Steve Klinko
Registered Senior Member
I was specifically referring to the Color Experience. It would seem that there might be people that do not Experience the Color Qualia, but yet they have full Color differentiation. They are not Color Blind, even though they do not Experience Color (the Qualia). So I should have said they are Color Zombies, and not imply total Zombies. Anyway, I am still exploring this unbelievable possibility and am not completely sure it could be true. We have no way of Experiencing what another Mind is Experiencing. It is the inability or unwillingness of people to admit to having Color Qualia that raises this as an issue for me.You are right. All conscious experiences have similarities, but are not necessarily identical. An eagle's eyesight is much sharper than a human, but the difference is an evolved genetic advantage for the eagle. I think you are wrong there. Almost all people have subjective conscious experiences .
You seem to accept the notion that subjective experiences must be exactly alike or one or the other is an emotional zombie. IMO, that is just a limited view of what goes on when we observe and experience cognition and how certain sensory experiences are balanced against prior memories.
The fact is that the experience of qualia is generated by the physical senses. When the sensory receptors of color are impaired by a condition such as deuteranopia, that does not make a person a zombie, it makes that person partially disabled.
Let's reverse the question. If I have arthritis and moving my hand causes pain do I have better qualia than a person without arthritis and who moves his hand without experiencing pain? In that case the increased qualia are an indication of inflammation, a homeostatic warning that something is wrong with my hand.
However, I have demonstrated before that deuteranopia does impair a person's perception (best guess) of reality and when that impairment is filtered for conflicting wave lengths and the brilliant distinction between red a green is accentuated , the emotional response is usually quite obvious. People may cry from the overwhelming experience of color differentiation, which increases the deeper emotional experience in the observer. But zombie is such a useless term.