I see a couple leads to investigate, which could help shed additional light on the topic. One is common enough to have a name: synthesthesia. The other, I think, may be personally unique to me, or at least some combination of very-rare and never-discussed that I’ve never heard of it.
Synthesthesia, to my understanding, involves multiple qualia accompanying various experiences, notably including qualia native to a different sensory modality. E.g. “That sound was green.” Exploring the causal chain resulting in such utterances seems likely to turn up insights into qualia which will be more broadly applicable.
As for my unusual qualia processing: I am measurably red-green colorblind; in a laboratory setting, clean of context clues, I guess no better than chance whether a color is red or green, although I can reliably tell X and Y are both red or green and they’re the opposite color from each other. Yet in everyday life, I experience qualia for red and green, almost always “correctly” (in that the qualium I’ll call “Green” I experience when seeing actual green objects well in excess of 99% of the time, and vice versa for “Red” and red objects.)
My current theory as to how this works:
Whichever module assigns qualia information to my experiences has some memory and some world knowledge, which it uses to make educated guesses.
When I see red or green, I think my qualia-assignment process searches my visual field for anything known-green, for example plant life. (Or known-red, though this case is rarer.) Since I apparently can tell red and green apart, then having a known example allows it to chain the “this is definitely green” belief to everything else I’m seeing that’s red-or-green and not opposite to the known-green object.
By elimination, the remainder of objects are red.
The assigned qualia are stable, that is, they never change while I’m experiencing them, even when their incorrectness becomes evident. “That LED is green, not red.” --> No shift in perception.
...but repeated experiences with the same object separated by enough time, will result in me experiencing different qualia for the same object on different encounters, and feedback like the above “that LED is green, not red” will eventually be learned, and I’ll see “Green” reliably after enough feedback.
I think the existence of my defect may shed some light on the working of normal qualia.
That is, I think there’s a module which makes educated guesses about certain true properties of the world, based on the sensory stream, and annotates the sense information with its guesses, before that sense information reaches awareness. These annotations either become or select “qualia”, the inexplicable ineffable differences in experience correlating to (or encoding) actual sense data.
Further, I think that investigating the causal chain resulting in my unusual experience might allow us to localize the qualia-annotation process in my brain, and perhaps find a standard location in many brains.
Thanks for this description. I’m interested in the phenomenology of red-green colorblind people, but I don’t think I completely get how it works yet for you. Questions I have
Do red and green, when you recognize them correctly, seem like subjectively very different colors?
If the answer is yes, if you’re shown one of the colors without context (e.g., in a lab setting), does it look red or green? (If the answer is no, I suppose this question doesn’t make sense.)
if you see two colors next to each other, then (if I understood you correctly), you can tell whether they’re (1) one green, one red or (2) the same color twice. How can you tell?
Yes, red and green seem subjectively very different—but only to conscious attention. A green object amid many red objects (or vice versa) does not grab my attention in the way that, e.g. a yellow object might.
When shown a patch of red-or-green in a lab setting, I see “Red” or “Green” seemingly at random.
If shown a red patch next to a green patch in a lab, I’ll see one “Red” and one “Green”, but it’s about 50:50 as to whether they’ll be switched or not. How does that work? I have no hypotheses that aren’t very low confidence. It seems as much a mystery to me as I infer it seems mysterious to you.
Jacob Falkovich talks about how people have different minds, and how different minds can have differing experiences of what qualia involves to them, and thus we need to be careful in generalizing from our own mind:
For one, the decoupling of conscious experience from deterministic external causes implies that there’s truly no such thing as a “universal experience”. Our experiences are shared by virtue of being born with similar brains wired to similar senses and observing a similar world of things and people, but each of us infers a generative model all of our own. For every single perception mentioned in Being You it also notes the condition of having a different one, from color blindness to somatoparaphrenia — the experience that one of your limbs belongs to someone else. The typical mind fallacy goes much deeper than mere differences in politics or abstract beliefs.
My own take on what consciousness is in the general case is basically answered by me in the review below, and short form, I think Anil Seth got it close to right, with the mistakes being broadly patchable rather than fatal flaws to a theory:
For as long as there have been philosophers, they loved philosophizing about what life really is. Plato focused on nutrition and reproduction as the core features of living organisms. Aristotle claimed that it was ultimately about resisting perturbations. In the East the focus was less on function and more on essence: the Chinese posited ethereal fractions of qi as the animating force, similar to the Sanskrit prana or the Hebrew neshama. This lively debate kept rolling for 2,500 years — élan vital is a 20th century coinage — accompanied by the sense of an enduring mystery, a fundamental inscrutability about life that will not yield.
And then, suddenly, this debate dissipated. This wasn’t caused by a philosophical breakthrough, by some clever argument or incisive definition that satisfied all sides and deflected all counters. It was the slow accumulation of biological science that broke “Life” down into digestible components, from the biochemistry of living bodies to the thermodynamics of metabolism to genetics. People may still quibble about how to classify a virus that possesses some but not all of life’s properties, but these semantic arguments aren’t the main concern of biologists. Even among the general public who can’t tell a phospholipid from a possum there’s no longer a sense that there’s some impenetrable mystery regarding how life can arise from mere matter.
Or this comment, which comes from a similar place:
I’m sympathetic to Global Workspace theory as an explanation of some of the weird properties of human consciousness, like the approximate unitarity of it, though this is also explainable by latencies being acceptably low for a human body.
Actually, having written this, it just now occurs to me that my cached thought may be incorrect, that all my other qualia processing is “normal”.
...I routinely (but not always) fail to perceive any qualia for hunger or smells (this predates COVID) -- yet, curiously, in the case of smells I somehow know (without any experience of perception) that there is a smell that I ought to be experiencing, and its rough intensity.
In the case of hunger, I’ll literally fail to know I need to eat. I’ll get the shakes and collapse and wonder why. I’ve needed to establish a habit of scheduled eating, to avoid this occurrence.
Previously, I had grouped these defects in with my inability to know my own wants—in my theory: trauma damage that severed the connection to certain mental modules—but it now occurs to me that an alternative hypothesis exists: that there’s a possible connection to my unusual visual qualia processing.
I see a couple leads to investigate, which could help shed additional light on the topic. One is common enough to have a name: synthesthesia. The other, I think, may be personally unique to me, or at least some combination of very-rare and never-discussed that I’ve never heard of it.
Synthesthesia, to my understanding, involves multiple qualia accompanying various experiences, notably including qualia native to a different sensory modality. E.g. “That sound was green.” Exploring the causal chain resulting in such utterances seems likely to turn up insights into qualia which will be more broadly applicable.
As for my unusual qualia processing: I am measurably red-green colorblind; in a laboratory setting, clean of context clues, I guess no better than chance whether a color is red or green, although I can reliably tell X and Y are both red or green and they’re the opposite color from each other. Yet in everyday life, I experience qualia for red and green, almost always “correctly” (in that the qualium I’ll call “Green” I experience when seeing actual green objects well in excess of 99% of the time, and vice versa for “Red” and red objects.)
My current theory as to how this works:
Whichever module assigns qualia information to my experiences has some memory and some world knowledge, which it uses to make educated guesses.
When I see red or green, I think my qualia-assignment process searches my visual field for anything known-green, for example plant life. (Or known-red, though this case is rarer.) Since I apparently can tell red and green apart, then having a known example allows it to chain the “this is definitely green” belief to everything else I’m seeing that’s red-or-green and not opposite to the known-green object.
By elimination, the remainder of objects are red.
The assigned qualia are stable, that is, they never change while I’m experiencing them, even when their incorrectness becomes evident. “That LED is green, not red.” --> No shift in perception.
...but repeated experiences with the same object separated by enough time, will result in me experiencing different qualia for the same object on different encounters, and feedback like the above “that LED is green, not red” will eventually be learned, and I’ll see “Green” reliably after enough feedback.
I think the existence of my defect may shed some light on the working of normal qualia.
That is, I think there’s a module which makes educated guesses about certain true properties of the world, based on the sensory stream, and annotates the sense information with its guesses, before that sense information reaches awareness. These annotations either become or select “qualia”, the inexplicable ineffable differences in experience correlating to (or encoding) actual sense data.
Further, I think that investigating the causal chain resulting in my unusual experience might allow us to localize the qualia-annotation process in my brain, and perhaps find a standard location in many brains.
Thanks for this description. I’m interested in the phenomenology of red-green colorblind people, but I don’t think I completely get how it works yet for you. Questions I have
Do red and green, when you recognize them correctly, seem like subjectively very different colors?
If the answer is yes, if you’re shown one of the colors without context (e.g., in a lab setting), does it look red or green? (If the answer is no, I suppose this question doesn’t make sense.)
if you see two colors next to each other, then (if I understood you correctly), you can tell whether they’re (1) one green, one red or (2) the same color twice. How can you tell?
Yes, red and green seem subjectively very different—but only to conscious attention. A green object amid many red objects (or vice versa) does not grab my attention in the way that, e.g. a yellow object might.
When shown a patch of red-or-green in a lab setting, I see “Red” or “Green” seemingly at random.
If shown a red patch next to a green patch in a lab, I’ll see one “Red” and one “Green”, but it’s about 50:50 as to whether they’ll be switched or not. How does that work? I have no hypotheses that aren’t very low confidence. It seems as much a mystery to me as I infer it seems mysterious to you.
Jacob Falkovich talks about how people have different minds, and how different minds can have differing experiences of what qualia involves to them, and thus we need to be careful in generalizing from our own mind:
My own take on what consciousness is in the general case is basically answered by me in the review below, and short form, I think Anil Seth got it close to right, with the mistakes being broadly patchable rather than fatal flaws to a theory:
More here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FQhtpHFiPacG3KrvD/seth-explains-consciousness#7ncCBPLcCwpRYdXuG
Or in quote form:
Or this comment, which comes from a similar place:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FQhtpHFiPacG3KrvD/seth-explains-consciousness#oghhLpFNsvvN8FHpk
I’m sympathetic to Global Workspace theory as an explanation of some of the weird properties of human consciousness, like the approximate unitarity of it, though this is also explainable by latencies being acceptably low for a human body.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/x4n4jcoDP7xh5LWLq
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FEDNY4DLMpRSE3Jsr/neural-basis-for-global-workspace-theory
But that’s my take on the debate on consciousness.
Actually, having written this, it just now occurs to me that my cached thought may be incorrect, that all my other qualia processing is “normal”.
...I routinely (but not always) fail to perceive any qualia for hunger or smells (this predates COVID) -- yet, curiously, in the case of smells I somehow know (without any experience of perception) that there is a smell that I ought to be experiencing, and its rough intensity.
In the case of hunger, I’ll literally fail to know I need to eat. I’ll get the shakes and collapse and wonder why. I’ve needed to establish a habit of scheduled eating, to avoid this occurrence.
Previously, I had grouped these defects in with my inability to know my own wants—in my theory: trauma damage that severed the connection to certain mental modules—but it now occurs to me that an alternative hypothesis exists: that there’s a possible connection to my unusual visual qualia processing.