Originally created 13th January 2024
My posts on the topic of Consciousness:
Physicalist Consciousness - third attempt on the problem of Consciousness
Originally created 16th January 2024
Questions in Experience Realism - some questions about Qualia - Consciousness and Formlessness - Metaphysics (You are here)
Originally created 13th January 2024
Evolved Existence Programming - second attempt on the problem of Consciousness
Originally created 11th January 2024
Evolved Emergent Qualia - first attempt on the problem of Consciousness
Originally created 5th January 2024
What is the realism of experience (qualia)?
- Are there a finite and small (eg. 32) number of ways to experience "red", as a human?
- Are there a finite and quite large number of ways to experience "red", as a being, such that it could require an alien brain and/or a psychadelic to experience most of them, due to human brain hardware limitations (neuronal power consumption limit).
- Are there infinite variations of ways to experience "red", such that every single experience of "red" ever will always be an experience of a slightly different wavelength of it?
- Is it impossible to delineate or demarcate the different aspects of a being's conscious experience from one another, so that essentially every conscious experience that ever exists is a single, indivisble experience that will likely never exist for another being?
- are there any other options?
In the above thought experiments I assume that there is some distribution of skew in sensory perception. However, even if two beings have genuinely different sensory perception, the cumulative effect of sampling the distribution over many beings will cause at least one sensory skew cancellation or collision, as in the birthday paradox. This seems especially true when considering that colour exists along a wavelength, so one person's "blue" may be another person's "cyan". When the former sees their own "cyan" there is a chance of experience collision with the other person's 'blue'. So the skew could self-cancel if even 2 beings look at enough colours along the same spectrum.
I currently assume that there might be realism enough that colour experiences have a last and a first and are ordered. No colour experience is shorter than blue, and no colour experience is longer than red. Our evolution has simply learned how to make most eficient use of that experiential range offered.
ie. you could pick any colour experience by addressing it using a fractional number between 0.0 inclusive (blue), and any valid number up to 1.0 exclusive (red). The initial question is whether there is any limit to the number of decimal places you can meaningfully state the number with.
The supposition is that actually a being which views only infrared will via evolution likely end up with neurons which cause it to experience infrared with the same "red" experience at the low end of its receptive frequecy, and the same "blue" experience at the high end of its frequency, albeit that its most "blue" corresponds to a wavelength value longer even than the wavelength of our visual "red".
Suppose there's a sixth way of experiencing which is quite analagous to sound or colour experience, but different in the same way those are different from one another. How much spare energy would evolution have needed before it folded that experience in as a (possibly nearly redundant) part of our sense perception abilities (such as smell, but only for very minute traces)?
Are there other feeling experiences like pain and pleasure which human brains have not developed access to, culturally or evolutionarily?
Are the experiences somehow on a single continuum, with touch at the lowest end, followed by taste, followed by smell, followed by hearing, followed by sight? (and possibly other experiences in the large gaps in between)
We know the calculus that energy must conform to at the physical level - what is the calculus that formlessness must conform to at the metaphysical level?
Discussions welcome!
- Classical element
- Pancha Bhuta
- Wuxing
- Thales - Arche
- Plato - Theory of forms
- Colour perception across cultures study(s)
- Jimi Hendrix Experience?
- LSD psychonauts?
- Many, many more thinkers, philosophers, and spiritualists
- Psychophysics
- Sensory neuroscience
- IIT describes conscious experience in terms of its complexity
- Please contact me by Discussions (link above), Issues or Pull Request