. It is red, no interpretation required.
Brent Allsop
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