Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is married to Richard C. Blum, who was substantially invested in URS Corp, which owns EG&G, a leading government technical provider that has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in security-related contracts. Feinstein never abstained from voting when it affected her husband’s wallet and Blum made $100 million when he sold his shares, as investigative reporter Peter Byrne exposed in his 2007 series the “Feinstein Files.”
In any case, 1.5 million out of 30 million is 5 percent (isn't it?) So the summary implies 1.5 percent (5 - 3.5) have internet access but don't use it. Maybe they use it but just won't own up!
Actually, you could make a case that the technology in 1984 is linguistic in nature and that the "sci" in its sci-fi is linguistics and social psychology.
I appreciate you're taking the view that it's a purely technical question, but moral questions are rarely far away from security concerns (why do you need the security?) and TFA acknowledges this by raising the moral issue directly:
Sometimes, the malicious insider isn’t so malicious. This is the argument many are making in Snowden’s situation these days
TFA doesn't resolve it directly, though. It goes on to liken Snowden to Terry Childs and then Childs to Jason Cornish.
This comes off as a weak attempt to tar Snowden with the moral dubiety surrounding Cornish's spiteful data deletion spree.
(More charitably, perhaps it's just a clumsy effort to indicate a subjective factor in such moral arguments, or perhaps the author is just rambling.)
At any rate, having mentioned the argument it doesn't answer it, apart from to say this point of view (the view that there are cases where people have pretty good moral reasons for breaching security) "isn't new."
The Slashdot story itself can be read as to imputing malice to Snowden (right at the end: "malicious insider") and indicating that the consequences of his leaks are "catastrophic" for the NSA. "Massively disruptive" would be a value-neutral way of putting it; whether or not it's catastrophic is going to depend on what views you have about the activities and goals of the NSA.
The technical question is an interesting one, sure, but don't expect people to ignore the moral dimension, especially when it's presented in such sloppy fashion.
"with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code" - so why don't you test their code, then? (If you can't do this yourself, hire QA.) Regard the contract as complete when all your tests pass (note: *your* tests!).
If bugs are found after the project is complete, it is because the test coverage was incomplete, or QA failed, and you should be happy to take responsibility for having them resolved (including payment if necessary.)
The ol 'designers haven't figured out how to design efficient website' argument is rolled out now and then
I don't know if it's a matter of "figuring out" - they may be perfectly well able to write efficient markup and so on, but in the commercial internet other considerations come into play.
Have a read of this Charlie Stross article in which he describes how much work takes place in order to view a one-page Salon article:
I stared at it for some time while it loaded over a 10mbps cable modem connection. Then I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit "reload", and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files... and a bunch of other crap.
The grand total of extras comes to 860Kb by dry weight, meaning that in order to read 950 words by Patrick Smith my cable modem had to pull in 948Kb, of which 942Kb was in no way related to the stuff I wanted to actually read.
Later in the comments he notes his browser had to resolve and request from at least 11 hosts in order to view his article, which, without all the extraneous cruft would have been about 40k of html.
The amount of data (~1M) is still fairly trivial on a 10Mb cable connection, even without compression, but there's no getting around the latency of pulling from so many sources.
I suspect tracking and advertising-driven "content" is the major player in reducing broadband surfing to apparent dialup speeds, rather than incompetent designers, by and large.
How can we be safe from criminals and terrorists while we still retain the ability to communicate face to face without full disclosure to our loyal public servants?
I regard it as not only highly desirable but a moral duty to provide the contents of all non-electronically-mediated conversations - ideally a full video or audio recording would be made available, but at the very least a transcript or precis.
I just don't know how one could claim to be an upstanding citizen without providing such.
String theory still only has one time dimension, whereas this theory proposes three time dimensions, and so is quite different, and not a subset of string theory.
A 6-D precursor to string theory you might be mistaking this for was called Kaluza-Klein theory, if memory serves.
One other proponent of three time dimensions, again if I remember correctly, was neo-Gurdjieffian J.G. Bennett, who christened the extra timelike dimensions "eternity" and "hyparxis" in his "The Dramatic Universe".
"Is there a relatively simple explanation of why we think the space we experience is actually the result of 3 distinct "dimensions"?"
The simplest one I'm aware of is that it's a specific case of Murphy's law.
Three dimensions is the only space in which you can form a knot: less than three and you don't have enough dimensions to loop strings together, more than three and knots will just slip apart via the extra dimensions.
So exactly three dimensions is the only number that will allow a pile of network cables to become hopelessly entangled with each other while you're not looking.
Connectfree did have a reseller programme where other "virtual ISPs" or "VISPS" as they called them could take a cut of the 0845 revenue in return for attracting the users, but, for the record, Freeserve was not one of those ISPs, and had their own deal with a telco.
0845 isn't local rate *now* - but it exactly was, back then.
Oh, and Freeserve wasn't even the first 0845 ISP. That distinction, AFAIK, belongs to ConnectFree, who beat them by about a month, though they never had the advertising campaign that Freeserve did, leaving a lot of people with the impression that Freeserve were first.
Probably they mean the Local Group: "the group of galaxies that includes our galaxy, the Milky Way. The group comprises over 30 galaxies, with its gravitational center located somewhere between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxies of the Local Group cover a 10 million light year diameter (see 1 E23 m for distance comparisons). The group belongs to the Virgo Supercluster."
As far as I understand, that's basically it, except there's no need to come up with a new explanation - existing String Theory already allows the Cube not to work.
The basic problem is this: String Theory predicts that at some (non-specified) energy E, Stringy effects will become apparent; but the virtually infinite set of physical models which the theory allows (the infamous "landscape") means that there's no cut-off point for E, no realistically attainable maximum energy beyond which it's not worth looking for any Stringy effects. So for any specifically tested energy, e, at which no stringy effects are observed, the String Theorist can always claim e < E, and the effects will be observed at some higher energy.
Some people (quite plausibly it seems to me) interpret this as the non-falsifiability of String Theory.
On the other hand, it's been argued that as a theory that admits of many solutions, String Theory is far from unique: for example, while the tensor equations of General Relativity admit a multitude of solutions and no-one is in a position to say which one is the solution that we actually live in, there is no problem with the standing of GR. (But then, if there was a theory which stood in the same relation to GR as the Standard Model stands to String Theory, perhaps things would be different!)
earliest we could possibly really know (for certain) that the mind is (or isn't) like a machine
Thanks for your informed and informative post! But doesn't this whole approach miss the target (the offered distinction between mind and machine: syntax vs semantics)?
To me, it seems that the salient feature is awareness: if it is conscious, then (though it be man, machine or cabbage!) it has a mind. Longhead and Shortbeard can argue until the cows come home about syntax and semantics, but consciousness is an empirical fact!
(Admittedly, consciousness may be a little hard to get at empirically outside the first person:-)
On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation
Wrong. Computation is a process. Syntax defines static relationships between symbols. Computation uses syntax, but is not defined by it.
Searle isn't saying here that computation is syntax. He's saying that specific computations are defined by syntactical means - whether we write 10 + 10 (= 100), or 2 + 2 (= 4), the computation we're defining is defined in virtue of the formal system we use to express it. Formal systems are systems for symbolic manipulation whose operations are completely defined once we've given their syntax.
Rather than say that computation "uses" syntax, I'd say that computation "implements", "instantiates" or "realises" operations which are indeed syntactically defined.
Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
Physics, in using symbols to describe parts of the world, therefore intrinsically has syntax.
I'd agree with you here - since (at least theoretical) physics is essentially a business which takes place inside formal systems (such as algebras) a physical theory is involved with syntax. However, is Searle really talking about physics having syntax, or the physical world having syntax? "Syntax is not intrinsic to the physical world" is a much more plausible statement - indeed syntax is a property of symbol systems, and our descriptions of the physical world. It's a much bigger step to say that syntax is a part of the physical world itself!
Reading your parent post, I'd guess the argument Searle is trying to make is that the ascription of "intentionality" (a philosophers' term meaning "aboutness", nothing to do with having intent or intentions) to physical systems is an interpretive act performed by a mind - there's nothing in the physical situation of a CPU that compels us to say that a given set of electronic states "means" the number two - it's in virtue of our choice to interpret it so that that it acquires its meaning.
Whether it's a good argument or not I won't say, but I don't think it can be dismissed quite as easily as suggested (and in fairness to your own post, I suspect the parent has mangled it a bit..:-)
Even if the word "model" were to transfer straightforwardly into what we have "in" our mind, this misses the point that for equivalence (which is what is demanded here - ie a complete simulation) more is required than having a rough idea of how it works.
Question - if your mind is "something that exists" that you know about, can it therefore be simulated in your mind? Certainly - you can take a guess what you would do do in a hypothetical situation, presumably by simulating your decision process at the time.
But can your mind be simulated completely (in your mind?) Doubtful - you'd run into the halting problem!
It's kind of misleading. The pressure on m$ is coming from the fact that many government departments are waking up to the fact that it's absolutely insane to "own" millions of vital files which are written in a format where they can't produce software to access the contents themselves in the way that they choose. In a quite real sense, they are only by-proxy "owners" of such data (the proxy being the m$ programs in question, of course).
However, they wouldn't be waking up to this were there not a healthy looking and viable alternative in the form of OpenOffice, which, as well as delivering true ownership of the files, also provides (most of) the convenience, bells and whistles of the m$ software stable. So in that sense, open source is a driver of this pressure.
That's why I think the half-assed, quasi-open strategies discussed in some posts here do not present a real long-term option for m$ - once people are fully awake to the fact they don't really own their own data, only real open formats will solve m$'s marketing problem, and we'll see a real shift in the file-format landscape, of which this latest thing may be an early sign.
When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled about the Death of Art -- as if the process was anything new, anything more than an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were already revealing people's tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music they'd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it -- all in a single, streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible for a suitable fee... the music industry had finally achieved its long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.
Ok, a little less prosaic than the item under discussion, but an interesting read...
... don't matter a bit to an average person - you're dealing with consumer consciousness, which has been softened up by decades of bombardment by advertising, designed inter alia to weaken the ratiocinative faculties of the targets. Especially when it comes to questions of value - monetary and otherwise.
Bottom line: people know that copying a CD is quick and easy. They just see a cheap, simple means of distribution and instinctively grok that the prices asked bear no relation to the intrinsic distribution cost. That's why it's no big deal to them.
Yeah, I know that there are development costs, artists' costs, all that - but those considerations are simply beyond the complexity horizon of the average consumer.
The trouble with your point that consciousness "can be defined by its properties" is - no-one even knows what the "properties of consciousness" are.. (If you know, I think you have a Nobel prize or two waiting for you..:)
"If you can't define something it has no meaning" - terms have meaning, not things: what is "the meaning" of your automobile?
What you are trying to say is "if you can't define something it can't exist", I think. But that is an overly narrow view. Why should we be able to define (not just in a dictionary sense, but in the sense we consider a mathematical object is well defined) everthing that exists. In fact, you know your experience of red exists, but you can't define it in that way (3rd time of asking: can you?).
You are just apparently religiously committed to a view that holds all existent things must be mathematically definable. (Oh, I've got news for you about Protons - they have mass, and they obey Quantum Field Theory, right? You can't count them as well defined until there's a quantum theory of gravity. Look up something called the Landau Pole.)
As to "Wittgenstein was full of shit" - you can't have read where I said, "obviously this isn't meant to be taken literally". You seem to have no grasp of what he was saying. (Or what I'm saying, for that matter).
Again: Re: "If their was a box with something in it that had no effect on the outside world then it has no meaning", talk about such things would not have informational content (just as you cannot convey information about "your experience of red") but you know quite well that red looks like something when you see it, but you can't say just what it is. Where does that leave your argument?
Having consciousness have a definition doesn't help your point of view here. I can define consciousness as "awareness of the environment", "having subjective experience", or whatever, but that isn't sufficient to establish that the subjective elements of that awareness can themselves be defined.
Indeed, as you say yourself: "a specific subjective experience is not part of the definition of consciousness".
Again, your high-school algebra only serves to illustrate my point. Where we can exchange information, we have to do it about "public" objects. (Or, if you like, the fact that we *can* exchange information is what qualifies the subject of the information as "public".)
Cf. this idea from Wittgenstein: if everyone had a "beetle" in a box, except no-one ever ever showed their beetle to anyone else, then the word "beetle" would have no meaning in our language. Obviously, this isn't intended to be taken literally, but is intended to show the relationship between meaning, understanding, and the existence of shared criteria for the verification of statements.
Really, this means that "my red" and "your red", insofar as we can actually talk meaninfully about them, imply the forgetting of the difference between them. We can only talk meaningfully (informatively) about the shared public concept of red.
If there were a way of encoding the nature of one's private experience of red, then the case would be different, and we could "compare reds" easily.
Since we can't, then (unless you can come up with a method; again: can you?) I feel justified in adhering to my claim that since private experience admits no exhaustive formal description, it cannot be accounted for by a functionalist theory, in which every element must be exhaustively formally definable..
Re: your PS. You're mistaking the cases of a doctor wanting a diagnosis, and a philosopher wanting an ontology. Very different!
Slashdot Mirror
After all the bitcoins are mined, you can't mine them, right? Because they're all mined.
There aren't any left to mine.
So you can't mine them.
I don't see how this is a problem that incentives can solve, and I don't see how it is a problem period.
It would be no great surprise if voting on this bill went along the same lines as the congressional vote on reining in "the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 'no' voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 'yes' voters."
In particular,
See also:
Good luck firing them, though.
In any case, 1.5 million out of 30 million is 5 percent (isn't it?) So the summary implies 1.5 percent (5 - 3.5) have internet access but don't use it. Maybe they use it but just won't own up!
Actually, you could make a case that the technology in 1984 is linguistic in nature and that the "sci" in its sci-fi is linguistics and social psychology.
I appreciate you're taking the view that it's a purely technical question, but moral questions are rarely far away from security concerns (why do you need the security?) and TFA acknowledges this by raising the moral issue directly:
TFA doesn't resolve it directly, though. It goes on to liken Snowden to Terry Childs and then Childs to Jason Cornish.
This comes off as a weak attempt to tar Snowden with the moral dubiety surrounding Cornish's spiteful data deletion spree. (More charitably, perhaps it's just a clumsy effort to indicate a subjective factor in such moral arguments, or perhaps the author is just rambling.)
At any rate, having mentioned the argument it doesn't answer it, apart from to say this point of view (the view that there are cases where people have pretty good moral reasons for breaching security) "isn't new."
The Slashdot story itself can be read as to imputing malice to Snowden (right at the end: "malicious insider") and indicating that the consequences of his leaks are "catastrophic" for the NSA. "Massively disruptive" would be a value-neutral way of putting it; whether or not it's catastrophic is going to depend on what views you have about the activities and goals of the NSA.
The technical question is an interesting one, sure, but don't expect people to ignore the moral dimension, especially when it's presented in such sloppy fashion.
"with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code" - so why don't you test their code, then? (If you can't do this yourself, hire QA.) Regard the contract as complete when all your tests pass (note: *your* tests!).
If bugs are found after the project is complete, it is because the test coverage was incomplete, or QA failed, and you should be happy to take responsibility for having them resolved (including payment if necessary.)
According to what I read, "innuendo" is an Italian suppository.
Are you kidding?
I don't know if it's a matter of "figuring out" - they may be perfectly well able to write efficient markup and so on, but in the commercial internet other considerations come into play.
Have a read of this Charlie Stross article in which he describes how much work takes place in order to view a one-page Salon article:
Later in the comments he notes his browser had to resolve and request from at least 11 hosts in order to view his article, which, without all the extraneous cruft would have been about 40k of html.
The amount of data (~1M) is still fairly trivial on a 10Mb cable connection, even without compression, but there's no getting around the latency of pulling from so many sources.
I suspect tracking and advertising-driven "content" is the major player in reducing broadband surfing to apparent dialup speeds, rather than incompetent designers, by and large.
How can we be safe from criminals and terrorists while we still retain the ability to communicate face to face without full disclosure to our loyal public servants?
I regard it as not only highly desirable but a moral duty to provide the contents of all non-electronically-mediated conversations - ideally a full video or audio recording would be made available, but at the very least a transcript or precis.
I just don't know how one could claim to be an upstanding citizen without providing such.
A 6-D precursor to string theory you might be mistaking this for was called Kaluza-Klein theory, if memory serves.
One other proponent of three time dimensions, again if I remember correctly, was neo-Gurdjieffian J.G. Bennett, who christened the extra timelike dimensions "eternity" and "hyparxis" in his "The Dramatic Universe".
The simplest one I'm aware of is that it's a specific case of Murphy's law.
Three dimensions is the only space in which you can form a knot: less than three and you don't have enough dimensions to loop strings together, more than three and knots will just slip apart via the extra dimensions.
So exactly three dimensions is the only number that will allow a pile of network cables to become hopelessly entangled with each other while you're not looking.
Thanks for your interesting comment. It just made me wonder about the gambling aspect... Wasn't there some sort of US law passed about that recently?
Connectfree did have a reseller programme where other "virtual ISPs" or "VISPS" as they called them could take a cut of the 0845 revenue in return for attracting the users, but, for the record, Freeserve was not one of those ISPs, and had their own deal with a telco.
Oh, and Freeserve wasn't even the first 0845 ISP. That distinction, AFAIK, belongs to ConnectFree, who beat them by about a month, though they never had the advertising campaign that Freeserve did, leaving a lot of people with the impression that Freeserve were first.
Probably they mean the Local Group: "the group of galaxies that includes our galaxy, the Milky Way. The group comprises over 30 galaxies, with its gravitational center located somewhere between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxies of the Local Group cover a 10 million light year diameter (see 1 E23 m for distance comparisons). The group belongs to the Virgo Supercluster."
The basic problem is this: String Theory predicts that at some (non-specified) energy E, Stringy effects will become apparent; but the virtually infinite set of physical models which the theory allows (the infamous "landscape") means that there's no cut-off point for E, no realistically attainable maximum energy beyond which it's not worth looking for any Stringy effects. So for any specifically tested energy, e, at which no stringy effects are observed, the String Theorist can always claim e < E, and the effects will be observed at some higher energy.
Some people (quite plausibly it seems to me) interpret this as the non-falsifiability of String Theory.
On the other hand, it's been argued that as a theory that admits of many solutions, String Theory is far from unique: for example, while the tensor equations of General Relativity admit a multitude of solutions and no-one is in a position to say which one is the solution that we actually live in, there is no problem with the standing of GR. (But then, if there was a theory which stood in the same relation to GR as the Standard Model stands to String Theory, perhaps things would be different!)
Some informed and heated debate on string theory is available at Peter Woit's not even wrong (anti) and Lubos Motl's somewhat rabid pro string theory counter-blog
Thanks for your informed and informative post! But doesn't this whole approach miss the target (the offered distinction between mind and machine: syntax vs semantics)?
To me, it seems that the salient feature is awareness: if it is conscious, then (though it be man, machine or cabbage!) it has a mind. Longhead and Shortbeard can argue until the cows come home about syntax and semantics, but consciousness is an empirical fact!
(Admittedly, consciousness may be a little hard to get at empirically outside the first person :-)
Searle isn't saying here that computation is syntax. He's saying that specific computations are defined by syntactical means - whether we write 10 + 10 (= 100), or 2 + 2 (= 4), the computation we're defining is defined in virtue of the formal system we use to express it. Formal systems are systems for symbolic manipulation whose operations are completely defined once we've given their syntax.
Rather than say that computation "uses" syntax, I'd say that computation "implements", "instantiates" or "realises" operations which are indeed syntactically defined.
I'd agree with you here - since (at least theoretical) physics is essentially a business which takes place inside formal systems (such as algebras) a physical theory is involved with syntax. However, is Searle really talking about physics having syntax, or the physical world having syntax? "Syntax is not intrinsic to the physical world" is a much more plausible statement - indeed syntax is a property of symbol systems, and our descriptions of the physical world. It's a much bigger step to say that syntax is a part of the physical world itself!Reading your parent post, I'd guess the argument Searle is trying to make is that the ascription of "intentionality" (a philosophers' term meaning "aboutness", nothing to do with having intent or intentions) to physical systems is an interpretive act performed by a mind - there's nothing in the physical situation of a CPU that compels us to say that a given set of electronic states "means" the number two - it's in virtue of our choice to interpret it so that that it acquires its meaning.
Whether it's a good argument or not I won't say, but I don't think it can be dismissed quite as easily as suggested (and in fairness to your own post, I suspect the parent has mangled it a bit.. :-)
Question - if your mind is "something that exists" that you know about, can it therefore be simulated in your mind? Certainly - you can take a guess what you would do do in a hypothetical situation, presumably by simulating your decision process at the time.
But can your mind be simulated completely (in your mind?) Doubtful - you'd run into the halting problem!
However, they wouldn't be waking up to this were there not a healthy looking and viable alternative in the form of OpenOffice, which, as well as delivering true ownership of the files, also provides (most of) the convenience, bells and whistles of the m$ software stable. So in that sense, open source is a driver of this pressure.
That's why I think the half-assed, quasi-open strategies discussed in some posts here do not present a real long-term option for m$ - once people are fully awake to the fact they don't really own their own data, only real open formats will solve m$'s marketing problem, and we'll see a real shift in the file-format landscape, of which this latest thing may be an early sign.
Read the whole story, at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/worth.htm
If you're interested, Greg Egan's site: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/
Bottom line: people know that copying a CD is quick and easy. They just see a cheap, simple means of distribution and instinctively grok that the prices asked bear no relation to the intrinsic distribution cost. That's why it's no big deal to them.
Yeah, I know that there are development costs, artists' costs, all that - but those considerations are simply beyond the complexity horizon of the average consumer.
"If you can't define something it has no meaning" - terms have meaning, not things: what is "the meaning" of your automobile?
What you are trying to say is "if you can't define something it can't exist", I think. But that is an overly narrow view. Why should we be able to define (not just in a dictionary sense, but in the sense we consider a mathematical object is well defined) everthing that exists. In fact, you know your experience of red exists, but you can't define it in that way (3rd time of asking: can you?).
You are just apparently religiously committed to a view that holds all existent things must be mathematically definable. (Oh, I've got news for you about Protons - they have mass, and they obey Quantum Field Theory, right? You can't count them as well defined until there's a quantum theory of gravity. Look up something called the Landau Pole.)
As to "Wittgenstein was full of shit" - you can't have read where I said, "obviously this isn't meant to be taken literally". You seem to have no grasp of what he was saying. (Or what I'm saying, for that matter).
Again: Re: "If their was a box with something in it that had no effect on the outside world then it has no meaning", talk about such things would not have informational content (just as you cannot convey information about "your experience of red") but you know quite well that red looks like something when you see it, but you can't say just what it is. Where does that leave your argument?
Have fun.
Indeed, as you say yourself: "a specific subjective experience is not part of the definition of consciousness".
Again, your high-school algebra only serves to illustrate my point. Where we can exchange information, we have to do it about "public" objects. (Or, if you like, the fact that we *can* exchange information is what qualifies the subject of the information as "public".)
Cf. this idea from Wittgenstein: if everyone had a "beetle" in a box, except no-one ever ever showed their beetle to anyone else, then the word "beetle" would have no meaning in our language. Obviously, this isn't intended to be taken literally, but is intended to show the relationship between meaning, understanding, and the existence of shared criteria for the verification of statements.
Really, this means that "my red" and "your red", insofar as we can actually talk meaninfully about them, imply the forgetting of the difference between them. We can only talk meaningfully (informatively) about the shared public concept of red.
If there were a way of encoding the nature of one's private experience of red, then the case would be different, and we could "compare reds" easily.
Since we can't, then (unless you can come up with a method; again: can you?) I feel justified in adhering to my claim that since private experience admits no exhaustive formal description, it cannot be accounted for by a functionalist theory, in which every element must be exhaustively formally definable..
Re: your PS. You're mistaking the cases of a doctor wanting a diagnosis, and a philosopher wanting an ontology. Very different!