Comment by pavas
6 months ago
I'm actually curious here, because maybe our experiences are different. When you look at something red, before any associations or thoughts kick in, before you start thinking "this reminds me of fire" or analyzing it, is there something it's like for that redness to be there? Some quality to it that exists independent of what you can say about it?
For me, I can turn off all the thinking and associations and just... look. And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense. It's hard to put into words because it's prior to words, and can possibly be independent of them.
But maybe that's not something universal? I know some people don't have visual imagery or an inner voice, so maybe phenomenal experience varies more than we assume. Does that distinction between the experience itself and your ability to think/talk about it track for you at all?
> And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense
I think I know what you mean, but if you consider something really simple like the patch of a single color, even without any color associations (although presumably they are always there subconsciously) then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". There is something there, that is the same in that spatial region, but different elsewhere.
At least, that's how it seems to me, and isn't that exactly how the quale of a color has to be - that is the essence of it ?!
Yeah that pretty much seems to be it.
> then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent".
I don't know why this seems to be so hard for me to think about and even put into words, but isn't "the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent" something other than the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent itself?
I mean that the words we use to describe something aren't the something itself. Conceivably, you can experience something without ever having words, and having words about a phenomenal visual experience doesn't seem to change the experience much or at all (at least for me).
Maybe another way of phrasing this would be something like: can we talk about red blotches using red blotches themselves, in the same way that we can talk about words using words themselves? And then, supposing that we could talk about red blotches using red blotches (maybe the blotches are in the form of words or structured like knowledge, I dunno), can we talk about red blotches without ever having experienced red blotches? I learned this idea from Mary's Room thought experiment, but I still don't know what to think about it.
Yes - the experience / quale has nothing to do with words.
The point (opinion) I'm trying to make is that something like the quale of vision, that is so hard to describe, basically has to be the way it is, because that is it's fundamental nature.
Consider starting with your eyes closed, and maybe just a white surface in front of you, then you open your eyes. Seeing is not the same as not-seeing, so it has to feel different. If it was a different color then the input to your brain would be different, so that has to feel different too. Vision is a spatial sense - we have a 2-D array of rods and cones in our retina feeding into our brain, so (combined with persistence of vision) we experience the scene in front of us all at once in a spatial manner, completely unlike hearing which is a temporal sense with one thing happening after another... etc, etc.
It seems to me that when you start analyzing it, everything about the quale of vision (or hearing, or touch, or smell) has to be the way it is - it is no mystery - and an artificial brain with similar senses would experience it exactly the same way.
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