Also, going meta for a moment (having a hard time putting words to this):
I sometimes feel there is a mismatch that happens when I talk to functionalists, which is that I get the impression that they are considering the “whole functional system”/inputs and outputs all the way out at the very edge of the system (like, red light entering the eyes, the word “red” being spoken, etc), and this seems arbitrary and not grounded in internal observations.
And if I am being honest, working with tokens at the level of “red” feels coarse/crude, I prefer to work at a level of detail that’s actually informed by my qualia, like I’ll be thinking about minute red fluctuations in the visual field and what neural structures might underly them. I’d not be working with red in isolation because I don’t think you can even have colour qualia without them being embedded in a field (Richard P. Stanley talks about this sort of type error in this paper).
So, I am trying to find some physical structure whose momentary shape is similar to whatever is happening in the visual field, and this might have an input/output boundary around it equivalent to the boundary between phenomenal and access consciousness – and I am inclined to be skeptical that this extends all the way out into neighbouring cortices, let alone the eyes. But maybe it does, who knows (Emmett Shear once claimed that the brain sends more messages to the retina than the other way around, but this didn’t pass my friend’s fact check).
It’s an outside in, behaviouralist perspective rather than inside out one, and it leads to very different intuitions, but I think they can be worked through. Lmk what you think.
Also, going meta for a moment (having a hard time putting words to this):
I sometimes feel there is a mismatch that happens when I talk to functionalists, which is that I get the impression that they are considering the “whole functional system”/inputs and outputs all the way out at the very edge of the system (like, red light entering the eyes, the word “red” being spoken, etc), and this seems arbitrary and not grounded in internal observations.
And if I am being honest, working with tokens at the level of “red” feels coarse/crude, I prefer to work at a level of detail that’s actually informed by my qualia, like I’ll be thinking about minute red fluctuations in the visual field and what neural structures might underly them. I’d not be working with red in isolation because I don’t think you can even have colour qualia without them being embedded in a field (Richard P. Stanley talks about this sort of type error in this paper).
So, I am trying to find some physical structure whose momentary shape is similar to whatever is happening in the visual field, and this might have an input/output boundary around it equivalent to the boundary between phenomenal and access consciousness – and I am inclined to be skeptical that this extends all the way out into neighbouring cortices, let alone the eyes. But maybe it does, who knows (Emmett Shear once claimed that the brain sends more messages to the retina than the other way around, but this didn’t pass my friend’s fact check).
It’s an outside in, behaviouralist perspective rather than inside out one, and it leads to very different intuitions, but I think they can be worked through. Lmk what you think.