You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point.
A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience.
tl;dr RGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) !== the subjective experience of red.
No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color.
Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.
> Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color.
You're getting memory mixed up with current experience. I think you mean to say that experience is based on the neural substrate associated with a color (mostly area V4 in human brains, which causes achromatopsia when damaged bilaterally).
(If memory is mandatory, then infants wouldn't see color when they first open their eyes, which seems unlikely. It also implies that cerebral achromatopsia would be impossible; but the damage that causes achromatopsia is in primary visual cortex, not memory areas.)
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But again, this misses the point. The RGB triplet is a fact known about the color, but knowing 100% of the facts of the representation does NOT tell you what it is like to experience red.
Consider a perfect future neuroscience lab that uses nanomachines to safely record every neuronal firing, every dendritic voltage shift, every synaptic cleft's neurotransmitter levels, all at microsecond precision, while showing you red circles. This lab knows everything about what your brain does in response to red stimuli. Everything EXCEPT the subjective experience of redness in the participants.
An infant's perception of the world, in the days/weeks/months following birth is not going to be like our own until they have indeed started to form memories/associations of things outside of the womb (where the main color they will be exposed to is red - light filtered through the mother's stomach). Even after birth it's going to be a while (depending on parents/environment) until they have much exposure to certain classes of things, maybe even certain colors (e.g. an indoor baby may not be seeing a lot of green).
RGB triplet has little to do with color vision since we don't have sensors for individual wavelengths - our color cones (most people have 3 types, but some have 4, allowing them to distinguish a lot of spectra that a normal person can't) all have broad gaussian responses and so all respond to all wavelengths, just with different spectral sensitivities.
An infant who first opens their eyes, or is exposed to new colors for the first time, is not going to have the same experience of color as later on, but necessarily there will still be some experience of "color" (e.g. a varying surface attribute, differing by the different neural inputs coming from the retina), but the subconscious associations will of course be different - something is not going to be perceived as "grass green" or "sky blue" until you have experienced those.
Of course you can never know the subjective experience of another person, let alone another animal, since while there will be a lot in common, dictated by brain architecture, it's also going to depend on individual experience. Our senses work by prediction, which is based on personal experience. If you look at a mid-game chess board you are not going to see the same thing as a grandmaster since they will be seeing positions and you will just be seeing pieces.
The real point is that the subjective experience of a color like red is not some absolute thing tied to the neural inputs for "red" (i.e. varying strengths of signal firing from your 3/4 wavelength sensors), since the experience is the same even when those inputs change - color constancy, goggle experiment, etc etc.
You are still missing the point, and talking about everything BUT the disconnect between objectivity and subjectivity. I don't know how many times I have to mention the Hard Problem in the comments before people address it in their responses.
Yes, subjective experience is unique, based in neural architecture, color-blindness, experience, etc, etc etc. All of that is irrelevant to the essay.
> The real point is that the subjective experience of a color like red is not some absolute thing tied to the neural inputs for "red", since the experience is the same even when those inputs change
Not the real point of the essay at all. Please, just go read up on the Hard Problem.
That's not really what Nagel is talking about - the paper is about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of using reductionism to explain some things such as subjective (conscious) experience.
Note that at the beginning of the paper Nagel says "Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life ...". His starting point is a willingness to accept that higher order animals are indeed conscious, and that by extension it is indeed like something to be them.
If you want to discuss the hard problem, then you are talking about the wrong paper, and should be reading Chalmers (or Kirk's earlier "Zombies v. Materialists") not Nagel. However, Nagel is of course right, and the p-zombie is a non-sensical construct. If you have a sufficiently advanced cognitive apparatus then of course you can reflect on your own mental life - of course it "feels like something".
The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness.
> "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not
very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave
as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
This is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not a bat.
This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be you, the commenter. As I am writing this, I am imagining a consciousness on the other side of the monitor that is somewhat like me. But this is just my consciousness extending itself and imagining another consciousness within its own consciousness.
> If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat".
This is what makes the question so difficult. The human would experience what is like for a bat to be a bat but in the context of human understanding and consciousness. It already makes too little sense so maybe an analogy to attaching a debugger is getting close? Or "running a bat" as a VM or inside a sandbox in the human mind hypervisor, one brain brain hemisphere is the bat (with virtual peripherals), the other observes and experiences everything as a human.
But in the end the goal would be to have the full bat experience on your own skin and perception, and then process it as a human to understand as a human would.
I guess this depends on whether you're emphasizing deadliness or likelihood.
I live in Thailand, and I can assure you that while scooters dominating city streets increases awareness by car drivers, it doesn't make accidents less likely.
Most accidents worldwide happen on low-speed streets, not highways. On highways, the speeds are higher, so the rare accidents that occur are more damaging, but the opportunities for accidents are also much, MUCH lower. (No/few turns, no/few stops, similar speed levels, better visibility, etc.)
HN is, at the time of writing, over 48 million posts over nearly two decades. Whatever you want to notice, you'll notice plenty of examples of. So, sure, I guess there has been plenty of "simping" over the years on HN. There has also been plenty of the opposite of it. As someone who reads the comments (particularly the most emotionally charged ones) every day, the sentiment towards prominent tech companies and leaders has been leaning decidedly negative on HN for several years.
Yep I'm a moderator and we're reading all the threads all the time, so we get a sense of the overall sentiment. Yes we read the worst comments because they're the ones that needour attention with respect to account penalties and bans. But we still read over all the threads, so we'd see it if there was a large "simping" contingent or tred. But we don't see that; what we see instead generally aligns with HN's reputation for being critical, skeptical, cynical and, at times, curmudgeonly. Much that has its roots in HN's "hacker" ethos, which is anti-establishment by definition. There is a good amount of positivity and enthusiasm too, but barely ever for major companies and rich/powerful figures it's most commonly for small teams and freelance/indie developers who have built a cool project or useful tool. We are thinking about what kind of data analysis would be good to publish.
Unless you're advocating for mass direct democracy, with public votes on everything under the sun, a certain level of delegation is inescapable at scale.
You say "career bureaucrats" as if they can't be fired or controlled, but that's obviously wrong (since they're being fired and/or controlled right now).
QED, they ARE still under public oversight. (1) Voters vote for (2) elected officials who oversee (3) agency bureaucrats.
I don't see what the core complaint is then. The guy the public voted for can refuse to spend public funding on a particular grant. There's no reason that it's somehow more pure to have the public vote for someone who appoints someone who appoints someone.
No good reason really, it just sounds cooler.
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