Ooops ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Stephen Lin <[email protected]> Date: Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:59 PM Subject: Lack of L/M cone selectivity and the inverted qualia problem To: [email protected]
Dear Dr. Dacey, I wanted to introduce myself: I'm a longtime fan of your work, particularly in the problem of L/M cone selectivity (or lack thereof) by interneurons in the retina and its consequences for developmental and evolutionary neurobiology. My interest started about a decade ago, when I was in high school, and I completed a computational neuroscience project wherein I tried to show that the mixed L/M model of foveal midget ganglion cell surrounds was consistent with its observed behavior in response to various stimuli (I did this by basically implementing my own compartment-model based neural simulator framework in C++ and wiring up a small-scale model of the L/M pathway.) I fondly remember reading a few of your papers (collaborations with Dr. Lee, I think) as background research for my project. Anyway, I'm not sure what your feelings are about philosophy of mind questions, but I'm writing to you because I was hoping to get your opinion of a particular one I've had on my mind for quite some time, and which ultimately provided the impetus for my independent research back in high school. Basically, it seems to me that the lack of differential L/M selectivity in the retina implies that there can be no preferred orientation for the red/green qualia color axis, if such a thing exists. Therefore, at least in the case of red/green color vision, it seems that 1) red/green qualia may be arbitrarily inverted between different individuals or (more likely, from my perspective) 2) qualia don't really exist, and that, despite intuition, there is nothing unique about the subjective experience of "red" versus the subjective experience of "green", independent of the neurally coded information that the two form a color axis. Unfortunately, I have not seen this argument ever described anywhere, which has been nagging me for quite some time. Just to explain why I'm deciding to e-mail you know, this whole idea was re-prompted by a question that I read today in an online science forum: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hnh4s/can_people_perceive_colors_differently_from_one/ to which I decided to respond (as the username "hoenikker") with a somewhat lengthy description of my argument, so I hope you can take a look at that if it's unclear what I mean. if you are able, please let me know if you have any thoughts on the matter. I was also thinking about contacting Dr. Daniel Dennet at Tufts and explaining my argument to him, and was wondering if you two may have ever corresponded about color vision: he's often used color vision as an example in his criticism of qualia, but doesn't seem to have ever picked up on this particular (possible) property of retinal wiring and its consequences. Thank you! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
