In an earlier meditation, I made the rather outlandish claim that all processes of the brain were the result of the internal ontology of the mind, and the relations between nodes in this ontology. Today, I aim to quickly revise a few of my earlier points.
First, it is unlikely that the perception of one qualia such as color is defined by the relation with the neural potential for another. Simply put, it is absurd to reason that the presence of neurons that code for a specific qualia dictate the nature of another "qualia"/ information state of the mind if that state is inactive. How is an inactive group of neurons any different than if those neurons simply did not exist?
Yes, theses neurons add degrees of freedom to the potential states of the mind, but that is what they are: potential. There are an infinite number of potential states, it is just that some of these potential states are encoded for, while others are not.
Assuming that an inactive group of potential "bits" of information in the mind is no different than if the neurons encoding these bits simply did not exist, then we can either conclude that any current information cluster/ "qualia" is either relative to the state of ALL possible information states, in which case it is simply absolute, or just skip this step and state that information states are purely absolute in the mind, in terms of potential relative to the neurons encoding that information state.
There is another case, which is that the inactive neurons DO drive the active ones, to an extent, in which case we might argue that they aren't really inactive/have an electromagnetic effect. In this case, our relational claims WOULD hold, but there doesn't seem to be overwhelming evidence to substantiate this idea.
Regarding the current set of active neurons/ the current total information state of the mind, each substate/ subset of "bits"/ on neurons in the mind ARE relative to the other on bits. That is, the mind is indeed an intrinsic ontology dependent on relational interactions for consciousness, but this relational interaction is nothing more than the summation of all physical understandings of the system across different scales. One can understand the firings of synapses at both the electron level, the synaptic level, or zoom out and see the larger picture in a particular macroscopic brain region. It just happens that these permutations are a natural way of thinking about the local minimum of information processing that results in the singularity of consciousness.
Because of the context-maintaining nature of the neocortex and other areas of the brain, we know that the current activations of neurons in the brain is sufficient to encode information in context of previous time steps.
Additionally, given a certain activation of a substate of the mind (take a "qualia" like red), this substate acts relative to the rest of the ontology in a different way than blue or green. So even though the red substate isn't actively being compared to blue or green, the system is able to differentiate.
One might protest that this doesn't solve the classic blue strawberry problem. But in truth, it makes no quantitative difference if there were relational mechanics at play between all possible color "qualia" at any given time- imagining the color wheel, the migration of colors would affect the all the same, and so the relation truly isn't needed. One WON'T fundamentally experience blue differently if they are introduced to orange, because they have already learned blue. They WILL learn something fundamental about orange, which is that it exists.
The thought experiment from my last writing was greatly flawed in this regard. We must stick to the physicalist interpretation, else accept the fallacies and shortcuts of the idealist. We must stray from this, and accept that the mind and consciousness is the result of the mind now and not what it has potential to do.