/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12113161
Well, you think what you want. Though I'd say it's pointless to be sadden by what I am or have become.

I just want to delve into the presumed irreducible nature of qualia.
Let's take the example of the sensation of the color red.
When you feel that an object is red, do you always feel the same redness? No you don't. Things are more or less red. And as such you can order them on a line, say that one is redder than the other. Just like numbers. What if redness was merely a number then? Well, that would be pretty convenient, because that would remove the need for us to rely on an absolute concept that gives us no other information than it's existence. If redness is a number, then it can be compared: things are more or less red. It can even be compared with the redness experienced by others, something we do all the time.
Is assuming that redness is a number a fallacy in the sense that we're attributing characteristics specific to numbers that redness doesn't have? No. Numbers only exist when put in relation with other numbers. Like red only exist when put in relation with other sensation of red.
So redness is indistinguishable from a number. And this is where it gets interesting. Because numbers are not atomic concepts.

Take set theory: numbers can be defined by sets. If you take Neumann ordinals, the first numbers would be written like this:
0 ->
1 -> ()
2 -> (())
3 -> ((), (()))
etc.
In this definition, each number is defined as the set of all previous numbers.

Now let's go back to our example. Redness is a number. It can be defined by a Neumann ordinal. And thus it is composed of all previous numbers.
What did we just proved? We proved that redness can be built from smaller components.
At first it seemed indivisible, atomic, irreducible. But in the end, put in relation to all the existing kind of redness, it wasn't.