[bizerl]

I'd like to try doing the same thing with switching colours round, and inverting some (or all of them) in terms of brightness. The range of colours and shades available should be the same, though fewer can be expressed in the blue, so just switching red and green round would be best, but we can work fairly well with a reduced range without it being obvious, so it may not be too important. If you brought up a baby wearing such a device it would grow up thinking the colours it sees are absolutely normal, and that white is dark while black is light (if you're reversing the brightnesses). Whether someone could adapt to it well later in life is another issue, and would be well worth doing the experiment.

Is this similar to what happens when I wear tinted ski goggles and for a while everything looks orange, but after a while I forget I'm wearing them and colours just look "normal". I can see a spectrum and it doesn't appear to have a tint. Then when I take the goggles off, everything looks extra blue until my "eyes" (or probably more acurately "brain") re-adjusts.

I've only skimmed over this thread I must admit but it seems that if consciousness was something external, it would be able to interact with other consciousnesses, and would provide something to observe as evidence. I personally believe that this is not the case and take the anthropic argument that the neurons and chemicals and what-nots that are all whizzing around doing their job in our heads create the effect of consciousness. The fact that there is a direct effect on our experience when all this grey matter is altered (ie with chemicals - drugs, or with direct electrical stimulation) seems to support the idea that what we call "consciousness" is contained within the structure we call "brain".

Sorry if i'm repeating points from earlier, as I said, I've only skimmed this thread.

[cheryl j]

Since additive and subtractive color mixing works differently, I was wondering if you'd end up with discrepancies if people really did have inverted qualia.

With mixing paint, there are several ways to make brown. If you did it one way and I did another,  and we had inverted red green, would we agree on the final color?

This article has some interesting pictures.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/

[Aemilius]

Would any of you care to define what it is you are trying to measure? A functional definition will suffice for a start, as in "consciousness is that which....."

Consciousness is that which perceives.

[cheryl j]

Francis Crick  was lecturing on consciousness at the Salk Institute and a student raised his hand an said "But professor Crick, you say you are going to lecture on the neural mechanisms of consciousness, and you haven't even bothered to define the word properly."

Crick said "My dear Chap, there was never a time in the history of biology when a group of us sat around a table and saying 'let's define life first.'We just went out there and found out what it was - a double helix. We leave matters of semantic distinctions to you philosophers."

I agree that not having an adequate definition can be a problem, but it might also be true that good definitions only follow once you actually know more about the phenomena you are interested in. And even if they don't follow, you still end up with a lot of useful knowledge that can be applied to other things and opens doors to other interesting questions that wouldn't have occurred to you before. I would trade a "perfect" definition of life for the discovery of DNA any day.

[David Cooper]

Since additive and subtractive color mixing works differently, I was wondering if you'd end up with discrepancies if people really did have inverted qualia.

It would remain additive, unless it's already subtractive with qualia, in which case it would remain subtractive.

With mixing paint, there are several ways to make brown. If you did it one way and I did another,  and we had inverted red green, would we agree on the final color?

Are there multiple ways of making brown if you start out with only three colours of paint, those being magenta, yellow and cyan?

[Aemilius]

Francis Crick  was lecturing on consciousness at the Salk Institute and a student raised his hand an said "But professor Crick, you say you are going to lecture on the neural mechanisms of consciousness, and you haven't even bothered to define the word properly."

Crick said "My dear Chap, there was never a time in the history of biology when a group of us sat around a table and saying 'let's define life first.'We just went out there and found out what it was - a double helix. We leave matters of semantic distinctions to you philosophers."

Looks to me as if he was just artfully dodging the issue of directly linking neural mechanisms to consciousness.

With his DNA research, Crick was more exploring the physical/tangible "Nuts and Bolts" side of things.  When exploring the nuts and bolts side of things in the physical sciences one can often just go out there and start finding things out.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is the non-physical/intangible product of all the nuts and bolts, so if your planning on just going out there and finding out what that is, you shall be out there for a very, very long time.
 

I agree that not having an adequate definition can be a problem....

Can be a problem? This thread has been impaled on it right from the start.

[Aemilius]

Consciousness is that which: "establishes the communion between the self to it's environment."

Consider the word; "Myself"

This is a compound word consisting of two words; My and self. The "My" establishes ownership of the following word "self". To understand the significance of this union, one needs to grasp the notion that the "My" refers to the physical attributes of one's existence and the "self" extends to the ethereal portion of this alliance between body and mind.

There is no absolute evidence that this alliance exists without both participants being involved. Until that evidence surfaces, we can only speculate, and speculation is not science.

Consciousness is that which establishes the communion between the self to it's environment? Are there any little wafers involved? I hate little wafers!

No real need for all that. Consciousness is simply that which perceives. It is perception that is the hallmark of consciousness.... whether for a man, a whale, a parakeet, a tree, a single cell, a leopard, what have you. 

[cheryl j]

Can be a problem? This thread has been impaled on it right from the start.

Perhaps, but I still tend to agree with Crick, in that neuroscience has provided a different perspective about the nature of the things that philosophers sometimes associate with consciousness, words like "self" or "intelligence" or "awareness" or "perception."

What I like about Ramachandran's experiements is that he often demonstrates that the abilities, or type of experiences, that philosophers see as being "the same" or "one thing" aren't always, that certain mental functions viewed as inseparable, some times are. Who would have intuitively thought it might be possible to write but not be able to read what you or someone else has written, to speak (in a meaningful way) but not understand what is said to you, to see but not be consciously aware of what you are seeing, or to divide consciousness in half in a split brain patient?