Purple and the conscious experience

Purple [PUR] + [PUL] #

The color worn by Roman magistrates. A color most often associated with royalty and richness of life. Originally obtained from sea snail piss for use in dyeing fabrics.

But at its core, what is it? well, a physicist would say it’s light with a wavelength between 380 to 450 nanometers. and he would most certainly be right. But there’s a difference here.

Bear with me for a second and close your eyes, imagine you are in a room where there are bright purple lights. What’s the kind of music you hear? Personally, I hear fast-paced electronic, similar to what someone at a Berlin rave would experience. But why did that happen, why did you think of a specific type of music which does not correlate with the color purple or the physical description of it at all?

What processes went on in your brain which translated 🟪 into 🎧. How did the color purple get transmitted via electrical signals in your brain and suddenly turn into music?

Let me give you another example, imagine you’re at a store buying chocolates. You flip to the back and find the list of all the ingredients and the different elements present in it, you can read through them a million times but that would never tell you how the feeling of eating it would be. You can only find that out once you actually eat it. and what happens then? well, your taste buds catch onto the sensations and send them over to your olfactory cortex and that information somehow turns into the taste of chocolate.

And this is the main rub, we don’t know yet how sugar+cocoa+milk solids turn in your brain into the taste of chocolate. this is called the hard problem of consciousness and it is the greatest mystery in history.

Qualia [kwa] + [lia] #

Imagine you are shopping with your girlfriend for a purple dress, say you find a nice one and show it to her. and she goes like “It’s not purple enough”.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN??

This my friend is qualia, the purpleness of purple, the sweetness of chocolate, the disgusting smell of piss after a heavy night of drinking. It’s the experience of sensation, the feeling of feeling something.

Definition-wise, qualia cannot be fully conveyed verbally. It is something which is felt. If you have never been in love, no matter how many books you read about it, you will never know what it truly is like. You will never have the qualia. Descriptions and Experiences live in totally different worlds.

In reality, of course, there is no such thing as the purpleness of purple, the sweetness of chocolate or real love. It’s all about how your brain interprets things. Ignorance is bliss

If we were to experience reality objectively, all we would see are wavelengths of light and chemical formulas of food.

There is no purple. It’s just one of the things our brain creates to make the living experience a little better (don’t forget to give a 5⭐️ on Airbnb).

And that is the wild part, okay, so physically our brain is just meat with electricity, it’s a biological computer so how the fuck is it able to create such exquisite experiences out of simple things like chocolate.

This is the hard problem of consciousness.

Now there are easy problems of consciousness too. like:

• how can our brain quickly change focus from one thing to another?
• how can you control some of your behaviours but not others?
• the difference between waking and sleeping
• how does memory work?

these are still not figured out but they seem close, all of them seem vulnerable to explanations through computational or neural mechanisms, but with enough cocain.. coffee scientists can definitely figure it out someday.

But the really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience, the problem of Qualia. When we think and perceive, there is a large amount of information being processed by our brains, obviously history and biases tend to have an effect on the experiences (which kinda sounds like an ML problem to me).

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? Because of the hard problems, we do not have the beginning of the beginning of a plausible solution yet. You can explain all the chemical processes in the brain, what exactly which part of it does but still you would have no idea why it makes you feel like puking every time someone lets out a nasty fart right beside you. It’s.. just a smell, right?

So our brain is basically a computer, it processes images and audio, outputs sounds via voice, it can do math(most of us anyway) but what separates us from the silicon life form? That’s right, it’s the experience. you can show your computer hours upon hours of Pokemon furry porn but it suddenly would not start getting aroused by it by the mere-exposure effect, there is no feeling to the processing.

The duality of subjective and objective reality must be broken, nothing is binary, it’s all a ✨ spectrum ✨. Break the walls down.