One last roll of the dice

I'll start with the second question.

is there any experiment or argument or experience or anything that could convince you that green is not real in the way that you currently believe that it is?

That would amount to convincing me that the experience which is currently happening, is not currently happening; or that an experience which previously happened, did not actually happen.

is it your belief that green is an ontologically basic primitive? Or is green composed of other ontologically basic primitives that are outside the standard model?

The analysis of color as abstractly three-dimensional (e.g. hue, saturation, brightness) seems phenomenologically accurate to me. So as a first approximation to a phenomenological ontology of color, I say that there are regions of color, present to a conscious subject, within which these attributes vary.

If we want to go further, we have to tackle further questions, like what ontological category color belongs to. Is it a property of the conscious subject? Is it a property of a part of the conscious subject? Should we regard sensory continua as part of the perceiving subject, or as separate entities to which the subject has a relation? Should we regard color as a property of a visual region, or should we look at some of the philosophical attempts to collapse the distinction between object and property, and view "colored region" as the basic entity?

What I believe is that consciousness is not a collection of spatial parts. It has parts, but the binding relations are some other sort of relation, like "co-presence to the perceiving subject" or "proximity in the sensory manifolds". Since color only occurs within the context of some conscious experience, whether or not it's "ontologically basic" is going to require a lot more clarity about what's foundational and what's derivative in ontology, and about the ontological nature of the overall complex or unity or whatever it is, that is the experience as a whole (which in turn is still only going to be part of or an aspect of the total state of a self).

Clearly this isn't in the standard model of physics in any standard sense. But if the standard model can be expressed - for example, and only as an example, as an evolving tensor network of a particular sort - then it may be possible to specify an ontology beneath the tensor formalism, in which this complex ontological object, the conscious being, can be identified with one of the very high-dimensional tensor factors appearing in the theory.

The correct way to state the nature of color and its relationship to its context in consciousness is a very delicate question. We may need entirely new categories - by categories I mean classic ontological categories like substance, property, relation. Though there has already been, in the history of human thought, a lot of underrated conceptual invention which might turn out to be relevant.

For the sake of further discussion, let us assume a physical ontology based on point-particles. These particles have the property of location - the property of always being at some point in space - and maybe they have a few other properties, like velocity, spin, and charge. An individual particle isn't actually green. What about two of them? The properties possessed by two of them are quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles - e.g. "location of center of mass" or "having a part at location x0 and another part at x1". We can even extend to counterfactual properties, e.g. "the property of flying apart if a heavy third particle were to fly past on a certain trajectory".

To accept that actual greenness still exists, but to argue against dualism, you need to show that actual greenness can be identified with some property like these. The problem is that that's a little absurd.

Well, it sounds quite reasonable to me to say that if you arrange elementary particles in a certain, complicated way, you get an instance of something that experiences greenness. To me, this is no different than saying that that if you arrange particles in a certain, complicated way, you get a diamond. We just happen to know a lot more about what particle configurations create "diamondness" than "experience of green"ness. (As a matter of fact, we know exactly how to define "diamondness" as a function of particle type and arrangement.)

So, at this point I apply the Socratic method...

Are we in agreement that a "diamond" is a thing that exists? (My answer: Yes - we can recognize diamonds when we see them.)

Is the property "is a diamond" one that can be defined in terms of "quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles"? (My answer: Yes, because we know that diamonds are made of carbon atoms arranged in a specific pattern.)

Hopefully we agree on these answers! And if we do, can you tell me what the difference is between the predicate "is experiencing greenness" and "is a diamond" such that we can tell, in the real world, if something is a diamond by looking at the particles that make it up, and that it is impossible, in principle, to do the same for "is experiencing greenness"?

What I think your mistake is, is that you underestimate the scope of just what "quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles" can actually describe. Which is, literally, anything at all that can be described with mathematics, assuming you're allowing all the standard operators of predicate logic and of arithmetic. And that would include the function that maps "arrangements of particles" as an input and returns "true" if the arrangement of particles included a brain that was experiencing green and "false" otherwise - even though we humans don't actually know what that function is!

But I claim they can't be the same thing because of the ontological mismatch. A visual experience contains actual green, a sheet of neurons is a complicated bound state of a quadrillion atoms which nowhere contains actual green, though it may contain neurons exhibiting an averaged behavior which has a structural and causal role rather close to the structural and causal role played by actual greenness, as inferred from psychology and phenomenology.

To sum up, I assert that you are mistaken when you say that there is is an ontological mismatch - the sheet of neurons does indeed contain the experience of green. You are literally making the exact same error that Eliezer's strawman makes in Angry Atoms.

Colours "exist" as a fact of perception.

Why do you put "exist" in quotation marks? What does that accomplish? If I chopped off your hand, would you say that the pain does not exist, it only "exists"?

If you're looking for colours without perception, you've missed what normative usage of "colour" means.

I'm not looking for colors without perception; I'm looking for the colors of perception somewhere in physical reality; since colors are real, and physical reality is supposed to be the only sort of reality there is.

You've then covered your views in word salad; I would not attempt to write with such an appalling lack of clarity as you've wrapped your views in in this sequence, except for strictly literary purposes; certainly not if my intent were to inform.

It's not so easy to describe conscious states accurately, and a serious alternative to dualism isn't so easy to invent or convey either. I'm improvising a lot. If you make an effort to understand it, it may make more sense.

But let us return to your views. Colors only exist as part of perceptions; fine. Presumably you believe that a perception is a type of physical process, a brain process. Do you believe that some part of these brain processes is colored? If someone is seeing green, is there a flicker of actual greenness somewhere in or around the relevant brain process? I doubt that you think this. But then, at this point, nothing in your model of reality is actually green, neither the world outside the brain, nor the world inside the brain. Yet greenness is manifestly there in reality: perceptions contain actual greenness. Therefore your model is incomplete. Therefore, if you wish to include actual conscious experiences in your model, they'll have to go in alongside but distinct from the physical processes. Therefore, you will have to be a dualist.

I am not advocating dualism, I'm just telling you that if you don't want to deny the phenomenology of color, and you want to retain your physical ontology, you will have to be a dualist.

it's not fictional evidence, it's me asking what your true rejection would need to be for you to accept that the universe is turtles all the way down.

If it's a question of why I believe what I do, the starting point is described here, in the section on being wrong about one's phenomenology. Telling me that colors aren't there at any level is telling me that my color phenomenology doesn't exist. That's like telling you, not just that you're not having a conversation on lesswrong, but that you are not even hallucinating the occurrence of such a conversation. There are hard limits to the sort of doubt one can credibly engage in about what is happening to oneself at the level of appearance, and the abolition of color lies way beyond those limits, out in the land of "what if 2+2 actually equals 5?"

The next step is the insistence that such colors are not contained in physical ontology, and so a standard materialism is really a dualism, which will associate colors (and other ingredients of experience) with some material entity or property, but which cannot legitimately identify them with it. I think that ultimately this is straightforward - the mathematical ontologies of standard physics are completely explicit, it's obvious what they're made of, and you just won't get color out of something like a big logical conjunction of positional properties - but the arguments are intricate because every conceivable attempt to avoid that conclusion is deployed. So if you want arguments for this step, I'm sure you can find them in Chalmers and other philosophers.

Then there's my personal alternative to dualism. The existence of an alternative, as a palpable possibility if not a demonstrated reality, certainly helps me in my stubbornness. Otherwise I would just be left insisting that phenomenal ontology is definitely different to physical ontology, and historically that usually leads to advocacy of dualism, though starting in the late 19th century you had people talking about a monistic alternative - "panpsychism", later Russell's "neutral monism". There's surely an important issue buried here, something about the capacity of people to see that something is true, though it runs against their other beliefs, in the absence of an alternative set of beliefs that would explain the problematic truth. It's definitely easier to insist on the reality of an inconvenient phenomenon when you have a candidate explanation; but one would think that, ideally, this shouldn't be necessary.

your writing a "counter-fiction" would be a very useful exercise and might clarify to me how you can continue to hold the position that you do. I honestly do not fathom it.

It shouldn't require a story to convey the idea. Or rather, a story would not be the best vehicle, because it's actually a mathematical idea. You would know that when we look at the world, we see individuated particles, but at the level of quantum wavefunctions, we have, not just a wavefunction per particle, but entangled wavefunctions for several particles at once, that can't be factorized into a "product" of single-particle wavefunctions (instead, such entangled wavefunctions are sums, superpositions, of distinct product wavefunctions). One aspect of the dispute about quantum reality is whether the supreme entangled wavefunction of the universe is the reality, whether it's just the particles, whether it's some combination. But we could also speculate that the reality is something in between - that reality consists of lots of single particles, and then occasional complex entities which we would currently call entangled sets of particles. You could write down an exact specification of such an ontology; it would be a bit like what they call an objective-collapse ontology, except that the "collapses" or "quantum jumps" are potentially between entangled multiparticle states, not just localized single-particle states.

My concept is that the self is a single humongous "multi-particle state" somewhere in the brain, and the "lifeworld" (mentioned at the start of this post) is wholly contained within that state. This way we avoid the dualistic association between conscious state and computational state, in favor of an exact identity between conscious state and physical state. The isomorphism does not involve, on the physical side, a coarse-grained state machine, so here it can be an identity. When I'm not just defending the reality of color (etc) and the impossibility of identifying it with functional states, this is the model that I'm elaborating.

So if you want a counter-fiction, it would be one in which the brain is a quantum computer and consciousness is the big tensor factor in its quantum state, and in which classical uploading destroys consciousness because it merely simulates the big tensor factor's dynamics in an entity which ontologically consists of a zillion of the simple tensor factors (a classical computer). In other words, whether the state machine is realized within a single tensor factor or a distributed causal network of them, is what determines whether it is conscious or not.

If you found yourself in the position described in the story, would you be forced to admit that there was not, in fact, any information that makes up a "mind" outside of the mechanistic brain?

I was asked this some time ago - if I found myself to be an upload, as in your scenario, how would that affect my beliefs? To the extent that I believed what was going on, I would have to start considering Chalmers-style dualism.

One possible counter fiction would have an ending similar to the bad ending of three worlds collide.