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I'm not sure I understand what your link has to do with consciousness. Yes, people experience the world differently. Someone with Tetrachromacy will see the wor

by Faark 7y ago

I'm not sure I understand what your link has to do with consciousness. Yes, people experience the world differently. Someone with Tetrachromacy will see the world different than us, but that hardly invalidates our much less capable experience. Perception organs differ somewhat between individuals. I'd see little reason to make a distinction between those organic we are born with and those humans managed to invent. So yes, the guy in your room can experience colors by using the sheets (though in a different and much less capable way than most of us, thus him not wanting to equate this with our common understanding of experiencing color), and is color blind without. And I kind of get deaf when plugging my ears, though that experience is vastly different from someone who never had hearing to begin with. That doesn't answer what it is like "seeing red" and "feeling blue". I don't know what it's like for you. I can only look at your behavior, see it being similar to mine under the same circumstances and thus assume your internal state to be similar. Until your behavior tells me it being different... like someone blind running into a wall or someone approaching a chasm with no signs of fear. ps: had to google "feel blue", as it meaning "depressed" isn't really a thing in my native language. Translating (color based) idioms is actually kind of telling... it seems only possible directly if both cultures had shared aspects / experiences. So yeah, while conflating consciousness with intelligence doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But I'm not sure equating it with perception is getting us anywhere better (hope idiom didn't get lost in translation).

DonaldFisk 7y ago
With the exception of our thoughts, pretty much all of our consciousness experience, i.e. involving qualia, is due to perception. The person in my room (an achromat) can't experience colours at all, and they're able to tell you that. Their eyes have no functioning cones. They see everything in monochrome, so to them, watching a colour movie is how watching a black and white one is to us. Under low light conditions our cones are inactive and we see only in monochrome using our rods, just like achromats do. So people with normal colour vision can experience what it's like to be achromatic, but achromats can't even imagine what colours are like. In the room, the person can only tell what colours the papers are by observing how dark they look when overlaid with the coloured filters (whose colours they know). The metaphorical use of colours in the language isn't really important, and as you point out is dependent on culture.

by Faark 7y ago

DonaldFisk 7y ago

With the exception of our thoughts, pretty much all of our consciousness experience, i.e. involving qualia, is due to perception. The person in my room (an achromat) can't experience colours at all, and they're able to tell you that. Their eyes have no functioning cones. They see everything in monochrome, so to them, watching a colour movie is how watching a black and white one is to us. Under low light conditions our cones are inactive and we see only in monochrome using our rods, just like achromats do. So people with normal colour vision can experience what it's like to be achromatic, but achromats can't even imagine what colours are like. In the room, the person can only tell what colours the papers are by observing how dark they look when overlaid with the coloured filters (whose colours they know). The metaphorical use of colours in the language isn't really important, and as you point out is dependent on culture.