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.
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.