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Comment by neonrider | Hacker News Reader

> Is the colour you see the same as what I see? It’s a question that has puzzled both philosophers and neuroscientists for decades, but has proved notoriously difficult to answer.

> Now, a study that recorded patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of different people.

They're not asking the same question though. Neuroscientists are asking whether the brain processes the physical substrate (photons) that precedes the experience in the same way. Philosophers are asking if the subjective experience that follows (the qualia) is identical. The former is the easy question. The latter is the impossible question.

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In fact, I think the latter is an even easier question. People’s subjective experience of colors is obviously different across a large enough population. Colorblindness and synesthesia alone prove as much.

This is a classic case of “STEM types please learn the tiniest bit about the humanities before expounding on them”.

Heaven forbid that one of the ignorati express an unguarded comment in the august halls of Hacker News.

The article may be philosophically ignorant, but there's still value in the findings here. It answers the question in a limited sense: if materialism is ultimately true, then your blue is approximately my blue because the physical brain state is the consciousness.

The latter is an "impossible question" because it's a meaningless question.

It is not a meaningless question? It is a very profound question.

it's not meaningless, it has several direct implications about the nature of reality.

consider that subjective experience - to put it in the weakest and most general statement - clearly has a physical component. I'm being careful to not say that it is a physical phenomenon, is caused by physical phenomena, and so on, because while I think that's a reasonable assumption, we technically have no evidence for it.

but we do have plenty of evidence that, even if it is some supernaturally created magical process, subjective experience interacts with the physical world. for one, it clearly exchanges information with basic physical systems in your body - if it did not have some way to exchange information about what your eyes are seeing, you wouldn't be able to experience sight.

subjective experience is also easily altered with simple physical phenomena like chemical substances in your brain. so either these physics directly modify your subjective experience, or the subjective experience you have is mostly a physical product of your brain and the subjective experience part is only the end point of the process that receives all the information.

it's interesting because in physics, any exchange of information implies the existence of some directly measurable physical process. anything that is the product of such a process, you can generally speaking measure. all the things you can measure in an experiment are the things we eventually call the fundamental components of nature - like the charge, spin and so on of particles, as well as their place in time and space.

so subjective experience is either already some part we haven't observed of those fundamental components - which would in some way imply that everything is subjectively experiencing all the time - or it's an extra element we have not yet observed, but may be able to directly observe in experiment in the future.

Care to elaborate on why you think it's meaningless?

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