When I said “they don’t have direct access to R” this was imprecise and invited reading R as an implementation detail. It’s not an implementation detail so I should clarify precisely what I mean here.
The phenomenal character of red in my experience and the categorical base property R are the same thing. So when I have a red experience, in a sense, I’m directly acquainted with R as this quality in experience (which is the primary intension.) What I meant to deny is not direct acquaintance with R but rather a transparently rendered a priori access to R under a physical/structural description that would let you derive what the phenomenal character is like. In other words, you need to be literally tokening the property R from a first-person perspective to experience the phenomenal character of red. The secondary intension just rigidly designates the property R across all possible worlds.
The 256-bit float vs 128-bit floats example is disanalogous because there’s a structural implementation difference in the host system which is causing the change. R and R’ have no internal structure with which to differ, instead they differ intrinsically. Think of it like the mass-role in physics. If we switched the intrinsic property of the mass m with m’ such that F = ma now read F = m’a the physicist would say that nothing has changed. Whether m or m’ is playing the mass-role leaves the third-person physical observables untouched. The Russellian move is to say that there’s still a further fact about the categorical properties m and m’ that cause them to differ intrinsically.
I think on this view you still have trouble “referring to R”, on relatively standard semantic views like “you refer to things by saying information specifying them”, requiring a significant weakening of semantics to get the references to work out.
Your semantics is doing a lot of work here, and I wouldn’t grant that it’s standard. If you build semantics in a way that reference always goes via informational differences in the structure, then of course reference to intrinsic properties will look impossible. From my perspective, this is baking the illusionist/structuralist conclusion into the semantics and I’d treat that as a bug rather than a feature.
The motivation for this Kripke-Chalmers style 2D semantics is motivated by these kinds of cases where we do seem to latch onto things whose immediate microstructure we don’t know (e.g. water/H20). And I’d argue that this acquaintance-based form of semantics works for all sorts of things like “this pain”, “that red” and arguably even “that object” without needing informational differences to specify them up to some structural isomorphism.
Regarding the term relata, I’m just using it to mean “things” which stand in relation to each other. On view 1) ontic structural realism says there are no “things” which stand in relation to each other, it’s the relations themselves which exist and that’s all. Your view sounds to me like it leans towards 1) with some epistemic humility about whether a richer structure like 2) really underlies reality.
I share your intuition that OSR sounds like a metaphysically dubious hypothesis even if it’s methodologically useful and given that your semantics is strongly information-based, it’s unsurprising that talk of “things” or “relata” feels slippery because your semantic machinery doesn’t have the resources to pick them out. That’s exactly why I’m inclined to bring acquaintance-based reference to intrinsic categorical properties as an extra ingredient.
I’m dubious about the existence of “multiple substances” in the classical philosophical sense. There is a “syndiffeonesis” argument that for things to be different, they have to have something in common. And as long as they have something in common, what is the meaning of claiming they have “multiple substances”?
I’m happy to grant that talking about “phenomenal substance” vs “physical substance” in the Cartesian sense is not well-formed. What matters more for me is just the distinction between intrinsic properties and relational/structural properties. Once we’ve granted that reality is not purely structural and there are some categorical/intrinsic aspects to reality then the distinction between 2) and 3) starts to collapse: they both allow relata with an intrinsic nature, 3) just treats our first-person acquaintance with experience as evidence about what that intrinsic nature is like.
So I think there are two cruxes:
Do we allow intrinsic/categorical properties in addition to structural relations?
If we do, how seriously do we take experience as data about them?
I take your view as saying: we have epistemic access to the structural relations, and it’s at least plausible that they’re populated by some kind of relata, even if our information-based semantics can’t get a clean handle on them. If that’s right, then there’s actually some convergence in our views: the phenomenal realist just wants to say “yes, there are such relata and their intrinsic nature is presented to us in experience.”
The phenomenal character of red in my experience and the categorical base property R are the same thing. So when I have a red experience, in a sense, I’m directly acquainted with R as this quality in experience (which is the primary intension.)
I want to read “directly acquainted” here carefully. There is a sense in which Oscar is “directly acquanited” with H20 in that he can touch it and so on. However this is very much not like “Oscar directly perceives H20”. Rather if he directly perceives anything, it is either a higher-level feature like “watery substance” or some less object-y “sense data” type thing.
I realize the analogy to twin Earth can’t quite hold, because R is an experience in a way H20 isn’t. I agree R can’t be defined as analytically equivalent to some complex physical or structural proposition.
I do want to push back on the idea of “literally tokening R”. “Tokening” would make me think of information processing systems, like parsers. In that sense I can “token” neuro-red by receiving red cone stimulation. Except of course neuro-red can’t equal R in the general case. I can see an analogy to Drescher’s “gensym” idea, that the mind operates as if it has access to symbols that can be equality-compared with each other, but from which it can derive no other information. (For color qualia, there would be 3 gensyms for the 3 primary colors; other colors could be vector combinations.) In that case the gensym would be token-like, yet not Shannon info (not serializable), and accordingly dis-analogous from linguistic tokens. (But also in that case, the actual value of the gensym (#:G430 or whatever) seems more like an implementation detail that I’m not directly acquainted with.)
And at the point where you have “non-serializable tokens” it seems more like they are encapsulated “objects” in the sense of object-oriented programming, rather than “tokens”.
I agree 128-bit float isn’t quite like “intrinsic property of mass” because it leads to different physical predictions. But perhaps the “intrinsic property of mass” is more like details of how 128-bit floats are stored in hardware. It does 128-bit either way, there’s no difference internal to our physics (as 128-bit floats are different from 256-bit floats), but there is some intrinsic difference. (Again, if simulation hypothesis, there is some way this could counterfactually leak into our simulation, in a way that would break physics and break the symmetry; physics requires the symmetry to hold.)
So in this case I would say:
we don’t exactly know if “intrinsic property of mass” is a thing, for standard ontological uncertainty reasons
assuming it is a thing, we can’t straightforwardly refer to properties of it; the most available analogies are to things in our universe, but there’s a geometric barrier between these
yet there might be a careful way of referring to these differences, such as “hardware differences in numeric representation assuming simulation hypothesis”, through counterfactual analysis or something.
again, “intrinsic property of mass” is an implementation detail, not something people are directly acequainted with
Your semantics is doing a lot of work here
Yes I’d agree that by assuming semantics is informational I’m risking begging the question. The thing I don’t have much clarity on is a non-Shannon account of semantics.
And I’d argue that this acquaintance-based form of semantics works for all sorts of things like “this pain”, “that red” and arguably even “that object” without needing informational differences to specify them up to some structural isomorphism.
It seems like (a) the semantics can be interpreted physically/functionally, in a way that gets the same thing for the original and twin, (b) the semantics can be interpreted to refer to “intrinsic sub-physical” implementation details, in which case it could get something different for the original and twin.
The thing I’m having a hard time imagining is a third alternative, where the semantics refer to an intrinsic property, and one that both the original and twin are acquainted with (in a MUCH stronger sense than Oscar is acquainted with H20).
Here’s how something could work in substance dualist land: The brain connects to the soul through a Pineal gland. Souls have their way of processing Shannon-inputs (physical) to Shannon-outputs (physical). That processing involves extra-physical implementation properties. “This person’s mind” has a secondary intension referring to something interior to the soul. So by secondary intension, a person’s mind is directly acquainted with some extra-physical properties interior to the soul, not with anything physical. Now “the experience of red” is referring to a soul quasi-info property that doesn’t line up with Shannon info, and which the mind is more directly acquainted with. And the “inverted qualia thought experiment” could correspond with a “real distinction”, in the sense that counterfactually mind-melding souls (rather than brains) could lead to noticing the qualia difference.
This is of course not something people believe now. But the hypothetical leads me to think that things like “the mind” and “direct acquaintance with the experience of red” could have secondary intensions referring to extraphysical qualia; the secondary intensions would work out if substance dualism were true.
I think this secondary intension picture works out less well in an epiphenomenalist and/or property dualist setting. In that case, by emergence (physical → mental causation) or pre-established harmony (physical → physical, and mental → mental) or neutral emergence (neutral → neutral, neutral → physical, neutral → mental) or similar, mental properties line up with physical ones (natural supervenience). Then you can try to refer to mental properties by the ones lining up with the physical ones (e.g. red cone stimulation).
This might even work. But it lines up less well with folk theory of mind than substance dualism. The minds could be directly acquainted with color qualia that have no physical definition. But then who am I talking to? The mind isn’t causing any talking. It’s a bit like the deterministic MMORPG situation. (I realize this gets into “standard problems with Chalmers-type views” territory and is less of a knock-down semantic argument.)
I am not sure if you would consider “figure out how qualia Kripkean semantics would work assuming substance dualism, then deflate from there to be realistic” to be a strawman of the semantics.
Your view sounds to me like it leans towards 1) with some epistemic humility about whether a richer structure like 2) really underlies reality.
Yep. To elaborate on what methodological OSR could look like, homotopy type theory has a “univalence” axiom which approximately says “isomorphic things are equal”. That means isomorphism classes always have only one element. That seems like the kind of ontological assumption one would want for OSR, and homotopy type theory makes it clear that Shannon info processing and Turing computation remain possible under univalence. So homotopy type theory could have the spirit of OSR without collapsing into grammatical absurdity (“relations but no relata”). (Of course, asserting univalence to be simply true would be dogmatic; usual situation with metaphysics.)
I take your view as saying: we have epistemic access to the structural relations, and it’s at least plausible that they’re populated by some kind of relata, even if our information-based semantics can’t get a clean handle on them. If that’s right, then there’s actually some convergence in our views: the phenomenal realist just wants to say “yes, there are such relata and their intrinsic nature is presented to us in experience.”
That seems right. I think “relata are real” and “relata aren’t real” are both in dogmatic metaphysics territory, but I’m ok playing with the idea that relata are real, as “relata aren’t real” is more conceptually speculative. The part that seems hardest to me is how direct acquaintance with relata is possible, that would grant the relevant epistemic access and so on. (Kantian framing would be “is this claiming to have epistemic access to noumena? and if so, is there a skeptical hypothesis perhaps OSR-like that undermines this claimed epistemic access; which need not be true, only possible, to undermine epistemic access?”)
I should clarify my view a little here. Roughly I’m committed to two things: * Intrinsic/categorical properties exist and they are qualitative. * Conscious experience of a quality consists in representing the quality where further conditions obtain.
I’m deliberately not going to endorse a detailed view on when “further conditions obtain” because I think basically any good cog-sci theory of consciousness could be ported in here e.g. RPT, GWT etc.. and I’m happy to just let disputes among these be settled empirically by whatever best fits the data.
I think you’re circling a genuine pressure point on my view which is more epistemic than semantic, namely, the Awareness Problem. Roughly, the objection says that if qualities exist as intrinsic properties of the categorical base and the brain is “aware” of the qualities then it’s conceivable that a qualitative zombie could exist i.e. the quality could be present but the structure of the brain would conceivably not be able to become aware of it. The original objection targets a Higher-Order-Thought view of panqualityism where the quality needs to be quoted or indexed by a HOT for the brain to be aware of it. This feels reminiscent of the “tokening” objection you’re pushing where the brains structure and the categorical base are two separate kinds of stuff and the brain needs to “reach across” to token the base in a Cartesian dualist sort of way.
I don’t think this is the correct route. On my view the brain is part of the categorical qualitative base and it’s just in those qualitative states. It’s not a separate type of stuff so I don’t think it needs to “reach across” by indexing or quoting them in a special way, it just needs to minimally represent the qualities.
There’s an interesting recent paper Rosenberg (2025) which argues that certain brain states represent the qualities at first-order. The analogy is a projector film reel[1] which is capable of producing coloured film when it’s projected in the right way onto the wall. By contrast, the HOT is like a sticky note stuck on the reel saying “this film plays X” which doesn’t add anything to the actual content. I don’t need to literally token the state with a higher thought like “boy am I in some pain right now!” to be feeling pain. The first-order representation of pain seems to be doing the work. I don’t think this fully solves the problem but it does make “qualitative zombie” feel less compelling for me. If we have qualities in the base and the structural machinery to represent them in the right way it’s hard, for me at least, to conceive of a scenario where the result is a zombie with no awareness of the quality. In fact, I’d be inclined to treat the zombie as an absence of the categorical base with the structure/relations intact i.e. OSR.
Again, I don’t think this view is without challenges but I think it has real theoretical parsimony that makes it attractive. It takes phenomenal consciousness seriously, it doesn’t lead to counter-intuitive bullets like panpsychism and it fits squarely into a naturalist/monist picture.
The minds could be directly acquainted with color qualia that have no physical definition. But then who am I talking to? The mind isn’t causing any talking. It’s a bit like the deterministic MMORPG situation. (I realize this gets into “standard problems with Chalmers-type views” territory and is less of a knock-down semantic argument.)
One of the main motivations for Russellian views is to provide a natural story for where qualia sit. They’re not “causal” in the sense of meddling with the physics but rather “constitutive” in terms of populating the structure. So Russellian views are typically thought to evade epiphenomenalism objections.
Roughly, the objection says that if qualities exist as intrinsic properties of the categorical base and the brain is “aware” of the qualities then it’s conceivable that a qualitative zombie could exist i.e. the quality could be present but the structure of the brain would conceivably not be able to become aware of it.
Yeah pretty much. The qualitative zombie’s possibility would be a consideration against the idea that there is direct acquaintance with qualitative intrinsic properties, by way of being an epistemic block. (If OSR is plausible then ESR is true; if ESR is true then quiddites can’t be phenomenal even if they exist; except possibly through a ‘direct realism’ type dodge?)
On my view the brain is part of the categorical qualitative base and it’s just in those qualitative states. It’s not a separate type of stuff so I don’t think it needs to “reach across” by indexing or quoting them in a special way, it just needs to minimally represent the qualities.
So I think I have at least partial agreement here. Summarizing my current (Sellars-inspired) angle of attack on philosophy of mind:
The visual phenomena to explain are 3d, not 2d.
The appearance to explain is the appearance of direct realist transparency.
The illusions of consciousness function to make the representation match the environment.
So as a relatively simple example, the environment is actually approximately continuous; the neural representation of it is discrete; yet visual phenomena are again continuous-seeming. This points at something illusionary (inflation of e.g. visual neural info to a continuous-looking image, that appears to have “more bits” taken as info). But some “hallucination” is needed in the decompression step, to make the map match the territory. (Compare autoencoders)
In the example of “the redness of red”, actual red in the environment is deep, there’s deep optical physics behind it. The neural representation of red is, at some stage, shallow, like ‘optic nerve firings corresponding to red cone stimulation’. Then there’s an (apparent) inflation into a deep-seeming phenomenon of red.
The information bottleneck (e.g. optic nerve) enables hallucination to be possible, by sending different info through the info bottleneck. Yet under normal conditions, the intuition that red is deep is correct, if interpreted intensionally.
Russelian monism starts with: structuralism about physics, and quiddism (underlying relata) of sub-physics. That’s what I would see as a reasonable set of assumptions to work with, even if not proven. The third claim, quiddism about phenomena, initially seems to me like a wild epistemic claim. I could steelman it as, quiddism about phenomena is through representation; the human representational system “believes” relata exists, so the representation is “of” a relata-containing world, and a Russelian monist can say the representation is correct due to a representational link with quiddites.
To be clear this might be rounding off the position too close to standard cogsci. The thing this steelman is consistent with is phenomena coming from the world to phenomenal consciousness through an informational bottleneck. This avoids positing unusual physics in, say, the intrinsic quiddite properties being mapped equivariantly to phenomenal properties in a direct way (rather than intermediately through a Shannon info space, which would have to eliminate all intrinsic relata.) This is perhaps in analogy with skepticism of claims like “quantum states pass into the brain in a cognitively/phenomenally relevant way”; quantum states can’t be transferred through a Shannon info bottleneck, in common with relata. (Apparently equivariance is a constraint on which unitary operators count as physically valid in quantum mechanics! I’m not a QM expert, but there is a significant analogy here.)
The “direct acquaintance” here with quiddites would be similar to the direct realist sense of “direct perception” of objects. It is causally mediated through an information bottleneck (optic nerve and so on). But there is an epistemic sense in which the actual objects out there are causing representations of objects. Knowledge as justified true belief plus Gettier resolutions, a causal chain of sorts. (Or in the Russelian view, actual quiddites out there are causing phenomena with apparent intrinsic properties.)
The main way I could imagine the Russelian view being more tenuous than direct realism about environmental objects is that quiddites are obscure implementation details, unlike environmental objects. (For direct realism I’m drawing on: Wilfred Sellars, “Phenomenalism”.) The ambient deepness corresponding with the visual phenomenon of the deepness of red is, primarily, deepness of a physical/relational nature (the quantum mechanics of red light, for example), not deepness of an intrinsic property nature.
In common with direct realism, the Russelian view would have some amount of trouble with an “argument from hallucination”, under which the optic nerve would receive the same stimulation even assuming completely different underlying relata, or even absent relata.
Now getting back to inverted qualia. Let’s again compare with direct realism about objects. It is logically possible to have a hallucination of an object, which yields the same brain state as if the object was really there. The direct realist says, knowledge of the object wasn’t had in this case. But the same doxastic primary intension is present in the hallucination and ordinary perception cases.
The Russelian monist wants something similar to that. There are skeptical hypotheses about quiddites: absent quiddites (OSR) or very different quiddites. These produce the same optic nerve stimulation and so on. In analogy with direct realism, this would be a case of absence of knowledege. But if we continue with the analogy, then the primary intensions between the “correctly represented quiddites” case and the “hallucinated quiddites” case have to be the same. That is, the original and the copy have the same primary intensions.
This somewhat undermines the idea that pheonmena are quiddish, rather than that phenomena depict quiddite-like relata. (Since intuitively, phenomena go with primary not secondary intensions.) Now what about the secondary intension? Perhaps the original and the copy have primary intensions of qualitative aspects of color that refer to different secondary intensions. The primary-to-secondary mapping would, by analogy with twin Earth, happen by looking at the thing they are both pointing to: a control red object such as a stop sign. But then it looks like they have the same secondary intension: whatever quiddites underly the red properties of standard red objects. The Russelian Monist who wants to accept the inverted qualia hypothetical might instead want them to be disagreeing about quiddites. But it isn’t apparent how they could disagree. They have the same primary intensions, and if they point at what their primary intension seems to be about (control red objects), they get the same secondary intensions.
It could of course be the case that their brains have differing underlying relata. But perhaps “these are not the quiddites you are looking for”. The way red looks would seem to be a representation of a red object, and that representation can postulate quiddites; the primary intension of that representation can connect with the secondary intension of actual quiddites in the red object. But on the direct realist analogy, it can’t connect with the quiddites of the brain.
Briefly looking at the article: Panpsychism does seem wrong in supposing that there is consciousness corresponding to quiddites in general (that’s a wild epistemic claim). Rather quiddites are qualitative, and consciousness seems to represent qualitative intrinsic essences. So the “pan” is more naturally “panqualityism” than “panpsychism”. The paper has the “quoting” idea which is… I understand it kind of like you could point right or left instead of saying “right” or “left”? It seems to involve the relata appearing as part of the sentence, which requires a somewhat expanded idea of what a sentence is. For redness this could involve something like “At home my laptop is the color of” points at red stop sign. (But again, I’m not convinced this works with inverted qualia, as the original and the copy would both point at control objects of the same color. Whereas inverted qualia requires something like them pointing at intrinsic properties in their brain. But then they need to find where the color is in their brain… I believe it’s more natural to point at the apparent red object!)
This is possibly a misinterpretation on my part, and perhaps the Russelian monist wants the representation of intrinsic properties of color to point at the brain somehow, so that the original and the twin could actually have different intrinsic properties corresponding to color perception. I don’t see how to square this with the direct realism analogy, although maybe I’m not adequately exploring alternative ways to operationalize direct acquaintance.
(Very brief compression: 1. If Russelian monism then direct acquaintance with quiddites. 2. If direct acquaintance with quiddites, then direct realism about macro-scale objects (they’re less obscure). 3. If direct realism about macro-scale objects, then “inverted qualia” is semantically problematic (standard Sellars; visually presented phenomena are of 3d, public objects.))
So Russellian views are typically thought to evade epiphenomenalism objections.
Yeah it evades epiphenomenalism. Quiddites cause physics, even though different quiddites could cause the same physics.
I’m onboard with pretty much your whole picture about how we acquire content. Rich information from the environment passes through the optic nerve through an information bottleneck and then gets reconstructed by the brain which suggests there’s some representation going on.
I’m even happy to grant (most of) your steelman of Russellian Monism. There’s structuralism about physics and underlying quiddities which serve as the relata. The brain then represents the incoming information stream in a certain way to generate conscious experience.
Where we differ is how the quiddities enter the story. The quiddities “in the world” don’t need to travel from the photons all the way through the optic nerve to get represented by the brain. I agree this doesn’t make any sense. Rather, information travels through the network and is realised by the quiddities in the neuronal substrate. The visual system builds a world-tracking representation (like in normal cog-sci) and the Russellian move is just to say the states that instantiate the structure have an intrinsic/qualitative nature.
To give a concrete example, in prosopagnosia I might lose the ability to recognise a face as “my friend’s face” at a high representational level. But that doesn’t mean the basic colours, blobs etc.. stop appearing in my visual field, it just means the system is no longer organising the low-level representations into a higher-order world-directed concept like “my friend’s face”. The intrinsic qualitative properties of the base are still “there” they’re just being represented differently by the brain.
It could of course be the case that their brains have differing underlying relata. But perhaps “these are not the quiddites you are looking for”. The way red looks would seem to be a representation of a red object, and that representation can postulate quiddites; the primary intension of that representation can connect with the secondary intension of actual quiddites in the red object. But on the direct realist analogy, it can’t connect with the quiddites of the brain.
I think there are two concepts here that should be distinguished:
The environmental concept: the “red on the stop sign out there” whose primary intension is world-directed in the direct realist way you’re suggesting.
The phenomenal concept: the “way red feels to me” those primary intension is vehicle-directed i.e. picking out whatever internal state I’m in.
Imagine we implemented an exact copy of my brain in a silicon twin. The categorical base properties in my neurons are R and in the silicon twin they’re S. We both look at a red stop sign and say “the stop sign looks red” so at the level of the environmental concept we both latch onto the primary intension of “the red on the stop sign” and use the public word ‘red’ to denote it.
But for phenomenal concepts, the primary intension of “the way red feels to me” would be different for both me and the twin as it’s anchored to the categorical base our internal states are realised in. They’d also have different secondary intensions as the content is realised in different categorical bases R vs S.
This is possibly a misinterpretation on my part, and perhaps the Russelian monist wants the representation of intrinsic properties of color to point at the brain somehow, so that the original and the twin could actually have different intrinsic properties corresponding to color perception. I don’t see how to square this with the direct realism analogy, although maybe I’m not adequately exploring alternative ways to operationalize direct acquaintance.
I think this is right. I’m broadly happy with your picture of direct realism about world-directed content. On my view, the acquaintance relation is with the internal state that realises the content.
Rather, information travels through the network and is realised by the quiddities in the neuronal substrate.
I see what you mean, the idea is that the quiddites within are relevant to the having of the experience, even if the info gets there by way of an information bottleneck.
Prosopagnosia would be the kind of thing that would show up at a high level rather than quiddites.
So I think the thing to explore here is the general picture of internal quiddites and how they relate to external ones, and to functional aspects of experience.
To explore this I’m going to imagine a sci fi world that has intrinsic color properties. In our world people might think “color has intrinsic properties” then they do more science and then they realize that the colored light has different structural properties. So physics discards the idea of intrinsic color properties.
In this other world we imagine physics works as if there are three “intrinsic color essences”, called chroma. These are either quiddites, or structure that works as-if quiddites. They exist in light partices and matter, and determine color-related physical properties. Physics is S3 equivariant on chroma. The way chroma work in matter is like the Ising model and ferromagnetism, except with three states (Potts model). So the chroma in matter “flip” in a general tendency to match their neighbors, when at high temperatures. In crystals, large groups of matter, or the entire crystal, can have the same chroma.
The way crystals interact with light is that they preferentially allow similar-chroma light to pass through. So if you look at a white light source through a crystal of chroma X, you get more X light.
This allows building “cone”-like machines that determine information about the chroma of incoming light. But these machines must themselves contain chroma! So for example, you could put a crystal of chroma X in front of a light ray detector. That way, the detector preferentially fires when the light has chroma X.
It’s also possible to do equivariant optical computing more directly. This might involve something like putting two beams of light together, and somehow noticing whether the beams have similar chroma.
Nothing in physics distinguishes between the chroma in an absolute sense. Rather, physics is symmetric over S3. Like how the laws of Newtonian mechanics are symmetric over the Galilean group, not singling out particular positions/rotations/velocities.
Now in this world, there evolve human-like aliens who can “perceive chroma” except of course there are qualifiers. There are some different possibilities to play with here:
The aliens are born with cone-like chroma detectors. The functional chroma are in their eyes. They process light into neural firings. In the brain, there are no chroma. (This is most like humans)
The aliens are born with the three chromatic clusters put in three brain positions (say, vertices of an upward-facing equilateral triangle towards the back of their heads), in an arbitrary permutation. Then they do “optical computing” on incoming chromatic light. They can for example “trap” light in cells, to form chromatic memories. Since they are born with chroma, they can use their own inborn chroma to gain a reference frame on the light. So chroma can feel “up-ish”, “left-ish”, “down-ish”.
The aliens are born with no chroma. They do optical computing. They trap incoming light into chromatic memories. Then they recall this light (letting some of it exit the cell) to do comparisons. They can do something like a “nearest neighbor check” when looking at new chromatic light, does it look more like the ocean or a stop sign?
Now we want to think about what “folk language” they would develop for color and chroma, without using loaded terms like red/blue/green. They may develop something analogous to red/blue/green when they only exist in their “home territory”, like their village. Within the village, the aliens they interact with have the same chromatic patterns as them; they don’t look like blue-ish aliens who bleed blue. So they could anchor on “red = color of blood”, “blue = color of lake”, and so on. But then they encounter others from different villages, and they appear to the originals to be color swapped, e.g. R/B swapped. Then their intra-village language stops working well.
One adaptation they use is to carry around chromatic crystals. Then they can both (a) take out the crystals in the middle of a sentence, to refer to the chroma, (b) use the crystal like a colored pencil to write chroma in letters. (This is a lot like the “quoting” idea, using external chroma)
When explorers go around the world, they realize that the planet has certain asymmetries. There’s more X chroma towards the north pole, more Y towards the south pole, and more Z around the equator. So they standardize on the terms “north-ish”, “south-ish”, “equ-ish” for chroma. (Compare north/south terms in magnetism.)
The explorers come from a cultural context where X is like our blue, Y is like our green, and Z is like our red. They are, like the British in our world, highly influential in global culture. Hence, “north-ish” has a default association with “calm lake”, “south-ish” has a default association with “trees and grass”, and “equ-ish” has a default association with “blood and strawberries”.
Now the explorers have enough context to ask “inverted qualia”-ish questions. They ask, “what if your experience of north-ish was like mine of equ-ish and vise versa?”
The thing is, they can literally go out and find aliens who are north-ish / equ-ish swapped relative to them. They might have somewhat different culture, but they’re reasonably similar. This other group sort of looks analogous to “red/blue swapped” to the explorers; for example, the explorers bleed equ-ish, while the other group bleeds north-ish.
The situation is pretty symmetric! This second group associates north-ish with the color of blood, and equ-ish with the color of lakes. So it looks weird to them if the explorers bleed equ-ish.
Here’s a general thing I’m getting at with this hypothetical: It seems to me that the experience of color in this world is something in relations and interactions between chroma, not in the chroma themselves. To locate the experience you have when seeing a stop sign, you don’t just point at the stop sign or your brain. You point at both; your experience exists in the differences, as the chromatic light from the stop sign interacts with the chroma within, which form cone-like color receptors, memories, and so on.
I don’t think in this world, the experience of color is found in the chroma within. You could imagine a strange situation where an alien was in a room, and the whole room including the alien’s body got a north-ish / equ-ish chroma swap instantaneously. They wouldn’t notice a thing. If you just changed the chroma within them, they would notice. If you just changed the chroma in the room outside their body, they would also notice. That indicates that the experience is more “of” relations between chroma, rather than of the chroma within.
(A quick analogy with Newtonian mechanics: when you see an object you get an idea of its vector relative to you. This is a “difference in absolute positions”, assuming absolute positions are real. Absolute position here seems like the quiddite intrinsic property, while the vector difference is relational, and corresponds more with the experience.)
I think the chroma toy-example is nicely illustrative and I’m happy to grant most of it with a clarification: The environmental chroma stand in some relations which allow for information to be transferred, but we don’t actually have access to the quiddities in the environment because those quiddities are not constituting your internal states.
I don’t think in this world, the experience of color is found in the chroma within. You could imagine a strange situation where an alien was in a room, and the whole room including the alien’s body got a north-ish / equ-ish chroma swap instantaneously. They wouldn’t notice a thing. If you just changed the chroma within them, they would notice. If you just changed the chroma in the room outside their body, they would also notice. That indicates that the experience is more “of” relations between chroma, rather than of the chroma within.
I agree there’s no noticeable difference (provided you also rotate their memories of the previous internal state as part of the global rotation). But this is exactly the type of internal quiddity permutation that Russellian Monists think matters metaphysically even if it doesn’t make a noticeable information-based difference in the structure.
I’m fully aligned that our behaviour and utterances are determined by informational content coming from the environment. The map gets optimised for the territory by way of information transfer/optimisation and the brain reads the map. I imagine it like a neural net where the information flows into the network and fixes the relations between nodes in the structure — if you moved the nodes around in relation to each other you’d get different experiences as the structure changes. But in my view if you permuted the nodes themselves you’d also get a change in what’s constituting the structure so the intrinsic part of the experience would change.
I think where we differ is that I don’t think the S3structure provides the whole story. It fixes an equivalence class of possible categorical assignments e.g. RGB or R’G’B’ or XYZ but each of these assignments is a modally potent metaphysical possibility that could have obtained.
At the meta level:
I’m not able to carve out as much time/energy as I’d like to keep up my end of the exchange over the next few weeks so I might take the opportunity to gracefully tap out and make this my last reply (or maybe one more if you have any loose ends you’d like to close off.)
On the whole, I’ve really appreciated how much time and effort you’ve taken to model my point of view and then crash test it. The whole exchange has forced me to clarify the view in my mind and highlighted some pressure points that I need to continue thinking about and further read up on.
I also stick by my original comment that the exchange has been a small update towards illusionism for me. Previously I held that illusionism lacked some coherence points, but I think your “many worlds” interpretation where all orbits are real smooths over some of the coherence issues in my mind and makes for an avenue worth exploring.
Really appreciate the exchange, helped me clarify my thoughts.
As a brief note for potential future exploration (no need to reply if you don’t want to):
A crux seems to be that with chroma world, I think experience is of difference between chroma, assuming chromatic realism (real quiddites). Whereas the Russelian monist wants the experience to be of identity of internal chroma. This is perhaps a disagreement on the phenomenology / epistemology relationship.
I think the analogy with Newtonian mechanics (if absolute positions are real, then experience is of relative positions, even if located at absolute positions) is pretty strong; chroma world “just” has different physical symmetries.
On my end I think I could continue this line of exploration by studying Deleuze (difference as more ontologically/metaphysically primary than identity), Dennett (more clarity on whether I agree/disagree with his basic picture), and Russell as a primary source.
A crux seems to be that with chroma world, I think experience is of differencebetween chroma, assuming chromatic realism (real quiddites). Whereas the Russelian monist wants the experience to be of identity of internal chroma. This is perhaps a disagreement on the phenomenology / epistemology relationship.
I agree this is the crux. The Russellian Monist wants to say there’s an intrinsic component to experience which is not exhausted by the structure.
I’d also recommend this paper on Russellian Monism by Chalmers. And to add Frankish to your list of illusionists alongside Dennett to explore e.g. this paper against panpsychism.
From my side you’ve motivated me to read more of Sellars’ work which I wasn’t familiar with before this exchange.
When I said “they don’t have direct access to R” this was imprecise and invited reading R as an implementation detail. It’s not an implementation detail so I should clarify precisely what I mean here.
The phenomenal character of red in my experience and the categorical base property R are the same thing. So when I have a red experience, in a sense, I’m directly acquainted with R as this quality in experience (which is the primary intension.) What I meant to deny is not direct acquaintance with R but rather a transparently rendered a priori access to R under a physical/structural description that would let you derive what the phenomenal character is like. In other words, you need to be literally tokening the property R from a first-person perspective to experience the phenomenal character of red. The secondary intension just rigidly designates the property R across all possible worlds.
The 256-bit float vs 128-bit floats example is disanalogous because there’s a structural implementation difference in the host system which is causing the change. R and R’ have no internal structure with which to differ, instead they differ intrinsically. Think of it like the mass-role in physics. If we switched the intrinsic property of the mass m with m’ such that F = ma now read F = m’a the physicist would say that nothing has changed. Whether m or m’ is playing the mass-role leaves the third-person physical observables untouched. The Russellian move is to say that there’s still a further fact about the categorical properties m and m’ that cause them to differ intrinsically.
Your semantics is doing a lot of work here, and I wouldn’t grant that it’s standard. If you build semantics in a way that reference always goes via informational differences in the structure, then of course reference to intrinsic properties will look impossible. From my perspective, this is baking the illusionist/structuralist conclusion into the semantics and I’d treat that as a bug rather than a feature.
The motivation for this Kripke-Chalmers style 2D semantics is motivated by these kinds of cases where we do seem to latch onto things whose immediate microstructure we don’t know (e.g. water/H20). And I’d argue that this acquaintance-based form of semantics works for all sorts of things like “this pain”, “that red” and arguably even “that object” without needing informational differences to specify them up to some structural isomorphism.
Regarding the term relata, I’m just using it to mean “things” which stand in relation to each other. On view 1) ontic structural realism says there are no “things” which stand in relation to each other, it’s the relations themselves which exist and that’s all. Your view sounds to me like it leans towards 1) with some epistemic humility about whether a richer structure like 2) really underlies reality.
I share your intuition that OSR sounds like a metaphysically dubious hypothesis even if it’s methodologically useful and given that your semantics is strongly information-based, it’s unsurprising that talk of “things” or “relata” feels slippery because your semantic machinery doesn’t have the resources to pick them out. That’s exactly why I’m inclined to bring acquaintance-based reference to intrinsic categorical properties as an extra ingredient.
I’m happy to grant that talking about “phenomenal substance” vs “physical substance” in the Cartesian sense is not well-formed. What matters more for me is just the distinction between intrinsic properties and relational/structural properties. Once we’ve granted that reality is not purely structural and there are some categorical/intrinsic aspects to reality then the distinction between 2) and 3) starts to collapse: they both allow relata with an intrinsic nature, 3) just treats our first-person acquaintance with experience as evidence about what that intrinsic nature is like.
So I think there are two cruxes:
Do we allow intrinsic/categorical properties in addition to structural relations?
If we do, how seriously do we take experience as data about them?
I take your view as saying: we have epistemic access to the structural relations, and it’s at least plausible that they’re populated by some kind of relata, even if our information-based semantics can’t get a clean handle on them. If that’s right, then there’s actually some convergence in our views: the phenomenal realist just wants to say “yes, there are such relata and their intrinsic nature is presented to us in experience.”
I want to read “directly acquainted” here carefully. There is a sense in which Oscar is “directly acquanited” with H20 in that he can touch it and so on. However this is very much not like “Oscar directly perceives H20”. Rather if he directly perceives anything, it is either a higher-level feature like “watery substance” or some less object-y “sense data” type thing.
I realize the analogy to twin Earth can’t quite hold, because R is an experience in a way H20 isn’t. I agree R can’t be defined as analytically equivalent to some complex physical or structural proposition.
I do want to push back on the idea of “literally tokening R”. “Tokening” would make me think of information processing systems, like parsers. In that sense I can “token” neuro-red by receiving red cone stimulation. Except of course neuro-red can’t equal R in the general case. I can see an analogy to Drescher’s “gensym” idea, that the mind operates as if it has access to symbols that can be equality-compared with each other, but from which it can derive no other information. (For color qualia, there would be 3 gensyms for the 3 primary colors; other colors could be vector combinations.) In that case the gensym would be token-like, yet not Shannon info (not serializable), and accordingly dis-analogous from linguistic tokens. (But also in that case, the actual value of the gensym (#:G430 or whatever) seems more like an implementation detail that I’m not directly acquainted with.)
And at the point where you have “non-serializable tokens” it seems more like they are encapsulated “objects” in the sense of object-oriented programming, rather than “tokens”.
I agree 128-bit float isn’t quite like “intrinsic property of mass” because it leads to different physical predictions. But perhaps the “intrinsic property of mass” is more like details of how 128-bit floats are stored in hardware. It does 128-bit either way, there’s no difference internal to our physics (as 128-bit floats are different from 256-bit floats), but there is some intrinsic difference. (Again, if simulation hypothesis, there is some way this could counterfactually leak into our simulation, in a way that would break physics and break the symmetry; physics requires the symmetry to hold.)
So in this case I would say:
we don’t exactly know if “intrinsic property of mass” is a thing, for standard ontological uncertainty reasons
assuming it is a thing, we can’t straightforwardly refer to properties of it; the most available analogies are to things in our universe, but there’s a geometric barrier between these
yet there might be a careful way of referring to these differences, such as “hardware differences in numeric representation assuming simulation hypothesis”, through counterfactual analysis or something.
again, “intrinsic property of mass” is an implementation detail, not something people are directly acequainted with
Yes I’d agree that by assuming semantics is informational I’m risking begging the question. The thing I don’t have much clarity on is a non-Shannon account of semantics.
It seems like (a) the semantics can be interpreted physically/functionally, in a way that gets the same thing for the original and twin, (b) the semantics can be interpreted to refer to “intrinsic sub-physical” implementation details, in which case it could get something different for the original and twin.
The thing I’m having a hard time imagining is a third alternative, where the semantics refer to an intrinsic property, and one that both the original and twin are acquainted with (in a MUCH stronger sense than Oscar is acquainted with H20).
Here’s how something could work in substance dualist land: The brain connects to the soul through a Pineal gland. Souls have their way of processing Shannon-inputs (physical) to Shannon-outputs (physical). That processing involves extra-physical implementation properties. “This person’s mind” has a secondary intension referring to something interior to the soul. So by secondary intension, a person’s mind is directly acquainted with some extra-physical properties interior to the soul, not with anything physical. Now “the experience of red” is referring to a soul quasi-info property that doesn’t line up with Shannon info, and which the mind is more directly acquainted with. And the “inverted qualia thought experiment” could correspond with a “real distinction”, in the sense that counterfactually mind-melding souls (rather than brains) could lead to noticing the qualia difference.
This is of course not something people believe now. But the hypothetical leads me to think that things like “the mind” and “direct acquaintance with the experience of red” could have secondary intensions referring to extraphysical qualia; the secondary intensions would work out if substance dualism were true.
I think this secondary intension picture works out less well in an epiphenomenalist and/or property dualist setting. In that case, by emergence (physical → mental causation) or pre-established harmony (physical → physical, and mental → mental) or neutral emergence (neutral → neutral, neutral → physical, neutral → mental) or similar, mental properties line up with physical ones (natural supervenience). Then you can try to refer to mental properties by the ones lining up with the physical ones (e.g. red cone stimulation).
This might even work. But it lines up less well with folk theory of mind than substance dualism. The minds could be directly acquainted with color qualia that have no physical definition. But then who am I talking to? The mind isn’t causing any talking. It’s a bit like the deterministic MMORPG situation. (I realize this gets into “standard problems with Chalmers-type views” territory and is less of a knock-down semantic argument.)
I am not sure if you would consider “figure out how qualia Kripkean semantics would work assuming substance dualism, then deflate from there to be realistic” to be a strawman of the semantics.
Yep. To elaborate on what methodological OSR could look like, homotopy type theory has a “univalence” axiom which approximately says “isomorphic things are equal”. That means isomorphism classes always have only one element. That seems like the kind of ontological assumption one would want for OSR, and homotopy type theory makes it clear that Shannon info processing and Turing computation remain possible under univalence. So homotopy type theory could have the spirit of OSR without collapsing into grammatical absurdity (“relations but no relata”). (Of course, asserting univalence to be simply true would be dogmatic; usual situation with metaphysics.)
That seems right. I think “relata are real” and “relata aren’t real” are both in dogmatic metaphysics territory, but I’m ok playing with the idea that relata are real, as “relata aren’t real” is more conceptually speculative. The part that seems hardest to me is how direct acquaintance with relata is possible, that would grant the relevant epistemic access and so on. (Kantian framing would be “is this claiming to have epistemic access to noumena? and if so, is there a skeptical hypothesis perhaps OSR-like that undermines this claimed epistemic access; which need not be true, only possible, to undermine epistemic access?”)
I should clarify my view a little here. Roughly I’m committed to two things:
* Intrinsic/categorical properties exist and they are qualitative.
* Conscious experience of a quality consists in representing the quality where further conditions obtain.
I’m deliberately not going to endorse a detailed view on when “further conditions obtain” because I think basically any good cog-sci theory of consciousness could be ported in here e.g. RPT, GWT etc.. and I’m happy to just let disputes among these be settled empirically by whatever best fits the data.
I think you’re circling a genuine pressure point on my view which is more epistemic than semantic, namely, the Awareness Problem. Roughly, the objection says that if qualities exist as intrinsic properties of the categorical base and the brain is “aware” of the qualities then it’s conceivable that a qualitative zombie could exist i.e. the quality could be present but the structure of the brain would conceivably not be able to become aware of it. The original objection targets a Higher-Order-Thought view of panqualityism where the quality needs to be quoted or indexed by a HOT for the brain to be aware of it. This feels reminiscent of the “tokening” objection you’re pushing where the brains structure and the categorical base are two separate kinds of stuff and the brain needs to “reach across” to token the base in a Cartesian dualist sort of way.
I don’t think this is the correct route. On my view the brain is part of the categorical qualitative base and it’s just in those qualitative states. It’s not a separate type of stuff so I don’t think it needs to “reach across” by indexing or quoting them in a special way, it just needs to minimally represent the qualities.
There’s an interesting recent paper Rosenberg (2025) which argues that certain brain states represent the qualities at first-order. The analogy is a projector film reel[1] which is capable of producing coloured film when it’s projected in the right way onto the wall. By contrast, the HOT is like a sticky note stuck on the reel saying “this film plays X” which doesn’t add anything to the actual content. I don’t need to literally token the state with a higher thought like “boy am I in some pain right now!” to be feeling pain. The first-order representation of pain seems to be doing the work. I don’t think this fully solves the problem but it does make “qualitative zombie” feel less compelling for me. If we have qualities in the base and the structural machinery to represent them in the right way it’s hard, for me at least, to conceive of a scenario where the result is a zombie with no awareness of the quality. In fact, I’d be inclined to treat the zombie as an absence of the categorical base with the structure/relations intact i.e. OSR.
Again, I don’t think this view is without challenges but I think it has real theoretical parsimony that makes it attractive. It takes phenomenal consciousness seriously, it doesn’t lead to counter-intuitive bullets like panpsychism and it fits squarely into a naturalist/monist picture.
One of the main motivations for Russellian views is to provide a natural story for where qualia sit. They’re not “causal” in the sense of meddling with the physics but rather “constitutive” in terms of populating the structure. So Russellian views are typically thought to evade epiphenomenalism objections.
The analogy is imperfect and it runs straight into your “implementation details” objection—but it serves to illustrate the point about tokening.
Yeah pretty much. The qualitative zombie’s possibility would be a consideration against the idea that there is direct acquaintance with qualitative intrinsic properties, by way of being an epistemic block. (If OSR is plausible then ESR is true; if ESR is true then quiddites can’t be phenomenal even if they exist; except possibly through a ‘direct realism’ type dodge?)
So I think I have at least partial agreement here. Summarizing my current (Sellars-inspired) angle of attack on philosophy of mind:
The visual phenomena to explain are 3d, not 2d.
The appearance to explain is the appearance of direct realist transparency.
The illusions of consciousness function to make the representation match the environment.
So as a relatively simple example, the environment is actually approximately continuous; the neural representation of it is discrete; yet visual phenomena are again continuous-seeming. This points at something illusionary (inflation of e.g. visual neural info to a continuous-looking image, that appears to have “more bits” taken as info). But some “hallucination” is needed in the decompression step, to make the map match the territory. (Compare autoencoders)
In the example of “the redness of red”, actual red in the environment is deep, there’s deep optical physics behind it. The neural representation of red is, at some stage, shallow, like ‘optic nerve firings corresponding to red cone stimulation’. Then there’s an (apparent) inflation into a deep-seeming phenomenon of red.
The information bottleneck (e.g. optic nerve) enables hallucination to be possible, by sending different info through the info bottleneck. Yet under normal conditions, the intuition that red is deep is correct, if interpreted intensionally.
Russelian monism starts with: structuralism about physics, and quiddism (underlying relata) of sub-physics. That’s what I would see as a reasonable set of assumptions to work with, even if not proven. The third claim, quiddism about phenomena, initially seems to me like a wild epistemic claim. I could steelman it as, quiddism about phenomena is through representation; the human representational system “believes” relata exists, so the representation is “of” a relata-containing world, and a Russelian monist can say the representation is correct due to a representational link with quiddites.
To be clear this might be rounding off the position too close to standard cogsci. The thing this steelman is consistent with is phenomena coming from the world to phenomenal consciousness through an informational bottleneck. This avoids positing unusual physics in, say, the intrinsic quiddite properties being mapped equivariantly to phenomenal properties in a direct way (rather than intermediately through a Shannon info space, which would have to eliminate all intrinsic relata.) This is perhaps in analogy with skepticism of claims like “quantum states pass into the brain in a cognitively/phenomenally relevant way”; quantum states can’t be transferred through a Shannon info bottleneck, in common with relata. (Apparently equivariance is a constraint on which unitary operators count as physically valid in quantum mechanics! I’m not a QM expert, but there is a significant analogy here.)
The “direct acquaintance” here with quiddites would be similar to the direct realist sense of “direct perception” of objects. It is causally mediated through an information bottleneck (optic nerve and so on). But there is an epistemic sense in which the actual objects out there are causing representations of objects. Knowledge as justified true belief plus Gettier resolutions, a causal chain of sorts. (Or in the Russelian view, actual quiddites out there are causing phenomena with apparent intrinsic properties.)
The main way I could imagine the Russelian view being more tenuous than direct realism about environmental objects is that quiddites are obscure implementation details, unlike environmental objects. (For direct realism I’m drawing on: Wilfred Sellars, “Phenomenalism”.) The ambient deepness corresponding with the visual phenomenon of the deepness of red is, primarily, deepness of a physical/relational nature (the quantum mechanics of red light, for example), not deepness of an intrinsic property nature.
In common with direct realism, the Russelian view would have some amount of trouble with an “argument from hallucination”, under which the optic nerve would receive the same stimulation even assuming completely different underlying relata, or even absent relata.
Now getting back to inverted qualia. Let’s again compare with direct realism about objects. It is logically possible to have a hallucination of an object, which yields the same brain state as if the object was really there. The direct realist says, knowledge of the object wasn’t had in this case. But the same doxastic primary intension is present in the hallucination and ordinary perception cases.
The Russelian monist wants something similar to that. There are skeptical hypotheses about quiddites: absent quiddites (OSR) or very different quiddites. These produce the same optic nerve stimulation and so on. In analogy with direct realism, this would be a case of absence of knowledege. But if we continue with the analogy, then the primary intensions between the “correctly represented quiddites” case and the “hallucinated quiddites” case have to be the same. That is, the original and the copy have the same primary intensions.
This somewhat undermines the idea that pheonmena are quiddish, rather than that phenomena depict quiddite-like relata. (Since intuitively, phenomena go with primary not secondary intensions.) Now what about the secondary intension? Perhaps the original and the copy have primary intensions of qualitative aspects of color that refer to different secondary intensions. The primary-to-secondary mapping would, by analogy with twin Earth, happen by looking at the thing they are both pointing to: a control red object such as a stop sign. But then it looks like they have the same secondary intension: whatever quiddites underly the red properties of standard red objects. The Russelian Monist who wants to accept the inverted qualia hypothetical might instead want them to be disagreeing about quiddites. But it isn’t apparent how they could disagree. They have the same primary intensions, and if they point at what their primary intension seems to be about (control red objects), they get the same secondary intensions.
It could of course be the case that their brains have differing underlying relata. But perhaps “these are not the quiddites you are looking for”. The way red looks would seem to be a representation of a red object, and that representation can postulate quiddites; the primary intension of that representation can connect with the secondary intension of actual quiddites in the red object. But on the direct realist analogy, it can’t connect with the quiddites of the brain.
Briefly looking at the article: Panpsychism does seem wrong in supposing that there is consciousness corresponding to quiddites in general (that’s a wild epistemic claim). Rather quiddites are qualitative, and consciousness seems to represent qualitative intrinsic essences. So the “pan” is more naturally “panqualityism” than “panpsychism”. The paper has the “quoting” idea which is… I understand it kind of like you could point right or left instead of saying “right” or “left”? It seems to involve the relata appearing as part of the sentence, which requires a somewhat expanded idea of what a sentence is. For redness this could involve something like “At home my laptop is the color of” points at red stop sign. (But again, I’m not convinced this works with inverted qualia, as the original and the copy would both point at control objects of the same color. Whereas inverted qualia requires something like them pointing at intrinsic properties in their brain. But then they need to find where the color is in their brain… I believe it’s more natural to point at the apparent red object!)
This is possibly a misinterpretation on my part, and perhaps the Russelian monist wants the representation of intrinsic properties of color to point at the brain somehow, so that the original and the twin could actually have different intrinsic properties corresponding to color perception. I don’t see how to square this with the direct realism analogy, although maybe I’m not adequately exploring alternative ways to operationalize direct acquaintance.
(Very brief compression: 1. If Russelian monism then direct acquaintance with quiddites. 2. If direct acquaintance with quiddites, then direct realism about macro-scale objects (they’re less obscure). 3. If direct realism about macro-scale objects, then “inverted qualia” is semantically problematic (standard Sellars; visually presented phenomena are of 3d, public objects.))
Yeah it evades epiphenomenalism. Quiddites cause physics, even though different quiddites could cause the same physics.
I’m onboard with pretty much your whole picture about how we acquire content. Rich information from the environment passes through the optic nerve through an information bottleneck and then gets reconstructed by the brain which suggests there’s some representation going on.
I’m even happy to grant (most of) your steelman of Russellian Monism. There’s structuralism about physics and underlying quiddities which serve as the relata. The brain then represents the incoming information stream in a certain way to generate conscious experience.
Where we differ is how the quiddities enter the story. The quiddities “in the world” don’t need to travel from the photons all the way through the optic nerve to get represented by the brain. I agree this doesn’t make any sense. Rather, information travels through the network and is realised by the quiddities in the neuronal substrate. The visual system builds a world-tracking representation (like in normal cog-sci) and the Russellian move is just to say the states that instantiate the structure have an intrinsic/qualitative nature.
To give a concrete example, in prosopagnosia I might lose the ability to recognise a face as “my friend’s face” at a high representational level. But that doesn’t mean the basic colours, blobs etc.. stop appearing in my visual field, it just means the system is no longer organising the low-level representations into a higher-order world-directed concept like “my friend’s face”. The intrinsic qualitative properties of the base are still “there” they’re just being represented differently by the brain.
I think there are two concepts here that should be distinguished:
The environmental concept: the “red on the stop sign out there” whose primary intension is world-directed in the direct realist way you’re suggesting.
The phenomenal concept: the “way red feels to me” those primary intension is vehicle-directed i.e. picking out whatever internal state I’m in.
Imagine we implemented an exact copy of my brain in a silicon twin. The categorical base properties in my neurons are R and in the silicon twin they’re S. We both look at a red stop sign and say “the stop sign looks red” so at the level of the environmental concept we both latch onto the primary intension of “the red on the stop sign” and use the public word ‘red’ to denote it.
But for phenomenal concepts, the primary intension of “the way red feels to me” would be different for both me and the twin as it’s anchored to the categorical base our internal states are realised in. They’d also have different secondary intensions as the content is realised in different categorical bases R vs S.
I think this is right. I’m broadly happy with your picture of direct realism about world-directed content. On my view, the acquaintance relation is with the internal state that realises the content.
I see what you mean, the idea is that the quiddites within are relevant to the having of the experience, even if the info gets there by way of an information bottleneck.
Prosopagnosia would be the kind of thing that would show up at a high level rather than quiddites.
So I think the thing to explore here is the general picture of internal quiddites and how they relate to external ones, and to functional aspects of experience.
To explore this I’m going to imagine a sci fi world that has intrinsic color properties. In our world people might think “color has intrinsic properties” then they do more science and then they realize that the colored light has different structural properties. So physics discards the idea of intrinsic color properties.
In this other world we imagine physics works as if there are three “intrinsic color essences”, called chroma. These are either quiddites, or structure that works as-if quiddites. They exist in light partices and matter, and determine color-related physical properties. Physics is S3 equivariant on chroma. The way chroma work in matter is like the Ising model and ferromagnetism, except with three states (Potts model). So the chroma in matter “flip” in a general tendency to match their neighbors, when at high temperatures. In crystals, large groups of matter, or the entire crystal, can have the same chroma.
The way crystals interact with light is that they preferentially allow similar-chroma light to pass through. So if you look at a white light source through a crystal of chroma X, you get more X light.
This allows building “cone”-like machines that determine information about the chroma of incoming light. But these machines must themselves contain chroma! So for example, you could put a crystal of chroma X in front of a light ray detector. That way, the detector preferentially fires when the light has chroma X.
It’s also possible to do equivariant optical computing more directly. This might involve something like putting two beams of light together, and somehow noticing whether the beams have similar chroma.
Nothing in physics distinguishes between the chroma in an absolute sense. Rather, physics is symmetric over S3. Like how the laws of Newtonian mechanics are symmetric over the Galilean group, not singling out particular positions/rotations/velocities.
Now in this world, there evolve human-like aliens who can “perceive chroma” except of course there are qualifiers. There are some different possibilities to play with here:
The aliens are born with cone-like chroma detectors. The functional chroma are in their eyes. They process light into neural firings. In the brain, there are no chroma. (This is most like humans)
The aliens are born with the three chromatic clusters put in three brain positions (say, vertices of an upward-facing equilateral triangle towards the back of their heads), in an arbitrary permutation. Then they do “optical computing” on incoming chromatic light. They can for example “trap” light in cells, to form chromatic memories. Since they are born with chroma, they can use their own inborn chroma to gain a reference frame on the light. So chroma can feel “up-ish”, “left-ish”, “down-ish”.
The aliens are born with no chroma. They do optical computing. They trap incoming light into chromatic memories. Then they recall this light (letting some of it exit the cell) to do comparisons. They can do something like a “nearest neighbor check” when looking at new chromatic light, does it look more like the ocean or a stop sign?
Now we want to think about what “folk language” they would develop for color and chroma, without using loaded terms like red/blue/green. They may develop something analogous to red/blue/green when they only exist in their “home territory”, like their village. Within the village, the aliens they interact with have the same chromatic patterns as them; they don’t look like blue-ish aliens who bleed blue. So they could anchor on “red = color of blood”, “blue = color of lake”, and so on. But then they encounter others from different villages, and they appear to the originals to be color swapped, e.g. R/B swapped. Then their intra-village language stops working well.
One adaptation they use is to carry around chromatic crystals. Then they can both (a) take out the crystals in the middle of a sentence, to refer to the chroma, (b) use the crystal like a colored pencil to write chroma in letters. (This is a lot like the “quoting” idea, using external chroma)
When explorers go around the world, they realize that the planet has certain asymmetries. There’s more X chroma towards the north pole, more Y towards the south pole, and more Z around the equator. So they standardize on the terms “north-ish”, “south-ish”, “equ-ish” for chroma. (Compare north/south terms in magnetism.)
The explorers come from a cultural context where X is like our blue, Y is like our green, and Z is like our red. They are, like the British in our world, highly influential in global culture. Hence, “north-ish” has a default association with “calm lake”, “south-ish” has a default association with “trees and grass”, and “equ-ish” has a default association with “blood and strawberries”.
Now the explorers have enough context to ask “inverted qualia”-ish questions. They ask, “what if your experience of north-ish was like mine of equ-ish and vise versa?”
The thing is, they can literally go out and find aliens who are north-ish / equ-ish swapped relative to them. They might have somewhat different culture, but they’re reasonably similar. This other group sort of looks analogous to “red/blue swapped” to the explorers; for example, the explorers bleed equ-ish, while the other group bleeds north-ish.
The situation is pretty symmetric! This second group associates north-ish with the color of blood, and equ-ish with the color of lakes. So it looks weird to them if the explorers bleed equ-ish.
Here’s a general thing I’m getting at with this hypothetical: It seems to me that the experience of color in this world is something in relations and interactions between chroma, not in the chroma themselves. To locate the experience you have when seeing a stop sign, you don’t just point at the stop sign or your brain. You point at both; your experience exists in the differences, as the chromatic light from the stop sign interacts with the chroma within, which form cone-like color receptors, memories, and so on.
I don’t think in this world, the experience of color is found in the chroma within. You could imagine a strange situation where an alien was in a room, and the whole room including the alien’s body got a north-ish / equ-ish chroma swap instantaneously. They wouldn’t notice a thing. If you just changed the chroma within them, they would notice. If you just changed the chroma in the room outside their body, they would also notice. That indicates that the experience is more “of” relations between chroma, rather than of the chroma within.
(A quick analogy with Newtonian mechanics: when you see an object you get an idea of its vector relative to you. This is a “difference in absolute positions”, assuming absolute positions are real. Absolute position here seems like the quiddite intrinsic property, while the vector difference is relational, and corresponds more with the experience.)
I think the chroma toy-example is nicely illustrative and I’m happy to grant most of it with a clarification: The environmental chroma stand in some relations which allow for information to be transferred, but we don’t actually have access to the quiddities in the environment because those quiddities are not constituting your internal states.
I agree there’s no noticeable difference (provided you also rotate their memories of the previous internal state as part of the global rotation). But this is exactly the type of internal quiddity permutation that Russellian Monists think matters metaphysically even if it doesn’t make a noticeable information-based difference in the structure.
I’m fully aligned that our behaviour and utterances are determined by informational content coming from the environment. The map gets optimised for the territory by way of information transfer/optimisation and the brain reads the map. I imagine it like a neural net where the information flows into the network and fixes the relations between nodes in the structure — if you moved the nodes around in relation to each other you’d get different experiences as the structure changes. But in my view if you permuted the nodes themselves you’d also get a change in what’s constituting the structure so the intrinsic part of the experience would change.
I think where we differ is that I don’t think the S3structure provides the whole story. It fixes an equivalence class of possible categorical assignments e.g. RGB or R’G’B’ or XYZ but each of these assignments is a modally potent metaphysical possibility that could have obtained.
At the meta level:
I’m not able to carve out as much time/energy as I’d like to keep up my end of the exchange over the next few weeks so I might take the opportunity to gracefully tap out and make this my last reply (or maybe one more if you have any loose ends you’d like to close off.)
On the whole, I’ve really appreciated how much time and effort you’ve taken to model my point of view and then crash test it. The whole exchange has forced me to clarify the view in my mind and highlighted some pressure points that I need to continue thinking about and further read up on.
I also stick by my original comment that the exchange has been a small update towards illusionism for me. Previously I held that illusionism lacked some coherence points, but I think your “many worlds” interpretation where all orbits are real smooths over some of the coherence issues in my mind and makes for an avenue worth exploring.
Anyway, thanks for the exchange!
Really appreciate the exchange, helped me clarify my thoughts.
As a brief note for potential future exploration (no need to reply if you don’t want to):
A crux seems to be that with chroma world, I think experience is of difference between chroma, assuming chromatic realism (real quiddites). Whereas the Russelian monist wants the experience to be of identity of internal chroma. This is perhaps a disagreement on the phenomenology / epistemology relationship.
I think the analogy with Newtonian mechanics (if absolute positions are real, then experience is of relative positions, even if located at absolute positions) is pretty strong; chroma world “just” has different physical symmetries.
On my end I think I could continue this line of exploration by studying Deleuze (difference as more ontologically/metaphysically primary than identity), Dennett (more clarity on whether I agree/disagree with his basic picture), and Russell as a primary source.
I agree this is the crux. The Russellian Monist wants to say there’s an intrinsic component to experience which is not exhausted by the structure.
I’d also recommend this paper on Russellian Monism by Chalmers. And to add Frankish to your list of illusionists alongside Dennett to explore e.g. this paper against panpsychism.
From my side you’ve motivated me to read more of Sellars’ work which I wasn’t familiar with before this exchange.