Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness and Epiphenomenalism

As @swamidass points out, it possible the aliens are color-blind or color deficient. I chose a bad example. Let me revise the example.

Are you saying the aliens could not see the car our earlier visitor rented?

Unless the alien from another solar system is completely blind, such an idea seems absolutely bizarre to me. It is especially bizarre for anyone who admits that an outside reality exists. If an outside reality exists, then it exists for all of us. If we are blind, we can still touch it. If it’s there, it’s there.

You are asking the wrong question.

I was questioning whether there’s a way that reality is. You are assuming there a way that reality is, and that car is part of the way that reality is. But maybe that’s not how reality is for the alien.

I put my car keys on the shelf. An ant crawls over them. Are those car keys an object for the ant? Or does the ant see the keys as just a weirdly shaped part of the shelf?

You see a street with trees along the edge and a car driving down the street. Does the alien see that? Or does the alien see that car as just another tree?

It has to do with the kind of distinctions that we make. And we make distinctions that are useful to us, and that we are capable of making. Both of those requirements – what is useful to us, and our capabilities depend on our biology.

An alien might make very different distinctions from the ones that we make. So what the alien sees as an object might be quite different from what we see as an object.

This might all be orthogonal to the point.

Even though we do not think reality is perceived the same way by everyone, I think we all still believe there is real physical world that we all inhabit together. That common space we inhabit is an external reality.

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Yes, I very much agree with that.

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