Qualia again ("blue is not a number")

NOTE: This post, slightly edited, is taken from what to me was/is an interesting thread on Ray Kurzweil's "Mind.X" forum. The title refers to the handle of one of the more active participants in that thread, whose questioning regarding this project has been a spur to get me to think not just about how to refine the ideas here, but also how to improve the communication of them. What follows here and in the post above are some of the results.

Take the color blue -- not the concept "blue" which gathers together all the particular perceptions of blueness, but a specific perception of blue itself, the quale or experience of blue. It's not a number, precisely, it's a color. But what exactly does it mean to say that it's a "color"? What else could it be? Could it be a number, for example? The problem with that is that number itself is a concept not a perception, not a quale. We humans understand numbers because we invented the concept (and we tend to think that computers deal in numbers or "computations" because that's what we invented computers for), but how would number work in place of color in a conscious but non-linguistic organism? Not well, I think, because it's an abstraction, and what we need is a concrete experience. Similarly, even though we believe that blue "represents" a certain frequency of light, it's hard to see (so to speak) how there could be a direct perception of frequency, because "frequency" too is just a concept. If we had the problem of designing an artifact that perceived light frequencies (as opposed to simply being affected by frequencies, as is a digital camera, say, or for that matter, anything that's not transparent), we would need to come up with a way of presenting to it a simple, immediate, irreducible, and distinguishable quality for each frequency that we wanted the artifact to be able to distinguish. And that, for evolved organisms, is just what color does and is.

But there's another part of the story to come, and it may be the hardest part -- this involves explaining the distinction between perception and simple effect, because that gets to the core of the idea of consciousness as such. What we need, here, is a mechanism that is able to "apprehend" the various qualities presented to it, or to which it turns its "attention", but isn't simply determined by them -- "apprehension" meaning that the perceiving mechanism is affected by the qualities that it perceives but has them available as input for further processing. Ultimately, of course, such a mechanism is as determinate as any other system in nature, but insofar as we look just at the connection between the "perceiving system" and the "world" of qualities, on all channels, that it's able to perceive, then this sort of apprehension opens up a certain free play, so to speak, a looseness of connection that isn't present in other kinds of mechanism -- the world affects the perceiver but doesn't determine it.