I stopped when I got to "According to Maxwell’s equations, blue is ripples of electromagnetism with a wavelength of between 450 and 495 nanometres."
But because they didn't read it through they didn't read the part were I was addressing what I wrote.
I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. "Oh there was something that is wrong" then I don't want to finalize it. I wonder if it says something about our generation or whether this is something thats always been at play (like older people who wouldn't take a punker serious because of how they look)
I don't want to single you out but I just don't understand this approach to reading things. Care to comment?
Between link-sharing sites like this one, print and digital publications, and never ending ad campaigns masquerading as blogs and "relate-to-me!" emails, most of us are inundated with the specious ideas and arguments of people whose reliability can be difficult to assess. A simple heuristic is stop reading if the author appears to not be grounded in the empirical tradition. Which, unfortunately, most writers aren't.
Not all valuable perspectives follows some strictly logical path to get to it's conclusions. And not all conclusions make high claims of validity. Some are just exploring potentials.
Newton was right about many things but wrong about others.
That doesn't mean his contributions aren't valuable. Imagine reading him today efter relativity and QM and then applying this approach.
Might be just me, but being that this article in total is not about a scientific understanding of the color blue but rather about consciousness, it seems reasonable to me to read on.
In other words it might be a wrong scientific claim right there (I don't know enough about Maxwells equation) but that doesn't mean that it's damaging the rest of the article since it's not a scientific point that it's trying to make but a philosophical one.
I am not saying it's ok to be sloppy or wrong just that sometimes right conclusions and useful perspectives can happen even though some of the details are wrong.
It's not a scientific paper and as far as I read it shouldn't be read as such IMO.
But each to their own of course.
There's an enormous quantity of correct, novel and insightful content. So I filter harshly and don't bother with it.
Title of the article led me to believe that it would be a essay about what the present generation of researchers of consciousness are doing differently than previous generations. That I would be presented with a new strategy to attack the problem of consciousness.
I personally don't believe there is a "problem of consciousness". But I still was willing to give the article a chance.
I became dubious when I read
> for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue.
Already the author is starting to set up a contrast between inanimate systems and animate ones. Which I reject. A complicated response to stimulus isn't a different thing from a response which is simple to causally explain.
Eventually I read
>physicalism contains a logical flaw ... something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience
And I stopped because I don't agree and have no need to read the inferior versions arguments for dualism when I've already reject the better versions.
I am not just looking for correct, if i wanted that I would read scientific papers. I am looking for perspectives. Things that are useful even if they don't live up to scientific scrutiny.
More specifically, I think it's symptomatic of a tendency towards performative dismissal -- the GP's comment is intended to demonstrate the superiority of their knowledge to that of the author, and simultaneously insult the author via dismissal of their work. It's purely a social display, as evidenced by their need to comment on having stopped reading (completely irrelevant to e.g. alerting people to the inaccuracy of a fact essentially tangential to the subject of the piece).
Lets be clear. What you're describing, and mis-attributing to me, is an attempt at dominance.
I'd say you need to understand two things. First, you simply don't know me well enough to make such an accusation. In fact you don't know me at all. So, despite your pseudo-clever phrasing ("social display", "performative dismissal"), all you're actually doing is making a series of assumptions about my intentions before going on to do exactly what you accuse me of. And secondly, there isn't remotely enough content to my original comment to justify your assumptions.
It can also be counter-productive to setup strawman arguments which you tear down at a later point.
It takes time for anyone to read something and no one has enough time to read everything. Further, most people have read lots of things that setup strawman arguments and never tear them down. Often, people will then conclude that the author actually believes such strawmen and may avoid further reading the author.
If I read to completion every piece of text that came before my eyes I would have died a long time ago.
I made an observation. Said why I think it's counter productive from my line of reasoning. Then I asked for comments. Because there might be a good reason.
Where did I make the strawman?
Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read?
I used the strawman as an example of why someone may, legitimately, stop reading any essay you wrote, or this article, or really, any piece of text they come across.
>Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read?
I think you probably understand that. However, it is very difficult for you to know what value I place on my time spent engaged in various activities. At some point, it is just no longer worth my time to continue reading some pieces of text. Some things are just more important, including, possibly, posting a comment about it.
I mean you want to spend time going here to write you stopped reading instead of reading a little further?
Sure, there may be a point to discuss with others, or you may just want to warn them.
The brevity of my comment, which I regret, was a symptom of lack of time. I have lots to do at the moment, and yesterday was particularly busy. This same lack of time caused me to abandon the article.
The author's statement that Maxwell's equations connect the subjective label "blue" to a physical EM frequency range is wrong. Its not so much an error of fact as of conception. And in an article that is specifically examining the relationship between subjective concious experience and the physical world, that conceptual error is significant.
But it doesn't really invalidate the author's arguments. And contrary to what I wrote, I did actually continue reading some way past the passage that I quoted. There were some interesting facts and analysis, but ultimately the structure and framing was similar to many other popular science articles I've read, and I felt it was just ground I'd already covered. That, and the above error, lead me to stop. In different circumstances I'd have continued to the end.
So my reason for bailing on the article had little to do with any deficiencies it might have, but I justified my decision using what seems to me to be a glaring error. I don't think that was wrong: it is important to be selective. Wwhat I've learned is that reading long form articles when you are busy is counter-productive, and posting context-less comments is basically noise.