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Comment by yarg

2 years ago

I do think that the philosophical question could potentially be approachable in a modern context;

Show people a colour and map their brain activity - the level of similarity between two people's colour perceptions should be reflected by similarities in the activity.

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yarg

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lazide  2 years ago

Why do you think that would be the case?

One persons ‘blue’ activity could be different than another’s while still being the same wavelength of light and general perception.

  • yarg  2 years ago

    The philosophical question is not dealing with the objective external reality;

    It's a question of subjective experience - and that experience should be reflected in electrical activity.

    Given the fact that the broad structure of the brain is largely shared across members of the species, similar stimulation should trigger similar activity in the same regions of the brain.

    If the same colour triggers markedly different activities, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the subjective experiences are not the same.

    • lazide  2 years ago

      Except that’s literally not how humans are wired or develop - even nerve paths and other fine grained details in our bodies show significant divergence, and there are major macro level differences readily apparent even based on gender, color blindness, etc.

      Honestly, it would be shocking if it were even a little true beyond ‘frontal cortex’ levels of granularity. And even then, Phineas Gage type situations make it clear that may not actually be required either.

      And that means completely different individual activity can trigger similar subjective experiences as much as similar activity can trigger different subjective experiences, no?

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