Nigel wrote:Interesting Ian wrote:
You have to specify why being in a particular brain state leads to the experience of redness rather than greenness. What physical law is involved here? What physical theory leads us to understand why we experience redness rather than greenness?
I submit that one cannot be supplied. All we can do is note that certain brain states are correlated to certain experiences. You can claim that these brain states generate these experiences. But then we would have no justification for calling the experiences themselves physical.
Thus this would be a rejection of materialism and an endorsement of epiphenomenalism.
Ian, you remind me of a fellow I used to know several years ago. He constantly wanted to have a "contest" about movie trivia - but since he was primarily interested in gore films, and the rest of us weren't, all his questions concerned people like Dario Argento, an Italian film director famed for making some of the most bloody gore-filled zombie flicks ever put on screen. In other words, he asked questions only he was able to answer. You seem to be doing the same thing.
If you cannot answer my question you should not be a materialist! :o
I've done some searching, but cannot find a reference to "different brain states" as relating to color perception.
With any mental state, there will be a corresponding brain state; yes? If brains generate minds, or if mind states are identical or supervene on brain states, then for different people to have similar mind states, their brain states must be similar. OK??
In particular, I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about, for instance, our brains emit alpha waves when we see red, but beta waves when we see green? Or something entirely different? You may be correct, but I'd ask you to be more specific, and put it in laymen's terms.
I have absolutely no idea if they do or not. The only science I took at school was physics, and that was only to the age of 16. Anyway, this is irrelevant. The fact, if it is a fact, that brains emit alpha waves when we experience redness, does not explain why we see redness rather than greenness, blueness, experience an orgasm or any otehr mental state.
I know you don't understand. Just read my "Is materialism correct" section in my web site when I have completed it (quarter of the way through at the moment).
In the meantime, here is some information I did find.
Jeremy Nathans spent much of the past 17 years focusing on just one aspect of vision: how we see colors.
http://www.hhmi.org/senses/b110.html
What exactly is the product of a perceptual process?
There seems to be an innocuous--indeed trivial--answer:
The product of a perceptual process is a perception!
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/seebelie.htm
First of all I can't get the first link. Second link looks ok. I've just read the first 2 paragraghs.
BTW, just by coincidence, I've just started last night reading a book called "the nature of perception" by John Foster. Apparently he comes to the conclusion that idealism is the only coherent position. But at the moment I'm reading about representational realism and direct realism, and further sub-catagories of these positions. Heavy going stuff! For example, this is the paragraph I'm just trying to come to grips with now:
(I'm using voice recognition software rather than typing out LOL).
Note # replaces peculiar symbol the author uses.
Broad representational theory (BRT), as I have said, takes the #-terminal perceptual relationship to break down into two components, one of which is the subject's being in a certain psychological state -- a state which is not, in itself, perceptive of the relevant physical item -- and the other of which comprises certain additional facts, but ones which do not involve anything further about the subject's psychological condition at the relevant time. Now, in requiring the relevant psychological state to be one which is not, in itself, perceptive of the relevant physical item -- one which does not, on its own, suffice to put the subject into perceptual contact with that item -- BRT is, in effect, requiring it to be one which is not, in itself, physically perceptive at all -- to be a state which is logically capable of realisation without there being anything physical perceived. This is not because there is any general difficulty in understanding how a state which is, in itself, physically perceptive could be mediationally involved in the perceiving of a physical item of which it is not in itself perceptive. For a state which is in itself perceptive of one physical item might be mediationally involved in the perceiving of another. But once we have reached the point of # terminaity -- the point where there is no further physical item which is more immediately perceived -- the only way in which the psychological state which is fundamentally involved in the perceiving of the relevant physical item could turn out to be itself physically perceptive will be by being, in itself, perceptive of that item.