[Y]our conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself.
Of course. If I had perfect knowledge of my brain’s functioning, now that would be a very strange thing indeed.
You can imagine the state of having switched that “red” experience with the “green” experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred.
No, I can’t. If all my memories had been altered to agree with my newly-altered perception system, what difference would I detect? How would I detect it? Different from what?
The hypothetical situation I mean is one where your current retina is reprogrammed to switch red and green stimuli, and your memories are edited so that you don’t figure it out from inconsistencies, but everything else is left the same.
The fact that there’s subconscious cognitive content to red vs. green can be deduced from things like instinctive reactions† to the sight of blood: the brain doesn’t check the color against the memory of other blood, it reacts faster than that to to perception. The emotional valence of colors would seem off somehow after a switch, because those don’t appear to operate fully through memory, either. Snap judgments of peoples’ attractiveness would backfire as your subconscious applied the rule “green tint means sickly” to someone with a healthy complexion.
I don’t think you’d be able to consciously articulate what exactly seemed “red” about that green grass, but parts of your mind would be telling you that something’s gone wrong, because they’re hooked up not just to labels “red” and “green” but to full systems of processing that would be running on suddenly different stimuli.
†Similarly, chimps raised by humans in captivity will still freak out when exposed to a fake snake, because certain patterns have been encoded deep within. There’s no reason for such patterns to be raised to the level of conscious knowledge.
Ahhh, so you’d only be reprogramming part of my brain. Well, of course I’d run into problems then. All that means is that there are more parts of my brain than those I have conscious access to, which seems pretty obvious to me even before I start to think about what I know of neurology.
I wouldn’t be sure, the vision system has an amazing ability to adept to rewiring.
Monkeys were able to see another color through gene therapy that their species hadn’t seen before.
Of course. If I had perfect knowledge of my brain’s functioning, now that would be a very strange thing indeed.
No, I can’t. If all my memories had been altered to agree with my newly-altered perception system, what difference would I detect? How would I detect it? Different from what?
The hypothetical situation I mean is one where your current retina is reprogrammed to switch red and green stimuli, and your memories are edited so that you don’t figure it out from inconsistencies, but everything else is left the same.
The fact that there’s subconscious cognitive content to red vs. green can be deduced from things like instinctive reactions† to the sight of blood: the brain doesn’t check the color against the memory of other blood, it reacts faster than that to to perception. The emotional valence of colors would seem off somehow after a switch, because those don’t appear to operate fully through memory, either. Snap judgments of peoples’ attractiveness would backfire as your subconscious applied the rule “green tint means sickly” to someone with a healthy complexion.
I don’t think you’d be able to consciously articulate what exactly seemed “red” about that green grass, but parts of your mind would be telling you that something’s gone wrong, because they’re hooked up not just to labels “red” and “green” but to full systems of processing that would be running on suddenly different stimuli.
†Similarly, chimps raised by humans in captivity will still freak out when exposed to a fake snake, because certain patterns have been encoded deep within. There’s no reason for such patterns to be raised to the level of conscious knowledge.
Ahhh, so you’d only be reprogramming part of my brain. Well, of course I’d run into problems then. All that means is that there are more parts of my brain than those I have conscious access to, which seems pretty obvious to me even before I start to think about what I know of neurology.
I think we agree with each other.
I wouldn’t be sure, the vision system has an amazing ability to adept to rewiring. Monkeys were able to see another color through gene therapy that their species hadn’t seen before.
Indeed there’s rewiring over time, but it wouldn’t be instant and it wouldn’t be total, so the point stands.
That’s a really interesting experiment—can you find me a link?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/colortherapy/
Thanks!