[KillahBhyte]

I was just reading through this sub thread and I agree. I immediately started comparing the statements against Russell's Teapot ("...can't get bogged down...") and God of the Gaps ("...lack of explanatory power physical theories...") type issues.

[abnry]

When I say can't get bogged down I mean I don't have the energy to get into a big long discussion.

You baited me into starting one... but I'll be brief. The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain. I could imagine myself as the same person except for the perception of two colors swapped. All this is summarized in the question, "What canvas does the brain's neurons draw its images on?" I can't imagine any answer that is material.

Also, saying that physical theories lack explanatory power is not the same thing as saying there is NOTHING can offer explanatory power, or even that physical theories cannot augment any theories. But I strongly oppose the blind optimism of those believing pure physical theories will explain consciousness when it is has so far failed abysmally. That is not the same thing as saying no such physical theories exist, but that I wish more people realized just how optimistic they sound without real reason to be.

[KillahBhyte]

Glad to have pulled you back in, however unwillingly. =) It's an interesting topic to kick around.

On the first, could we not say the same about how an image is rasterized from a set of points, to a polygon, to a shape, to a set of pixels displaying the images on your very screen? Before it was displayed, way down the stack, it was just a series of switches being turned off and on. Electrical impulses that viewed from an ignorant outside source would just appear as random noise. And yet we can easily ascribe the material manner in which it made its way from one to the other. Just because we currently can't directly encode\decode the exact means in which the mind creates these scenes, it's not hard at all to build mental models that a network of synapses could be responsible for a very similar thing from my perspective.

Also decoupling 'blue' from it's physical properties would inherently remove any relevance of the color between us. I agree with and also wonder do two people see 'blue' as the same color sensation, but the only means we have to compare that experience between two separate minds is both looking at a light source in the 450nm spectrum. We have no means to convey the experience itself, only the relation of understanding any further experiences with the first. I'm not sure that it matters much though. Another computer analogy, although Linux and Windows differ a good bit on how they would internally configure a PDF document to be displayed on the screen from it's initial bits, the end result should be close enough that we can both agree on the information the screen displays.

On the second, I'd stand beside my original complaint. This to me draws from the God of the Gaps issues, that somehow if the way we've described the world in every other recognized way is unable to put forward a valid reasoning for a phenomenon with our current level of understanding, we should instead ascribe a non material or physical level of power to explain it that has never been shown or proven to offer a provable valid reasoning for anything. That to me sounds rather optimistic.

[toasterlovin]

> The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain.

Why is it your assumption that the sensation of seeing something is anything other than simply the network of neurons in one part of your brain firing in concert in response to visual stimuli? Why is the color purple, which is a mix of blue and red, also perceived as an intermediate between blue and red if the sensation of seeing a color is not linked to it's actual, physical properties and how they interact with your visual sense organs?