David asks..
> Let us now return to "Where is the yellow." Is the yellow in the
> phosphor on the screen? And not in your head / mind? You do not
> experience the yellow as being in / on / at your eye, you know
fairly well where that is located in space and that location is not
the same location in space as the yellow is. While you "have" the
experience of yellow or yellowness, you do not have the experience of
seeing.

> Experiencing yellow is the result of seeing. Seeing is a process.
You do not experience the process / processing itself, you experience
the result of the process. That result is yellowness. The process
(ing) is the motor or engine which powers the manufacturing, of the
output product. The manufactured product is (the qualia) yellowness.
As yet computers seem not to have or perform this particular process
and so their awareness is of a different nature than ours. That
nature is about signal-stationarity, detection and logical
processing. Some terms for that: subconscious, second order
metaprogramming,proto-awareness. (PS The original bar-chart had a red
coloured bar that was highest. In the SVG code for the latest version
of my bar-chart that bar is coloured orange, the dates are
different, and the (IDs for) bars are called bars instead of lines.)
>
... some thoughts from Hugh

Interesting question.. We are indeed not aware of the "processing" of
our sensory input - but we do experience the result. This seems self
evident... and is probably a "learned experience".

We say something is "yellow" when photons of a given frequency hits
our retina's and the resulting electrical signals are processed.

Yellow photons arrive at our eyes - when an object emits photons of
the "yellow frequency".

We "know" it is yellow because of second hand learning that taught to
say a thing has colour... and colour that looks like that is
called "yellow". A convention - a shared name for the the thing we
are talking about "the colour" - and its value "yellow".

However, the question is - where is the yellow - not what is the
yellow. At one level - I think stereo vision is responsible for our
ability to place objects in 3D space. Hmmm.. that yellow bar is
about 23 inches in front of my face. We have learned to triangulate
and estimate distances to things out in front of us... very handy as
we approach a cliff or a brick wall in our car.

I think I remember that it wasn't very far back that artists learned
for the first time to accurate "paint" objects that didn't appear in
the plane of the drawing - but rather back inside the drawing. Of
course they were still on a 2D plane - but our heads interpreted the
signals and placed the objects behind the canvas. If you look at
very good holographic colour photographs... the objects appear to our
minds as complete 3D objects - even though we know the "image" is
spread out over the complete 2D surface of the "canvas". We cannot
see these things except as real 3D objects no matter what we know
intellectually... all the right signals hit our eyes.

A blind-from-birth person can sometimes be given limited sight. I
believe I have read that they can initially make no sense of their
new sensory input. This seems to suggest that we have no
inherent "built in" capability, other than "raw seeing". They have
to learn via trial and error - to integrate "sight" into all their
other sense impressions.

The process that happens in our head - is sort of like a "lens". We
look at a lens system and find a "small image" of a distant object at
the focal length of the lens. This lens system exists in the eye of
course, and focusses an image from the outside on the retina - but I
am talking about what happens from there on in - being like a
secondary lens system.

This process of seeing builds an "image" of the yellow bar inside our
head... probably some sort of "pattern" which if we have ever
seen "bars" before - we recognize as a bar - or rectangle - whatever
we know. I think something like "sync" happens - spontaneously
triggering matches between what we are seeing and what we have seen
before. If we have never seen this before - we try to figure it out
based on similar things we have seen before - and if all else fails
we yell "What the hell is that?" the normal command for more input.
;-)

We triangulate it to be a certain distance away (two eyes - two
signals). We infer data - much like the lens system. We never say
that what we see is the small focussed image at the focal point of
the lens - we say what is we see is a certain shape, colour, at a
certain distance from us.

We infer that the yellow bar we are experiencing is on the screen -
something we have learned via trial and error... and we simply ignore
all the in between pieces and extrapolate our internal experiences
into the outside world.

What it Dennett that wrote about being a headless person?? If you
look out you see this body stretching out below you - and see all
these things around you... it is as if you were a headless person
(you can't see your face) in some sort of 3D space. It is odd to read
this story and experience what he is telling you first hand.

Ok - so the information about the yellow bar is carried via photons
of the "yellow frequncy" - to our eyes/brain - as a 2 channel
information pipe - we extract this information and process it - and
based on past experience (information acquired through trial and
error or second hand learning) - interpret it in such a way as to be
able to say the source of this information is on a 2D surface some 23
inches away from your face - it is yellow and of a certain size and
shape.

Still the question about where is this "experience" - is still a bit
of a mystery... how something that clearly has to be occurring inside
your head can be "projected out" - and we are quite comfortable with
ignoring all the internals - is still really Kewl.

Somehow all this info we extract from the outside is assembled into
a "real world pattern" in our head that also "includes us" and we
take that as being totally isomorphic to the outside "real world"...
then conveniently forget about all the middle stuff. Sort of like
riding a bike - initially as we learn - we are continually thinking
about what to do next, over correcting, etc... but eventually it all
sinks into the sub concious mind and we never think about it again.