Studying the geometry of a thing is usually going to be the right direction for understanding anything. Though qualia aren’t going to be a mere count of dimensions, as then all senses would be experienced the same way. There is something more going on that has vision represent differently than sound, even though both are technically just measuring the same dimensionality (it’s all just a single 2D spectrum of wave frequencies).

The difference is what our computers are doing with the data, so it’s a more complex question of the complexity and directionality of the computation, and not simply how many dimensions the explored space ends up being. This, too, will reduce to geometry (the topography of the I/O protocols), but not in so simple a sense as just counting dimensions.

Our visual and sound systems are experienced differently precisely because distinguishing between light and sound is what they are doing, i.e. the whole point of those computational systems is to draw a trackable distinction between “there is a red wall” and “there is an audible echo off of that wall.” Otherwise we lose the information distinctive to each domain (what frequency and abundance of photons is reflecting or emitting from the wall, and what the seismic qualities of the wall are, and what the frequency and abundance and directionality of phonons the wall is reflecting or emitting).

The “what it is like” thus stems from what the computer is doing, how it is computing an output from the input. Hairs and cones are otherwise largely the same thing: just buttons that when pushed send electrical signals to the brain. Those signals are identical ontologically. So the only way our brain “knows” the difference is that those signals are going to different computers that are running different protocols to process the information.

That is why “F major” does not register as “red” or vice versa: our brains are doing different things with the information in each case. With color, we are trying to map the durable properties of objects that signal useful underlying information (e.g. telling a ripe fruit from an unripe or rotten one, telling a poisonous snake from a harmless one). The processing requires geometric surface mapping (colors span areas and volumes, and we have to tell specific colors apart, not only from each other, but from other information, like “sounds”). With sound, we are trying to map dynamic events in our environment (e.g. “what is happening and where”). The processing requires tonal space mapping (sounds have sources and distinguishable pitches, and we have to tell specific sounds apart, not only from each other, but from other information, like “colors”).

When we get wires crossed, we get synesthesia, where signals from cones or hairs cross into the wrong computer, and sound gets processed into color or color into sound. The difficulties and confusions that result reflect the unsuitability for domain crossing to accomplish what these computers are trying to work out. It is not very effective to map color as sound or sound as color. We can do it (instruments can represent sound as color and vice versa), but we can’t extract the information we usually (and evolved to) want. Imagine trying to keep track of what color everything is with a constant cacophony of sound, or trying to map a soundscape with only colors and then try to tell that apart from actual colors.

Interesting. I have very similar views, that I have extrapolated on in different but complementary ways in a informal paper I put up, here.

https://www.academia.edu/105166969/Consciousness_A_Matter_of_Perspective

One main, thought I’ve had, that might be of interest to you. That I’ve been exploring more recently while studying the work on wolfram physics from Jonathan Gorard. Is how much we might be able to explain the difference in qualia simply as a consequence of the difference in dimensions of the computation. Comparing for example audio and visual.

Understood and makes sense.

The current review process of preprints is still in a very early stage and not that efficient in my opinion, but there are efforts to improve it.

This is an example:
https://europepmc.org/article/PPR/PPR806301#reviews

Ah! Sorry. I misunderstood you. Because Wolfram has also written on mutation patterns in biology, though I hadn’t encountered him arguing that; and Maimon is not a biologist, so I disregarded his comments on that as irrelevant, since he never links them to anything specifically argued by Wolfram; it’s just a drunk uncle, a digression on some crank pet peeve of Maimon’s I saw no point in exploring (looking at it more closely now, it’s hopelessly confused, as he has the chronology backwards and doesn’t know his position is the new synthesis, not a return to Darwin, although his descriptions even then are confused).

Do you think preprints and preprints servers can play a role in alleviating some of these issues?

It has to be part of the process, but otherwise, just by itself, it is the absence of a vetting system rather than an improvement on it. And I don’t see any utility in that. We already have that. It’s called the internet.

We have a focus on indexing preprints including their informal post publication peer review process. I am heavily involved in this aspect in our team.

As for example, here you mention “informal post publication peer review process.” Really, the quality and efficiency of that will make the difference, ultimately (and it will come down to its false positive and false negative rate: how many good papers get punished or downscored or whatever the sorting mechanism is; vs. how many bad papers get rewarded or elevated or whatever the sorting mechanism is).

In the end, we need some reliable and efficient scoring of submissions, so scholars can tell the vetted quality of a paper or book from a reliable score of it. This scoring can change over time or build over months after “prepublication,” which can even result in a productive revisions process, but “publication” need merely consist of the version that scores well.

That was very informative as usual, thank you!

I am aware of some of these issues solely due to my employment as a software engineer in the team that develops and maintains europepmc.org for the past two years. We have a focus on open science and the institute that employs us (EMBL-EBI) and its funders mandate publishing under an open access model

I have a question:

Do you think preprints and preprints servers can play a role in alleviating some of these issues?

We have a focus on indexing preprints including their informal post publication peer review process. I am heavily involved in this aspect in our team.

I didn’t think my professional work will ever come up in my journey of learning from you here 😀

P.S. Here are some good breadcrumbs from professionals on defects in the peer review system that are starting to convince me (the trend now is to argue for both public and open peer review, for example, which does not suit for-profit journals and thus why we don’t see it happen very often):

Matthew McKeever, “The Problem of Peer Review Is The Most Important Philosophical Problem”

Catarina Dutilh Novaes, “The Many Problems with Peer-Review”

Justin Weinberg, “Is Peer Review in Philosophy “Broken Beyond Reasonable Repair”?”

Helen De Cruz, “Seems Like the Peer Review System Has Given Up the Ghost”

Neil Levy, “Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review”

Marcus Arvan, “Compromising Anonymized Review”

All of which reference yet more articles on the subject, and so on. A maze of rabbit holes—that’s how discussed this issue is becoming.

The most formal treatment so far is Remco Heesen and Liam Kofi Bright, “Is Peer Review a Good Idea?”. And theirs may be the most radical entry. They propose alternatives be studied to identify the best. But they suggest something more like a multi-tier system where instead of peer review, papers publish in a journal on just meeting basic intelligibility and formatting standards, and then the expert community (a community of only certified experts) openly scores papers for merit (and their scores can also be scored, thus eventually weighting the most reliable reviewers over the least), resulting in post-publication review, as papers are improved and escalated to higher tiers of quality or value scoring, similar to the way some social media systems score comments or reviews as most or least helpful.

I don’t want to give the impression that this means peer review is entirely useless (I’ve written on this before in The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History). But it is has a serious problem with inefficiency, exploitation, and false positives and negatives.

The main (really, only) benefit of peer review is to ensure quality (that a paper meets minimal standards and is worth attention and not just a bundle of bullshit or error). An author’s reputation can already provide that. But most scholars haven’t the time to vet every paper or every scholar, so they would like a process that does that for them.

Kind of the reason we have college “degrees” is this same function, to certify someone knows what they are doing, even though we know some people can get all the way to even a PhD in any field and still be unreliable (false positive), while occasionally complete amateurs can be remarkably competent (false negative). It’s just, individual scholars can’t each vet every single person, so they need a system to handle that for them (a division of labor). The only problem is that any system will suffer a false positive and false negative rate (and entail inefficiencies), and when those rates (and/or inefficiencies) are high, its utility declines.

It’s only worse when, with capitalist exploitation, the system demands an enormous amount of unpaid labor to profit off of other people’s work. While most of the movement criticizing peer review is looking for ways to make the system more efficient and reliable, I could also suggest ways to make it more fair in the distribution of profit as well.

For example, reasonable download fees (like two or five dollars for a paper instead of twenty or even in some cases fifty as we have now, or worse, articles you must spend thousands of dollars to have access to because you can’t access them individually; and maybe even scaled to tier, so a paper in tier-one of a process can be downloaded for a dollar, while tier-two it’s two dollars, and maybe at tier-three it’s five) which are split equally between publisher and author.

In any event, this is all pipe dreaming. We are stuck with the system we have. So we have to navigate it best we can. Hence in my case, I mostly publish here for free (tier one), and eventually when I have time elevate one or another paper or book through one or another peer review process (tier two; the present system has no other tiers).

Oh, nice. I hadn’t known that. And her textbook is indeed well reviewed I see. If only it were affordable!

This was one of your hardest articles for me to read, not because of the writing, but because the topic itself is very complex.

I concur. Because we are at the meta-threshold (talking about what lies behind the things through which we comprehend things at all), it won’t be easy to convey or talk about. Because we can’t circularly refer to the qualia to argue the point.

We have to refer to facts beyond the qualia, which by definition our brains did not develop any circuitry to process—just like we can’t imagine colors we didn’t genetically inherit brain circuits for, precisely because we lack those circuits by which to imagine such colors, so we can’t imagine anything else we didn’t get qualia circuits to imagine it with, and thus have to speak at an abstract level beyond direct conscious modeling.

So, yeah, it was as hard for me to think through and write as you found it to read! It took many years to get to this point (which is why I decided to synthesize it all in print now, when I finally think I have maybe a wisp of a ghost of a handle on it).

-:-

As for publication, mainly I publish here to float ideas that I might publish under peer review someday, if they survive critique.

But the biases of (a lot of arbitrary gatekeeping) and requirements for peer review are often also a waste of time (peer reviewers often require an bunch of bells and whistles, necessary or not, like a historical survey of the subject or a gratuitous response to a dozen different philosophers that they just randomly fancy and so on, as well as hyper-specific formatting and styling often differing by journal), and I don’t get paid for that work—yet the journal makes a profit on my work anyway, and keeps access away from the public to do that, thus making publication largely fictive—it will be “published” but no one will likely read it (even most experts don’t read hardly any of their own field’s literature), and certainly rarely the public.

When I combine that with the fact that the timeline from submission to publication ranges from six months to several years (because journals have to reject most submissions not for quality but for want of space, so you have to keep starting the process over; an extremely inefficient process), it hardly seems worth the bother. I’d rather just do the work, and publish it for the world to readily access without delay, and get paid by my Patrons for exactly that, and lean on my reputation and reach to ensure influence.

When I do bother, it is only because I see some sort of value in the resulting Argument from Prestige, e.g. if I want my work to have the stamp of peer review approval in order to carry authority, for some particular reason, and I have the time to do that. And the reason is most typically, because of the complex sophistication of the argument, it benefits from that vetting (like my article on biogenesis in Biology and Philosophy or my chapter on moral theory in The End of Christianity or my book Proving History, which I all ensured were peer reviewed). While some I would indeed like to do that for (e.g. my Argument from Nothing), but I lack the time needed to do it (I have to make a living), so it gets shelved.

I do approve others putting in the work though. So anyone who wanted to be lead author on a joint paper that crystalizes any article of mine into peer reviewed form, and then handles all the tedious labor of running it through however many peer review processes it requires, is more than welcome to contact me and get that ball rolling. Or just do a paper on their own analyzing mine. For example Nick Clarke completed a whole doctoral dissertation on my moral theory; but as usual for dissertations, that’s now in a paywalled archive somewhere hardly anyone will ever get to read, because no publisher wants to eat the cost of obscure niche nonfiction, a common folly of capitalism.

Meanwhile, if someone simply refuses to consider or engage with my work “because it’s just on a blog” they are not an intellectual worth engaging with anyway. Everyone worth reaching won’t have that fallacious attitude. And in part that’s because of my own long-labored-for reputation for at least not being bad at this and thus being at least worth a hearing (I’m not just some internet rando anymore). Which includes a legacy of successfully peer reviewed works in philosophy, demonstrating I can do this professionally. I’m not an amateur.

But as you note, above all, publishing my philosophy here ensures far more human beings read and think about and thus are influenced or impacted by my work (and not just a scant few denizens of some ivory tower somewhere). And I am a firm believer that all human beings should be doing and engaging with philosophy (it should be their religion). So those are the people I am usually most keen to communicate with. And lo, that’s my profession now. 🙂

Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough.

I wasn’t talking about Wolfram as I haven’t read any of his work.

I just read Maimon’s answer and his replies in the comments there and generally liked it until he started bashing biologists for clinging to the random mutation dogma and rejecting what he describes as “RNA engineering the mutations”. I am not widely read in biology, but I do understand that biologists have abandoned the idea of completely random mutations decades ago and am aware of some of the research you cited, so I was perplexed by this part of his answer and his follow up comments. When a user even pressed him to provide some sources refusing the “rando mutations” dogma, he said that it’s mostly religious folks who do but he won’t cite them because he doesn’t agree with them which confused me even more.

I felt like I am reading some sort of a secular attack on evolutionary biologists on the same attack lines normally used by creationists and that’s why I asked if you think he has some valid points there.