Hi Brent, "You say nothing could be simpler, yet always talk in ambiguous ways such as "an infant can know what red is". " Why is that ambiguous? Infants know simple things. Red is simple and direct. The concept of frequency modulation and electromagnetism are abstract cognitive experiences which an infant would not know. They cannot have the direct experience of 650nm light but they have the experience of red, which is what we can call a visual qualia. "650NM light is reflected off of the strawberry, whether we are there or not. " Yes but it's not that simple. I agree that there is something physically occurring whether *we* are there or not, but I don't think that it is 'light' any more than it is 'heat'. Those terms refer to experiential qualia, not objective characteristics. What is objective is unclear as anything that we use to measure electromagnetic oscillations in matter is also made of matter so it is impossible to say whether there is actually an emission of photons from a source and a collision to the sensor or whether it just looks like that because there is a mathematical continuity between what we observe of the behavior of both the emitter and sensor. We have no first hand experience of what a nanometer scale detection instrument 'sees', we only know what is seems to do. That's my conjecture though - I don't ask you to consider that as a possibility if you don't want to, although I think it makes a lot more sense than the consensus model of literal particle interaction and solves the explanatory gap. If you look at it my way, there is no reflection of light unless there is something to receive and interpret the event as a reflection. If you felt the 650nm 'light' as heat or as sweetness instead, there would be no sense of reflection and it would be impossible to tell whether the strawberry was warm from the sun/light bulb or generating the heat by itself non-reflectively. We agree that qualia cannot be assumed to be immutably bound to an physical referents or automatically generated consequences of them..data has no sensory preference as we know from computer files. You say the relation is completely arbitrary, and I almost agree, but I only say that they are not directly related - they may very well be indirectly related through sense. Sense allows us the possibility of penetrating our solipsistic bubble, not to contact an absolute reality, but to internalize greater and more inclusively true experiences than just the self, mind, or brain, can generate. Let's look at it your way though and say that 650nm "light" does not require any receiver and independently exists in a way that red does not. What would be the point, from a functional perspective, of turning that light into something other than what it is? If your visual system can capture the pattern of light to begin with, why turn it into some magical modeling in a new dimension of 'color'? In order to generate a coherent spectrum of color, where red plus blue equals purple for example, and red light plus green light equals yellow light but red paint plus green paint equals grey-brown paint. That is a lot of sense to make out of a 'completely arbitrary' hocus pocus. It's rather a stretch to imagine that this is a pin-the-tail-on-the-quanta 'representation' - clearly important truths about light on many levels are revealed with an effectiveness and elegance that our quantitative models have not equaled. If you had to choose whether to understand everything about what your eyes are seeing from a scientific perspective but be blind, ie if you could have X-ray vision and infrared vision, radio vision, etc but have to have that vision only as understood knowledge and information, would you choose that instead of being able to see? Would you go blind in order to have superhuman blindsight? If not, why not? The answer explains the difference between qualia and quanta. "Also, you indicated that you think 'effing' of the ineffable will be possible, within your theory, then you contradict this with things like: "you can't" know what the near death person experienced "you aren't them". So is effing possible or not? " Yes, it is probably possible if you connect your brain to another person's brain. I never said that is isn't possible at some point to merge with another person, just as brain conjoined twins are merged. Sense provides with something even better though - intuition, inference, imagination. Infinitely richer for the universe. Instead of one set of qualia per universe, or one per person, you have each person being able to imagine what others qualia might be like if they want to - and they might even be right, or have valid insights about it. "But prediction is that these complete pictures of experiences can all be broken down, and reduced to fundamental qualities which our brain uses to 'paint' them with. " That contradicts what you just said though, which I agree with, that qualia is shaped by experience. Proof: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-deaf-brain-differently.html If there were complete pictures of experiences which could be reduced, then we would expect to just give an ordinary five year old a calculus book and give them a heavy dose of the neurotransmitters associated with understanding in the areas of the brain associated with mathematics and expect the calculus to become understood without benefit of any experience to get from ignorance to expertise. That is not going to happen. Symbol grounding problem is the key to why. Forms do not automatically generate contents. Formation is not information without sense to interpret it as such. That interpretation is a physical event through time which is experiential and private for which no substitute will suffice. You might be able to speed it up relative to external inertial frames of time measurement so that you can experience something like a slowdown of time while you spend a month learning calculus in your experience with only five minutes elapsed time...maybe that can happen, but not because we force feed the brain a finished configuration. It would be like trying to heat a house by turning logs in the fireplace into ashes directly. You can't skip the subjective experience. "There is no possible theory of NCCs that will ever predict something like a new primary color quale.", which is good to know. Because MPD is predicting the opposite. " It's like a drunk in a bar predicting that he is going to win a fight though. MPD has no way of even defining the actual content of a color (or any other) quale, so there is no danger of it ever being able to predict what a new one would or could look like. What is the prediction based on? Promissory vapor. Why does MPD have any credibility whatsoever in delivering anything more than it already has? What progress can a blind person make in discovering the blueness of blue? To avoid the straightforward reality of that I think can only be wishful thinking and sentimental attachment to naive materialism. Craig

Hi Craig, You say nothing could be simpler, yet always talk in ambiguous ways such as "an infant can know what red is". 650NM light is reflected off of the strawberry, whether we are there or not. Redness, can be there, whether the strawberry is there or not. As is proved, by the fact that a "red" / "green" inverter can be added anywhere along the perception process, proves that the two are completely arbitrary, and to talk model any perception process as if they were the same thing is just irrational. Also, you indicated that you think 'effing' of the ineffable will be possible, within your theory, then you contradict this with things like: "you can't" know what the near death person experienced "you aren't them". So is effing possible or not? Also, I addressed this issue of not being able to experience everything any one person experiences with a quale, like redness, when all the memory of, and attached emotions and everything are bound into the experience to make it complete, in the "Reduction to the Right Fundamental Level" section of the [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I94L7QW4STfLlAm2OXYWQVhVfNmKduASBgf3hySy8DM/edit Effing of the ineffable] paper. Of course, in order to experience the entire thing, including all the memory, and semantic meaning, you'd have to duplicate much of the other person's brain, and as you say, become that person's experience. But prediction is that these complete pictures of experiences can all be broken down, and reduced to fundamental qualities which our brain uses to 'paint' them with. And this is what we'll be able to easily share / eff, not the entire experience. (at least not without duplication of everything that makes the entire picture/experience) You say: "there are no NCCs" and "There is no possible theory of NCCs that will ever predict something like a new primary color quale.", which is good to know. Because MPD is predicting the opposite. Of course, if science demonstrates this to be the case, you'll have to eat your words, to say nothing of your claim that your being right is already a 'fact', even before there is any demonstrable evidence one way or the other. Brent Allsop

Hi Brent, "Just the way you talk about this makes it seem like to me you don't really fully understand what a quale like 'redness' is" I don't understand why you say that. To me nothing could be simpler than understanding what a quale like redness is. An infant knows what red is, even if they don't know what the word that their parents use for it. What I am saying is that just as your memory of the size of your desk in elementary school may not jibe with your experience of it's size were you to encounter it now, you can't be sure that your quale of redness has not drifted through your life, dragging your memory of it with you. You have only your own word to take that red is still the same. How is that really much different from doubting that my red is the same now as your red is the same now? Maybe I have the red now that you had as an infant..who ultimately cares and why would it matter? "Barbara Walters special on people's beliefs about "Heaven" on TV." I saw that. It was interesting to me that she could remember the color clearly long after the experience. Although she still described it as a kind of blue and not a new primary color. "want to know what all these extra colors are like for them." Sure, yes, but you can't because you aren't them. If you could neurologically bind your brain with theirs, or electromagnetically tweak your brain to match some of the patterns in the particular sense cortices, you might get a taste of it - or you might not...you might have to have been born a dog and lived as a dog to smell what a dog smells. All of these things can only be determined experimentally though, what is the point of theorizing about them? "I want to significantly expand my mind, not just intelligently, but phenomenally also." That's what psychedelics are for, my friend. Or, if you aren't into that, you can try avoiding food and sleep for a few days. Meditate. Go on a silent retreat. Chant. Lots of ways to open the doors of perception. I would suggest to you though, that what the strawberry is 'really' like is not 'really' an askable question, as the strawberry itself is only presented as a strawberry to certain kinds of perceivers. Any animal may perceive a berry in roughly the same way that you do - a sweet juicy blob that smells fruity. Other organisms may not perceive that at all - bacteria, other plants, etc. An inanimate object that we use as an instrument is only detecting resistance to velocity, temperature, etc. The berry is a qualitatively flat field of purely physical characteristics. At least, that's what it seems like would be detected by inanimate objects - who knows, maybe every popsicle stick is like the Dalai Lama and has a nice conversation with every piece of trash in the trash can...but I doubt that. "Evidently, within your theory, nothing like that is possible, or worth considering, or is just all a 'red herring'?" I consider those to be some of the most elementary questions about qualia. Not that they aren't worth considering, but that they are not materially important to the hard problem and explanatory gap. It's a given that subjectivity is in some important sense, private. Your approach is to try to think of ways to open the locked door, by banging on it and jiggling the knob, while my conjecture explains exactly why the door is there and why it must, by definition, appear locked to the extent that sanity and identity can be maintained. "And of course RQT is predicting achieving the ability to eff the ineffable, or the discovery of the relationship between our Neural Consciousnes Corelates, and how we experience them, will be the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And the only thing holding us back is lack of our ability to communicate concisely, quantitatively and effingly." The problem with that is that there are no NCCs, any more than particular shadows are correlates of trees and houses. There is no possible theory of NCCs that will ever predict something like a new primary color quale. Neuroscience can tell us how many primary colors we see, or why colors might appear complementary or opposite, or any number of quantitative measures about color, but none of those will *ever* be able to predict exactly what the color xellow might look like. Until you understand why that is not a speculation but a clear statement of fact, I am certain that I am not the one who doesn't fully understand qualia. Craig Weinberg

Hi Craig, Just the way you talk about this makes it seem like to me you don't really fully understand what a quale like 'redness' is, how this is drastically different from something like 650 NM light, and so on, or even what consciousness really is or what is important about it? Lots of people ask me questions like this - and to me this is a strong indicator of how intelligent they are about what consciousness really is. Recently, there was a Barbara Walters special on people's beliefs about "Heaven" on TV. In that program a person related a 'near death experience' where she went up a stair way into heaven. As she ascended the stairway, she noticed that the sky was a color blue she had never experienced before, and she has looked for such in all the "color palates" but has never found it. Of course MPD predicts it's not heaven, just some other neural transmitter her brain was using to build here near death experience with. And of course, the whole effing point is I want to know phenomenally what she experienced. And there are "tetra chromats" that experience 4 primary colors, where you and I experience 3. I want to know what all these extra colors are like for them. And how are 'color blind' people color experiences different than mine.... And what do dogs smell crap like - as it surely must be different than what I smell it like..... And of course, I want to know, phenomenally, what the surface of the strawberry is really like, if anything, beyond just the abstracted information I know about how it behaves. I want to experience and discover all possible phenomenal properties, not just my current limited set. In other words, I want to significantly expand my mind, not just intelligently, but phenomenally also. Evidently, within your theory, nothing like that is possible, or worth considering, or is just all a 'red herring'? And of course RQT is predicting achieving the ability to eff the ineffable, or the discovery of the relationship between our Neural Consciousnes Corelates, and how we experience them, will be the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And the only thing holding us back is lack of our ability to communicate concisely, quantitatively and effingly. Brent Allsop

Brent, It seems to me that the effability issue is a red herring. How do you know that your red is the same as your red was a week ago, or twenty years ago? What would it matter? Might not physicists imagine concepts like charge and force differently? Even the structure of atoms and molecules are awfully ineffable when it comes down to it. What is really completely effable? Craig

Hi John, Wow, this is all very great educational stuff about the claustrum. I have some specific questions for you, Steve, and any other neuroscientists out there, so I wanted to start up a new thread on this topic, if that's OK. You talk about the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, or NCCs. I'm wondering, in your experience with all these neural scientists, how much do they understand about these NCCs, and how much interest is there in such? For what interest there is in them, what is it, exactly, that they think they are looking for, or testing for and how are they looking for or testing for these NCCs? For example, when I heard about the now famous [http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ Jack Gallant, making color movies, reading the minds of people watching movies], I contacted him to find out exactly what their movies of the brain were seeing. I was totally surprised and disappointed that the movies were false colored by them. Basically Jack Gallant had no idea about color quale theory, as we are capturing in this survey, and he admitted that he had no interest in such. Like most neural scientists, they seem only interested in stuff they can test for, and immediately turn off when you mention the word qualia. Similarly, Stuart Hameroff (the anesthesiologist), only seems to be looking for experience, as a hole (what disappears, when he puts people to sleep on the operating table.) His interest in NCCs seems to be at this level, not at something much more specific like what is it that is the NCC for redness vs. greenness, and is there any diversity in such between, us, for example. It seems to me that nobody really knows how to look for or test for NCCs, and nobody is even attempting, or even thinking about such? There seems to already be clear expert consensus out there (for which there is emerging evidence for here at Canonizer.com) for a lot of things like qualia are important, and qualia are properties of the final result of the perception process. The only remaining controversial issue is what is the relationship between these NCCs, and the experiences of things like redness vs greenness. It seems to me that the only major expert consensus disagreement is split between a few major competing theories about this relationship between what we experience and the NCCs of such. As you pointed out: "Phenomenal events may be identical to NCCs (as in the Identity Theory): or they may be non-identical correlates (as in the Smythies-Carr hypothesis)" which is the major split. Also, within mind brain identity, the two competing major sub theories are [http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/8 "Functional Property Dualism"], favored by Chalmers, and [http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/7 Material Property Dualism], favored by Hameroff. In other words, there is consensus on everything except deciding between these 3 main yet to be falsified theories. The current [http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 RQT camp statement] describes 3 different ways to 'eff' the ineffable, or ways to know if my redness is anything like your redness. In other words, it is predicting that this is the way to look for NCCs, which nobody seems to realize yet? We are in the process of moving these 'effing' ideas, and describing them in more detail in new versions of the following camps: * [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gginaif0YTvDVSwFF7V_wRei-SDZlelt0LPIc5I_gD8/edit Property Dualism] * [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dogSoCsouz2RhQ-CTNjtnYJ8Xr6JILNDki5Kn_met_o/edit Material Property Dualism] * [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V03WBMSY5cKf97NoM6KPZSKtxEEHg5MZJfb6FPq0Ui0/edit Macro Material Property Dualism] Given such methods of 'effing' the ineffable, it seems to me it should be trivially easy to test for which of these 3 main theories is the correct one, and eventually find the real NCCs of redness, and so on – falsifying and forcing all mistaken experts into whatever theory's camp is the one. Have you seen any evidence that anyone is thinking about looking for what it is, in the brain, that is responsible for my redness, and how to tell if my redness is more like someone else's greenness, or possibly someone's redness is nothing like someone else has ever experienced before? In other words, is anyone thinking of testing for any possible diversity of ways our brain experiences something like 'red', and so on? Brent Allsop