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'Fine tuning' the universe...


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7 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

 

I agree with all of that, but arguably it still leaves open the possibility that subjective "redness" to one person isn't the same as it is for another. It could be considered an aspect of the more general problem of explaining how consciousness arises.

As I said, from a scientific perspective it can justifiably be ignored as irrelevant. A positivist would no doubt dismiss it as literally meaningless.

Again I'm not really sure it can.  The sensor (retinal photoreceptors) the processor (neural cells) are a shared design as is the biochemistry, I don't see where there is potential for any differentiated response.  I may well be missing something.

Jim 

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7 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

We know that all senses end up as being electrical impulses in our brain, right?

Why does one produce color, other smell and third note of certain pitch?

... and synesthesia has already been mentioned, which Wikipedia tells me is still not understood, but there appears to be one theory that there are physical differences in the brain that allow different regions to communicate in some people, and another theory that the sensory response is the same, but the "semantic interpretation" differs.

 

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6 minutes ago, EarthLife said:

It might well be a group of neurons and connections that are triggered in the same rough areas, but those neurons can be totally wired differently in each of us, and so create a very different experience. If we were all wired the same, we'd be identical drones.

Some people love pain, some people can't cope with pain, some people have no pain/touch sense at all.

Very true - pain threshold is again something to consider when speaking about matching part.

We sometimes can't even match things between us and in certain cases not even on individual level.

Depending on state of mind and body chemistry - sometimes we can find certain stimulus pleasant and sometimes unpleasant. So stimulus itself is not solely responsible for response it creates - there is also state of observer. Given that one observer can be in different states - it is not very hard to imagine that different observers will be in different states.

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21 minutes ago, EarthLife said:

I don't think it's the physical method of colour detection/sense that's in doubt, it's more how we each perceive the colours and the various combinations of them once the signals reach the brain.

So what is the different mechanism in person A's brain compared to person B's brain that would lead to a different outcome? A response that we interpret is a neural pattern. I'm not aware of the mechanism whereby person A's brain can produce a different pattern of response.

Jim

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1 minute ago, saac said:

So what is the different mechanism in person A's brain compared to person B's brain that would lead to a different outcome? A response that we interpret is a neural pattern. I'm not aware of the mechanism whereby person A's brain can produce a different pattern of response.

Jim

Same neural network can be trained differently and produce different output for same input.

That is how we learn and remember.

Even if "schematics" (number of neurons and their connections) of neural network is the same, and even that is different in different people, result of certain stimulus will be different.

Optical nerve can deliver same electrical impulse to "processing" network - but that network might output totally different signal for same stimulus in different people.

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7 minutes ago, saac said:

Again I'm not really sure it can.  The sensor (retinal photoreceptors) the processor (neural cells) are a shared design as is the biochemistry, I don't see where there is potential for any differentiated response.  I may well be missing something.

Jim 

I think we're only a cigarette paper apart, Jim.
I'm a materialist at heart, and I think subjective sensations are emergent properties of complex systems. Until we understand how that happens, though, I'm not sure we can be confident that people with identical stimuli will experience identical sensations.

 

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Even with our attempt at copying the way the brain works (extremely basic artificial software neurons and their connections) can and does create totally different outputs from the network when all neural biases and connection weights are similar (all network values are slightly different), the smallest difference in those values (with same wiring) can and does produce totally different signal propagations and output results.

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Just now, ollypenrice said:

Possible, certainly. But not all limes and lemons in nature are all that acid in colour.

Olly

You see what you did there with showing me that color: you said to me - look at this, once your brain matches any color to this particular one - you need to yell acid.

You might have as well told me that it is called superluminal green.

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19 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

This is beautiful example of how perception can be different in different individuals.

We know that all senses end up as being electrical impulses in our brain, right?

Why does one produce color, other smell and third note of certain pitch?

They are all just electrical impulses at the moment they "enter" our brain, right? It is the brain and structure of the brain that determines what each electrical impulse will be felt like.

Now, we, in general, have very similar brain structure - but there is enough differences to raise question if what we experience is also different. Different people do have different wiring in their brain. Chess player will have different wiring in their brain compared to say rock climber or precision optician (our brain rewires itself to some extend based on our experience - that is how we learn and acquire skills).

The bearer signals are as you say are common, electrical impulses, however it is the addressable area of the brain, the area to which those signals are sent that determines the sensory response - aural, or visual or touch, pain etc. At some stage in the development and evolution of the brain  a certain response gave a more favourable outcome. The rest is history and we now have a dedicated visual cortex, auditory cortex etc - a differentiated brain structure.

  So let's take this differentiated brain - its physical design and biochemical response encoded in DNA to be replicated again and again and again.  This brian will have an evolutionary advantage in the ability to detect Red - a warning sign in nature of danger/harm.  That brain and those of shared DNA are then constrained to the same physical and interpretive response to stimulation of the colour red. If not, where is the mechanism, post firing of the neural pathway in the visual cortex that leads to a different interpretation?

Jim 

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7 minutes ago, saac said:

This brian will have an evolutionary advantage in the ability to detect Red - a warning sign in nature of danger/harm.  That brain and those of shared DNA are then constrained to the same physical and interpretive response to stimulation of the colour red. If not, where is the mechanism, post firing of the neural pathway in the visual cortex that leads to a different interpretation?

Interpretation is the same.

But we can't say that about perception.

What I see as RED - I will associate with warmth and danger and arousal and all those nice things that nature took care that I associate it with. That is interpretation.

In fact - my mind is not doing the association - my "body" is.

Here is interesting question: at what stage do color blind people fail to differentiate red and green? Or to put it in another words - would people with particular type of color blindness see green as threat?

 

 

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58 minutes ago, EarthLife said:

It might well be a group of neurons and connections that are triggered in the same rough areas, but those neurons can be totally wired differently in each of us, and so create a very different experience. If we were all wired the same, we'd be identical drones.

Some people love pain, some people can't cope with pain, some people have no pain/touch sense at all.

Inability to sense touch or pain  arises from a mutation so we can discount that.  I'm not sure an expression of liking a stimuli informs how that stimuli is physically sensed, certainly not how it is detected. Liking suggests a learned action usually based on reward. I'm not sure what you mean by "totally wired differently" do you mean the physical structure of the brain?  I would have to disagree there, I think we now have sufficient knowledge from neuroscience to map the macro structure and functional areas of the brain.  We can see that through work done in remediative care following brain injury. 

Jim 

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7 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Interpretation is the same.

But we can't say that about perception.

What I see as RED - I will associate with warmth and danger and arousal and all those nice things that nature took care that I associate it with. That is interpretation.

In fact - my mind is not doing the association - my "body" is.

Here is interesting question: at what stage do color blind people fail to differentiate red and green? Or to put it in another words - would people with particular type of color blindness see green as threat?

 

 

What are you meaning by "perception" ?

I agree regarding differences in association - we associate through a learned process, influenced for example by culture, education, environment, external imposed constraints and rules.  None of these however inform the mechanism of detection and identification of a particular colour - I cannot see how that is not otherwise fixed and common due to our shared biochemical response. 

I would imagine colour blind people are affected by the condition from birth or if acquired from that moment. Like a faulty ZWO camera, they would be unable to discriminate between certain colours due to a limited frequency response. Generally due to an imbalance in the expression of the gene responsible for opsin synthesis leading to a deficit/surfit in either the L, S or M photoreceptor.

Seeing green as a threat could arise from a learned mechanism or, there is I believe, a route for behavioural responses to be inherited.

Jim 

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1 hour ago, Zermelo said:

I think we're only a cigarette paper apart, Jim.
I'm a materialist at heart, and I think subjective sensations are emergent properties of complex systems. Until we understand how that happens, though, I'm not sure we can be confident that people with identical stimuli will experience identical sensations.

 

Yeah I think so, almost in touching distance of violent agreement :)  The difficulty here as we all can see is how to measure the sensation/interpretation. I'm not sure we can or ever will be able to.  I think we can measure and define to a good level of resolution what happens to the point of neurons firing and neural chemicals being released etc. That must all surely be common. But what happens after that, if that is wrapped up in consciousness then will we ever put any definition on it? Fascinating isn't it?

Jim 

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I do not believe there is any possible way for us to communicate to one another how we each perceive the world. My world, the one that my brain has processed from the input from my five senses, is in all probability very different to your world. We can both look at a red rose and agree that it is a red rose, but that's just putting a handy label on an object, it does not convey anything at all about our perception of it.

 I will never know how my wife perceives the red roses I give her on our wedding anniversary, to her they may be what I would describe as yellow. I wonder what they smell like to her? Does she hear the Atlantic rollers crashing onto the beach the same way that I do? How does Beethoven's Fifth sound to her? When I hold her hand, how does it feel to her? I will never know. We can never know what anyone else in the world is feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling or tasting.

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42 minutes ago, saac said:

I'm not sure what you mean by "totally wired differently" do you mean the physical structure of the brain?

Ok, so I might be coming from totally different perspective into this and this might be a problem - but I'll explain the way I see it.

Computer neural networks are based on actual thing, so we can say that they are abstraction mimicking the real thing to a degree. Maybe not all the intricacies but if something holds for artificial neural networks - I think it will hold for real brain as well - at least things that I will mention.

If we take a neural network and break connection between neurons A and B -  neural network will start giving different output for the same input even if what the network "has learned" is the same. We can see this in serious injury to the brain where individuals must re learn certain skills - like learning to talk / walk and so on again (these are extreme cases).

This is what I mean by wiring of the brain. As far as I can tell (but I'm not 100% certain on this) - pathways or connections between neurons form in early age and part of learning. This is different from artificial neural networks which are mostly "fixed" - e.i. count of neurons and their connections remains the same ("no rewiring").

Given above and from the fact that we all have different DNA - it is very sensible to assume that:

a) two individuals might not have same number of neurons

b) two individuals might not have same number of connections or differently arranged connections between existing neurons

Now, it is possible for two networks with different architectures to be trained the same and to roughly have the same response - but it will never be exactly the same.

From this it is easy to see that even if we have very similar / "the same" structure of eyeball, photosensitive area, optical nerve and so on and we get the same electrical impulse to the brain - first neural network / processing center will be different because it will likely have:

a) different number of neurons

b) with different connections

c) and different training

34 minutes ago, saac said:

What are you meaning by "perception" ?

Ok - so this is very hard to explain - and for precisely that reason it is hard to establish if we have the same perception or not.

Let's try with green: there is nothing in physical phenomena of color that is green. Green does not exist in physical world - it is our sensation. It is sort of a feeling in our brain that we get when we see object or light that is green.

People that have suffered some severe trauma sometimes smell colors.

Their brain is rewired differently in such way that when they see green for example - they "smell" or have sensation or feeling inside of their brain of some smell. By the way - smell is also very similar to color - in the sense that we have this perception in our brain of something - and as we have seen this perception is triggered by certain signal from processing center of our sense (which can get mixed up).

That is what I mean by perception - thing that happens in my consciousness when green light triggers my sensory system - a feeling.

There is simply no way of telling if I have same green feeling as someone else.

Maybe my green feels like your roasted pork (either smell or taste) - but we would never know that because all we have in order to communicate that to one another is just comparison between physical stimuli and corresponding feeling that each one has but can't express.

 

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I thought we figured out green a long time ago.

I seem to recall a documentary on the BBC in the 80's about an English courtier in Elizabethan times who created a sample of purest green.  I think he was trying to make gold, but his plan wasn't cunning enough...

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3 minutes ago, Ratlet said:

I thought we figured out green a long time ago.

I seem to recall a documentary on the BBC in the 80's about an English courtier in Elizabethan times who created a sample of purest green.  I think he was trying to make gold, but his plan wasn't cunning enough...

 

"So what you are telling me Percy is something you have never seen, is slightly less green than something else you have never seen" 😁

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1 hour ago, EarthLife said:

 

 

Interesting, thanks. By co-incidence, just before I saw this thread, the subject of "Mary's Room" came up in my news feed. I hadn't heard about it before that. Funny how that happens.

 

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So... I realize that it's possible that nobody has proven that our sensory experiences are the same.  However, I also know that there are countless examples of shared responses to shared sensory experiences. Certain colours clash. Having your fingernails torn out is horrible. Middle C played where it wasn't meant to be will sound wrong. 'Out of tune' makes sense. Chocolate and onions don't go together. This list could run to millions of examples.  Are we to believe, therefore, that by some remarkable conincidence, the relationships between these non-shared experiences are consistently unaffected by their not being common? Yes, you can argue this but - be honest - are you not flying a kite in doing so? Does it not make a lot more sense to suppose that, in our genetically similar bodies, we have highly comparable responses to identical outside stimulii?

Test yourself. A peer reviewed paper is set to appear, saying that it contains a clear answer as to whether or not your red is more or less someone else's red. You have a chance to place a bit on the outcome. Do you really bet on the the side that says we all have significantly different reds? I don't believe you will and I do believe that, if you do, I will take your money.

Olly

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23 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

So... I realize that it's possible that nobody has proven that our sensory experiences are the same.  However, I also know that there are countless examples of shared responses to shared sensory experiences. Certain colours clash. Having your fingernails torn out is horrible. Middle C played where it wasn't meant to be will sound wrong. 'Out of tune' makes sense. Chocolate and onions don't go together. This list could run to millions of examples.  Are we to believe, therefore, that by some remarkable conincidence, the relationships between these non-shared experiences are consistently unaffected by their not being common? Yes, you can argue this but - be honest - are you not flying a kite in doing so? Does it not make a lot more sense to suppose that, in our genetically similar bodies, we have highly comparable responses to identical outside stimulii?

Test yourself. A peer reviewed paper is set to appear, saying that it contains a clear answer as to whether or not your red is more or less someone else's red. You have a chance to place a bit on the outcome. Do you really bet on the the side that says we all have significantly different reds? I don't believe you will and I do believe that, if you do, I will take your money.

What's being said is that we have no way of communicating with each other on how we each actually perceive certain facets of our sensory input, such as colour, we simply don't have the ability to communicate that kind of information, at least no way that we currently know of.

It highlights just one of the limitations of our ability to learn and/or comprehend the place we appear to exist within, our own existence etc, which can be frustrating, very much so to some, not at all to others, to some the mystery is the best bit of it all.

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