Posted: Aug 08, 2017 3:23 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:
As long as we are careful not to add a pook in the middle of our semantics we are all good. As soon as we say 'qualia of' we have added the spook and all goes badly from there on down. Now we can just declare that this IS the Hard Problem. But we could also then suggest the Easy Solution is to stop believing in the spook.
I have no evidence that I ever have an experience fo seeing red. I can easily convince myself that I have just had or am having this 'experience' but when I look into just how it is that I do that my evidence starts to quiver and shake.
The origin of this thread was a claim I made that colour is an illusion [not as it seems] not that it does not exist. Perhaps with the extension that some buses are not red in the sense redness we perceive is a construct of the brain and not some intrinsic property of the bus.
There is no spook. That for me is a complete red herring. If you pardon the colour reference. Redness I perceive is simply correlation of my brain and retinal chemistry/whatever with the wavelength of the photons reaching the cones on my retina. The photos reaching my retina are also dependent on the surface properties of the bus.
The surface properties of the bus we might call red. But is the surface itself red in the same way I perceive it? Personally I don't see how it can be.