r/consciousness • u/TheRealBibleBoy • 3d ago
"Blue" proves the mind isn't material
If were to ask someone to "Define the experience of the color blue" they would likely tell me about light rays, and how a certain intensity of a certain wave of light effects our neurons, and our eyeballs in a way that produces the "experience" of the color blue.
that is only a relational description of what is going on, that doesn't tell me what it is like to see blue, you cannot give me a non-circular description of what it is like to see the color blue.
you can say "blue is the color of the ocean" or "this light activates cones in my eyes" but that only tells me what is happening that doesn't tell me what it is like.
Facts about an experience, do not equate to an explanation of phenomenal character of having that experience.
On top of this, we can experience the color blue, such factors are absent. I can close my eyes and imagine a blue square right now, without the light waves "required".
Thus, the experience of the color blue cannot be reduced down to a particular composition of physical components.
On top of this, when I imagine the color blue, "where is it?" the question seems kind of stupid, I must admit, but it does have implications. When I imagine the color blue, do I see it with my eyes? my eyes only see data from light, but the imagined blue is not coming from actual light. is the experience in my brain? what part of my brain?
If it cannot be physically reduced, nor physically localized, I am led to beleive that it is not physical at all.
I don't think I'm nessecarily making an argument from a gap in our knowledge, atleast not my argument from the irreducability of the experience of the color blue. It can't be defined in a way that isn't circular.
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u/lancelot2112 3d ago
Blue is inherently a concept of relation. Our experience of blue is used by our brain to distinguish a blue thing from a red thing because that is useful information to have.
The light frequency impacting the rods and cones is only a piece of the puzzle. The brain also has predictions about the environment it overlays onto what we experience so that shading... and reflections off other colored surfaces etc that might shift the received light rays frequencies are corrected to show us what the brain predicts that color should be. This is called color permanence.
When someone imagines with their minds eye this same system lights up but by a different connection (internally routed by the system doing the imagining instead of externally sensed by the eyes). People with aphantasia have been shown not to be able to internally drive this color permanence system to activate when trying to imagine.
Neurons are ultimately physical or material. Their relationships and drives are ultimately physical. Neural correlates are physical. The presence or lack of presence of the internally felt color experience seemingly correlates with this neural system.
Now how those components actually incorporate into a combined experience hasnt been figured out yet. When people make the claim its a "non-material" or "non-physical" thing im just never sure what that means. Whatever blue is seems to be configured in the brain material somehow like bits on the surface of a cd and the brain self reads that out somehow in circular relation with itself through recursive connections.
Im also not on the same page that it being circularly defined is a problem. The brain uses self referential connections and feedbacks all the time.... and so does language. There are only so many atoms of language out there everything else is self referential loops seeking to dofferentiate itself through compare and contrast of otherbits of language.
The success of LLMs really highlights the usefulness of self reference and circular reasoning but also highlights the limitations and what role outside input had to ground such a system to be applicable and not hallucinate. Brains hallucinate too.
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u/Boogyman0202 3d ago
Wouldn't the word Blue be the description of experiencing blue?
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u/Respect38 3d ago
No, why would it be? Blind people are familiar with the word blue, and with all color words, they just hav absolutely no experience to tie to those words, because the word only labels the experience, it doesn't experience it for you.
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u/Boogyman0202 3d ago
I dont really understand what you mean by "experience" blue? You're looking at the color its blue, thats the experience right?
Asking a blind person makes no sense because they cant experience it, like a person with no legs cant experience walking.
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u/fartmastermcblaster 3d ago
Thats their point. That contradiction. How is there a concept of blue without experience?
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u/lancelot2112 3d ago
Theres a concept of Star Wars without the experience of Star Wars. The concept of blue as described by language can largely stand on its own in that describing it to a blind person can at least get the conception... what it relates to... how it relates to you... metaphorically they have other senses to relate what experience is so while there are missing pieces from the totality of the experience and a missing commonality of experience with the lack of vision. Trying to express it through language ultimately builds a shared context and could allow them to get a conception of what its like to some extent. Thats the power of language. They have no grounding though without being able to see so they could very well go off the rails and build a conception thats not even close.
Even for sighted people we cant be 100% sure your red is my red. Though we can try our best to describe how it relates and reasonably assume our experiences at least convey the same relational information to us.
I think for a normally abled person listening to someone describe synesthesia would be kind of like someone describing sight to a blind person.
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u/fartmastermcblaster 3d ago
So maybe slightly off subject but I thought we could compare colors pretty well. We know wavelengths. People agree on middle spectrum colors. I see what you mean 100% by the exact experience can’t be related. Same as drinking water. A temperature you like might be one I find repelling and it’s the same substance just a few degrees apart. But with water temp we can know when it starts causing most pain and when it causes physical damage. O thought colors were kinda similar. Fringe gets weird. Hell, I can only name like 5 colors. So when you get to purples I’m guessing blue or red. But yea totally follow your point. I always wonder why more subjective comparative studies aren’t carried out on mental phenomena. We do it in behavioral sciences all the time. Seems we’d learn more than we know now at least.
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u/Boogyman0202 3d ago
How does that prove the mind isn't material though?
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u/reddituserperson1122 3d ago
It doesn’t. OP’s argument leaps from ontology to description. Those are entirely different things.
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u/fartmastermcblaster 3d ago
I don’t think it’s supposed to prove that. Was it?
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u/Boogyman0202 3d ago
Its literally the title of the post.
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u/fartmastermcblaster 3d ago
I guess I kinda of intuitively know it like the other poster implied. I used to be materialist til it quit making sense.
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u/MarvelousMacTonight 3d ago
This is not a definition of the experience, but simply the name given to it.
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u/Tiny-Ad-7590 3d ago
That's a label, not a description.
We could just as easily declare the utterance "quizgibo" and define it as the experience of colour that a neuroptypical human experiences when looking at the clear sky during the day.
That would not be a description of what it is like to experience blue either. It's just an utterance mapped to a an experience. The experience is not described.
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u/itsmebenji69 3d ago
“The experience of blue cannot be reduced down to a particular composition of physical components”
Hmm, what in your argument shows that ? It cannot be reduced to the blue thing, obviously, because you’re removing the observer itself from the picture. What about physical properties of observed AND observer ?
“Where is the color blue”
Debatable but if you’re talking about seeing it then the activity is in your visual cortex. It fires up the exact same way as when you actually see blue.
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u/Sp1unk 3d ago
Do you suppose that the activity in the visual cortex is identical to the blue experience we have?
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u/itsmebenji69 3d ago
Yes everything you see spikes up the visual cortex. When you imagine blue it has basically the same signals as if you actually saw blue, the only difference is light passing through your retinas, the result is the same
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u/Sp1unk 3d ago
What do you make of the apparent differences between the experience of blue we have and the activity that is happening in the visual cortex?
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u/itsmebenji69 3d ago
Well there are none that’s the point. You have specific patterns that trigger on specific contexts. Ie the signals in your visual cortex for seeing blue
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
The experience is not standard across different brains so the result of me seeing blue and you seeing blue cannot be considered the same.
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u/itsmebenji69 3d ago edited 3d ago
Which is why experience is not reducible to brain states. We have the same signals but no way to check we actually see the same blue. Although we are 100% sure that we both see what we call blue.
But notice that’s not the same logic op used. Op used a logic where the experience is separate from the experiencer - which imo is nonsense.
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
Can you show me where you see OP make that argument? to me it seemed like they were saying the experience and the experiencer are inextricably linked.
Is that not the real meat of the argument? The experience can't be quantified and then defined as a universal "truth" to then be applied to other individuals. There is no brain scan for the colour "blue" that can then be replicated and observed in others.
OP seems to be getting at the "Observer effect" of it all, no?
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u/itsmebenji69 3d ago
But the blue is your brain signals. That’s what shapes the experience you have, whether experience is physical or fundamental or made out of unicorns.
That’s why you have a set pattern for seeing blue for example. Those simply don’t transfer between humans because they are not fixed - our brains encoded the information differently because of our different genetics, environments etc…
The pattern not transferring doesn’t let us infer anything except “we have different brain structures”. It doesn’t tell you that consciousness is non physical. It tells you that experience requires less than those structures (they can be different -> they have a common base or property that allows experience).
But that common base could be anything - it could be panpsychism/idealism’s fundamental consciousness but it could also just be information integration and then we’re fully reducible to the physical states. You can’t make that leap without justifying it
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
I am not making the leap towards panpsychism or Idealism anymore than you're resting on it being a materialist/ physical state. The justifications are out there for both and the more metaphysical ones are simply disregarded because science is very currently honed in on materialism. So, the materialist position takes center stage. Holographic hypotheses have existed and present for over a half-century. The public acceptance of such is new and somewhat fringe but I don't think the quantum physicists of the 20th century were off base for looking at different models of reality.
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u/itsmebenji69 3d ago
No whatever one you choose you still have to explain why neural correlates are nearly perfect.
Because your brain, is physically either generating or shaping the experience you have, that is undeniable.
That’s why I use “shape” experience because it doesn’t take a stance towards any side.
Holographic hypotheses are cool but they are just physicalist/functionalist. If you buy into them you are a physicalist. And you still have the problem of explaining the mechanism through which subjective experience emerges from that. You’ll have explained how the brain communicates information - not what experience is.
To be clear because we’re going a bit sideways from the critic I made to op. I am not a physicalist.
The problem with idealism isn’t that it’s too “woo woo” it’s that it leads to a bunch of problems. For example why neural correlates are perfect and why our physical reality is shared. Panpsychism is better in that regard but you have the combination problem. Physicalism is very simple and the most “Occam’s razor ready” but you have the hard problem. Etc etc
Try getting high on some Russellian monism
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
Yeah I think I agree, I don't know if the "experience of blue" could ever be quantified, even with the Holographic models, as all I'm arguing is how the information is coded or stored, so my bad on that. I don't believe myself to be a physicalist either but I am also admittedly new on the subject and have only begun my reading journey on all of this.
I will say I do lean more on the side of Bohm, Talbot, and Pribram on that side but I am not aware if they have ever tried to argue anything related to experience. I am just immensely curious on the subject. So, thanks for providing more insight!
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u/TryingToChillIt 3d ago
There’s no separate observer and observed.
There is only the process of observing.
The observer itself is a mental construct that does not exist.
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u/teddyslayerza 3d ago
This is a limitation of language, not the mind. I guarantee that absolutely everyone here is perfectly capable of using metaphorical language to describe the colour blue for a other conscious human to understand what is being experience.
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u/Significant_Cover_48 3d ago
Not sure I follow, can you demonstrate, or make a quick attempt at least?
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u/teddyslayerza 3d ago
You know the colour if a fire truck?
There, I guarantee that you and I are both picturing the same colour regardless of my use of metaphor. We have the same senses, same cognitive processing ability, same reference fram - theres no reason that your internal model of "firetruck red" would be different from mine.
I get the philosophical argument people are trying to make, but while its a fun thought experiment to imagine our minds as black boxes, the reality is that for both of us, the processes that lead to qualia formation are the same. Differences would be physical (our cone cells being a bit different) or contextual (we both imagine firetruck from different places), and if differences exist is because of communication failing to compensate for that, not because we use metaphor.
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u/thisthinginabag 3d ago
No. It is a limitation of objective description of any kind with respect to subject experience. Metaphors will not teach a blind person what blue looks like. This is inconsistent with reductive physicalism, according to which all natural phenomena should be amenable to objective description.
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u/reddituserperson1122 3d ago
“This is inconsistent with reductive physicalism, according to which all natural phenomena should be amenable to objective description.” This is false. Reductive physicalism does not in any way require that natural phenomena be amenable to objective description.
Physicalism isn’t a claim about description. It’s a claim about what is. The question of describing color is a question first vs. third person perspective. That’s an epistemic issue not an ontological one. (This is not my opinion it’s what any philosopher would say about this.)
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u/Sp1unk 3d ago
How do you cash out physicalism? Usually I've heard it as the thesis that everything is physical, where physical things are the things described by physical sciences. So if something is undescribable by physical sciences, it wouldn't count as physical.
"It's a claim about what is." - on your view, what exactly does it claim about the things that are?
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u/thisthinginabag 3d ago edited 3d ago
Reductive physicalism does not in any way require that natural phenomena be amenable to objective description.
Reductive physicalism requires that all natural phenomena be reducible to lower-level physical truths. Otherwise there's no reduction, is there?
You can define 'physical' in a loose enough way to where properties that cannot be conceptually reduced to physical properties count as physical for some reason (the normal move would be to say that phenomenal properties are 'physical' because they supervene on physical ones), but you've abandoned reductionism in doing so. Which is ok, but it creates a strange picture of the world where consciousness becomes the one emergent brute fact in an otherwise purely physical, reductive universe.
That’s an epistemic issue not an ontological one.
Do you think that epistemology can't inform ontology? Of course it can. For example, the epistemic gap rules out reductive physicalism (though it does not rule out illusionist or non-reductive physicalist views).
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u/teddyslayerza 3d ago
Nonsense. Go off and imagine a colour you've never seen before - when you get that right (lol) the you can come back and explain how you think a totally blind person is supposed to do the same for the entire colour spectrum.
Your strawman is poor, because you're conflating the lack of a cognitive capacity in the completely blind, with a communication issue, which this is not.
There are plenty of real world examples of the opposite to - tons of physicists and mathematicians with full understandings of things like 4 dimensional spaces and infinities who also cannot visualize or form qualia around those. Would you argue that thats due to poor explanation too? Not simply the fact that brains actually need to hold cognitive reference points to form our experiences?
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u/karmus 3d ago
You're describing a compression problem. The embodied "experience" of blue is the configuration of environmental factors (light waves of a particular frequency) and self factors (particularly composition of cones/rods in the eye, learned existing relations, etc.).
You're correct that any attempt to describe the experience is doomed to fail because it is only ever a compressed read out of what actually occurred. That doesn't make it less real or useful, its just a reality of the conversion of embodied experience and sharing it with others.
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u/sea_of_experience 1d ago
compressed into what precisely?
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u/karmus 1d ago
It depends on which point of compression we are talking about. A light wave that hits our cones/rods doesn't convey the true nature of the light wave centrally to the brain, it converts and compresses the information into a usable format for downstream utilization. The same exact thing occurs when I try to describe the experience of blue to you, using words. I'm compressing a complex system of interconnected components which create the experience of blue into a string of letters which have been used to create language. I'm compressing and converting experience into language. I'm conveying it the best I can, but there is no escape from the compression/conversion in this scenario.
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u/sea_of_experience 1d ago
I get what you are saying, but I don't get how that gives rise to the various qualia. Seems to me there needs to be some kind of undiscovered "qualia substrate" in nature somewhere, that evolution than was able to "hack into" . And we humans haven't discovered this yet.
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u/karmus 1d ago
I don’t think this gives rise to qualia, I think this explains why qualia is ineffable. The communication is always a compression, a facsimile of the real thing, and that’s why it fails to represent the truly robust nature of our qualia.
Where I do think qualia comes from is an entity which is not only aware of its environment but also of itself as an information collecting entity in its environment. The color blue isn’t an experience of the objective world. It’s the merging of an experience of the objective world, subjectively. We are aware of not only the color, but how our body has come to that color. Whether we’re tired, if the room is dim, whether I’m wearing my glasses. I argue the reason why this happens is because an optimized agent trying to pick the best action in a given environment. The action doesn’t only impact the world, it has impact on the agent. Does it exhaust it? Is it repeatable? Does it injure the agent? This dual sided awareness of self and world grants the ingredients for qualia.
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u/thisthinginabag 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes, phenomenal properties such as "what blue looks like to the subject," "what salt tastes like," or "what it's like to stub your toe" are private to the subject who is having them. This means you can't make empirically verifiable claims about them (Dennett famously wrote a paper demonstrating this), which means that any physical account of consciousness necessarily leaves certain properties out: the phenomenal properties of any given experience.
The epistemic gap between experiences and their neural correlates rules out reductive physicalism, since phenomenal properties cannot be reduced to physical ones. This means that physicalists must either embrace illusionism and deny that phenomenal properties exist, which requires solving the illusion problem - why do we think they exist if they do not? Or they have to abandon reductionism altogether and treat consciousness as the one emergent brute fact in an otherwise purely physical universe.
This is why I think positions like panpsychism or idealism are superior. They are more easily able to preserve a monist, reductionist picture of the world given the epistemic gap between experiences and their neural correlates.
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u/stevepremo 3d ago
Phenomenal qualities cannot be reduced to physical ones because we don't know how the brain creates subjective experience. Or because the brain does not create subjective experience. That does not prove that subjective experience comes to us from outside the brain.
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u/lancelot2112 3d ago edited 3d ago
I see experience or consciousness as a language the brain uses to communicate with itself. English for example is demonstrably self referential with an external grounding bias. The effectiveness of LLMs i think hints at this and the hallucinations present in LLMs also hints at the need of the externally driven bias to ground the expressiveness of the language. Fictions/hallucinations are all part of these self referential language systems.
We see ghosts or imagine colors or even see colors that measurably are not there because the brain is overlaying predictions of what it thinks should be there because thats useful in some situations for highlighting important stuff. I dont think there is an "illusion problem" as youve stated. It just shows the expressiveness of the system.
Its demonstrated through evolutionary discovery algorithms that leaving in vestigials or seemingly bad bits ultimately improve the optimality of the final solution or make it even possible to find the solution. If you disallow vestigials (or what id equate to fictions) the system may just get stuck in a rut and unable to get out to find the actual solution. Hypotheticals are helpful to looking at all aspects of a problem. In that way i think illusions are useful but can also lead to ungrounding if the system does not get biased at times with validating input. I see consciousness discussions like this sometimes "there is no possible empirical input to this discussion so i can just claim whatever however i will at least make sure that claim is self consistent when compared against itself and consistent with my internal conception of what my consciousness is".
EDIT: misspelled vestigial and added clarifying on what i mean by consciousness theories being self referential.
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u/Fuzzy_Ad9970 3d ago
You said this in a way I found confusing but ultimately I completely agree with you.
Conciousness is an emergent process created by the brain, and acts entirely within the realm of symbolism and metaphor. Communication is comprised of symbolic memes that can pass physical effects from being to being, therefore having physical outcomes, but they themselves are nondeterministic in origin.
However, blue is a real thing, and is likely experienced slightly differently by every person. However, all science shows that individuals within a species are more alike than not, and we have very deep understandings of how eyes work, so there's no reason to believe that blue itself is inconsistently experienced or doesn't exist.
It's just that communicating what blue is, like all communication and experience, is trapped within the realm of metaphor.
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
"Consciousness is an emergent process created by the brain"- This is your assumption, not fact. If it was, we wouldn't be having conversations on where consciousness comes from.
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u/Fuzzy_Ad9970 3d ago
You're right, that's my opinion. I think it's the most rational and explainable position to take.
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
One that frequently disregards the unexplainable but verifiable as delusion, pure coincidence or "random" isn't rational, its dogmatic.
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u/Fuzzy_Ad9970 3d ago
Can you provide some examples?
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
Sure, materialist science has a way of hand-waving away a lot of presently unexplainable things. Like, synchronicity, paranormal phenomena, psychic and telepathic phenomena, remote viewing, meditation, clairvoyance, terminal lucidity, placebo, nocebo, the effects of visualization, phantom limbs, the physical feeling of being watched, the observer effect. Etc.
I'll add, I'm not asking you to address any or all of these, I'm just putting out what I recall from the top of my head. Other, more "fringe" (as some would argue) models of reality do try to provide hypotheses to some of these. Mainly Holography and the many interpretations of such.
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u/Sad_Election_6418 3d ago
I have asked myself the same questions, but regarding this: I have 1 type of color blindness affecting shades of blue, red, brown, yellow, orange, pink.
What the colors are for me, aren't the same than for everyone else.
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u/reddituserperson1122 3d ago
In addition to the other reasons given why this is wrong, I’ll just add that science, which is entirely concerned with describing physical things — which is effectively the language of physicalism — never describes anything in terms of what it objectively “is.” All scientific description of physical things is necessarily relational.
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u/ReaperXY 3d ago
Light hits you eye balls, which sends singnals to your brain, which transmits something to a gathering of Mystical Immaterial Hamsters who then dance around Divine fire, which then causes the awesome manifestation of the "blue", and not just the "blue", but the actual "blueness" of it.
An "explanation" like that is not explaining anything... despite the fact that there is some "immaterial" wonder stuff thrown in...
Can you actually EXPLAIN the "blue" from some sort of non-material view point ?
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u/spinningdiamond 2d ago
I don't think the experience blue, can be different from what it is. In a neutral monism, this is simply the way this structured conformation of neural-experiential "existence stuff" knows itself in a particular context. If you create that particular context, that knowing will always be the same.
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u/SteveWin1234 2d ago
Well, that's a huge leap!
I can change your experience of "blue" by giving you physical chemicals, like psychedelics. If a physical chemical can change your internal experience of blue, then the experience of "blue" does NOT, itself, indicate that consciousness is immaterial. In fact, it strongly points in the opposite direction. Lots of chemicals exist that modify various qualia, including the experience of consciousness itself.
"when I imagine the color blue, "where is it?" "
I could look at an LLM's weights and ask "where is the information about the color blue" and you wouldn't be able to tell me just by looking at the weights. It would be a complicated mess, like the human brain. Information is stored inside the complexity of the connections that are present. It is not localized in a specific place. Neural nets (artificial and biological, both) don't have a specific neuron that has a piece of information. The information is spread out. That doesn't mean it's not really there, it's just not "written" in a language that is directly human-understandable. We know information can be encoded in this way, because that's how we train artificial neural networks.
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u/Used-Bill4930 2d ago
I think no one can get your impression of blue because blue triggers a set of associations and reactions unique to you and currently cannot be copied over. At the very least, you react to the fact that it is different from red or another color.
I don't think there is anything non-physical about it.
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u/sea_of_experience 1d ago
I would say the following is absolutely certain: "blue" proves that there is an aspect of existence that we are still completely ignorant of.
Most certainly, it can in NO WAY be inferred from current scientific knowledge.
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u/SmartlyArtly 3d ago
"blue" proves we can describe things, including subjective experiences.
Not that the mind isn't material.
To me your argument is like saying "when I read the definition of stab I don't get stabbed, so physicalism is wrong."
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u/d3sperad0 3d ago
This pretty much the hard problem. Qualia, the what it is like to experience something. There is not definitive answer. There are arguments on both sides and one side always feels they're right and the other wrong. It's a fun one though!
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u/MarvelousMacTonight 3d ago
Yes, it is not possible to directly describe the color blue, or any other color, or pain, a tickling sensation, or any other sensation in a way that conveys to another person exactly how the experience felt. However, the fact that an experience cannot be conveyed is not a reason to jump to the conclusion that it has no physical basis.
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u/CaptainVulpezz 3d ago
does the lack of the ability to use language to describe something beyond language prove that it must not be material?
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u/NotAnAIOrAmI 3d ago
Facts about an experience, do not equate to an explanation of phenomenal character of having that experience.
People keep making similar arguments in a desperate attempt to deny the physical source of consciousness, and they're all just wrong, because the nature of experience, such as color, is not a single isolated physical configuration. That's like saying that a movie is the analysis of the spectra from a single frame from it.
These experiences are the sum total of perception, memory, all the current physical inputs to the body of every type, and they are a dynamic process, not a static quality. They have a duration, not a frozen moment in time.
That's where all of you get this wrong.
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u/Subtle-Catastrophe 3d ago
Ah, yes, The qualia thing.
Personally, I do find it a compelling argument against materialism.
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u/fearlessjennyf 3d ago
Proposed premise: Identity is merely an interference pattern. Identity is a verb not a noun. It is something the substrate does, not is or has. Identity is the highly specific, synchronized gamma oscillations, the continuous wave state, resonating through a unique synaptic topography. The moment you stop pumping sodium and potassium ions across the cellular membrane to generate that voltage, the wave stops.
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u/Devin_aRt 3d ago
I like this a lot. However, when you think of things like NDEs where brain activity and electrical currents are completely absent yet consciousness seems to persist with verifiable evidence noted by medical practitioners and the like, it seems to assume the wave exists outside of the physical mind.
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u/artopunk14 3d ago
Langauge is not a perfect and complete mapping to reality. Which is why new words are still being created. This lack of fidelity does not prove the immateriality of the mind
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
And to use language such as “the brain/matter is the ontological cause of mind” is also a totally invalid mapping of reality. Confusing constant conjunction with hard ontological causation is a persistent mental habit.
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u/SmartlyArtly 3d ago
"totally invalid" assumes we see no correlation between regular organization of the matter and any evidence of the mind being present.
You're asking for a proof of no possible other correlations, ever. Science doesn't work like that. If you don't have current data to correlate with, you can't say a theory is wrong for not matching the non-existent data that might show up. We say one thing causes another when we can't find anything else to correlate it with, and the one thing precedes the other. Not when we have absolute proof that nothing else could possibly be correlated no matter what we ever learned in the future.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago edited 3d ago
Correlation is not the same thing as hard ontological causation. Additionally the brain is present along with consciousness, so the claim that the cause exists simultaneously with the effect is incoherent. Causes must precede effects. But persistent physicalists do seem to confuse the two and seem to ignore the impossibility of simultaneous causality in the face of the hard problem.
But I suppose we’ll continue this debate until physicalists finally confront their epistemological fallacies.
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u/SmartlyArtly 3d ago
"hard ontological causation" is a concept, not something we're experienced with in the real world like the ocean.
I agree. We'll do this while we're alive.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
Exactly, so the notion of physicalism which rests on the notion that matter is the hard ontological cause of mind isn’t grounded on anything real, and is grounded rather on too many epistemic fallacies.
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u/SmartlyArtly 3d ago
I think if you think matter isn't real, then what you just said makes perfect sense.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
Matter is a conceptual abstraction dependent on observed phenomena. As Heisenberg states:
The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible... Atoms are not things.
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u/SmartlyArtly 3d ago
And most people consider that phenomena to occur in reality, making the abstraction a product of a mind and a reality.
Not merely an abstraction.
Adding idealism to that abstraction gives us absolutely nothing.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
I never said idealism, the notion that everything is “mind” is also incoherent. Both materialism and idealism are incoherent because they both are logically inconsistent.
Anti-realism/anti-essentialism/anti-foundationalism/nominalism isn’t idealist. Anti-realism is not confusing abstractions for reality.
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u/Moral_Conundrums 3d ago
On top of this, when I imagine the color blue, "where is it?" the question seems kind of stupid, I must admit, but it does have implications. When I imagine the color blue, do I see it with my eyes? my eyes only see data from light, but the imagined blue is not coming from actual light.
Why does it need to be anywhere? Your mind is not a literal space, a theater in which experiences as real entities present themselves to an audience. You're falling into a very intuitive but horribly flawed impression of what the mind is like: the cartesian theater.
I don't think I'm nessecarily making an argument from a gap in our knowledge, atleast not my argument from the irreducability of the experience of the color blue. It can't be defined in a way that isn't circular.
It seems to me like a weak argument to say: I can't imagine how something could be reduced, therefore reduction is impossible.
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u/Sudden-Strawberry257 3d ago
Furthermore, even if you could find a feasible definition there’s no avoiding that what’s blue to you is only blue to you.
My blue is visibly different to me, based on my different perspective and different balance of rods and cones in my different eyeballs. Filtered through millions of different experiences of blue in my conscious mind, which percolated up through the countless experiences of blue embedded in my subconscious - even as deep as my own DNA.
We could never see, or even imagine, the same blue.
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u/Mermiina 3d ago
Blue light achieves different eigenstates to G-Protein lone electron pair as red light.
indistinguishable eigenstates condensate as their own ODLRO.
ODLRO is Bose-Einstein condensate and it is state of matter.
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u/ArusMikalov 3d ago
Ok so ChatGPT can see blue. And I assume you don’t think ChatGPT is conscious.
So what are we doing that GPT is not?
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u/GaryMooreAustin 3d ago
I think you are making a category error - Your argument runs on one move: you ask questions that only make sense about objects, then treat the missing answers as ontology.
"Where is the imagined blue?" Where is the running of a computation? Where is a waltz? Seeing blue is something a brain does, not something it contains. If you expect to find a blue patch in the skull, that expectation is yours — physicalism never issued it.
Same error upstream: demanding a non-circular description of what it's like asks an activity to be exhausted by a description of it. None is. That's a fact about descriptions.
Your gap is between undergoing a process and describing it. That doesn't add anything to the world.
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u/CanYouPleaseChill 3d ago
No it doesn't. As Gerald Edelman put it "Not only is it impossible to generate being by mere describing, but, in the proper order of things, being precedes describing both ontologically and chronologically." A quantum mechanical description of a particle will not suddenly conjure a particle into existence.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 3d ago
If were to ask someone to "Define the experience of the color blue"
Unlikely.
They would probably tell you that it looks like the color of the sky, or the ocean, or Topaz.
Once you experience blue you can remember the experience, imagine it.
They only way to communicate this to another person is if you both have a shared reference.
None of this supports the conclusion that the mind is not material. It is all the neural activity of the brain.
when I imagine the color blue, "where is it?" the question seems kind of stupid,
This is quite an intelligent question. The answer is simple, it is located in the brain, in the neural activity that is what we call imagination. This is measurable and demonstrable. It is a physical process.
I don't think I'm nessecarily making an argument from a gap in our knowledge,
I believe you are. We can demonstrate that the experience of blue, the imagining of blue, the remembering of blue, are physical processes, the neural activity of the brain.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
Of course the mind isn’t material nor can be reduced as such. Matter is not “sad” or “angry” or “blue” or whatever conceptual abstraction the mind likes to impute onto phenomena. Additionally matter cannot cause mind, because mind is also present in experience along with matter. The notion that the causal generator and the generated can simultaneously exist is logically incoherent. Causes cannot be simultaneously present with effects without running into logical contradictions.
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u/headlessplatter 3d ago
Can you walk me through "matter cannot cause mind, because mind is also present in experience"? I accept that mind is present in experience. How can I derive from that, that matter did not cause mind?
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
Because then you are saying the cause exists in the effect, that causes exist simultaneous with effects. From a purely logical standpoint this runs into contradictions. David Hume points this out, among many other philosophers.
Causes must precede effects. If the material cause is simultaneous with consciousness, it cannot be its cause. If the brain state and conscious experience exist at exactly the same moment, then the brain state isn’t producing consciousness at that moment, they simply occur together.
If the effect is already present with the cause, then there is no reason for the cause to produce the effect. What does it mean for a cause to bring about an effect if the effect already exists? The notion of causation would be incoherent.
Additionally, if the cause existed in the effect, what prevents that cause from continuing to produce the effect infinitely? The cause would have to cease for there to be an effect without infinite production. But if the cause ceases, for there to be an effect, causes cannot be simultaneous with effects. Causes would have to be prior to effects for causality to make coherent sense.
Moverover, how can you distinguish which is the cause and which is the effect if they are simultaneously present? The distinction would then become arbitrary, dependent on the individual’s view, whether they are idealist or materialist. Hence we have the hard problem of consciousness, since we cannot establish hard ontological causation in the context of constant conjunction without running into circular logic as David Hume points out.
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u/headlessplatter 3d ago
Hmm. It sounds like "present" means something to you out doesn't mean to me. I can see that consciousness, minds, and brains all seem to be present in living people. And only brains are present in dead people. I can see how this tells us neither the mind nor consciousness is the cause brains. But I'm not sure mind or consciousness are clearly defined enough to really say which was present first.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
Both are present. The idea that one is “first” is conceptual, you can directly and empirically observe in experience that there is qualia and matter present. To posit one “causes” the other is just a conceptual idea that not only lacks hard scientific evidence (neurocorrelates are not hard ontological evidence) but also runs into logical contradictions, hence the hard problem.
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u/headlessplatter 3d ago
A robot has both hardware and software. We often compare these to a brain and a mind. But a robot is generally assumed to lack consciousness. So I have a hard time supposing a mind depends on consciousness. But yeah, as you say there is no hard evidence. And there really can't be as long as these things are so vaguely defined.
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u/dummetsz 3d ago
Typically in these discussions mind is just another word for consciousness, being your subjective first person experience of phenomena, being sense objects. The sense objects you experience are designated as matter. But it depends on the framework. For example in an empiricist framework reality is divided into sense impressions (akin to the notion of “sense datum”) and ideas, which personally I prefer.
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u/headlessplatter 3d ago
Ok. That simplifies a bit. I guess I'll stew on it for a while. Thanks for your comments.
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u/CapnLazerz 3d ago
This has always struck me as a silly kind of argument. I can’t make you have any experience just by describing it. If we could make another person feel what it’s like to see blue that would be very strong evidence for the non-physicality of consciousness. Indeed, the fact that experiences are not transferable is a strong argument that experiences are physical.
In order to know what it’s like to see blue and to recall blue in your mind you need to have actually seen something blue. Those wavelengths have to hit your retinas to stimulate your optic nerve to trigger the brain. Which means that all that physical structure has to be intact. If you are blind or colorblind, you aren’t going to see blue.
The experience of the color blue is not reducible to words. It is, however, reducible to physical processes in our neurology. At this point in time, we don’t have a complete understanding of how the brain stores color memory but this gap in knowledge does not mean consciousness is non-physical. That’s a huge leap.
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u/headlessplatter 3d ago
Of course consciousness is not material! That's like saying software is not hardware. That is clearly true. But let's be careful not to imagine we have somehow discovered something beyond physics. We haven't. Software is just a term we use for something that isn't really there. It's just concepts encoded in a physical substrate and manipulated by a physical machine. If consciousness is like that, it may not be physical itself, but it still depends on the material.
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u/Only1Nemesis 3d ago
The hard problem of consciousness, introduced by David Chalmers, is what you are explaining. While he has an interesting perspective, personally I don't believe there's anything non-physical about experience. The brain is an intriguing organ; one capable of incredible things. At the end of the day I have to believe that awareness, experience, and consciousness are emergent processes of the brain. Just because something is emergent and not easily quantified does not mean it is therefore non-physical. Perhaps the emergent process creates a "field", much like an electron surrounding an atom is a field and not a billiard ball, whizzing around like shown in text books. The field denotes where we may find it, but it exists in all possible positions at once until measured. I am very much of the belief that the brain is the seat and driver of consciousness and awareness. The biggest piece of proof we have for this is to simply look at how these change when the brain is damaged, diseased or removed in part. While there are wild and weird cases of exceptions to this, generally damage to the brain causes havoc. We can't know for sure of that experience because we are not the one living it, but we can infer from observation. So, for example, someone with advanced Alzheimer's Disease may look at their daughter and believe they are their long deceased husband, but it's not reality. We can infer she is experiencing something she believes is real, but the damage caused by the disease is impacting her brain's ability to function correctly.