Is my red innately your red
Quoting magritte
Interesting theory. Do you mean that those people innately
or is it that they
Or both?
Or is it some weaker claim about an innate ability to develop responses (or experiences) in such a way as to recognise a "rainbow" of distinct (and/or fuzzy) classes (of either stimuli or sensations) that may be different from our own rainbow? But independently of learning what to call them?
Quoting magritte
One at a time, please.
Open to all. Apologies for adding a word to the title, if it skews àny existing comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate?wprov=sfla1
The color red is innate to people with normal color vision, calling it red is a learned cultural convention.
Interesting theory. Do you mean that those people innately
- respond to (or otherwise experience) in a distinct manner roughly the same set of external stimuli that we call red, independently of learning the word?
or is it that they
- respond to (or otherwise experience) in a distinct manner roughly the same set of internal sensations that we call red, independently of learning the word?
Or both?
Or is it some weaker claim about an innate ability to develop responses (or experiences) in such a way as to recognise a "rainbow" of distinct (and/or fuzzy) classes (of either stimuli or sensations) that may be different from our own rainbow? But independently of learning what to call them?
Quoting magritte
At least all of the above.
One at a time, please.
Open to all. Apologies for adding a word to the title, if it skews àny existing comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate?wprov=sfla1
Comments (152)
There's an excellent essay on this very topic by Galen Strawson, called Red and 'Red'. It's available online, but it's very expensive, so not worth it. I wish I could find it online somewhere for free. I'll keep trying.
EDIT: Nevermind, found it. It's quite tough in some areas, but it covers the topic pretty well.
https://www.academia.edu/397789/Red_and_Red_1989_
Interesting question. John Locke developed some theories about colours and then how is in our vocabulary. He tried, somehow, explaining in a empirical thesis if my red is equals to your red.
I guess you would like the following examples to debate with and explain it.
Conclusion and personal opinion: I guess it is just upon us the criteria of red and their significance. Nevertheless, it is something we put rules on just to provide an order. Red is a very important colour because it reflects a lot of signs. We can say here and debate if it is equal but somehow has to be one red just to promote order
I think there may two overlapping aspects to experience. One is direct and lacking clear boundaries between me and other. The other is rational, reflecting, explaining, and naming.
This explains how I can tell you I experienced redness, but I wasn't conscious of the word. I remember the direct experience and channel it into metaphors. Like a dream that slips through my fingers as I try to explain it, I'm aware that something is lost as I try to put it into words.
Words are about remembering. Words shape what we remember because direct experience only has those blunt forms to flow into. Without the words, you'd experience red, but wouldn't remember it.
Seeing color is difficult to untangle from our philosophical perspective because we need to ignore physical, physiological, and psychological approaches to color as irrelevant to our direct model of reality. We only need to start with rational thought and its public language which above all the scientific minutia that might be raised as objections to what we do.
Having said that I'm not objecting here to any philosophy, I'm just pointing to a couple of very anti-intuitive yet on second thought perhaps obviously correct facts.
Physically we can only see light which comes in many shades of grey.
Our three 'color' sensors at the back of the eye record three slightly different black and white image frames every 1/25th of a second or so. One is brighter, more sensitive, in the higher wavelengths, one at the lower, and one in the middle range. Each 'pixel' records nothing but intensity in its range. Analogously, this is like using three connected black-and-white movie cameras, each with a different filter, RBG. The input is amazingly simple with subtle differences that are transmitted through the simplest chemical channels, much like copper wires, for complex computational processing by the brain.
What the brain does with this 'sensation' is 'perception'. The two are not distinguished in direct realism resulting in a simpler more manageable model.
So, external stimuli are only red if we say so, preferably based on universal, if not then cultural agreement.
If I did magnetic resonance or positron emission testing of brain function and found that my brain reacts similarly when I see something I call "red" as yours does when you do, would that answer the question? What if the testing showed significantly different brain response?
I don't know. Show me your red.
Is my red your red?!
Boom!
I'm a pragmatist. I paint everything white.
"Red" does not refer to any particular phenomenal quality.
There is no "my red".
Hence, "Is my red your red?" is a question without sense.
I'm glad you liked it. I find that it causes me some considerable mental anguish :rofl: It's like what the heck am I even talking about?
It's very hard to break away from common sense. But it's certainly fascinating.
If I cut both of you, and you bleed, whatever word, phrase, or as it really is "sound" you assign to the color we all see, is not relevant. The lone exception being if the conical rods in your ocular system (eyes) are deficient or otherwise altered.
Perhaps as a cultural or social custom certain colors are either darker or lighter as far as common appearance. Then, of course, "your" color, that is to say your idea and preconceptions of said color, will be either of a slightly darker or slightly lighter hue than mine. That is about all there is to it.
Alas, that article isn't about innateness at all, in what I took to be the implied respect of its possible role in determining the extension of 'red' e.g. the border between red and, say, yellow; but about, rather, the relationship between internal and external extensions, where both are freely acknowledged.
On the other hand, that may have been what @magritte meant, too. "Innate" as in, our agreement as to the external extension happening to result from a corresponding agreement as to the internal extension.
And @Galen Strawson's argument does bear on the presumed innateness of a "colour-space". Just not the issue of the alleged inevitability of a particular "rainbow", the issue explored on the wiki page linked above. At least, not clearly.
The different issues deserve separating. Happy to discuss the article. His internalist definitions are confusing, and I'm not sure it's our fault.
I guess you are quoting your thread, not Locke? By all means edit.
I think you are on the side of the extension of "red" (the things it refers to) being a recognisable class of things independently of learning the word? Would that be an internal or external class of things?
You're like @Galen Strawson in not only accepting internal sensations but also an internal experience (or experiencing subject) distinct (or varyingly distinct) from those sensations?
Do you think the red type of internal sensation is determined innately, and/or independently of learning the word?
Quoting magritte
In what sense of "comes"? Not "reflects", I take it... Unintuitive indeed. I'm willing to learn some physics, though.
Quoting magritte
In what sense "record"? In what sense "frames"?
Quoting magritte
Ok, and how universal, how innate?
Quoting T Clark
Choose a question?
Quoting Fooloso4
You're saying I can't, because it's private?
Or that we should compare samples of red objects?
Quoting counterpunch
So, innate?
I've read that article many times in the past, it was part of my thesis and yet I still have some problems with it, in that, I find that although I think he is correct that the word "red" does not refer to phenomenal, manifest experience, we assume that when such a word is used the other person understands us, and they usually do, as he admits.
We just can't prove that we are having the same experience. Then again, we can't prove almost anything. It's just a useful assumption about other people's experience. So I'm also confused, but I guess I like being confused at times.
Quoting bongo fury
I know it was not issued to me, but I'd just like to say, that I think it's determined innately. I don't think learning the word tells us anything about the experience.
Yes, all rainbows are fuzzy going from colour to next colour. But funnily enough (as you may have noticed) each colour can act as a buffer making its neighbours mutually distinct!
I'm saying there is no way to compare. Anything that you show me would be something that I see.
... and is that one colour, or one each?
Ok. So it's not that I can't show you? It's that you can't compare things you are shown? Not getting it.
Assuming everyone's senses are calibrated the same.. it's one color. Merely different names or words (sounds) to describe it. And even if they weren't, it still is the same properties of what makes what we can perceive as different colors.. so would still be semantics. Kind of like how a door can be both an entry and exit while still never not being a door. It would seem as if you or the viewpoint your espousing attempts to argue that if someone uses a door for a single purpose (entry or exit) it is somehow not a door?
Fair enough. I think innatism, which is usually assumed, and not even nuanced as indicated on the wiki page (allowing for a number of different sized rainbows) reinforces the belief in mental furniture. Contra Witty, of course. Also, more salient for me, Goodman.
Your views have been found acceptable, and you are free to go.
Goodman is fascinating, his Starmaking is very thought provoking to me, though I wouldn't go as far as Goodman does.
You are correct, innatism is not nuanced, I think, because so little is known. I don't see how one can get around it, unless one adopts a quasi Lockean or Humean approach to the mind. It's assumed to be true for all other animals: dogs, turtles, lions, etc. Why would we be the exception?
Yes, but with the nuance, you get to talk about the extension of the word as a (very) fuzzy set of externals (stimuli), in our case controlled largely by language.
Dogs have cones, but do they have a "rainbow" of distinct colours?
Quoting Manuel
Yes, paradoxical when set against his (seeming) eliminativism about mental entities (previous link).
Suppose you show me a sample of a red paint chip. I agree that this is what I call red, but this does not get us any further. What I am seeing, what it looks like to me is not something I can show you. We have learned to call this sample 'red' but this is as far as we can get.
We'd have to assume that what the science tells us about dog vision is accurate, in the sense that if we had some device put in our brains, that could simulate dog vision, we'd see as they see.
They can't see red, apparently: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/200810/can-dogs-see-colors.
Quoting bongo fury
It is. He was an empiricist of sorts. He even got so mad at Chomsky for believing in innateness that he stopped talking to him for life. And prior to that they were friends.
Innately. If you and I are looking at a chair, are their two chairs? One for each of us?
In front of you, or inside you?
Quoting Fooloso4
The other things it is (colour-wise) like?
Quoting Fooloso4
Because we can't see inside each other's head? But we can infer that what goes on in there is the same confusing of inside and outside that makes our own thoughts so interesting.
Oh, if only! A molecule of plague left untreated is as good as an entire world of it, removing circumstantial factors such as state of being and time. No, I'm in it for the long haul I'm afraid. And so are you now, whether knowingly or not.
And of course they aren't able to confuse their thoughts with pictures.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, Chomsky still talks very fondly. (In at least one interview, googleable. You probably read it.)
Quoting bongo fury
There is no necessary relationship between signifier and signified. The word for the thing, signifier, is not the thing itself, signified. Red is a thing; a particular wavelength of light that excites particular cone shaped nerve endings in the eye. We might have used another word for it, but that wouldn't make it a different thing. Experience of the thing that we call red, is the same for you and for me - unless you're colour blind, which about 10% of men are. Women, less so. In summary, I'm on the universalist side of the debate - and my 'cut the red wire' joke was intended to mock the Worfian cultural relativists.
Why then innately, though? Especially if you are likening colour classification to furniture classification?
:cool:
Sorry, I wasn't likening them. I'm just guessing that redness is hardwired. As I said, the memory of seeing red probably depends on language use.
The chair was a different question.
Yep, yep.
Quoting counterpunch
Ok... or: it's a class of illumination events (stimuli) that cause that kind of excitation.
Quoting counterpunch
Here's where I'm guessing your lack of nuance on this issue (that of the OP) is connected with a naive belief in internal sensations (qualia). I suspect the two problems can be treated together.
Quoting counterpunch
Yes, I was just checking that was your drift.
Thanks all :cool: bye for now
It's not a lack of nuance - it's a view that's informed by the evolutionary development of the organism in relation to a causal reality with definite characteristics, where the organism has to be 'correct' to reality to survive. It's also based on consideration of things like art, discussion of art, traffic lights and colour coded electrical wires - all of which suggest that "red" is an objective reality, experienced similarly by physiologically similar individuals.
I may not use big words. I avoid hippy dippy terms like qualia - like the bubonic plague they are, but don't presume that, because I seek to express myself in the simplest possible terms, that I don't know what those terms mean, and haven't fed such considerations into my conclusions.
Quoting bongo fury
Run Forrest, run!
This presupposes a problematic representational theory of perception. I do not see two things - the thing in front of me and the thing in my mind.
Quoting bongo fury
Suppose something happened to me when I was very young and my perception of color was altered. What I previously saw as red I now see as green. This happened long enough ago when I was young enough not to remember it happening. But I was thought to call this "green" sample in front of me "red". Although I see it differently than you do, there is no way for either of us to know that.
Some of the last thoughts by the metaphysical logician Wittgenstein were on the mystical nature of color. He asked the question whether color was imbued in physical substance, or an artifact of our perception, to which he felt there was no final answer. In his earlier thought, that would have been all that could be said. But in his later thought, the discussion of color becomes meaningful when we wield the concept like a tool.
While many have scoffed at the ridiculousness of considering something like color in so much depth, consumerism has indubitably transformed color into a commercial tool. One may only witness the incredible number of packages and brands distributing lipstick and eye makeup colors at the entrance of any local pharmacy, where once there were medicines and common household goods.
This proliferation of 'color for sale' inside the caverns of our stock houses replaces appreciation of the natural colors around us, and their sensitive purpose. Primary in this spectrum is the color of the chloroplast's photosynthetic mechanism. We are attuned to see this vivid green most of all, because that mechanism is how plants create and sustain all life on the surface of this planet. The hues around the green of growth are therefore most frequently easiest for eyes to see, and therefore dominated by peculiar evolutionary developments, such as flowers and fruits to attract animal life and encourage it, in the most bizarre forms of symbiosis, to propagate the seed of the sedentary plant. Yet no one complains of this massive act of domination, but instead considers it only with pleasure, for all the benefits that the plant provides to animal and human experience.
From this each culture has attached its own secondary associations. For example, in the West, scarlet is associated with danger, and forbidding of action; whereas in the East, scarlet is the color of parties and festivities, across cultural, familial, and political realms.
The subtlety of Wittgenstein's thought was to identify that association as being arbitrary, or rather, without logical necessity, yet still existent and powerful enough to be a causal agent. We are influenced by color, both by deep evolutionary forces, and by abstract cultural associations; yet the colors themselves possess no intrinsic properties to cause such influence. The colors themselves are no more than labels we apply to a physical phenomena (parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, in this case). When engaged in tantric meditation, we are encouraged to perceive beyond the direct physical manifestation, and to discover the strange and illogical passions to which such phenomena can bend our unconscious will. To the insights from such introspection the tantric gurus attach the names of Gods and forces to which they claim direct and irrefutable knowledge. It is the path of Wisdom to pass by such exaggerations without verbal debate; for if some person becomes convinced of a supernatural connection at the borders of perception, there is no verbal dissuasion possible from the delusion.
The irresolvable question to Wittgenstein nonetheless remained: we have the capacity to consider the nature of experiencing a color, such as the paradoxical nature of scarlet, without connection to any physical object directly, but merely as a property of itself.
The word 'merely' is in this case no diminishment, but rather remarkably, in some ultimately unknowable absolute sense, a humble portal to a deeper understanding of conceptual reality. In some respects, our understanding must always be limited, for, how much can we truly appreciate the different associations of any particular color to different cultures?
It even remains perplexing to those who share in communal joy, for example, this picture of haystacks by Claude Monet, even while others pass it by in disdain and scornful abjuration of those who find peaceful appreciation within it.
For any introspective insight we obtain, no matter how wise it may be to ourselves, remains only for ourselves, if we find no way to apply that insight for the omniversal influence of society.
From our insights we may choose sides, and argue for example that such concepts as color could exist without any contemplation of such concepts by any thinking being. If so, we may pause to consider what concepts remain yet to be considered. For if there exist concepts by themselves, not in the thoughts of any conscious entity, then there might remain concepts of reality as yet unknown by any person at all.
If you look again at Monet's painting, perhaps now the striking scarlets in the haystack appear in new shades of our imagination. In the distant hazy cottages we may infer, from this color, the joyful and industrious party of farmers embarked on celebration of their haymaking. We may infer, from this color, the warmth inside the haystack itself, lingering more slowly inside the straw bundles, during the twilights of sunset. Others may share the imagination and inference of Monet's intent. But within Monet's own silence, we find no confirmation of our speculation, and our insights persist only as hypothetical inferences of his intent. Those who claim some perfect understanding of reality may have deep contributions to make on its underlaying precepts, but for most of our knowledge of others' experience, the veil of postulation is too impenetrable to remove the bias of personal perspective.
We may also choose to believe there are no abstractions beyond those conceived by conscious entities. Leibniz argues that we see imperfectly that which is totally and perfectly understood by God, from which our own abilities of understanding and imagination propagate. Modern thinkers prefer to remove more majestic conceptions with Occam's razor, diminishing us further into the effervescent randomness of physical events.
Yet no matter how much the nihilists and cynics scoff, too many are struck by the beauty of material order and fantastic structures of rational thought, leading to mathematics and the physical sciences. Too many find something more in such as a painting by Monet; a sense of wonder, undeniable in strength, somehow demanding finer resolution of our own understanding, within the passing of days, and seasons, and eras of our civilizations.
Yes. Goodman took his own philosophy very seriously, maybe too much.
Mental furniture that would present us with mental objects has major drawbacks. The mind, like the outside world, is a complex chaotically functioning place out of where rational thought is only a small presentational fragment.
While the outside world is third person accessible and open to public observation and survey, the mind is private and we have no-one else to ask whether a feeling, sensation, motive, or attitude is really there at all rather than being a momentary illusion. We cannot directly see into our minds without some intermediary higher level conceptual modeling.
When I talk to the doctor over the phone complaining of sporadic leg pain, I have trouble relating that general sensation in words specific enough for diagnostic needs. Even at the office, the doctor must poke and prod for a couple of minutes until the problem is narrowed to the right strained ligament. Why is that? Isn't much of experience unavoidably social, conducted primarily through language?
BTW, aren't both Witt and Goodman attempting to solve the same problem of what can be said? Reformulating philosophy might not be enough to fill the gap between the mind and the word.
I would however suggest that the colours you see aren't different but are in different order.
The blue I see reminds me of waves and birds; if you were to describe your blue using mementos, how would you?
Not so often, no. But expecting a parallel situation in the different modalities is common enough in theoretical talk.
By "lack of nuance" I meant no disrespect guvnor, honest. Only, that
Quoting counterpunch
seems to assume without question a rainbow of internal, private sensations. Whereas even the universalist side of the linguistic debate (on the wiki page) considers the aspect of public negotiatiation (linguistic evolution), and an external subject-matter.
Pleased to hear more detail of your theory, whatever the terminology.
Quoting Fooloso4
Well, quite. The what thing in your what?
Quoting Fooloso4
Is this the beetle story?
Are our beetles innate?
You are definitely addressing innateness... possibly that of the semantics of red, rather than of the syntactic identity of red. Will get back to this.
Quoting magritte
Or can't because it's private, then? Not sure of your drift. (Tractatus?)
Was I anywhere close, here:
Quoting bongo fury
? By internal extension I mean the range or class of internal sensations (images, qualia) referred to (on an internalist reading) by "red".
Quoting ghostlycutter
That's intriguing, because it isn't necessarily the usual beetle-swapping story, even though your other remark suggests it might be, for you:
Quoting ghostlycutter
But, yeah... will get back to this, too. Thanks all.
I was responding to your question:
Quoting bongo fury
Quoting bongo fury
I don't think it is helpful to introduce one problem as the solution to another.
It is clear that you do not see that and why my original response was a philosophical joke.
Quoting ernest meyer
Colors are not physical phenomena, they are perceptual phenomena, and as such are the achievement of a constructive process. They are intentional acts , and like all acts, they produce a change of sense. Colors may not present ‘intrinsic’ properties on the order of qualia, but they do present us with the experience of a transformative construction. For instance, the perceptual act of color constitution is created primoridally as a black shape either emerging out of or receding into a dark background. You can demonstrate this yourself. Cut out a white cardboard circle, paint one half black , and then draw a series of black lines following the curvature of the circle on either side of the disk emerging from the black half. Then attach it to a fan and watch the appearance of red and blue.
This explains why red is often a metaphor for anger and aggression, and blue can represent calm and coldness.
Red is literally the sense of a shape popping out at us and blue is an appearance receding from us( and the other colors of the rainbow fit between these two
poles), even as these are just features of a motionless surface.
So our language, through its metaphors , is in fact indicating organizational characteristics ( aggressive approach vs passive receding) of the supposedly ‘private’ feel of color.
Color, like all other perceptions, is never just immediate ‘sense data’ taken from the world , but correlations , figures emerging out of and co-created by their relationship to a background bodily field. And one can see how perceptual correlations are intertwined at a higher level with the social field of interpersonal relations.
that is AN explanation. One of many. lol. Let me think about it, thanks for the thoughts.
Treating these as if they were mutually exclusive will get you nowhere.
Have a read of the Strawson article cited by and get back to me.
I don't see good reasons to assume otherwise.
Maybe in the future there will be mind-o-vision technology so we can put your experience up on a monitor and tell when this sort of thing is happening.
Would that change your philosophical outlook?
I did not mean to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. What I meant was, following Husserl and Merleau-Pontus, the ‘physical’ is a higher order derived product of constitution, and can’t be used to ‘explain’ the fundamental basis of color in perception. .
Strictly speaking, if you want to assert that mind is physical, you need to explain mind. Your audience doesn't need to show anything.
I saw an article suggesting that mind might be some sort of electromagnetic shenanigans. At one time, electromagnetism wouldn't have qualified as physical.
As long as you say physicality is a category that's in flux, but always basic to everything, you can call mind physical. That's not saying much, though.
So much the worse for phenomenology, then. It leads to things such as:
Quoting Joshs
...as if colour could not be measured, mastered and mathematicised; and
Quoting Joshs
...as if you and I did not overwhelmingly agree as to what is black and what is white.
Phenomenology starts in the wrong place and proceeds in the wrong direction.
That is correct. I won't be saying much. But there's already so much stuff about "physical" as opposed to mental or opposed to consciousness, that this little bit, is already something. Particularly when strands of physicalism claim that our experience is an illusion, not real.
I don't see why I need to explain mind, in order to say that mind is physical.
I've been quoting this a bit too much recently, but I think it's worth it one more time:
"It is said that we can have no conception how sensation or thought can arise from matter, they being things so very different from it, and bearing no sort of resemblance to anything like figure or motion; which is all that can result from any modification of matter, or any operation upon it.…this is an argument which derives all its force from our ignorance. Different as are the properties of sensation and thought, from such as are usually ascribed to matter, they may, nevertheless, inhere in the same substance, unless we can shew them to be absolutely incompatible with one another.”... this argument, from our not being able to conceive how a thing can be, equally affects the immaterial system: for we have no more conception how the powers of sensation and thought can inhere in an immaterial, than in a material substance..."
(Italics mine)
"...there [is] in matter a capacity for affections as subtle and complex as any thing that we can affirm concerning those that have hitherto been called mental affections."
- Joseph Priestley "Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit"
I have not presented a philosophical outlook. My comments were intended to point to the problem faced in asking the question. It you are asking whether your mind-o-vision would provide a clear answer to the question, perhaps; although there may still be problems with the identify of brain-states and subjective experience.
There is general agreement about the frequency range on the light spectrum for red. If we can identify specific areas of the brain that light up when we see specific colors, I assume, given our biological make-up that they would be the same. But if my perception of color had been altered as in the example then the area of my brain that lit up would be the area associated with green. Practically speaking though, this would not be a problem. I would still be able to identify colors and call them what everyone else does.
Quoting Banno
Then so does Wittgenstein.
Look. My sense of what a color is changes in subtle ways in relation to my own previous perception of it all the time , in response to changing contexts of experience , both social-linguistic and private. If I am an artist, the meaning for me of red may be extraordinarily differentiated , and change in all kinds of ways as a result of different projects I engage in. I am constant evaluating and attempting to validate
my precious understanding of the sense of all of my perceptions, so my own use of words for color and sound and touch that I use for my own purposes shifts subtly all the time.
In similar fashion, the words we share with others for color undergo all kinds of changes in sense, both those that members of a group agree on and those they don’t. Straws on babbles on about evolutionary and genetic determinants of color perception, but what matters for
the social consensus concerning the meaning of a color word is what sense of color is being meant and how we go about validating whether others are meaning a similar sense not. So for instance ,the word red can be used to pick out an object against a background.
For this task it is irrelevant whether my perceived red is the same as yours. All that matters is that we both consistently pick out the same object. Then there can be an aesthetic use of the word red. If my red is fiery hot, aggressive, angry and yours is the opposite, then the word red in this context isn’t very useful in capturing a shared understanding.
Strawson’s reminder that we may be meaning different things with the use of the same color word is sort of beside the point. First of all, how would we even know this unless we established some situation
to validate it? If we normally don’t force our shared use of words like red to undergo validation its because our pragmatic involvement with it doesn’t present difficulties. The word is doing what we need it to do.
If it came to be that an important shared understanding of a word sense began to unravel, that is, if it became apparent that each user of the word could no longer depend on other users to behave in previously anticipated ways in response to the use of the word, the. it would likely cease to be practical in its present form.
Aside from the various "how much does your mind weigh?" objections, let me give you my favorite argument:
If brains and minds are the same thing, then necessarily, if two people are talking about their minds, they're talking about their brains (and vice-versa). Ancient peoples were able to meaningfully talk about their minds and mental states, however, ancient peoples had no idea how the brain worked. The Greeks thought it cooled the blood. If brains and minds are the same thing, it follows that those ancient peoples who were meaningfully talking about their minds and mental states were also meaningfully talking about their brains and brain states, which is an absurdity.
I entirely agree with that. We don't have the capacity to explain mind with neuroscience. How do I link a post of mine? I explain this in detail, I believe.
If you mean the stuff physicists study, then yes, they are. Optics is a thing, as the lac-a-beards say.
Ah, I see. You're suggesting that the universe is alive and conscious of itself, at least some of the debris on the surface of this planet is. Pretty provocative. I'm all for it.
Quoting Manuel
Interesting. The physical-mental divide has its roots in medicine where it distinguishes broken bones from lunacy. When scientists started realizing that some mental ailments have a physical basis, it marked a great advancement that requires the very insight expressed there.
The "What's Your Ontology Thread" that I started. Specifically the 3rd post on the second page. I just don't want to paste the entire thing.
If that's what you're proposing, then I'm going to demand proof that there exists anything outside the mind, and of course you won't be able to provide any, and I'll assert that the only thing we know for sure is that at least one conscious mind exists and the rest is speculation. But I'm curious: why are you so sure physicalism is true? Because that's the way the world appears? What do you think is physicalism's strongest argument? It's predictive accuracy?
I'm no panpsychist if that's what you mean.
my previous understanding and use of the sense of all of my perceptions, so my own use of words for color and sound and touch that I use for my own purposes shifts subtly all the time.
In similar fashion, the words we share with others for color undergo all kinds of changes in sense, both those that members of a group agree on and those they don’t. Straws on babbles on about evolutionary and genetic determinants of color perception, but what matters for
the social consensus concerning the meaning of a color word is what sense of color is being meant and how we go about validating whether others are meaning a similar sense not. So for instance ,the word red can be used to pick out an object against a background.
For this task it is irrelevant whether my perceived red is the same as yours. All that matters is that we both consistently pick out the same object. Then there can be an aesthetic use of the word red. If my red is fiery hot, aggressive, angry and yours is the opposite, then the word red in this context isn’t very useful in capturing a shared understanding.
Strawson’s reminder that we may be meaning different things with the use of the same color word is sort of beside the point. First of all, how would we even know this unless we established some situation
to validate it? If we normally don’t force our shared use of words like red to undergo validation its because our pragmatic involvement with it doesn’t present difficulties. The word is doing what we need it to do.
If it came to be that an important shared understanding of a word sense began to unravel, that is, if it became apparent that each user of the word could no longer depend on other users to behave in previously anticipated ways in response to the use of the word, the. it would likely cease to be practical in its present form.
Everything I said about the social validation of color concepts applies to the interpersonal establishment of objective science. This is the point of a phenomenological analysis. Strawson is doing a kind of rudimentary phenomenology when he shows how shared concepts are built from intercorrelations across individual perceptual systems that transcend subordinate differences
Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were drawing an unspoken conclusion based on the notion that we might be secretly wired differently.
I wasn't suggesting that.
Ah, did not know that. I'd be interested in reading up on some of that literature actually.
Shhh. I want to keep my secret wiring a secret.
Yeah. I don't see a way around it. I'd like to if possible, but so far it's the best I've been able to come up with.
See On Certainty.
:razz:
There are many reasons why this is not the case, but let's just consider some of the obvious physical ones. Let's take a control wavelength of visible red light to be 700nm. The source that emits this light is is subject to a variety of media that will alter this light (atmosphere, pre-corneal tear film, cornea, aqueous, lens, and vitreous). Everybody has a different make-up of the previously mentioned media, therefore the 700nm wavelength light source is going to undergo changes (various aberrations) accordingly.
Once the photons (waves?) reach the retina, there are all kinds of changes that take place which nobody has any clue about (as there are eight layers of the retina). Once the photoreceptors transmit through the ganglion cell layer axons which accumulate as the optic nerve, there are many unknown processes that take place along the optic tract until the nerves synapse in Brodmann area 7 of the cerrebral cortex.
You folks are chatting about something that nobody has the faintest idea about. The interesting thing is that whereas its fairly easy to imagine the complexity of the visual process, this applies to all things, no matter how simple they may appear. Nobody has any clue about anything...thank God for small favors!
If there's a "my red" and "your red", then why not also a "my box" and "your box"? But then your body too would be my, 'your body', and now the whole too, as it is all perceived by me, would be 'my world'. But then my body with its sense organs are also part of this world perceived - so then, my senses cause their own existence? Or perhaps the world, my body, and everything I've ever known is some sort of on-board self/world model within an actual, physical human body (see: Thomas Metzinger)?
I think at this point the box of red crackers is just getting thrown at your head.
Luck loses.
Risky business.
Are the stars really there?
Ask Nelson Goodman. He has a few things to say about that.
Quoting Joshs
So I thought about it, and I think you have a point, but it's more complicated. there's three parts to it:
1) Object and Lighting Properties
2) Visual Processing
3) Color Associations
1) Object and Lighting Properties
As you observe, apparent colors change, but it does not need such a sophisticated experiment as moving objects. It happens all the time. A white balloon outside looks 'white' most of the day, but if I carry it into shadow, it looks grey. At sunrise and sunset, it looks red. [b]Color is an object's absorptive and emissive spectra COMBINED WITH its reflective, specular, and translucent properties, MODIFIED BY the color of the light falling on it.
2) Visual Processing
An object's apparent color is FURTHER MODIFIED BY internal processing we perform to modify brightness, detect edges, and detect movement in the visual pre-cortex.[/b] Our irises dilate and contract to adjust the light intensity to our optimal detection processing. Muscles distort the eyeball's curvature to focus on different distances. Early processing compensates for these artefactual contraptions. And we know some of the further processing by dissecting the ocular pre-cortex nerve structures. There is a 'crossover network very early in the nerve chain to enhance edges, for example. At some point in the visual processing, the effects of changes to the eye for different lighting and focal length are 'canceled out' so we are not normally aware of them. We make so many internal modifications in our brains depending on our lighting conditions that are so innate, you may not have consciously realized them, lol.
Most people don't. Van Gogh, who actually had very bad vision and wore glasses, painted stars with rings around them because that's what he saw through his glasses (he liked to paint when it was raining, or he was in a smoky room). Most people don't realize 'Starry Night' is Van Gogh trying to paint what he actually saw. Here's another Van Gogh example.
People who wear glasses, or sunglasses, adjust after a few days and stop noticing the artifacts. Another obvious example is that the image on the inside of the eye is actually upside down. People can wear glasses that make the image upside down before it reaches the eye, and adjust to it, and don't notice it after a few hours. That is to say, the processing is innate, but it is not completely hard-wired. We can learn to turn parts of it on and off.
3) Color Associations
There is an associative element to the 'meaning' of color. This may form at an early age. Suppose we are waiting in a dark room as a baby, and our mother comes in and turns the light on, then feeds us. Then when she leaves she turns the light off. This makes an association in our minds that bright light is good, and shadows are bad.
I believe such associations at a very early age explain much of what we personally 'feel' about color. As we grow older, we form more associations, which are more direct, such as red being 'danger' because of traffic lights and blood. But even those learned associations with world phenomena at later ages are already 'tinted' by our earliest perceptions when little meant sense to us at all, and that's what makes color such an intensely personal experience.
I think the grey strawberries illusion demonstrates that.
Nevertheless, we can't ignore the fact our sense organs are generic i.e. there seems to be no difference, at least in any obvious way, in re our sensory apparatus. Ergo, that my red is identical to your or other people's red isn't going to be as controversial as it should be for your question to be interesting at all.
That's an absurd statement. You need to study the human body.
Really? Are you reading this sentence?
If you look at the painting Starry Night you’ll notice that Van Gogh didnt just paint rings around lights, he painting a veritable network of streaming movement that includes not only points of light but integrated the lights with the blank sky and clouds. This complex river of movement was intended as a subjective spiritual and emotive statement, not simply a copy of external reality.
Quoting ernest meyer
Only the capacity to process perceptual relations is innate, the actual constructive process is entirely a process of perceptual learning , which is why sensory deprivation at a crucial juncture in development can cause permanent deficits in sight or other sense modality.
Quoting ernest meyer
I think there are more interesting and more explanatory models of perception than those which make use of basic stimulus response reinforcement.
Newer approaches think of perception as a form of normative and goal oriented interaction with the world. not simply the processing of data but embodied sensory-motor interaction with environment. The model of blind arbitrary associative reinforcement has been replaced by the idea that perception is anticipative and oriented toward fulfillment of expectations. It doesn’t like surprise or loss of what was anticipated. Thus, what is reinforced isnt simply what is causally associated with a surge of pleasure , but fulfillment of anticipation , completion of pattern, consistency of appearance, a relative match between what we see and what we expect to see. In short , perception is patterned sense making , not causal association shaped by simple reinforcement It prefers coherence over incoherence and chaos.
In this regard, the change from light to darkness that ensues when we turn off a light represents a loss that is intrinsically negative. Of course, we can say we love the dark , but that involves secondary positive features that emerge for us after the immediate change from light to dark. Similarly , I think colors have intrinsic hedonic ‘feel’ to them prior to secondary meanings that are shaped though more complex social interactions, and this feel , like light vs dark , is linked to what I described as their ‘popping out toward us vs receding away from us’. Linking the expression ‘Having the blues’ with the color doesn’t require complex social associations of the color blue but can be directly related to the recessionary character of the basic perception. One can compare these recognized felt qualities of color to the way temporal arrangements of musical
notes provideds us with a feeling vocabulary of music independent of our varying reactions to particular musical pieces. We all recognize that when an octave scale is played it constitutes a subject and predicate. The first 4 notes constitute a completed ‘subject’ phrase and the second 4 are the predicate.Put together as a song , patterns of notes connote beginnings, endings, sadness adm joys, and all variants of moods. How does it manage to do this in such a way that we all recognize the basic feeling elements of music even when we disagree on how good or bad a particular song is ? Through consonances and dissonances that remind us of the rhythms of fulfillment’s and lack of fulfillment’s that perception and cognition in general present us with.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that this capacity to recognize feeling in music is either ‘innate’ or just a concatenation of reinforcement contingencies.
I don't lol. Musical patterns are learned. Recently they found a songbird species that had forgotten its song
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56417544
Have a nice day )
You have to say it three times to make it true. So copy and paste it again.
On re-reading our discussion, I don't see what it is, if anything, that you are objecting to in either Strawson or Wittgenstein.
I personally choose to deny the existence of qualia, mostly because mind body philosophy can get dense and produces the qualia of confusion in me.
As mentioned in another thread, consider the concept of lifeworld, which is maybe where phenomenology wakes up from its lonely dream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld
:point:
It cannot be used to 'explain away' perception in an eliminative manner -- one cannot say on the basis of one's perceptions, that perception is an illusion -- but I see no reason why one could not provide a reasonable account of biological processes involved in color perception, in an affirmative manner: "Perception works, and this is how it works, based on my perceptions" may be a circular argument but not self-contradictory.
I guess what I’m saying is that we always have a certain account in mind when we think about what perception isor how we talk about the processes that precede something like perception historically , like the biological evolution of organisms, or something to which they can supposedly be reduced, like physical
processes. So for instance to say that the perceptual can reduce to the biological and the biological can reduce to the physical presents us with a problem because we are not simply shifting our focus from one level of perspective to another, we are moving between accounts which I think are incompatible with each other. Why are they incompatible? Let’s take physics and evolutionary biology. Darwinian theory ground biology on a fundamental principle of the unidirectionality of time. Physics, meanwhile is still mostly in thrall to the notion that time is a human invention that is irrelevant to the understanding of physical
processes. Only now are there some physicists , like Lee Smolen, who are insisting that physics needs to learn from biology and transform itself into a radically temporal account. I think there are similar problems in attempting to reduce perception to a biological account , unless that biological account has learned from constructivists like Piaget, Maturana and Varela.
I think this approaches the solution.
Conveniently, red is the color of blood. It's striking for us, nature decided so this color should cause such sensation.
Now, we also know that colors are just different wavelengths.
So yes, I'd agree that the answer for this matter needs us to separate rationalization from what we understand so far about nature (physics).
In either China or Korea, colour red is symbolises blood, therefore death.
They write dead person's name in red ink. It is taboo writing living person's name in red ink.
Exactly. A non reductionist account, an account of the mind that gives justice to it rather than try to eliminate it, is not logically impossible, whereas a reductionist account of the mind would be self-contradictory
For me the self-contradiction is best focused on language as a substitute for mind. For instance, why do we assume that there is one mind per skull? Why grasp the brain as a unity in the first place? Other ways of thinking are vaguely possible, and the mind-matter distinction itself has an inherited, cultural aspect. On the other hand the unreality of theory (of language) is more bluntly self-contradicting, along the lines of 'this sentence is meaningless.'
EDIT: started a thread on Wittgenstein's Blue & Brown book which touches on this issue. I invite you to join.
If we substitute the ‘I’ or ‘self’ for mind , then I think the issue of a unity comes down to whether perspective, interpretation and ‘ for-me-ness’ are fundamental features of any experiencing of a world. One would then have to examine how phenomenologists treat this idea of a primordial ‘self-awareness’ in such as way as to avoid the Wittgensteinian accusation of solipsism and internality (beetle in a box). I think they succeed at this, and in so doing enrich Witt’s account by integrating it with perception and temporality.
I am of two minds about this.
I have a question. If a person believes redness is essentially a linguistic trick, how does that work?
If the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", doesn't the child need to have an experience of redness to associate with the word?
Why 'experience'? I can see why you'd need something to happen in the brain to attach the word 'red' to for next time, but why need this be an 'experience' (by which I assume you mean conscious)? Surely it could be any brain activity at all. The firing of some neuron in the v4 region would be sufficient.
Do they need to be?
Maybe not , but then its ‘lonely dream’ may be misunderstood by those who are wont to attribute it to an idealist solipsism.
Husserl wrote this a few years before his death, in the midst of his so-called ‘life world’ period:
“The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you,
his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)
“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a
particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental
intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life
proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185
I have been arguing that this ‘solitude of the ‘I’ for Husserl is somewhat akin to the mineness of experience for Heidegger’s Dasein , not as a reified idealism but as a more intimate way to understand the perpsecrival
nature of experience than through the Witt’s language discourse
Yes, I agree, but why an 'experience', was my question.
I don't know what you mean by linguistic trick. Red is the name of a color.
What is an experience of red? How does she know it is an experience of red? By comparing it to another experience of red? Does the toddler also have an experience of apple? Are these two different experiences?
I would say the toddler sees this thing she learns is called an apple. She at some point also learns her colors. Being told the apple is red might be part of that process. It might go something like this: she is shown various things - "red wagon", "red shirt", "red crayon", "red apple." Rather than an experience of red I would say she is shown things that are red.
She just needs to associate the word with something. What do you think that something is?
She learns that the word is an abstraction?
When the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", how does she know this does not mean the object pointed to is called red instead of apple? If she already knows "apple" she might be confused or even laugh at the joke of calling an apple a red. If she already knows "colors" then she might know that you are not pointing to the apple but the color of the apple.
The color is not an abstraction, but it not the object, not the apple.
I think all of this would come from spontaneous exuberance like what we might see in a baby lion learning to leap and attack. Something innate is being activated. In us, it's the capacity to symbolize.
Once learned, it can't be unlearned to see how how it came to be, though.
This (massively oversimplified) model...
A certain wavelength of light excites the retinal ganglia, which fires a part of the v4 region, which fires parts of Broca's associated with the word 'red', which creates a steeper action potential in the neurons that would make the mouth say the word red (but not enough to fire them)
Meanwhile a desire to make the right sound (to please mummy) fires some neurons which also create a steep action potential in the neurons that make the mouth say (or imagines saying) the word red.
Those neurons now fire (having two dendrites excited), the word 'red' is spoken.
The child is aware of a desire to say the right word, will generally do so in response to a certain wavelength, but no 'experience' of red is necessary.
The relation between 'red' and the word is carried by the ventral stream, the toddler's intent is only to say the right word. Only signals from both streams will be enough to get the word said.
Yes, only they do not think they are mimicking, they are speaking. I think they may understand Quoting frank
I think they may understand far more than we give them credit for.
Cool. So later, while the child is playing with toy soldiers (as all american children do), her brother asks for the red soldier.
Now it works in reverse. The word causes the child to seek the wavelength.
This is wrong btw, but I'm asking if it's what you believe.
You're probably right.
Nice quote! Looks like things are messier than I implied.
Quoting Joshs
Fair enough, though I must say it's hard (for me, at least) to get clear on this 'mineness.'
We do have that metaphor, and doubt doubles, so it seems the metaphor suggests an exception to complacent single-mindedness.
To me it seems contingent. It's convenient that there's one 'soul' or 'self' per body, because bodies have to be trained to wipe their asses and stop at red lights. Which of the fourteen souls that share a skull gets prosecuted for date rape? Which one is a captain and which one is a private?
I agree it is contingent. But as a temporal flow its contingency unfolds as a synthetic unity from moment to moment. Not a soul or self as something unchanging throughout the contextual transformations of sense but a self remade each moment as new variation of itself. Self as a pragmatic ‘in order to ‘ , an always implying, anticipating beyond itself. The world always matters to me, is significant to me , is relevant to me in a new and particular way, but is always recognizable in its mattering. There is an experiential intricacy built on change but much more intimate than the arbitrariness of socially conditioned languaged sociality.
I like much of this, but I still find the unity at least possibly contingent. I very much agree with the Heideggerian last sentence, except that 'me' becomes complex here. I like what Dreyfus writes about the 'who of everyday dasein,' which is something like a 'one' who is 'we.' But even calling it the 'one' might be inheriting too much, taking too much granted. It's our form of life to be trained to talk about ourselves as single personalities animating bodies. With conjoined twins, we recognize two individuals who are entangled bodily, presumably because they have their own heads. The 'mind' and its 'divine spark' are in the head. The idea of a brain transplant confuses us. Why couldn't the world always matter to a plurality of minds in a single body, matter to 'us in here'?
I'm not saying that I can't be convinced that the unity is necessary. I just don't yet know a knockdown argument.
Galen Strawson argues that the self is always different from one moment to the next, and there is nothing outside of the larger social norms to unify this subjectivity as an identity over time. In this view he is not far from this those say that self is nothing but a social construct, and that intersubjectivity is more fundamental than subjectivity , which is only a temporary position within a socially constituted field.
This may be what you mean by plurality of minds in a body. Marvin Minsky talked about a society of mind , and Francisco Varela described a groundlessness of being with no solid self. But then there are the discourses on the embodiment of mind, taking their cue from Merleau-Ponty. Mind is embodied in organism, organism is embedded in world , and all three interact reciprocally such that a dynamic autonomy of self-organization is evinced. This autonomy provides the organism with holistically organized aims that give it a normative character. This argues for a notion of self as reflection of the ongoing normative consistency of organismic directedness.
:up:
This is basically what I'm saying (and find also in other words in Witt's 'Blue Book.')
Quoting Joshs
This is what I was hinting at with Dreyfus on Heidegger's 'one' or 'who of everyday dasein.' Really it's two different but related points. Meaning is public or between 'individuals.' This endangers a traditional view of a single mind that gazes as privately possessed meaning-stuff. To be able to talk is (roughly) to be primarily an 'us' rather than a 'me.'
Quoting Joshs
:up:
That's the 'softwhere' I'm talking about, a groundless society of [s]mind[/s], groundless in the sense that its quasi-foundational quasi-elements are more deeply habitual than others. IOW, the non-foundation or fragile foundation we have is contingent social practices, especially dominant conventions, such as the rule of one-legal-person-per-skull.
Quoting Joshs
I like embodied mind and embedded organisms, but I don't find autonomy clear in this context. I tend to associate it with people who can be more or less autonomous. How does the world fit in except perhaps as a background or extended body?
BTW, my Witt thread hasn't taken off yet. The stuff we are talking about fits in well there, so I invite you to join.
If there is no dynamic aurnonomy , what makes an organism a dynamically functioning unity? Is it just a loose conglomeration of modules, or is there a functional unity to it , as Piaget argued?
Let’s say an organism is organized hierarchically, and even the most trivial aspects of its functioning are authorized or guided by more superordinate structures. Let’s then say that as the organism interacts with its world it assimilates a new aspect of the world to itself but at the same time accommodates and adapts its structures to the novel aspects of what it assimilates from the world. In sum, the structural organization of the creature as a whole is changed in every interaction with its world , but as a variation on a gradually changing theme. If this were not the case, then every interaction would produce an entirely new organism. it then would no longer be a living system but a rock.
One could look at mind the same way , in terms of a hierarchical organization that functioning as a unity , and that doesn’t ‘exist ‘apart from its being changed by the world that it is exposed to every moment. So it really has no internality to it. It is just a pole of self-world interaction. What I am pointing to here is not a solipsism but the exact opposite , a different and more radical notion of the social than that which believes in the coherence of the idea of the social as interpersonal. I’m my view interpsonal means something differ to every participant in it , and this isn t because a mind resists the social by being a box of inner stuff. On the contrary the so-called linguistic interpersonal notion of the social is a fiction. More precisely , it is a derived abstraxtion because it begins too late. One has to begin with radical temporality rather than language as Witt conceives it. Radical temporality reveals a more intimate and intricate beginning of the social, as both Heidegger and Derrida argued .
OK, now I think I see what you mean. Autonomy draws the boundary. I was stuck in the more honorific sense of the word, as the sort of conscious goal of an individual.
This also flows into my point about the convenience of the single self. The body is a natural 'first boundary' (or second, if the skull comes before) for us to draw.
In the following remarkable passage in response to a question from Thomas Baldwin concerning
the relation between the alterity produced by temporality and the alterity of linguistic sociality, Derrida appears to argue that the way in which time makes me other than myself from moment to moment is a more fundamental kind of sociality than that of linguistic intersubjectivity. I see this as a crucial point , and is certainly to my paprika concerning the unity over time of the self. It is a unity of transformations, but what unites it isn’t some dominating idealist center but the opposite, an utter lack of the arbitrary and polarizing force that is implicit in Witt’s and social constructionist models of socially.
Baldwin:
Anyone who reads Derrida having already familiarised themselves with the debates in English-language philosophy that we associate with Wittgenstein 's 'Private Language Argument' is bound to be struck by the similarities between, on the one hand, Wittgenstein' s critique of the possibility of private ostensive definition, and, on the other, by Derrida 's critique of the 'myth of
presence’. But then one difference must equally strike a reader; namely, that whereas Wittgenstein's argument focuses on a contrast between the private and the public, Derrida's focuses on a contrast between the present and the absent. So my second question is this: is
differance, this 'originally repetitive structure' of language, essentially public? Is some involvement with others essentially implicated in the use of language that counts as 'differance' ? There are suggestions in Derrida to this effect. For example he writes: Intersubjectivity is
inseparable from temporalization taken as the openness of the present upon an outside of itself, upon another absolute present' (Derrida 1973, p.a 84n). But, as this passage indicates, for him it is the 'temporalization' of meaning that carries the burden of his argument: it is the ecstatic potentially repetitive structure of differance that bursts the confines of anything merely present
through its essential reference to that which is not present. But is there here a distinction - between other times and other minds - without a difference?
...is the involvement of others in differance something essentially derivative - dependent upon the ecstatic structure of temporalization? Or is it absolutely fundamental in a way that might connect with that Hegelian conception of self-consciousness that is utterly dependent upon involvement with others?
Derrida’s response:
“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.
Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here. I quote you: “If one thinks back to the
Wittgensteinian debates again, it is clear that there are substantive issues concerning the alleged normativity of meaning and the role of a community in sustaining the practice of a language-game which involves other minds rather more than other times. “ I would immediately
agree on the level of the normativity of meaning. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn’t call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .) This is obvious. And, again, I would say that it is true even for animals, for animal societies. They form a community of interpretation. They need
that. And some normativity. There is here some 'symbolic culture‘.
But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other
now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely
other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the
living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it
knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.”(Arguing with Derrida)
Nice quote. I read 'indissociable' as not giving priority to one or the other. I like the critique of presence and punctiform 'now.' In some ways, philosophy has to keep beating back a mathematizing-idealizing-reifying tendency of the 'wax' to cool and solidify. Successful metaphors harden into cages. New metaphors depend on a dead context for traction.
Well, there's no point in me pursuing it if it's wrong. What's the latest thinking on the relationship between the ventral stream and language?
:up:
What? So you're just going to leave me hanging with regards to the right process? Come on man, don't be such a tease. Cite me a paper at least...
The grey strawberries illusion shows that ”red” doesn't line up with some portion of the em spectrum.
How does it do that? I mean, I can see how it shows that ”red” doesn't always line up with some portion of the em spectrum, but that's a different claim altogether.
The only fear you should have is that I release you before you finished wanting some much less interesting moment with whoever you wanted- like now- if you said yes. If something can replace you so that when you left you begun in such a way it still was you existing in our, the stayers, eyes, you can go I will send you. I plan to send you and whoever when you work this out, but, in a position as such there is more knowledge to gain.
Right.
We're still no closer to the way in which my description of a route from retinal ganglia to speech production was "wrong", which is, obviously, the bit I'm most interested in.
What do you mean when you agree that the strawberries look red? What does it mean for a thing to have an appearance?
Quoting Joshs
Exactly. A non reductionist account, an account that would start from the innate, pre-theoretical assumption, axiom, presupposition or a priori -- however you want to call it -- that our capacities for observation, perception and logic help us notice patterns, and thus give us a modicum of understanding and control over things and events. The non reductionist account would then use these capacities to explore and explore further the world, until such a point when one could propose a well-evidenced, logical theory for animal perception, how it emerged in evolution, how it works, what's its bag of tricks, and why it is indeed so useful to us.
(IOW, the exact opposite of what most materialists have been busy doing)
Such an exploration and validation of perception by itself may look circular, but I rather see it as an outward spiral, that starts from a kernel of intuition and explores the surroundings by going around in a spiral.
What it means is only that I've conceded that 'Red' is the correct word to use for the strawberries. Why I conceded that might be different in different contexts. some times it might be traceable back to the fact that some 700mn photons hit my retina, other times it might be traceable back to a memory of the colour of the objects matching that shape. There needn't be one cause. We have thousands of neural streams happening concurrently and the system is designed to only fire (move on to the next node) when there's sufficient triggers, so invariably there'll be more than one reason why it did so.
Quoting frank
Same issue. A thing's having an appearance means only that I can recall to mind an image of it to describe the details of. I could mange that recall in any one of a hundred different ways, it could be triggered by any combination of hundreds of preceding neural events.
That's not the explanation for the grey strawberries illusion (if it was meant to be.) Your brain is actually generating the experience of redness without any red light. It's pretty cool.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, so our conflict is about wording. :up:
How are you supporting that assertion?
- To clarify. All you've got by way of self report is that they appeared red in retrospect. By third party all we have is that the person selected the word 'red'. If we look at fMRI we'll see activity in v4...
...none of which amounts to 'the experience of red'.
here
Quoting Isaac
Remembering how things looked is a kind of experience.
Quoting Isaac
That's correct.
Some people believe there are infinite colors, not so, just ones discovered.
Right down to the rubillionth ant, the color black always annoyed me!
When we're talking mass amounts like the atom, some combination is in order to prevent infinite color regress, here here.
That doesn't support your assertion. All such illusions have the same properties I described above. What I'm trying to get across is that there are numerous pathways which may lead to behaviours indicating we think images (or parts of them) are red. An actual strawberry may take one route, a greyscale picture of a strawberry may take another, and a greyscale abstract image a third.
Quoting frank
I didn't say 'remembering how things looked' I said 'appeared red in retrospect', they're not the same thing. One implies that some mental event happened 'the strawberries looked red' which we then recall. There's no evidence for that. The other describes the construction of a narrative, post hoc, to explain the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Let me see if I can help out here. Undoubtedly one could link phenomenal appearances, memories, dreams, fantasies, etc to neural pathways stimulating clusters of neurons. But this reminds me a little of Skinner attempting to pair every word in the dictionary with a specific reinforced response. I don’t think Isaac is incorrect to reduce perceptipn to activation of arbitrary groupings of neurons. This will provide useful information depending on what one wants to know and how deeply one wants to understand it. But I think the reductive route offers a kind of explanation and prediction that misses something vital about both sensory perception and language, and that is that meaning of all kinds involve intentional acts that arise out of nested contexts of significance for the person. Events occur for people into personal contexts that imply forward and thus co-define and shape
what occurs into them. Neurons or clusters of neurons never function in isolation from ones bodily system as a whole. They belong to larger webs of implicating relations linking sense modalities to other sense modalities , embedding these within superordinate affective-intentional aims and purposes.
So let’s talk a look at what it might be like for a little girl to learn the color ‘red’ from this non-reductive vantage. You’ll notice that it doesn’t t contradict Isaac’s
account but rather enriches it.
So the mother is trying to teach her daughter the color red. What is the background context foe this from the girl’s perspective? If she hasn’t learned any of the other colors, then she would first have to learn the category ‘color’. Otherwise when she acknowledges seeing the color red when her mother points to it , she may simply be recognizing color in general. Of course ,an even more fundamental context here is that the girl is a participant in a a language community, that she is making a decision to respond to a request from her mother , etc. It was suggested that her motivation for correctly picking out the right color is she wants to please Mummy. Perhaps , but any number of motivations may also be in play , and these motivations are not extraneous to the meaning of the task and even the meaning of the word ‘red’ for her.
For instance , children have a voracious curiosity , as evidenced by the obsessive asking of the ‘why’ question.
This is an intrinsic motivation, to be able to anticipate events beyond the immediate present, to be a sense-maker. Even before the mother’s attempts to teach color
words , the child likely has pursued numerous explorations on their own of color, how different colors form a rainbow , how some colors make her feel bad and some good , She may already have come up with her own words to describe her experiences with color.
But beyond or before all these subjective variations in meaning of color , is there a specific set of neurons that fire when exposed to a specific wavelength?
I had described in an earlier post how the perception of color can be produced on a spinning half black half white wheel, where ‘red’ is a black line coming out from a black background and ‘blue’ is a black line receding into a black background. I suggested that color may be fundamentally this ‘popping out at me’ of warm
colors and ‘receding away from me’ of cool colors.
In other words , rather than just an arbitrary bunch of neurons firing , color would be a contextual
movement being perceived, just as binocular vision is a comparative relation between two sources of input .
And color as a whole must itself be a corrected rod it of more basic intentional correlations. Color implies the seeing of a surfaceIf one does t yet know what a surface is , then color will not emerge as a coherent sense. To construct a surface perceptually, one mist construct lit of the every changing stream
of sense impressions stable objects that remain as what they are when we move our eyes or head or body. I doubt if someone someone blind at birth and only attaining vision later in life would see color at all , at least not initially.
Even if one were to claim that somehow the behavior of this apparatus produced a color wavelength out of black and white, it wouldn’t explain the more significant feature that red vs blue corresponds to , is produced by , opposing intentional contexts. The colors are what they are to us because they are DOING SOMETHING meaningful to us, in relation to our bodily comportment, not just resting in themselves as arbitrary sensations. And this meaningfulness of color implies into the motivational and goal-oriented contexts that I described above.
So what may the girl have learned of the parent succeeds in ‘teaching’ her to link the word ‘red’ to some feature of surfaces that both of them see similarly enough to differentiate from other colors? It wouldn’t just be a simple association between a word and a perceptual experience. It would be a whole situation that the girl learned, and the elements of this situation can only be artificially separated out into discrete items. The situational meaning would include the girl’s sense that something was important to her mother , what it was, and why it was. The situation would include the girl making a decision to comply , not comply , comply happily and with curiosity , or with indifference. It might involve excitement on the girl’s part that there might be a new achievement she could share with friends and maybe even teach them. When the mother begins pointing to objects and attempting to show that there is something common to all of them that forms a category, even before the girl connects her perception of red with this category , she may already know what it is like to learn a new category because she has played such games before. There is also the possibility that she never thought of red as a category. Perhaps for her each experience of red is so uniquely connected with that particular object that it never occurred to her to see it as something common to different objects.
So in sum, linking words and sensations is as complex and multivaried a social and psychological act as the perception of a senation itself.
Cool comparison.
Actually, the scenario depends on a and b having perfect pitch, in the sense of absolute or non-relational pitch sensitivity or recognition. Otherwise, the alleged intuition,
Quoting Galen Strawson
would be hard to credit. Most of us are oblivious to the absolute pitch of sounds, and don't hear them to be (e.g.) numbers of pitch-steps higher or lower than others, except in context: relationally, indexically. For most of us there couldn't be a musical equivalent to, "ah, I see that your internal post box images are the colour of my internal banana images": at least not a scenario that is equivalent in the way Strawson wants to examine. Unlike a, we can't conceivably "hear middle C through b’s ears" because we can't recognise a middle C at all. (Me learning.) It's as though we aren't able to paint, nor later identify, our post boxes as red, but only as, possibly, redder than a (possibly green) banana we happen to have with us. If (and then I was going to say "we" but I'm too aspirational now) ordinary mortals have internal pitch sensations they don't map at all to non-relational values of sound frequency.
We might seek an analogy between relative (relational) pitch and visual colour differences or contrasts. That's a fascinating prospect, despite an obvious disanalogy: we can't begin to identify or compare 'intervals' of colour. And we can only begin, with scant hope of consensus, to even order colours. Without, that is, the intervention of a psychologist inferring from patterns in our failures to discriminate and order. But with pitch we can, unaided, form interval-based orderings (tunes) that translate recognisably to different positions on a scale (play in different keys).
A better parallel with colour differences and contrasts is, perhaps, pitch interval differences and contrasts. Since the better parallel with colours is pitch intervals. The steps on a musical scale may be conceived as displacements from a home or key pitch. Which isn't to deny the perceptibility of their displacements from other steps as well (perhaps encouraged by the theoretical influence of equal temperament?). But is merely to make it plausible to compare the scale-steps, so conceived, with colours. Scale : rainbow.
But all of the comparisons here, true or mistaken, involve what strikes me as a crucial relationship: an interaction between relational and non-relational clues to identification of stimuli; the tension between atoms and whole; between trusting wavelength and trusting context. Bleeding into the identity of a colour: its barely distinguishable relations with and position relative to others. Bleeding into judgements of higher and lower pitch: the haziest sense of interval magnitude.
Maybe "tension" and "bleeding" are metaphorical enough to, if warranted, explain belief in the occult: in "what-it's-like-ness", "internal sensation", "subjective experience", etc. Then people (e.g. ) would be right to connect these things to murky or hidden associations: with other colours, as well as variously coloured things. Belief in a "content", "quality", "character", "experience" etc. of seeing a coloured patch might be some kind of understandable confusion about the interaction of relational and non-relational clues to its identity.