Posted: Aug 07, 2017 5:18 pm
The_Metatron wrote:Not only is it trivial to compare how each of us detect color, standards exist which we can use to name those colors. It would be tedious, but we damn sure can test if red means the same to you as it means to me.
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In terms of 'qualia' we can't. There is this notion of "what it's like-ness"
What we can test is an ability to discriminate. A simple photo-sensor device can discriminate colours and output names of colours. That doesn't mean there is a subjective experience of colour qualia in that device. Function and qualia are not necessarily the same thing.
If you ignore qualia and adopt a narrow meaning for "if red means the same to you as it means to me" you are right. We can test people to see what degree they report stimuli as alike or different.
Still there is the notion that what red feels like to me is something other than just discrimination between stimuli. It doesn't seem absurd to speculate that what it's like to see red could be swapped with what it's like to see blue and our functional colour discrimination would not be affected at all. On the machine we could swap the red sensor with the blue sensor and calibrate it and it would work just as before discriminating colours.
We might just agree that qualia are nothing more than a sort of labelling of the discrimination function. That colour in that qualia sense doesn't really exist. If you think they do exist it should be clear they can't be tested.