What organisms are conscious enough to experience red? Are all the organisms that can detect the differences of intensity of many frequencies of light all able to experience color, or just some of them, and if so which ones and why?
Why? Why is that pattern conscious, and another is not? Without correlating that pattern to behavior (a person in a brain scanner reports he is conscious, for example), could you tell from the pattern alone and if so, how could you tell that? And would you be able to tell from the pattern alone what the experience was without correlating to reported experiences too?
Itās more mysterious because one is obvious and the other is not. Thatās the whole point. That is quite literally the problem. That it is easy to imagine in principle how to build a frog from molecules into cells, cells into tissues, and tissues into organs, limbs, etc.
Itās non-obvious how to do the same and find a point where it becomes obvious that weāve built a consciouos entity, much less what it should be experiencing if it doesnāt directly tell us. The problem is made all the worse by the fact that we have built machines that can claim to be conscious (you could get some AI to state those words), yet many would be quite convinced it isnāt really. And we really have to way of telling whether a machine that reports to us it is conscious, is or not. You could hook a small microchip to a loudspeaker and it would play a soundfile that simply declares āI am consciousā all day long. Is it? I donāt think so. But why? How complex does that machine have to get before I get doubts? How would I tell the difference between machines that are conscious and ones that are not? What if it canāt speak, what pattern am I searching for?
It seems to me the best I could hope for is to correlate behavior to other things we are already convinced are conscious, because the inside operations of the machine doesnāt seem to tell us.
I disagree. I think the thought experiments around consciousness (such as thinking about machines, artificial intelligence, people that are comatose etc.) reveals that there really is a fundamental problem here. Itās an incredibly strong metric.
Yes you presume that, but thatās really the point of contention here. That you could get from a complete understanding of all the activity of the brain to a point where you would have some sort of intuitive understanding of how that activity produces conscious 1st-person experiences, such as the nature of the smell of coffee, or the color red. An understanding that would allow us to explain why specific patterns are conscious, why others are not, and why specific patterns produces the experience of the color red while others produce different colors, smells, certain emotions, etc.
Not just discovering correlates of consciousness, but a theory that explains why these patterns are conscious.
I havenāt suggested any other source. I think consciousness is the product of the brain (the evidence that physical phenomena affect conscious experiences and that the brain is responsible somehow, are overwhelming). But that it is a complete mystery why it exists and how it arises. There just isnāt anything about brains or their activity that makes it obvious why they are conscious.
How could you tell that they are communicating a sensation of red? (And that it would be red in particular, rather than blue, or the sensation of itchy elbows?) All you could see if you had a good enough instrument would be the movement of particles in some pattern.
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Sure if that really is possible, then we have found our theory of consciousness. If the math can be applied to any complex information-processing object/system and reliably predict mental states, the work is done. Then we could also use it to determine when in the evolutionary history of life consciousness first arose.
I donāt think these are really analogous because the intuitions against life being a material phenomenon appear to have been nothing more than prejudice, or knee-jerk dismissals.
Iāve never read an account from any of these people that fleshed out the āproblem of the physicality of lifeā in the same way or to a similar extend that science and philosophy has explored the question of the nature and emergence of consciousness. Thereās a lot more meat on the hard problem of consciousness.
What arguments did they use? Iād be interested to read them.
These are excellent questions. I donāt know the answers. Do you, and how?
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Actually now that I think about it this really highlights the apparent impossibility of giving a mathematical account of conscious experiences. Equations have elements that represent numbers (which are themselves typically either measurements of physical quantities, or quantitative relations between them).
How are you going to put numbers into the equation and get ā= red experienceā out of it? Itās clear that you can never do that. All you could ever hope to achieve is for the numbers in the equation to stand in for or represent measurable quantities that you can observe or measure, such as the numbers of, locations, and relative movements of particles in space.
Thereās never going to be an equation that outputs ā=red experienceā. Youāre just going to get an equation that describes the change over time of the relative locations of particles in some system. It can at best describe a geometric pattern or shape and how it changes over time, of some sort. Thereās going to be nothing about that equation that makes it obvious that it describes the experience of red. Numbers in, numbers out.
Interestingly some equations can describe many different, seemingly unrelated phenomena. You canāt tell from an equation alone whether itās supposed to describe the diffusion of alleles in a population, molecules of some dye in a solution, or whatever else it can map on to. Youād need to already know the context to know what the equation describes, and then weāre back where the equation is only working with neural/physical correlates of consciousness which we couldnāt tell from the equation alone.
I can think of no better argument or example that the task is impossible and that such a theory, consisting merely of mathematical equations, will never be found.
The difference is that a frog can be apprehended by someone other than the frog. The same goes for other physical phenomena that are the result of cells interacting, such as the motion of blood thru the circulatory system or the propagation of an action potential along a nerve fibre. Whereas the subjective experience of āredā cannot be conveyed by merely observing the interactions of cells. One can only experience it directly.
Another way of putting it: If we can know that a person is seeing the colour red by scanning their brain activity, does our inability to know whether their experience of red is identical to our experience of red mean we are missing some knowledge about the perception of red? For many, the answer is āYesā, and the further conclusion, then, is that consciousness is not fully physical since physical parameters alone are not sufficient to fully understand it.
Itās not an argument I personally find persuasive, but I have a hard time articulating exactly what I find wrong about it. However, I am encouraged by the fact that the person who actually first made the argument no longer believes it himself.
I think part of the problem is in the confusion between a (natural) phenomenon occurring and a phenomenon being āexperienced.ā Moreover I donāt think we experience red, rather we see red (no pun intended). I would argue that red would exist independent of āconsciousnessā insofar as red is just a wavelength of light. That transmission of light happens whether we are there to see it or not. After all, if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one to hear or see it, it still falls in the woods. We know this because all you have to do is take a quick hike in the woods to see all the trees that have fallen without the benefit of a human audience.
I think it would be slightly solipsistic to claim that in the absence of consciousness, basic phenomena of nature simply cease to exist. Just my two centsā¦
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Light obviously can exist independently of consciousness, but a blind universe would have no red. That frequency just has an energy that matches what is required to excite a particular orbital in a given opsin molecule, which initiates the sending of a electro-chemical impulse to a particular region in the brain. The electromagnetism itself is not intrinsically any redder than x-rays or radio waves. The data from telescopes can be arbitrarily assigned colors, and we really do not know how other animals might perceive the same frequency.
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You set the bar oddly high. I couldnāt tell from the pattern of charges in a computer memory what a program does either, though presumably someone with a lot of knowledge of the particular machine language could. Absent that, we would just have to observe what a computer did. If we had enough detail in observations under various conditions, I suppose we could tell what the smell of coffee looked line inside the brain.
At any rate, is there an alternative hypothesis to the physical makeup of that smell for which there is any evidence whatsoever?
Howās this for an analogy: can you look at a genome in a zygote and tell what it will result in as an adult, and how? Can you say what will or wonāt make an eye capable of seeing red? Perhaps you can imagine that you could, but is that based on anything? True, we can actually characterize a genome exactly, which is more than we can do for a brain structure, but how is that more than an operational problem?
Intuitive? When did that get added? Nobody has an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, but few doubt that it describes how things work at the lowest level.
For most species, it isnāt even obvious that they are conscious. We have an undefined term here, so itās no wonder we canāt explain it. Are any other species conscious? Do other species have experiences? Can they experience red or the smell of coffee? What does that mean?
You would have to see them in the context of a person able to report the sensation, I suppose. This seems an operational difficulty rather than a conceptual one.
If you donāt know the answers, we canāt meaningfully talk about the experience of red other than to say ālike, you know, redā under the assumption that what you mean is the same thing I do, from personal experience. Canāt even ask a chimp, but wouldnāt you think that a chimp must experience the sensation of red? Again, this seems a problem for doing science on the phenomenon, not for thinking it may have no purely physical reality.
But we can (in principle, perhaps never in actuality) observe what happens in the brain when we experience this or that. We can even (again in principle) make that state happen and see if we reproduce the experience. You could even do this with your own brain and so bypass the second-hand reporting. Why isnāt that enough?
I repeat that nobody understands quantum mechanics, as Feynman assures us. But who says that quantum behavior isnāt fully physical?
But red isnāt a wavelength of light. Itās a response to three fuzzy samplings of a frequency distribution, one in which the samples near one frequency have a much greater amplitude than at two others. Purple is an even better example, since itās a response to the same three samplings, in which two of those frequencies have a greater amplitude than the one in between them, a bimodal distribution.
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It seems that any living creature, with the sensory apparatus to experience sensory data like light of different wavelengths or the ātasteā of chemicals, and the cognitive facilities to remember these experience, would need to assign some cognitive pattern to each distinguishable sensory experience (each individual color, taste, etc). This would seem true, even of lifeforms that are not āconsciousā (however we define that term).
It also seems conceivable, if less than certain, that these assignments may be arbitrary, and contingently depend on the organisms exact circumstances of each organismās developmental process, first in infancy (e.g. colors), but continuing throughout life (e.g. new tastes).
It is possible that phenomena such as synesthesia may offer some insights into this.
But even if these assignments are arbitrary, does it matter? Or is it similar to the fact that we assign different passwords to our computers? Or whether a specific computer encodes text as ASCI or EBCDIC? Meaningless except perhaps to the extent that there may be an overarching pattern to our individual arbitrary patterns?
Tossing a spanner in:
āRedā is really a range of wavelengths of light (and a range of intensities), and the extent of that range varies from person to person - wavelengths (and intensities) that some people would call āredā would be classed as āorangeā (or āpinkā) by other people.
I have to admit my impression was not based on a lot of specific knowledge. I have looked at the Wikipedia page on the subject and while the arguments are not exactly similar to those for dualism or panpsychism, they also seem to be genuine scientific efforts rather than pseudoscientific apologetics. I was surprised to see that Haldane, while not exactly a vitalist, had sympathies in that direction. He might have been considered a proponent of a āthird way.ā 
Yes, that is the crux of the anti-physicalist position. We might be able to determine that someone is looking at and consciously experiencing a red object thru their brain processes alone. But that wonāt tell us whether their experience of red is the same as ours, or even if their experience of āseeingā is.
The problem I have with that line of thinking: Letās presume that the mind cannot be reduced to activity of the brain. Instead, it may be the product of an immaterial entity like a āsoulā that uses the brain as a sort of receiver, but which can also continue to exist apart from the brain and might even continue to function after the brain is dead. Or, alternatively, the mind might be the product of more fundamental physical processes below the level of biology and chemistry.
If so, how does that solve the problem we are dealing with? No way that I can see. How do I know that you are experiencing the same āredā that I experience if the mind is produced by an immaterial soul, or by fundamental aspects of basic particles? The question remains unanswered.
Yes, but in that situation, you have complete knowledge of what will happen just thru the physical parameters. A knowledgeable person could know exactly what would appear on the computer monitor just from observing the activity of the microprocessor. Non-physicalists argue that the actual experience of āredā is not something that can be discerned from physical processes alone, even in principle. And, intuitively, that seems true. However, they then make they further argument that, therefore, mental states are neither physical states, nor can be fully accounted for by physical states.
Again, I think the difference is we can imagine, in principle, how we could conceivably answer that question. We just need to learn in more detail the various processes and pathways by which a genome becomes a full organism. It is far less apparent whether and how we can determine the means by which the subjective experience of āredā is generated from biological processes.
Yes, I think that is a good analogy. And, because there is no intuitive way to understand it, there remains robust debate about what is actually happening behind the mathematics of QM, including some suggestions that are every bit as weird as dualism and panpsychism.
Thatās kind of my thinking, too. I donāt really have much problem with the idea that, even if the subjective experience of red is not something that can be fully understood other than by actually experiencing it, nonetheless it remains something entirely reducible to physical brain processes. I donāt see those two premises as incompatible, but I try to remain aware of and sympathetic to arguments against that position.
Sure. There is a hole, likely permanent, in our ability to gather data on the workings of consciousness, into which you can stuff anything you like, however imaginary.
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There was a discussion of āFree Willā lot too long ago that covered a lot of the same ground as panpsychism, and my answers here is pretty much the same: A lot of the actions we take are predicated by our past experiences. Perhaps there is some free will or original thought involved, but not nearly so much as we like to think. If I were to ask for your opinion on something like politics or religion (and Iām NOT asking ) it is very likely your answer is entirely dependent on past experience. Itās entirely possibly that people are taught these opinions at an early age and there was never a choice or original thought involved.
There are also situations where acting randomly is the most rational choice (a āmixed strategyā), which is going to make data very difficult to interpret, even with probabilistic analysis.
It gets worse. Itās possible for some physical mechanism to influence thoughts and decisions indirectly. Perhaps you were hungry, and when you stopped for a snack you noticed and read an article about panpsychism, and you now favor this hypothesis. Is your choice the result of a thinking mind, or a physical reaction to being hungry?
I think we have some measure of free will or original thought because we can arrive at decisions independent of past experience (if we work at it). Itās no big deal though; we can achieve the same result by deciding things randomly and independent of past experience. Given this situation I donāt see much value to the idea of panpsychism; it seems trivially true and almost as useful. 
Talking about free will just introduces yet another undefined (possibly incoherent) term into an argument thatās too full of them already.
I could agree, or disagree, but whatās the point?
You are right that āredā is a ārange of wavelengths.ā That point is well taken. And, I know that there are individual differences to how light in the red wavelength, just like any other color, is processed. What I was trying to get at, in my clumsy way, is that there is nothing mysterious or inexplicable about experiencing red as suggested by various āphilosophersā of mind.
This from the āRedā entry on Wiki:
"The human eye sees red when it looks at light with a wavelength between approximately 625 and 740 nanometers.[1] It is a primary color in the RGB color model and the light just past this range is called infrared, or below red, and cannot be seen by human eyes, although it can be sensed as heat.[7] In the language of optics, red is the color evoked by light that stimulates neither the S or the M (short and medium wavelength) cone cells of the retina, combined with a fading stimulation of the L (long-wavelength) cone cells.[8]
And, as to other animals:
āPrimates can distinguish the full range of the colors of the spectrum visible to humans, but many kinds of mammals, such as dogs and cattle, have dichromacy, which means they can see blues and yellows, but cannot distinguish red and green (both are seen as gray). Bulls, for instance, cannot see the red color of the cape of a bullfighter, but they are agitated by its movement.[9] (See color vision).ā
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I will mention that, in current philosophical discussion āfree willā is usually defined along these lines:
Free will is the unique ability of persons to exercise the strongest sense of control over their actions necessary for moral responsibility.
Thatās quoted from here. So the matter is not necessarily settled by deciding that our decisions can be arrived at independent of past experience.
But John is probably right that introducing this topic is more likely to further obscure than to enlighten.
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Not entirely true. Some primates have no green cones. And in some species of NW monkey, blue and green cones are allelic variation on the X chromosome, so only heterozygous females have human-type color vision. I presume the former allelic variation became fixed on one X through unequal crossing over in OW monkeys/apes.
True. But if you are a primate who wants to protect the parking space on the street in front of your house, orange cones are a better choice anyway.
Yeah, Iāve heard that some of those heterozygous monkeys swing both ways.
Iām on strong painkillers for sacroiliac joint issues. Makes everything funny. As always, please tip your wait-staff.
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