Hi Alex I'm one of the former member of a cult religious group JMS, your contents helped me recover from my bad experiences.

If you cut open my brain, I can guarantee you, that you will see red.

Seeking redness in the brain is analogous to expecting to find a little Mario figure inside the silicon of a computer. Mario is there, but only as a collection of on/off transistor states. In a similar way, redness is in the brain as a complex collection of neuron firings.

I think qualia is an emergent property of information processing. Asking where the “redness” is is like looking at an engine and asking where the “functioning” is. There are certain parts that do stuff when the engine functions, and likewise certain neurons are probably more associated with redness-qualia, but asking for a concrete thing or and location that is only the “functioning” bit, nothing more nor less, doesn’t make much sense.

I do feel like he answered his own question there. If red doesn't exist the redness cannot exist either. What is perceived as red IS the activation of certain neurones, electrochemical actions/reactions that are testably there. If you were to remove or damage said components then the redness goes away also, as in the first account of where consciousness resides.

Loved doing this interview, one of my favourites yet on my Heretics channel!

I've always thought of it as a process rather than one particular object. Similar to the idea of 'work', it's multiple things converging to create something measurable but immaterial.

I think what people are missing about Alex' second point is that he is talking strictly about the first person experience of the mind and how no amount of science can tell us about what the mind (subjectively) actually IS. Forget about redness. He is basically asking the question 'where is a thought?' if you actually look, it is completely unfindable. If you look for the mind, or rather, if the mind looks for itself, it is elusive, like mist. There is nothing to point to, intangible like empty space. No amount of study from the outside can account for this seamless expanse of consciousness we call the mind.

It's such a fascinating concept to think about how our brain processes information and creates our perception of reality. It's almost like our mind is a complex puzzle, with different pieces working together to form our conscious experience.

When you close your eyes and ‘see’ redness, you’re remembering redness. It’s the same as remembering Tower bridge or any other other landmark. And if your brain were to be cut open you would not find tower bridge, or any other memory of a lifetime’s accumulation.

So glad to hear people talking about this. Its such a difficult yet fascinating topic.

Maybe I have failed to properly understand what it is that Alex is seeking to explain. But with reference to the cutting open of the brain and not being able to find the sensation or experience of

the redness argument seems to be the one of naming. it's an emergent phenomenon, of neurons firing in a specific way. you can no more dissect a brain to detect redness, than you can seperate water into hydrogen and oxygen to detect wetness.

I think Alex that it is similar to trying to cut open a hard drive with a knife. The hard drive might contain a bunch of software and various files for the software to work with, but cutting it with a knife is just not a proper way of getting to what is on a hard drive. What we lack is a way to connect a brain and produce an interface that is understandable to us. A knife isn't that tool. We might never get a fully functional way to interface with a brain on that level, but we can already interface to some lesser degrees with the brain. So the problem is the knife being the tool, not the hypothesis that it is in fact installed softwares and stored files in the system we call our brain.

Beautifully balanced presentation of a great problem. Whatever approach you belong to - always try to clash it with the best points the opposite one has to offer.

I'm personally satisfied with the explanation that our consciousness is an emergent property of simpler subsystems, a complexity that cannot be broken down into its individual components (whole greater than the sum of its parts). I find this plausible because it happens all the time in nature and even human engineering but at the same time we don't really have a good grasp of the theory behind complexity and how simple systems interact with each other to create complexity in this way.

It's probably related to electro-chemical reactions. Experiencing something builds a neural pathway, and then when the reaction happens through that pathway you remember what's encoded there.

I've been trying to explain the "Redness" thing for decades....goes over so many heads!

Oversimplified, the mind is an emergent property. Just as a highway has "traffic", the cars all together create a phenomenon greater than the cars themselves.

You can't find love in the heart either yet you feel it in your heart through joy or sorrow