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Do you and I see the same red?
If we both look at the same object, which is red, we have the same wavelength of light reach our eyes. Our eyes are both human eyes and process this wavelength the same way. We both recognize that we are seeing what we commonly call red.
But, what if I am seeing what you would call "blue"? I would recognize it as red - all red objects were this "blue" to me my whole life (and all blue objects were something you don't have a concept of at all.)
These are the kinds of things I pondered as a kid and it's why I don't scoff at qualia. There are some things that we can't in principle measure, and these things are the most foundational to our subjective experience of the world.
If we're both using broadly the same kind of bio-neurological substrate (ie not colour-blind, no drugs, no pathologic photosensitivity, etc) I don't see why we would have a grossly different experience. I think there are subtle differences in processing and interpretation (some people might have visual snow, some cultures don't clearly distinguish blue from green) but nothing so different as experiencing the other person's blue qualia.
It's an interesting idea and I used to ponder it myself when I was a kid, but now I'm older I take the other side and ask why wouldn't we share similar qualia.
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If you see something crimson, and then something cardinal red, are those "the same red" to you? My guess is that you can distinguish those colors, if they are put side-by-side next to each other, but that the associations that each color in isolation brings up in your mind are quite similar.
I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, we dissolve the philosophical question of whether the qualia are "the same", and replace it with empirical one of "how similar are they". We know how to tackle that one.
Let's say you were to take a set of 500 colors, and a set of 50 random memories you have, you could rate how strongly you associate each color with each memory on a scale from 1 to 10. This would give you a 500 x 50 matrix of association strengths, which you could think of as a 50 dimensional space where each orthogonal direction in the space is how strongly one of the 50 random memories is associated, and each of the 500 colors is associated with one particular point in this 50 dimensional memory space. But those points will not be randomly distributed within the space, and in fact you can probably map those points to a 3 dimensional space without losing much information. The position of colors within this 3 dimensional space would be a fairly faithful representation of the association of colors with those 50 memories.
If you were to repeat the above procedure with 50 random concepts you know instead of 50 random memories you have, you would also get a 3 dimensional space with colors in particular points within that space. Generally, I would expect that the positions of colors in this space generated by concepts would be pretty similar to the positions of colors in the space generated by memories.
Well now let's say we repeat this experiment with the same 500 colors, and the same 50 concepts, but a different person, Bob. I would expect that that person maps probably maps colors to concepts in a similar way, as long as they speak the same language and neither you nor Bob are colorblind. If crimson maps to a similar location in your color map as it does in Bob's color map, I think it's fair to say that you see a similar red to Bob.
This also tracks with how we teach colors to our children. We don't say "red is an ineffable experience which I experience and you might too", we say "red is the color you see when you look at a fire truck, or a stop sign, or a strawberry". This provides anchors so that our children know how to bind qualia to language. We can see evidence that they really do bind qualia to language in similar ways to each other too.
Take two kids, Alice and Bob. Teach them red by example. This fire truck is red. This strawberry is red. This stop sign is red. Teach them orange by example. This carrot is orange. This traffic cone is orange. This orange (fruit) is orange (color).
Take Alice into a room with many objects of many colors. Ask Alice to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange. Note the things she brought you, then put everything back exactly where it was at the start. Bring Bob into the same room, and ask him to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange.
Alice and Bob probably both chose similar things. They both took two of their qualia, interpolated an intermediate quale, and mapped that quale back to the physical world. When they did, they got similar results to each other, implying that their qualia were similar (unless Bob is colorblind, in which case they got very different results, implying that their qualia were very different).
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not talking about color associations or being able to distinguish between shades. I'm saying, when you look at an object, your brain seems to translate that into a "color" in your mind. This "color" is how you perceive that wavelenth to be, but there's no rule that says that I see the same "color" as you. All of the colors I see might be completely foreign to you. 100% of my colors might be ones you don't see at all ever. They all appear to gently blend together for me in shades and hues on a spectrum. We share the wavelengths together, but not the effect they produce in our minds.
My perception of the color is not a simple function of wavelength - see example of the blue+black/white/gold dress. My perception of a color is the effect it has on my mind. There is no perception of a color outside of the effect it has on my mind.
In terms of the effects colors have on our minds, we currently have limited direct visibility into this, but
I suppose one thing to check - do you agree that two identical-to-the-atom clones observing identical-to-the-photon sensory inputs would have identical qualia? Or do you think even that is not something we can have high confidence in?
I don't think we could have high confidence in. What if it's assigned randomly, like the first thing you ever see is assigned what I see as "red?" There's just no way of knowing, no conceivable test to find out.
Assigned by what? By "qualia" are you referring to anything you've ever experienced? If so, how do you know you've experienced qualia?
If the first color quale you ever experienced was "assigned" to red, and the second to blue, and then one day they magically switched, would you notice a difference?
If no, why do we care about "qualia"?
Well yes, I would notice if suddenly everything that was blue suddenly turned red.
Why do we care about qualia? Because it's weird. Because it's part of being an observer. Because it seems to point towards that information and experience are different. It affects how doctors need to assess pain, for instance.
If you think that changes in your qualia would have noticeable effects, what is your reasoning for saying
(Emphasis mine)
If you expect that your experience of red would be different if it were "assigned" first vs second, such that you would notice if the first "assigned" quale switched places with the second, including all associations, then it seems like there are at least conceivable tests.
You can test qualia inside a single person's experiences, but you can't compare qualia between persons.
Edit: In your hypothetical, Red and Blue "magically" switched. I don't feel like your comparison to "conceivable test" is fair if it relies on Magic.
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I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?
You're associating your sensory inputs with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. If you sever your optic nerve, and then you point your eyes at a stop sign, you will not experience redness.
I claim that qualia are what it feels like from the inside to ascribe meaning to your raw sensory experience.
Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though? If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context? I'm not sure how that would make sense, so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia. Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing. We can empirically observe that the meaning that we ascribe to these sensory inputs are very similar, but that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.
It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.
No? What would they even be sensory inputs to?
I don't think that's a thing you're able to do sans context. Infants, lacking context, aren't able to identify the colors of anything.
I suspect we're using the word "context" differently - what exactly do you mean by "sans context"? Are your memories a part of the context? Are the innate saccade patterns that all humans use to look at things (e.g. gaze snaps to contrast, edges) part of the context? How about the learned saccade patterns (e.g. scanning in reading order)?
You don't experience unmediated sensory inputs. The map is not the territory, and you can only experience the map, never the territory directly. See exhibit 1932741: the blue/black or white/gold dress. There's an excellent diagram on that page which shows how the exact same colors on the screen can lead to the perception of a white/gold dress or a blue/black dress, in a way that makes it very easy to verify that your raw sensory data really is the same for the blue on one dress and the white on the other.
And so if you have a quale of seeing white on the ruffles of the dress, that quale is not just your raw sensory inputs.
I would say the question should be "how similar is it" rather than "is it similar", but yes.
True, but since we don't directly experience the raw sensory inputs, I don't know how much it matters how similar the raw sensory inputs are. We could quantify the similarity of those raw sensory inputs (e.g. by doing the same dimensionality reduction trick on optic nerve spike frequencies), but I don't think doing so would buy us anything beyond pretty pictures to look at and maybe some cures for diseases.
I reject the idea that qualia are inescapably subjective. People talk about qualia all the time. Therefore, those qualia are causally upstream of what they're saying. If you can figure out the full chain of causality from sensation to perception to meaning making to conversion to language to speech, I don't think there's anything left to explain. It's a lot of stuff to understand, and we don't yet understand all the links in that chain, but that's a statement about the inadequacy of our knowledge, not the unknowableness of the phenomenon.
We probably are. Memories wouldn't be a part of the context, but it would be a tool that allows you to interpret the context (what does context even mean if you lack memories by which to understand it, anyway?). When I say "sans context," I mean that there's no context around the object that would allow you to identify its color even if you couldn't see its color. I.e. if it's so dark that my vision has become black & white - even then, I could guess that a stop sign is red, based on where it is, its shape, the words on it, etc. My contention is that, if I were interrupted during my walk by God bringing into existence some piece of paper on the ground in front of me that was painted a solid color of some color I'd never observed painted on a piece of paper before, I would still be able to identify that color, and the qualia that I experience from viewing that object will be reflective of the photons that bounced off of the paper and onto my retina, such that if similar-wavelength photons bounced off different things and landed on my retina, I would experience similar qualia.
OK, fair enough. You seem to be saying that the qualia you experience only comes up after your sensory inputs have been mediated by your memories, concepts, etc., and all the stuff that exists before that is inaccessible to your conscious mind and hence not really qualia. Seems likely to be correct.
But this doesn't address the question of how similar that qualia between different people actually are. The experiments you designed seem to be very capable of telling if the relationship between qualia that people have are similar to each other (which seems obviously true - people consistently place "orange" between "red" and "yellow" or "purple" between "blue" and "red," for instance). But having similar (or "very similar" or whatever) qualia doesn't refer to similarities in how one individual's various qualia relate to each other, it refers to similarities in the qualia themselves of observing the same thing between multiple different people. Which, as of yet, can't be measured directly. And one might say that the fact that relationships are pretty consistent between humans should push us towards believing that the qualia themselves are consistent, but we also know that, mathematically, it's pretty easy to have different coloring systems that are homeomorphic to each other.
That's a heck of a big "if," though, to figure out a chain of causality like that. If we could figure out in full just the link between sensation to perception, that in itself would be enough to make qualia "objective." But we don't have much of an idea on even beginning that. I'd say that figuring out that link is in the same category as mind-uploading or revival after cryogenic freezing in terms of being sufficiently advanced science as to be magic. I don't support the notion that science can never advance sufficiently, but also, it certainly hasn't, and so we lack the existence proof that this is possible.
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