Perception
Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?”
If there is no mind to experience and conceptually designate “red” does red ever aquire an inherent existence independent of a third party mind?
In my personal opinion all phenomena occur as experience, and experience is merely a mental form of consciousness. Awareness/consciousness is as vital to the existence of all phenomena as a canvas is to the existence of a painting.
If there is no mind to experience and conceptually designate “red” does red ever aquire an inherent existence independent of a third party mind?
In my personal opinion all phenomena occur as experience, and experience is merely a mental form of consciousness. Awareness/consciousness is as vital to the existence of all phenomena as a canvas is to the existence of a painting.
Comments (1455)
I am being very explicit with what I mean by the word "red", which is the opposite of equivocation. I'm saying that the colour red, as ordinarily understood, is the mental percept that 620-750 light ordinarily causes to occur, and that this mental percept exists when we dream, when we hallucinate, and when 620-750 light stimulates our eyes.
Any other use of the word "red", e.g. to describe 620-750 light, or an object that reflects 620-750 light, is irrelevant, because the relevant philosophical question is "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive [colour] property that they do appear to have?", and this question is not answered by noting that we use the word "red" in these other ways.
Quoting apokrisis
Not all naturalist thinking is limited in this way. Joseph Rouse’s radical naturalism is one example of alternative paths that are being taken by new materialists.
Thanks for the paper. In modern quantum theory they make as fine distinctions as scolastics of old. How many angels can fit in a quark, so to speak. The thing about Many Worlds is that people wonder, regret, and dream of what "could have been" a lot. Humans want it all, however it is that they get it i guess
I look at it almost like multitasking, maybe that's not the word I should use...but I kind of relate to what I can only describe because lack of better words, as "living in my head" as I let things get to my head. Subjectively speaking from my own life experiences as ME, when I am in this mode it seems to effect my performance. I tend to shut down under pressure, I used to cry easily if someone yells too scary and loud, or if I got in trouble at school no matter how stupid, I avoid confrontation, I have insane stage fright, but its not that I couldn't learn to control myself better, its that for some people I think the mind does bring outcomes that are undesired and inconsistently messing with the performances or messing with the way I end up handling a situation. I am still too worried about what people think, but have come a long way. So proud.
Where was I? Ah yes...the damage!
I think some times we can/ought to be able to "undo" or "redo" or "take-back" a decision or act before the damage is fully done or run its course. Sometimes the damage or "outcome" or "result" that comes from the decision, choice, act is not...it's too late. [Now, now, where could it be? where could that take place, a choice that is take back able? where is it still not too late? Hm? Ill give a hint. Think: privacy of your mind] :wink:
Those undesired or unnecessary outcomes stemming from questionable behaviors* or as I like to call them "unnecessary necessities" that bring results within a certain time frame whether it brought quick response results or a lag...that time clip is of interest to me. When the triggered response shows up in the body we can track whether it was instinct, intent, learned skills, reasons, beliefs, desires, maybe life they lead (lifestyle, identity, are you lost or found?) that leads to the an act, choice, decision that caused the damage to the line of no return...
What unit are those outcomes even in and how can we smush it in with time constraints or clips to get anything useful out of all this? Perhaps, it's not worth it.
BUT I still wonder if this is measurable...a limit, maybe? There is a line, i think, that when its crossed, we can't turn back. The damage that was done, consequences are seemingly immediate (to our physical bodies and selves at least).
Freak accidents should be tied into this somehow, with that time is important as it is always somehow constraining when its in decision-making moments and time it takes for that choice to bring the bad outcome, how quick the results play out from when the thought first stemmed in the mind, how much was thought out and how long did it take to act on that thought...and where did that thought come from?
I don't expect you Gregory, or anyone to answer or get into all this here...though I'd love to go back and forth all night. And could.
You had an interesting take on Many Worlds, a bit relaxed for me sure but like I said when I replied to the quote I wouldn't disagree. I joke when I say this but I am jealous of that, a relaxed take. As I am the opposite in character. Intense...
Anyways, as I was relating to these people you speak of stuck in "could have" in a somewhat similar way, I think but not exactly. I just definitely get what it could be like, what it means, how to get out of the stuck pattern of thinking that's keeping us stuck. Its tough and especially considering environments, circumstances, abilities,moods,will? etc...that do play a role into thinking patterns, some times.
These decisions could be linked to lifestyle and social life. Even personality, behavior, patterns, themselves in the individual can effect each other differently. It's not so easy to pin-point, I am realizing but I think doable. I am worried if any of this would be worth it, I could be unbothered if it wasn't...
Its like we constantly have to remind ourselves and work at it with self (in privacy of mind) and I think its important to not be fully recluse. Being alone in this process is quite...melancholic. With support from another that cares about you in a place of knowing that they have your back, no judgement, mutual trust and love. That you can be that back to another, is just as important and the lesson that also needs to be learned. Its the give and take...love and be loved. Is this fairness or balance? I don't know which works better, does it make a note worthy difference? I sharpened my pencils....
I imagine this data hard to capture though as its difficult to link what effects what. As once it comes to the subjective level of each our own lives, experiences, beliefs (if any-religion), circumstances, positions, abilities, etc. it could be tough to test given how inconsistent our skills to get reliable intel, gather it, and determine weights and values. It may be tough to communicate what exactly is going on, from either end...Unless honesty is a verified step that comes after the initial aware or unaware results, that focuses or filters the A or U into new folders for focused results...
Time can be a very hard thing for people because we only have so much of it. If we want everything to be perfect, we have to accept that for every mistake there can be an equal or greater victory.
But Rouse’s concern here appears epistemological whereas I was talking ontological commitments. Rouse wants to place the scientific image within some wider pluralistic space of materialistic images. I am instead asking about the best possible version of that scientific image. What would it be like to bring our scattered scientific understandings of the world into one coherent image of natural being?
A difference would likely be that the image in our minds has to be so abstracted and mathematical that it restructures our own habits of thought. We would be “picturing” a dynamical pattern of growth and symmetry breaking. Our understanding would be more kinesthetic in being about the movements of forms coalescing in spaces. A holistic geometry of relations rather than just some kind of cause and effect narrative.
If you are thinking in terms of pure structuralism, everything drops away except a stabilising architecture of relations - the constraints that produce the freedoms that compose the constraints in the one single triadic web of action.
And there you would have it. How reality hangs together according to what science has discovered. It’s deep structural logic. The symmetry that imposes itself on all possibility.
Getting to that level of the scientific image is what anyone who really “gets” the geometry of nature right in their heads is doing. But it is not then an easy thing for people to share and compare. That is one reason I would always offer Peircean semiotics as an anchor. And systems science in general. The dynamical structure of nature is a form not to be seen as if from the outside but something to become a lived and embodied experience.
It has to be an image in the internalist kinesthetic sense of always knowing which way to move so as to flow with the flow of the natural structure.
No. The opposite of equivocation is using one and only one sense of a key term in a logical argument about the ontology of our referent(s).
Well, that remains a contentious matter. The 'red part', huh?
:brow:
There are common elements within each. The mental percept that 620-750 light ordinarily causes to occur is but one. It does not follow that seeing red, dreaming red, and hallucinating red are equivalent in every way. There is no distinction between four different 'things' according to what you've argued(claimed and reaffirmed when later asked).
It does not follow from the fact that seeing, dreaming, and hallucinating red all involve the mental percept that 620-750 light ordinarily causes to occur that there is no difference between seeing red and the percept under consideration.
There are physical, non-physical, subjective, objective, internal, external, private, public, meaningful and meaningless elements. All three kinds of experience differ from one another in their elemental constitution.
You've no ground to speak in such ways. The consequences of your claims - if true - is that you cannot further discriminate between those four things. What is the difference?
Nothing.
The experiences consist of mental percept. They also consist of auditory functioning. We do not conflate hearing a sound with the sound. We ought not conflate seeing red with red, dreaming red with red, and/or hallucinating red with red.
Those are very different in the constitution. They are existentially dependent upon one another.
Seeing red pens is an experience that always includes red pens, whereas dreaming and hallucinating them does not - cannot. That's one elemental difference. The pen.
There is no red pen while dreaming and hallucinating red pens.
So? I'm talking about colours, not pens.
There is a clear distinction between wavelengths of light and the corresponding colour. We can certainly conceive of a variation of this image with the colour red on the left, the colour violet on the right, but the wavelength staying as it is, with the shorter wavelength on the left and the longer wavelength on the right. Such could even be the case for organisms with a different biology, and so a different neurological response to the same stimulation. We even see examples of that with the dress, where different colours are seen by different people despite looking at the same screen emitting the same light.
And the fact that we use the adjective "red" to describe tomatoes because they look to have the colour on the right is completely irrelevant. They look that way because they reflect that wavelength of light, and our biology just happens to be such that objects which reflect that wavelength of light look to have that colour. That's all there is to it.
But the colour just is that mental percept, falsely believed by the naive realist to be a mind-independent property of the tomato. Physics and neuroscience has taught us better.
:yikes:
Not only that, but colour is far more complicated than your simple description. Our eyes are never receiving one simple wavelength of radiation from an object. there is always a mixture to be discerned. Mixing is the art of the artist. A red object is not simply an object emitting or reflecting light photons only at some specific point between 650 and 700 nanometers. And the dress is a fine example of the problems we may encounter dealing with the mixing of radiation.
Take a look around your field of vision, and notice all the different colours, flowers are great and may make you wonder how evolution produced such an array of beauty, The human eye is capable of discerning millions of different colours, and this is not a matter of there being an infinite number of points between 400 and 700 on the number line, it is a matter of mixing. On top of all that mixing of photons with different wavelengths (if "photons with different wavelengths" makes any logical sense), there is the matter of non-mixing, the boundaries we see.
At the edge of each object there is a boundary, and there is background radiation, foreground radiation, radiation coming from the right and from the left, with an endless number of boundaries in a common field of vision. The capacity to perceive boundaries is the most fascinating aspect of the sense of vision. Because we can discern such a huge number of differences in the various mixtures, a slight change to that mixture is evident as a boundary. The boundaries give us the impression of objects. But what exactly is a boundary? A non-dimensional point of difference? A one-dimensional line of difference? A two-dimensional angle, or three-dimensional corner of difference? Of course it's not an angle or corner at all, it's curved in some way. And what lies behind that boundary, to the inside of the object, where light doesn't seem to be able to penetrate?
Quoting apokrisis
Th epistemological for Rouse is secondary to the ontology of agential materiality, what he calls ‘intra-action’. This ontology erases the boundary separating nature from culture, the manifest image of thought from the scientific image of nature. His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes.
Sure, and I don't really know enough about Peirce to engage these things. I tend to read Aristotle through Aquinas, although I recognize that in many ways Aristotle was the better philosopher.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, but Logos also seems to be something different from both chance and necessity. Nevertheless, theism tends to be averse to the notion of fundamental flux, and this is at least one data point where classical theism clashes with a Peircean (and also an Aristotelian) model.
Quoting apokrisis
But it is interesting that Peirce was not opposed to Medieval thought in the same way that modern science traditionally has been. For example, he read thinkers who his contemporaries were largely ignorant of, like Aquinas and especially Scotus. For this reason theistic semioticians like John Deely relate to Peirce in an entirely different way than they relate to scientists bound by modern thought.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, and it does not seem to be as agonistic and reactionary as many of the forces at work in modern science.
Quoting apokrisis
As I understand it, there are competing models that do not make such a strong use of the Darwinian principle of randomness or random mutation.
But considering the idea that the most effective possibility will win out, are we saying that what is known in a prior way to be most effective will in fact win out, or is "most effective" being defined as whatever ends up winning out? It is that dallying with necessitarianism which strikes me as odd, especially as a keystone for interpreting increasingly large swaths of reality. Teleology is becoming more and more acceptable, and yet the telos seems to always be up for grabs. Mechanistic science avoided the whole problem by turning a blind eye, but once teleology is admitted the idea of an ordering Intellect or Mover becomes more plausible.
That’s still just epistemology.
Hence the “God of the gaps” issue. My position argues from the point of view that even chaos can’t help but self-organise itself into some form or order. Chaos negates itself. Therefore order emerges.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes. When learning about Peirce as a group of biologists and complexity theorists in the 1990s, the Peircean scholars making sense of his vast volume of unpublished work were mostly theology researchers. Deely was one.
Quoting Leontiskos
It depends how much information we have about the situation. If you know that the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism is the simplest possible chiral form, then it is not a surprise that the Big Bang did not stop evolving until it arrived at that final simplicity.
If you know that the chemical reaction with the most bang for buck on the planet Earth is the redox reaction of carbon-oxygen bonds, then it is no surprise that life on Earth kept evolving until it not only could harness this reaction but even set up the planet to have its Gaian balance of oxygen and carbon.
So the basic entropic race drove the Cosmos towards an ultimate symmetry breaking simplicity, and Life, as the negentropic response, was driven towards its maximum negentropic advantage.
The goals existed in dialectical fashion. And they forced Nature through a whole set of unlikely hoops so as to arrive there.
Quoting Leontiskos
Science earnt its keep by being the epistemology that delivered a mechanised world. Teleology could take a back seat as technology was the pragmatic point. Humans existed to supply the point of a world of machines.
But when it comes to now incorporating telos into science, the mathematical inevitability of topological order or dissipative structure is how that is happening.
That could be seen as a thumbs up for Platonism, divine immanence, idealism, or whatever. Or it could be seen as the arrival of a structuralist understanding of Nature that rides on the back of stuff like Lie groups, thermodynamics, path integrals, and Darwinian selection.
Quoting apokrisis
And I suspect Rouse would consider Peirce’s view of the scientific image as an epistemologically-based first philosophy:
Of course. He wound things right back to raw phenomenology so as to get going again on a more solid epistemic basis. That is how he could then commit so wholeheartedly to an ontology where the Cosmos is the evolutionary product of "the universal growth of concrete reasonableness", its laws "the development of inveterate habit".
How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.
A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism.
This is a good summary....
Quoting apokrisis
i certainly agree that the way that we characterize the genesis and nature of human reason and logical understanding serves as a model for our understanding of the world. If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, then this will define our understanding of the world. But how would
the universe look to us, and how would we approach the structure of its reasonableness, if we adopted a post-sovereign epistemology?
But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight.
Your quote aims at the usual fashionable social “good” of pluralism. But that seems to be “reasonable” only as an epistemic claim based on an endless capacity to doubt. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole.
So all this talk about struggles and boundaries seems only to come from a presupposition about pluralism and its need to overcome totalising discourses, particularly ones such as pragmatism which seem intolerably successful. Just too good to be true.
But let’s first address the actual epistemic difference that separates those who claim there is always going to be a reason one can doubt - hence all possibilities remain forever in play - and those who instead say being reasonable has to be founded in a willingness to hazard a guess and live pragmatically with its consequences. That is the one best way to proceed when it comes to knowledge.
Well put
The light without color?
Earlier you forwarded the claim "there is no color in light". The visible spectrum is light. If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum.
Yet you offer a rainbow called the visible spectrum.
Colorless rainbows. Earlier I was pointing out that possible unacceptable logical consequence. Here it is in it's glory.
Light is just electromagnetic radiation, which is the synchronized oscillations of electric and magnetic fields. Colour is not a property of these fields. When it stimulates the eyes this causes neurological activity in the visual cortex, producing colour percepts. Just like chemicals stimulating the tongue cause neurological activity in the gustatory cortex, producing taste percepts. Colours are no more "in" light than tastes are "in" sugar.
Your naive projection has long since been refuted by physics and neuroscience.
Are you saying that there are colorless rainbows?
Light is unlike chemicals.
Correct, they are like tastes. They are mental percepts caused by neurological activity, often in response to sensory stimulation.
It's not clear what you mean by the question, but I'll quote Newton's Opticks:
Rainbows look coloured because the various wavelengths of light cause various neurological activity in the visual cortex producing various colour percepts. This is the scientific fact.
It follows from what you wrote. I showed that.
Quoting apokrisis
The chair certainly produces predictable constraints and affordances in response to our engagement with it, but the meaning of ‘chair’, that is, what those constraints and affordances entail, are the result of neither of a practice-independent reality impinging itself on us anor world-independent conception forcing itself on the world. Rather, the pragmatic use defines the sense of the reality of the chair, and as our practical engagements transform themselves in tandem with the world that they shape, the meaning of a pragmatic use context, and the empirical and theoretic concepts built from it, changes its sense. Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.
Quoting apokrisis
We are already intimately and actively embedded within a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. Truth and falsity relate to the relative amenability of aspects within those intelligible patterns of engagement. We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions.
Be equivocating.
Quoting creativesoul
These comments are inconsistent. The first states the visible spectrum is light. The second states the visible spectrum is biologically created. The first is a direct realism claim. The second is an indirect realism claim.
An internal experience of light can be experienced without there being any external light source. These are called phosphenes and they can be created predictably with electrodes in the brain, so much so that they can assist those with damaged optic nerves to "see."
https://www.pennmedicine.org/departments-and-centers/ophthalmology/about-us/news/department-news/vision-scientist
The point of this is that it is empirically proven that an internal, subjective experience can be evoked by direct brain stimulation. This means that you cannot conclude anything about the constitution of the stimulus from the experience. The smell you smell is the product of stimuli upon the brain, so the perception is entirely the creation of the brain.
You can no more say the electrode is a dot of light than you can say the tree is green.
So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences".
Quoting Joshs
And so? Didn't I say that Peirce started to get things right by beginning over from that givenness and then carefully examining its logical structure.
Quoting Joshs
Again, I just shake my head as you describe the Bayesian Brain at work. We come at the world armed with all the habits of anticipation that were found to be required to cope with that world. As babes, our phenomenology is just a blooming, buzzing, confusion. From experience, we learnt to pragmatically organise this into a known world behaving in predictable ways. Like little scientists, we formed the stories and lived by their consequences, continually growing and learning, updating our habits of belief to the degree that practice required.
You are not saying anything I wouldn't say here. But you are avoiding the point I made. And that is that your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted.
Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me. Or certainly, self-contradicting.
The first paragraph shows the consequences of adding Michael's earlier claims to known fact.
The second paragraph is also known fact. It makes no difference to me whatsoever which one counts as "direct realism" or which one counts as "indirect". I'm neither. At least, I reject the idea of color as a biologically independent entity.
And yet... you and Michael are doing exactly that.
Quoting apokrisis
How does Peirce understand the relation between model and what is to be modeled? Would he agree with the following from Rouse?
Quoting apokrisis
Rouse follows Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger in dissolving the basis of Cartesian doubt. Descartes’s understanding of the basis of skepticism, the gap between the perceiving subject and the perceived world, is based on unexamined presuppositions concerning the nature of subjectivity and objectivity which produce this gap (and this doubt) in the first place. We always stand within one social framework or another of practices of meaning, and the concept of doubt simply doesn’t arise at the level of the framework as a whole. It is only within the structure of a particular contingent framework (language game, paradigm, form of life, constructed niche) that we can doubt particular facts and talk of truth and falsity.A language game provides us with the presuppositions that make doubt or validation intelligible. When we move from one language game to another, it is not a question of doubting or invalidating the previous game, but of entering into a new world. What constitutes reliable or unreliable belief is only determinable within each game, but does not apply to transitions between them. Did Kuhn say that Newtonian physics was replaced by modern physics because the former was an unreliable form of belief, or because, while both were reliable in their own way, the latter solved a greater number of puzzles?
Quoting apokrisis
I’m perfectly comfortable agreeing with Foucault and Deleuze that the subject is an effect produced by social processes of subjectification, and that points of view are only intelligible within larger shared practices of meaning.
Strawdogs and ad homs... wonderful.
Colors corresponding to wavelengths of light...
Are there colorless rainbows?
I responded to this above. If Newton doesn't answer the question then you need to clarify what you mean by it.
I'm not concluding anything from my experience. I am telling you what physics and neuroscience have determined. I accept what the scientists say about the way the world works, not what some armchair philosopher says.
Quoting Michael
My question is: Why are humans such suckers for foliage?
Reds, yellows, oranges, browns. What do we get out of seeing the foliage? Is it a sign for the opportunities to come? Is it the weather we love? Is it the the photo op? Is it the beauty? Is it nature, showing us this beauty? Do we realize that?
The changing colors of leaves in the fall, for example, show their aging life phase. BUT what are animals seeing that we are not equally concerned with, or aware of, as we sip our pumpkin spice chai latte's, living our best lives under the foliage? Posing for "pictures or it never happened" to share this moment with our fans, they will see on our socials how we show off our meals and our acts in the day via Shoutbox or Instagram! It signals to people different messages than what it signals to animals, either way its updating information in our brains...were learning to "know" something more from this experience...both ends.
For animals, the leaves changing colors is a sign for the changing climate and what the next move is. Observing these changes can predict a lot about the family, tree, and the environment.
Another important part that color attributes to in nature is involved in a dynamic process occurring with plants, fruits and veggies and their color changing process. As fruits ripen, the degradation of chlorophyll reveals other pigments that were always present, and additional pigments are produced. This process is signalling ripeness to animals, which in turn aids in seed dispersal. This could show how color changes are not random but serve a purpose seemingly specific to the survival of certain species in nature.
I don't like the taste of browning bananas, I like them while they're green!
Our perception of color is influenced by sensory and neural mechanisms, but the role of color in nature points to an external reality that transcends individual perception. I'm aware that while color seems to have an objective basis in nature, it doesn't fully resolve whether colors exist independently of perceiving minds.
So she thinks, so she knows... Then of course to remain silent in irrelevance as one would anyways, is fine because no one wants to see it. No one wants to hear it. Or them. They are too ugly, words are too sad, and the lives are too painful. Not a single soul needs it. We also don't need to see what is, only what works for us to survive and reproduce. The consequences are colorful and your behavior is telling. It's called a "red flag" for a reason...we want more from things than we ought to think about in silence, in acts that never come to light. The thoughts, ideas, dreams, memories. We want answers before we are fit to handle and when we are willing to accept what those options are, it may be too late to experience again.
How rude of me to think, "Hide all the ugly people, I dont want to look at them." Ha! But how nice of me to be honest with my preferred....taste. Remember, the Lipstick Effect? How colors and visual appeal have deep-rooted significance in human behavior.
And also, as humans, our conceptual frames are socioculturally expanded. We are involved in some grander language game. Joshs born Aztec is very different from Joshs born in, say, 1970s Ohio, or 12th Century India.
But do you now agree that sociocultural multiplicity – that pluralism, that degree of social freedom – is still the product of pragmatic constraints? That it is a way of life that works in the usual organismic sense of being able to repair and reproduce the fabric of its being over some longer run? As a set of habits, it has proven itself properly tested against a larger ecological reality?
So to claim plurality as itself "natural" can only be true within the framework of pragmatism.
One could of course claim that plurality is natural as there is something else that transcends the pragmatism of being an ecologically-constrained organism. For example, a target beyond "this world" in the shape of a divine imperative or some moral absolute.
But is this the argument you are making? And if not, are you content with an ecological constraint on the freedom of our language games and ways of life?
We can try stuff out within those limits? We can do our best to imagine ourselves a better world by more deeply understanding the world we were already thrust into with some set of genetic habits.
We probably do agree this far. Except a lot of those with a utopian concern for the current state of human society don't really seem to want to factor in the environmental constraints on the expression of our social freedoms.
I would argue for example that social justice becomes a nice to have when the question is how do we avoid ecological disaster.
That is why I focus on the "superorganism" analysis of the human condition. The one that places our collective trajectory in its larger thermodynamic context. Our everyday choices must be seen to be making pragmatic sense within that long-run conceptual frame.
You're contradicting yourself at nearly every turn, in addition to the fact that your 'argument' leads to the absurdity of you claiming out loud, for everyone to see, that you do not conclude anything about stimulus from your experience all the while insisting that there is no color in stimulus.
Notice that this is not the conclusion of your account, but a presumption.
Quoting Michael
No, you aren't. They have 'determined" no such thing. You are treating the presumption as if it were a conclusion.
You are taking the special case in which for the purposes of experiment researchers restrict "seeing red" to having a "mental percept of red" and taking this to be what "seeing red' is in every other case.
Quoting Michael
An imagined naive realists and mind-independent properties. You haven't explained what that might be. Is your claim that "The tomato is red" is true only when someone is looking at it? So there are no red tomatoes in a box, unobserved? One can never order a box of red tomatoes without threatening metaphysical collapse?
Does the mildew smell nauseating when no one is smelling it?
[Quoting Banno
There is no nauseating mildew in a box unsmelled? One can never order a box of nauseating mildew without threatening metaphysical collapse?
Quoting Banno
Someone hasn't. That's for sure.
But making me feel nauseous isn't like making me see red!
Yes it is.
Was this one?
:yawn:
Seemed that way too me too
I'm reporting what the science says.
Opticks:
Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway:
Vision science: Photons to phenomenology:
Color:
I'm not. I'm saying that our everyday, ordinary conception of colours is that of sui generis, simple, qualitative, sensuous, intrinsic, irreducible properties, not micro-structural properties or reflectances, and that these sui generis properties are not mind-independent properties of tomatoes, as the naive colour realist believes, but mental percepts caused by neural activity in the brain, much like smells and tastes and pain.
The relevant question "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?" is not answered by engaging in a linguistic analysis of all the ways that the word "red" or the phrase “seeing red” are used, and so your continued insistent to appeal to language is a fundamentally flawed approach to the problem. The only people who can answer the question are physicists and neuroscientists. Armchair philosophy is useless in this situation.
I genuinely think this thread has made it clear that the discomfort with this (apparent) reality is all that lies behind htis debate.
Well, you're reporting what the writer says. If the author is a scientist, then you're reporting what a scientist says. And they... and we... are theorizing from observation/experiment. Not all scientists agree on the theoretical extrapolations you're presenting. Theoretical physics is philosophy. So, it seems to me that you're reporting on both, the experiments, and the philosophical explanations thereof. Those are flawed as well, as I'll address shortly.
First...
Here's what I'm saying: The biological machinery under consideration - in complete and total absence of external stimulus - is inherently incapable of seeing, dreaming, or hallucinating anything at all, colors notwithstanding. Seeing, dreaming, and hallucinating colors takes more than just the biological structures.
Second...
I'm not disagreeing that hallucinations and dreams happen even though there is no typical external stimulus present. I mean, hallucinating and dreaming red pens, never includes a red pen. It is only after one has seen color, that can one hallucinate and/or dream that color. It is during dreams and hallucinations that the same biological structures behave as if they were seeing a red pen, not the other way around. There is an existential dependency at hand here. It's important.
Third...
If there were no cake, then there could have never been anyone smelling one. If no one ever smelled a cake, there could never have been anyone dreaming or hallucinating cake smells. Likewise, if there is no creature capable of smelling cakes, there could have never been cake smelling, even if there were plenty of cakes being baked. It a complex process, replete with necessary elemental constituents.
So...
It takes more than just biological machinery. It also takes more than just cakes. Hence, to isolate only one necessary element in a complex process is to lose sight of and/or grossly neglect the fact that it's a process, and that process consists of different things, all of which are necessary for the emergence of seeing colors and smelling cakes.
You want to ignore the fact that dreams and hallucinations are existentially dependent upon veridical perception, excise the biological machinery from the rest of the process, and then claim that all three consist of only that machinery.
Depending upon one's notion of physiological sensory perception, it could sensibly and consistently be said that smell and color are both inherent in distal objects. Newton came close until positing "sensation". Colored things possess mind independent physical properties that are inherently capable of being seen as colored by a mind so capable. I think Searle holds something like that, but I'm sure his is more nuanced.
I personally reject the idea that color exists at all in the complete absence of both/either colored things and/or creatures capable of seeing color.
Can you perhaps lay out which two aspects you're referring to, in terms of the scientific understanding? I cannot see any room for the weird "pain in the toe" aspect in any scientific reading I've seen (I don't think!).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not really, but I think pain from sensory input and pain with no sensory input are the same thing from different sources. The experience is the same. Seeing a shadow in the exact same shape as an actual image (which you can also 'see') might be analogy here. Maybe a slightly better one would be apprehending something's shape due to touch, rather than sight.
In any case I take it that you're trying to get out of me an admission of difference between pain the "Sensory input" and pain the "mental experience". I could probably be pushed. Onward...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This does not seem true to me. I think I have covered this earlier. I'm unsure I will go back over it, but a pretty darn clear example is BDSM behaviours or combat sport. For some, "pain" is literally an academic label for something they don't shy away from whereas for most, that is the case.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I just think this is obviously wrong for reasons above, and elsewhere. I am less inclined to be pushed now :P
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not (on my account/view).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is (on my account/view) a different concept. Emotional pain, it seems to me, is actually a different but related mental experience. Perhaps, a bad one and hte unpleasantness in this concept seems to inhere, but I think you are wrong to conflate them and transitively apply this to "physical" pain. There are blurred lines - being emotionally struck can cause nausea for instance, but is that pain? I should think not. Discomfort. Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This, for me, seems to indicate exactly the opposite and represents an aberration in a physical signalling system. THe expereince remains the same.
I told you already. The two aspects are known scientifically as the sensory aspect of pain and the affective aspect of pain. If you research those to names you'll find plenty of information.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763408001188
Quoting AmadeusD
I was talking about the unpleasantness of pain. This is what makes it so that we cannot say that pain is simply sensory. Did you not read my example of sweetness? The taste of "sweet" is not defined as a pleasant or enjoyable taste, and sweet is simply a sensory experience. But if "sweet" was defined as a pleasant sensory experience, then it would be in the same category as "pain" which is defined as unpleasant.
Quoting AmadeusD
The definition of pain in my OED is: "1a the range of unpleasant bodily sensations produced by illness or by harmful physical contact, etc.."
Notice, "unpleasant" is the defining aspect of pain, sensations which are unpleasant. If you do not acknowledge this, then you and I will always be talking about different ideas when using the word "pain". And we' will be forever talking past each other in any discussion like this because I will refuse to accept the contradictory idea of pain which is not unpleasant.
That does not actually seem to be the case. This seems a floated theory on how to get around some esoteric aspects of pain, so to study them. The paper is speculative and philosophical, not scientific. You can tell they are way off track, without even havign access to the full paper (your link does not provide this):
" How can one obtain an account of the experience of pain that does justice both to its objectivity (and thus its similarity with exteroception) and to its excess of subjectivity?"
The former is a misnomer. They are trying to conflate pain with damage or stimulus. They are clearly not the same, and so conflating same as aspects of the 'same' thing is erroneous. I see how this approach will be very helpful in treatment of pain, but it does nothing for our discussion best I can tell.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. No it's not. I have given plenty of examples which violate this definition. It is inapt. Pain is not inherently unpleasant. If that were the case, the examples i've given would not obtain. I think what you meant to discuss is discomfort. I tried to lead you here... Discomfort is inherently uncomfortable. Pain is not.
The pain is in the limb, not the brain. The brain plays a role, but not as the location of the pain. It is the locus of one's awareness of the pain. Hence, after having already evolved the neurological pathways of having experienced pain in the limb, they are primed to act that way again, despite no longer having a physical extremity located where the pain seems to be coming from. It's akin to neurological muscle memory. Biological structures acting as they do... mindlessly.
:zip:
And yet
Quoting creativesoul
Obviously, pain is not in the limb. That para honestly felt like trolling... Is it?
Quoting creativesoul
These are aspects of visual world of a perceiver. If you're suggesting, in these terms, that colour inheres in the Rainbow... hehe. Nope. Try changing your terms around to be idependent of perception. Could make some headway..
I can't make you pay attention to the whole post. Hallucinations of red pens never include red pens. The pain feels like it's coming from where the limb used to be for the reasons already explained in the parts you edited out. The phantom pain is the result of having already had pain in the limb. It's what is happening when the neurological structures are acting as if there is pain in the limb.
It does not follow that no pain is located in limbs.
Pots and kettles.
'Felt like'???
Or projection, perhaps.
Nice red herring, strawman, non sequitur, etc...
I made the case a few posts back. See for yourself.
Yep - Michael is begging the question and then falsely appealing to "the science." This has been going on for a long time now.
---
Quoting Hanover
This poor argument is at the bottom of so much confusion on TPF. I have often considered devoting a thread to it. It is the basic modern error of thinking that Cartesian anti-Pyrrhonism represents the only kind of knowledge.* The modern skeptic will characteristically identify some absurd possibility, note that it cannot be apodictically ruled out, and then conclude that we have no reason to believe it is not the case. This is sophistry. To give an example, we could cash it out this way:
The error relating to (1) is always the same, and the corrective is to note that there are different kinds of knowledge and evidence. Knowledge and evidence are not an all-or-nothing affair. Aristotle pointed out 2500 years ago that the one who is intent on applying a criterion of mathematical certainty to every subject is fundamentally confused about the nature of knowledge.
This is of course related to Lionino's thread on Cartesian dualism:
Quoting Leontiskos
One approach to this modern form of skepticism is Pragmatism, but I think there is a simpler answer. The simpler answer is that one does not require perfect certainty in order to have knowledge. I do not need to have perfect certainty that I am not dreaming—whatever that is supposed to mean—in order to have good evidence for believing that reality exists.
* Burnyeat shows that Descartes was self-consciously interested in an inflated version of Pyrrhonism, which we might now call modern skepticism.
It strikes me as a performative contradiction, given the fact those purportedly holding the first claim as true have been incessantly making claims about the constitution of the stimulus.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yup. As far as I'm concerned, one need not be certain at all in many cases. Certitude is confidence. Knowledge is not. One can be unshakably certain and wrong just as one can be very hesitant and right, to put it roughly.
I like AJ Ayers answers to radical skepticism given the awareness of our own fallibility. It does not follow from the fact that we have been wrong about some things that we've been wrong about everything. It does not follow from the fact that we cannot know everything about something that we cannot know anything about it.
Yep, I think this is surely correct as well. Similar to what I said earlier:
Quoting Leontiskos
To place the idea in an image: someone in Michael's group might claim that, via the scientific findings of a microscope, they have proved that the human eye does not perceive reality. But without the legitimacy of the human eye the findings of a microscope have no value, for the microscope presupposes the human eye. More subtle iterations of this fallacy are percolating throughout this thread.
Yes, it does actually. In any case, we can actually jettison this entire part of the debate (I am well aware of what I see as erroneous arguments earlier in the thread from yourself - i am not coming at this in bad faith (you may think bad reasoning; so be it)). The disagreement is deeper than an issue of 'pain' and of reducibility, and demonstrability.
What we can do is simply ask:
Where is the pain? If it is in the limb, you can show me.
But you cannot show me pain.
You can show me potential stimulus for pain.
That's all. I need not take this much further to be quite comfortable that your position is not right (yet..)
Further, in this passage:
Quoting creativesoul
You are making a couple mistakes here(on my account - read all as such. I am not here to make absolute claims. I am, and will continue to often be wrong):
This is plainly wrong. An Hallucination, if it is of a red pen (so called), then that is what is present in the hallucination. Your position relies on your position. Which is to say, it is tautological. IFF hallucinations do not include anything they purport to represent (I take this as incorrect for reasons askance from this particular issue) then your point is extremely apt, loud, and clearly made in such a way I could not dispute it other than on grounds of linguistics (though, I wouldn't. That would be clear to me). But, it seems you rely on that there is a strict difference between the image conjured by the mind when eyes are cast, and the one conjured when no eyes are cast. I disagree. There is no solution to this disagreement, as it stands. You think they're not the same, and I do. We're in the weeds now. Onward..
The "red pen" in the hallucination is the same as a "red pen" gleaned from casting your eyes toward the object we (by convention) call a 'red pen' which, importantly, is just denoting it's function, not what it 'actually is'. It is a label indicating what it will cause in the perceiver.
Given this position, yours simply makes no sense. I can't understand why you think the 'red pen' in the Hallucination is not the same as the 'red pen' when one's eyes are cast on an object which, by convention we call a red pen. It might seem silly, but again, on my account they are the same, let's call it, mental image, triggered in different ways. A red pen can be inferred from any writing implement, and an experience of the colour red (mentally speaking). And, that is what the object is actually attuned to, as a conventional object. It is created to induce the experiences we have labeled variously as "(such and such of/for/and/before/after/because of etc)... a red pen". If you hand me what you think to be a red pen, and my experience looking at it is not red, you cannot tell me I am wrong. That is, in fact, what the object triggers in my mental space. On your account, this is an hallucination? (genuine Q, as it's a role reversal from your point about hallucinations not including hte object of their image).
But again, these all make sense on my account - not on yours, so I'm not trying to do some "You're an idiot" type thing here. I think we see things differently enough that we couldn't come to terms. Several of our competing points are independent of our disagreement about that particular point and simply go back to whether a mental image is it's object. I say no, which Hallucinations are a prime evidence for. If a mental image is not synonymous with it's object (which it couldn't possibly be, right?) then we have no appreciable difference to instantiate in some account. Nevertheless, It's probably worth my addressing:
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree, but you are the confused one. Hanover is exactly right. This is how the body/brain works.
Exactly. Unspoken necessary presuppositions. Collinwood comes to mind.
Care to shoulder that burden?
Edit: Nevermind, I see you just claimed that hallucinations of red pens include red pens.
Right, and we can run these arguments directly if we like:
Quoting Hanover
Given that the "empirical proving" is itself an experience, according to Hanover we cannot conclude anything from this experience. His conclusion is self-defeating.
More concretely, suppose a scientist observes that they can evoke some form of experience via brain stimulation. Hanover thinks this proves that experience is untrustworthy, and yet the scientist's observation is nothing other than an experience. So why isn't their experience untrustworthy? *crickets*
Hanover is making exceptions for himself in an ad hoc manner. He wants to invalidate experience, except for all the experiences that he doesn't want to invalidate, namely the ones associated with empirical tests. Hanover and Michael are both thinking about science in a muddled way, as if it were distinct from human experience. This is on par with the way that our culture treats science as an omniscient and inscrutable god, such that the word 'Science' may as well always be reverentially capitalized.
This whole approach should be suspect from the start, for arguments for hard skepticism cannot be domesticated in the service of scientific knowledge. When your monster chainsaw cuts down everything in sight, there is no use pretending that you are sitting safely on the high limb of Science. Science is the very first victim of the idea that all human experience is untrustworthy.
Hmm... I get it's a quip, but i'm not quite sure what you mean - your account showed to me (though, I saw this prior) the limb doesn't contain the pain in either the non-, or the phantom case (. Not sure what else could be said here. It might come down to something further on here...
I suppose what I'm trying to get at, is that (this may be askance from Michael/Hanover - if so, please do note it because it seems a bugaboo for you guys) we can't know for certain what's going on. That's actually the basis for discarding certain positions that require it. We can't positively discriminate based on 'experience' but we can remove what's not possible. We can't even experience a situation where the pain is in the toe or the colour is in the pen because they are not experiences open to us. One would need to be a toe, or a pen, to have such an experience of pain or 'being red'. And that, even if possible, would just further complicate the matter for reasons that are cartoonish and irrelevant. No human has ever had an experience of pain without their mind. No one has ever seen a red pen without their mind. So, it seems either there's an inviolable relationship between the two (experience/mind) which is read as a single entity qua whatever qualia you're talking about (pain in a toe, eg) or the claim is that there isn't, and the mind merely imports experiences (i.e pain, colour, texture) from elsewhere. I cannot accept that as it doesn't seem open to me to claim on either the grounds above (i.e we cannot make such positive claims) or because it is in clear violation of several types of experience we actually can have (mental pain mediation is one example). There is no 1:1 when it comes to stimulus v experience. It is all approximate.
What we can do in this context is eliminate unsupportable claims (not unsupported - those could well be the case, but are not being presented correctly). The claim that pain is in the toe is not supportable. We need not be apodictic or even emotionally certain of this to know that our position is not supportable. In the cases in front of us, I see that both 'viewing a red pen' and 'pain in the toe' are mental experiences. This does not rely on any form of scientific claim due to 'objective' experiment. It is self-evident, and only needs itself. However, the issue of the scientific understanding of how pain works certainly presents room for 'us' to do as you describe and that does seem to be happening in other arguments. I don't think I require this viz. I am uncertainexactly what is going on, but I am certain it is not red being imported from without, into my mind, and same with the pain. It is not being imported from the toe to my mind - something else (similar to a radiowave) moves from the triggered area, through my body physically (which does not hurt - important) and arrives in my brain, where my mind is triggered to give me an experience which would seem to be pain the toe so that I know where to tell the doctor it hurts (or whatever.. just a vessel). I would assume, from previous replies, you're going to label this a redherring/strawman etc.. I cannot understand that, if so. It would be helpful if you can set that account right - so far, the above accords with all you've said. Nevertheless, that reliance on 'objective' measures is certainly an issue (and, If I've inadvertently, or simply prior to due consideraiton)
So I 100% take that objection, and pretty much agree that relying on something like the minutiae of scientific anatomy is not that helpful to make a positive claim if we're saying perception is non-veridical. But, perception is close enough to get a lot out of it. And, the 'lot', to my mind, is able to show that it can't be the case (rather than "it is the case that..*insert positive claim*) that pain exists independent of the mind perceiving it. If the argument you're using merely creates a, let's say, inviolable relationship between "actual pain" triggered by an instance of injury, and the purported 'hallucinatory pain' (excepting phantom limb issues, on the grounds you've used to link it to the former "actual" account of pain) then, while I disagree, I can't argue against that. It is a position which cannot be adjudicated on empirical grounds. And, that, is where I think the entire thing lies. Maybe what's going on with the claims positive to a certain mode of perception is that if the institution of 'science' is telling us something like "well, we've never seen X, so we're not saying it's the case" is being taken too far. But, in this way, Leontiskos is laying out a severe red herring. Hanoever is not exempting himself. He's (I think, wrongly) delineating between kinds of expereince of perception. Perceiving 100 experiments that give us the same result, is pretty good, even though digging down Leontiskos is right to say each individual scientist is at the whim of their perception. That is clearly true.
Quoting Leontiskos
I would agree. Yet, you're not able to make the claims you're making on these grounds, so I'm unsure where that would lead... Will let Hanover actually answer instead of my speculation above.
But isn’t this approach failing to take into account that the witnessing selves are part of the semiotic construction of a witnessed reality? And there is a difference between the scientistic and the folk phenomenological account on this ground.
One view speaks to that of “ourselves” - our socially constructed notion of being an actual experiential being. The one having the experiences when we move our heads, widen our eyes, see something come into focus and mumur to ourselves, “I see a red pen”.
My point is that already we are constructing the self as the ultimate subjective witness, when objectively - as science can tell us - this is merely a socialised narrative.
An animal lacking language just exists in its world in a direct embodied fashion. It reacts to a red pen in terms of appropriate learnt behaviours and without any extra internal narrative about witnessing the world as a self who might thus have done something otherwise than react in a direct animal fashion.
So your eyeball may be pressed to the microscope, but there is also this idea of a “you” in play that comes at reality with already a theory. It is possible “you” were dreaming, hallucinating, distracted, careless, or whatever, when you saw what you thought you saw.
Even just at this regular linguistically constructed level of being a reliable observer of reality, you felt equipped to be able judge the rationality and soundness of your verbal reports about what was in fact the case. You can contrast a real red pen and a hallucinated red pen in terms of being a counterfactually theorising kind of self.
So the next step to a mathematically informed observer - the fully scientific ideal - is not such a great difference. We can swap out our phenomenological stance for the laboratory stance at a drop of a hat.
What we can’t do so easily is recover what being a self would have been like as a languageless animal. What it would be like not to live in this narrative haze of counterfactual possibility that adds so much complexity to our sense of self - our sense of always being both firmly rooted in reality and yet also floating somewhere else beyond it at the same time.
Huh. I think that's a very strange thing to say. Unpleasantness is exactly what "pain" indicates to me. It refers to a wide range of unpleasant feelings, just like the dictionary states. What does "pain" mean to you? Does it simply mean the sensation of touch? Are all touches painful to you, or do you have a way to distinguish a painful feeling from a not painful feeling?
Quoting AmadeusD
Yet you keep falling into the same trap of asserting you know how the body/brain works while at the same time asserting that we cannot trust our senses. How do I know that you read what you read about the body/brain accurately when you depend on your eyes to see the words? How do we know that some mad scientist didn't plant these ideas in your head, or that you didn't hallucinate the experience of reading "facts" about bodies and brains?
Just because someone can change the time on the clock to report the wrong time does not mean that clocks are useless in telling time. We eventually come to know that the clock is wrong by observing other clocks. In other words, we can determine the validity of what one sense is informing us by using other senses, observing over time and using reason.
If we were to evolve in an environment full of mad scientists that directly stimulate our brains, over millions of years our brains would have evolved to use the scientists as a means of knowing about the rest of the environment in the way that we currently use light in the environment to inform us about things that are not light, like pens and brains.
Well, yes. Tomatoes are usually red when ripe, especially the shop-bought ones. Other varieties might be orange, black or green, some with striated combinations of these colours. They are cultivated to this end, so reliably that the seed can be bought and sold. Some varieties of radish are white, some purple. Strawberries that are not red are tasteless.
Claiming that they do not "really" have these colours is a misunderstanding of the nature of colour.
If solipsism is the only logical conclusion of recognizing some amount of difference between the object and the perception and naive realism is the only practical solution to avoid that slippery slope, then I choose solipsism because at least it is logical.
Naive realism suffers from the same logical failure you assign to indirect realism in that it demands that objects are as they appear, but empirical studies (i.e. the study of things as they appear) prove soundly that objects are not in fact as they appear. In fact, what naive realism teaches us is often we have perceptions that do not correlate with reality, as in hallucinations, direct stimulation of brain cells, and and damage to various nerves and anatomical structures. That is, the system you use to prove that things are as they appear proves that things aren't as they appear. This seems a nice matching bookend to your criticism that indirect realism can't prove things aren't as the are if indirect realism demands the evidence received is inherently flawed.
What we learn is that there is no fully satisfactory answer, which is obvious, as if there were, this would be a physics class and not a philosophy class where there are no answers.
If you scroll up somewhere above, I long ago acknowledged that the difficulty with transcendetal idealism is that it creates an irrelevant sort of realism, where we can only assert an external reality, but we can't ascribe much to that reality. The alternative, which is to just say WYSIWYG suffers from another host of problems.
What does seem clear to me is that the pen is whatever it is, but its redness is not part of the pen, but is part of the person. That is the conclusion demanded of direct realism.
But this is only half of the conversation, the larger part circling around Wittgenstein, words, and beetles, none of which sheds a whole lot of light on the topic, and much of which was so unconvincing I have to believe that it's been poorly presented here because it's so facially invalid I can't see how it can be taken seriously.
No, claiming that they really have these colours is a misunderstanding of the nature of colour.
Vision science: Photons to phenomenology:
Color:
Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway:
Opticks:
...and you go over the same undisputed physiology. Again.
The tomatoes are red. So is the pen. And the physiology is also correct.
The question isn't "are tomatoes red?". The question is "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?"
You have admitted before that colour terminology is used in more than one way, and I have agreed. The problem is that you are then using this to equivocate. Any meaning of the word "red" or the sentence "the tomato is red" that does not concern the tomato's appearance is irrelevant. And any meaning of the word "red" or the sentence "the tomato is red" that does concern the tomato's appearance is explained by physics and neuroscience, specifically showing that tomatoes do not have such a property.
If I put on a pair of color distorting glasses and the tomatoes appear white, do we need to question if the color of the tomatoes are “really” red? Or that the circumstances have changes where the reported color of tomatoes is white. And if I damage my brain in such a way where tomatoes “appear” white, so be it, the circumstances have changed. Notice no mental percepts needed, although we need a human community agreeing on color judgment.
Of course they are, else you wouldn't be seeing anything; you'd just have light reaching your eyes and then nothing happening, e.g. blindness or blindsight.
Yep. They really have the distinctive property that they appear to. They are red.
Quoting Michael
Not I. I'm using it the way it has been used since well before recent developments in physiology. If you hang your argument on the difference between "Is the tomato red?" and "is the tomato really red?" then you are going to have to explain how red tomatoes are not really red, and end up looking a bit silly.
The trouble is that you take "red" to refer only to "mental percepts", and that can't be made sense of.
The science proves otherwise. They have a surface layer of atoms that reflect various wavelengths of light, but no colour, because colour is something else entirely.
If the science shows that the red tomatoes are not red, then the science is wrong.
But of course, it is Michael, not the science, that is in error, with an overblown claim that can't be made to work.
Quoting Michael
Yep. Red is not the surface layer of atoms, and it's also not your mental percept.
Well, if you're just going to dismiss the scientific evidence because it disagrees with Wittgenstein's nonsense story about a beetle then we're never going to agree.
I'm going to trust the science, not armchair philosophy, when it comes to explaining how perception works. You do you.
But that's not what I have done. I have not "dismissed the scientific evidence". I accept it wholly. Have done, repeatedly, all the way through this thread, explicitly and repeatedly.
What is rejected is the assertion that red is nothing but a 'mental percept' - a term with a fairly specific use in certain experiments, but not in sorting tomatoes.
I haven't claimed that. I have only claimed that the red mental percept is our ordinary, everyday understanding of red (even if we do not understand that it is a mental percept).
"...the red mental percept..."
There is only one?
It is very unclear what a 'mental percept" is, when you take it out of the context of the scientific papers that use it.
Hence it is rather hard to see how it could be the very same as the red used to sort tomato seeds.
And? It's unclear what electrons are when you take them out of the context of the scientific papers that talk about them.
Yep. But we do not use electrons to sort tomato seeds.
You want to equate the colour red with a thing you call a red mental percept. But they are not the very same thing.
Yes they are.
Ok. Explain them. You said "the red mental percept". Is there only one?
There are lots of percepts, many of the same type. Every pain is a percept, every pleasure is a percept, every sour is a percept, every red is a percept.
Ok. So which ones are red? Only the red ones? Why isn't there a vicious circularity in claiming that red is the very same as red percepts?
This isn't difficult Banno. If you understand what it means for pain to be a percept then you understand what it means for red to be a percept. If you don't understand what it means for pain to be a percept then I can't help you.
And of course, this is only the beginning of your problems.
The red percepts are red, the pain percepts are pain. These questions are tiresome, so if it's all you can resort to then I'm going to end it here.
Then you are using the difinendum in the definiens; defining red in terms of the red percept, with the resulting vicious circularity.
You're asking me which percepts the word "red" refers to. I can only answer such a question by using a word that refers to these percepts, and given that there is no appropriate synonym for "red", all I can do is reuse the word "red".
The word "pain" refers to pain, the word "red" refers to red, the word "sour" refers to sour.
There's nothing "viciously circular" about this.
Yep. So you have not explained red by equating it with a red percept.
So on to the next problem. If red is a mental percept, who's mentality is it a percept in?
What are you talking about? Your obsession with language is leading you to nonsense. It's incredibly simple for anyone who isn't blinded by Wittgenstein.
Pain is a percept, red is a percept. That's it. If you don't understand what pain percepts are then read some neuroscience and stab yourself in the foot.
But not only a percept.
Where are these percepts to be found?
And what is the common essence of calling these all “percepts”? I guess I can not use family resemblances, or I will be accused of being blinded by Wittgenstein.
Try Vision Science – Photons to Phenomenolgy if you want to know more.
I'm sure you will be able to explain your account without sending us off to such a text. It can't be that hard.
Quoting Michael
You want to change the topic back to pain, again. But of course pain and colour are quite different.
The question that you might address is how calling red a percept helps.
So let's go back to what you said was the basic issue: "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?"
Now percepts are not mentioned in this. You want to jump to the conclusion that objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes do not really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have, but of course that is either nonsense, or a play on words. Your claim to disdain mere wordplay leaves you closed to noticing when you yourself play with words.
Tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have. They are red.
Not quite, no. I've addressed this apparent hypocrisy recently and wont rehash because I'll make a pigs ear of it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
These are the precise issues I addressed in the referenced response. Quoting AmadeusD
Suffice to accept this part of it, at least LOL.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is precisely the defence I've run, in other terms.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, correct. This, despite not having any direct access, or certitude about our sensory apprehensions. Its a best-guess, and if that's the best we have, it's the best we have.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Very much fair, and I think this may illustrate what I'm saying: Clearly, as between you and I, there is not a 1:1 match between pain and "unpleasantness". Pain (i.e a sensation that indicates injury - physical, or mental (but mental is awhole different discussion I think)) doesn't, inherently, mean displeasure. Maybe that's clearer?
Perhaps you need to maintain my position (that pain is mental) to support the idea that pain is inherently unpleasant, as clearly, to the injury part (i.e the "physical" aspect of pain) this is patently not hte case.
I don't have an account because I'm not a physicist or neuroscientist. As I have repeatedly said, perception cannot be explained by armchair philosophy.
Quoting Banno
Only in that they are caused by quite different brain activity.
Quoting Banno
You're equivocating.
If we take dispositionalism as an example then "the tomato is red" means "the tomato is disposed to look red". The word "red" in the phrase "looks red" does not prima facie refer to a property of the tomato, and so it does not prima facie follow from "the tomato is disposed to look red" that the tomato has the distinctive property that it appears to have.
So what do you mean by "the tomato is red"? Without further explanation your claim here is a non sequitur.
So you have claimed. I rather think you are equivocating on the notion of "really", wanting to say that red tomatoes are not really red - the implication being that there is one true way of using words such as red, and all those folk who think that their tomatoes are red are mistaken.
I think you know what is meant by "The tomato is red". And without calling on mental percepts.
But I suspect that the account you try to give of what "The tomato is red" means supposes that there must be a something to which the word "red" refers, perhaps the property of being red, that is common to all red things. And such an approach doesn't work here. Rather, if you take a look at how we use the word "red" you will see that it is used to talk about a range of different things, very few of them being mere mental percepts.
Jesus christ lol.
Quoting AmadeusD
For sure, there are many types of unpleasantness, and not every one is pain. "Unpleasant" is the wider concept. So not all unpleasantness is pain, but all pain involves unpleasantness.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, not any clearer at all. I think you misunderstood what I meant when I said that unpleasantness inheres within the definition of pain. "Inheres" means existing within something, as an essential property. What this means is that pain implies unpleasantness, because one cannot have pain without unpleasantness. But the inverse is not implied, unpleasantness does not imply pain, because there is unpleasantness which does not involve pain, so pain does not inhere within the definition of unpleasantness.
Quoting AmadeusD
We are not talking about the physical aspect of pain. We are talking about pain. I went through this already. There is understood to be a sensory aspect of pain and an affective aspect of pain. You want to focus on the sensory aspect, but just because there is a sensory aspect does not mean that the affective aspect is not a real, and necessary part of pain. Have you not researched those two aspects yet?
Okay, and it is no coincidence that you are choosing solipsism, here. Your presuppositions point you in this very direction.
Quoting Hanover
Where have I or anyone else here attempted to prove this so-called "naive realism"? The answer is simple: we haven't. Yet the strawman proves eternal.
Quoting Hanover
The recurrent problem is that your position attempts to draw some kind of substantial conclusion from the fact that there is "no fully satisfactory answer," and this conclusion is logically invalid. There is no problem with pointing to someone's answer and arguing that it is not fully satisfactory. The problem arises when you say, "Your answer is not fully satisfactory, and therefore my opposed position is correct." The invalid inference is the problem, and it is what I have seen from folks like you and Michael in this thread.
Looked at from a different angle, a system which is not fully satisfactory is better than a system which results in performative self-contradictions.
Quoting Hanover
These are more false dichotomies. "My position is pretty bad, but the only alternative is what-you-see-is-what-you-get, therefore we have to accept my position." To claim that the only two options are the infallibility of the senses and the inability of the senses to penetrate reality is to posit a false dichotomy.
This is a recurrence of a kind of Cartesian dichotomy between perfect reliability and certitude, and zero reliability and certitude. The two extremes are not the only possibilities (and I don't mean to indicate that Descartes was himself unaware of this).
I will have to think about this post more, ideally when my head clears of Covid. I don't know that I disagree with any of it, but I also am not convinced that Hanover was making a semiotic argument in the way that you indicate. The argument that he gave seems to me to be invalid, and we could try to generalize it as something like this:
1. If a faculty is not infallible then it is not reliable.
2. X is not infallible.
3. Therefore, X is not reliable.
...Where 'X' is something like the senses or the mind, and (2) is justified by things like dreams and hallucinations.
I think this is just an invalid argument. Something can be reliable without being infallible. The person wielding the argument could press for (1) if they like, and there is admittedly a paradox at play in that neither (1) nor its opposite can be demonstrably proven, but I think we have good non-demonstrative reasons for believing that a faculty need not be infallible in order to be reliable.
That's a separate matter. :smile:
I just like pointing out how the semiotic approach goes further in emphasising that our model of the world is also the model of "ourselves in the world". The witness and the witnessed are inseparable even in their separation.
So I wasn't meaning to correct you. Just having fun outlining the next step that people never quite arrive at. Rest easy with the covid. :up:
Quoting Hanover
1. "The point of this is that it is empirically proven that an internal, subjective experience can be evoked by direct brain stimulation."
2a. "This means that you cannot conclude anything about the constitution of the stimulus from the experience."
3. "The smell you smell is the product of stimuli upon the brain, so the perception is entirely the creation of the brain."
(3) seems to be a non sequitur plain and simple. There is nothing at all here which proves that perceptions are "entirely the creation of the brain."
But what about (2)? An example would be, "Some people have visual hallucinations, therefore we cannot conclude anything about external objects of sight from the input of our eyes." This looks like a bad argument, albeit not necessarily false. The conclusion depends on the frequency and nature of the aberrations. I would simply say that not all visual aberrations result in the unreliability of sight. Instead of (2a) we could draw (2b) from (1):
Er, this is a quintessential example of vicious circularity. The fact that you can only answer such a question by giving a circular answer just shows that your account has failed. If you were correct in saying that 'red' means a percept, then your answer to Banno's question would viciously recur as follows:
Or else:
(As Banno indicates, option 2 fails to distinguish red from any other percept)
Cf:
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
If every red is a percept then it makes no sense to speak substantially about red percepts. The equivocation becomes more clear if you compare, "The red pen," to, "The red percept." If we follow your lead and reduce each statement consistently, then the first renders, "The red percept of the pen," and the second renders, "The red percept of the percept" (or else via option 2, "The percept of the pen," and, "The percept of the percept"). This all reflects a muddled understanding of language. Predications of color cannot be reduced to predications about percepts in the way you claim. You are involved in category errors which conflate an object-predication-intention with an efficient-cause-intention. It is two different things to talk about the redness of an object as opposed to the percept which mediates that redness. You are simply incorrect to claim that whenever we are talking about the redness of an object we are talking about nothing other than the percept which mediates that redness.* Your attempt to try to treat color predications as percept predications demonstrates that color predications are not percept predications at all, which should have been obvious from the start.
We can also see this by noting that we generally only refer to the perceptual apparatus when we are speaking about perceptual aberrations or abnormalities. For example, when colorblindness enters the conversation recourse to the perceptual apparatus of the colorblind subject will be at hand. But if we cannot distinguish the red object from the red percept, then we will no longer be able to talk about colorblindness, or any other kind of abnormal visual processing. Ironically then, if 'red' meant only a percept we would lose a great deal of scientific rigor. (This is similar to the Protagorean, "Man is the measure," result, which is akin to the way your approach overstates the case. Perceptions are not interchangeable with realities, even when it comes to color. Someone who forgets they are wearing red-tinted glasses might call a white ball red, but we all recognize that they are wrong despite their percept.)
* Your "scientific" argument would be more correctly exposited if you claimed that the subject commonly commits an error of inference regarding the cause of their visual experience. In that case I think you would still largely be wrong, but at least in a more plausible way.
I think the following two passages provides some insight on how Wittgenstein viewed perception and colors:
From Wittgenstein's "Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology The Inner and the Outer Volume 2",
"Psychology describes the phenomena of color-blindness as well as those of normal sight. What are the phenomena of color blindness'? Certainty the reactions of the color-blind person which differentiate him from the normal person. But certainly not all of the color-blind person's reactions, for example not those that distinguish him from a blind person. - Can I teach the blind what seeing is, or can I teach this to the sighted? That doesn't mean anything. Then what does it mean: to describe seeing? But I can teach human beings the meaning of the words "blind" and "sighted", and indeed the sighted learn them, just as the blind do. Then do the blind know what it is like to see? But do the sighted know? Do they also know what it's like to have consciousness?"
"Indeed he might be astonished when he sees the object, but in order to 'be astonished about the colour', in order for the colour to be the reason of his astonishment and not just the cause of his experience, he needs not just sight, but to have the concept of colour."
We don't learn concepts of "color" and "seeing" by only experiencing colors and seeing. We don't teach children what colors are by sharing are experiences of mental percepts of color, but by using the words under particular circumstance and seeing if the child can do the same. We don't teach what "seeing" means by describing what seeing is, but by using the word in the form of life humans typically engage in. By using these learned words and acting in the appropriate ways, we demonstrate to our fellow humans we do experience such things as colors and seeing.
No, it doesn't. I seriously do not think you are taking enough time to read these replies. I am directly, stringently addressing this point in each reply and you seem to miss it entirely. I have given you several inarguable examples of why pain is not always unpleasant and further that this isn't part of it's nature. If you reject this, fine, but you need to actually tell me why all the examples and reasons are wrong. You have not. The quote you used directly contradicts your position by my existing in this discussion. You can't be missing that, can you? You're replying, after all, to someone who does not always experience unpleasantness along with pain.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes they can. Sorry.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agreed. This was never put forward. Unpleasantness infers (well, requires) discomfort to obtain. Pain does not require unpleasantness to obtain. It simply doesn't. I don't know why you're claiming this against empirical evidence of millions of humans experiencing pain without unpleasantness - and in fact, experiencing pleasure from pain. This is just... why are you trying to simply erase a load of facts about other people's experience, including mine? Are you trying to say I'm lying?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I got you the first time. You're just not confronting what i've said at all. My reply is directly relevant to this, and unfortunately, shows it to be wrong. Pain is a sensation directed at the host attending to an injury. Unpleasantness is just one mode of this occurring to cut through other stimuli. Pain is patently not always unpleasant. I experience this fact all the time. Why are you not getting this??? "hurts so good"
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This wasn't suggested. I think you're maybe off on your own tangent now? All i put forward was that "unpleasant" sensation requires discomfort to be so labelled, but "pain" does not require "unpleasant" for hte same. And it doesn't. Sorry if you still think it does - this one isn't a "positional" disagreement. You are wrong. As I and billions of other's instantiate. If you've literally never felt a pain without also feeling that it is unpleasant, that's a shame - but understandable. It's a tricky thing. I absolutely, almost sexually, enjoy the pain of scalding water on the tops of my hands, my inner thighs, behind my shoulders and right on my hip bones (to the point that i had very midly burned myself many times in pursuit of it (opportunistic pursuit, to be sure)). It is definitely pain. But it is definitely not unpleasant. Its a tool telling me to stop fucking running scalding water on myself lmao. EVENTUALLY this can get unpleasant - as, when my skin starts melting, my brain kicks it up a few notches. Fair, too. I'm not exactly the most caring about my own body in this way. I self harmed for years. another notch on this club.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It seems you did not read that paragraph very well, as nothing you've said aligns with anything I've said. Huh.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is a an opportunistic reversal of Banno's argument. We use language differently. Great! "red" conceptually is a percept (lets pretend) and "the red pen" or "the red percept" is a label which is conventionally used to cut-down the actual phrase "Items we use to write with, containing ink flowing to a nib, which reflects light in "such and such a range" so as to trigger, under normal circumstances, that percept referred to as "the colour red" as a property of the brain-generated image of the object viewed by the sensory organ". But we don't say that. We say "red pen". Not "because we say X, therefore, Y". That's just shitty reasoning that makes no sense unless you think that language literally creates the world (I think Banno does).
Nothing around this thread violates this. There's nothing circular about hte fact that we re-use, mis-use and multiply-use words - and can be wrong in how we use them. The convention "literally" has had to undergo a redefinition because of it's constant misuse. Not a misuse anymore, is it?? Because convention said so. Not in any way relevant to trying to tease out the basis of colour experience. This doesn't touch on any of the science/scientistic claptrap you lot are stuck on. However, Michael has made some mistakes... not my circus. I just reply where I can see a point.
Quoting Richard B
yes we do. We literally compare items and teach children that the correlation in their mind between these items is due to colour concepts. Shades come after and probably fit better into what you're talking about. having raised two children, and specifically tasked with introducing the younger of the two to colours and hte understanding of them (as between objects) says I know that this is hte case.
"basic stuff" but you don't understand inferences, or fixing the nonsense you come up with sometimes. Tsk tsk.
You need to get over your obsession with language. The discussion is about perception, not speech. We must look to physics and physiology, not to all the ways that the word “red” is used in English.
I don't care about how Wittgenstein viewed perception and colours. He was not a physicist or a neuroscientist and so he didn't have the appropriate expertise. To think that somehow an examination of language can address such issues is laughable. Do you want to do away with the Large Hadron Collider and simply talk our way into determining how the world works?
That the pen is red just is that it (ordinarily) appears red, and the word “red” in the phrase “appears red” does not refer to a mind-independent property of the pen but to the mental percept that looking at the pen (ordinarily) causes to occur.
I don't think this is really the case, and that is why this sort of discussion goes on forever. Our model of the world is one put together through the scientific method of experimentation and observation. The model of ourselves in the world is based in principles of moral philosophy, because it must include intention motivation, politics and other human interactions. These two types of models are very far apart.
I would assume that you know your mind to be real. Then which is the case - direct realism, indirect realism, both, or neither? If you can talk about the contents of your mind like you can talk about the contents of your pants pocket, then what is the difference if you're telling me the truth in both cases?
Quoting AmadeusD
You couldn't at least link it in your reply considering that we are 38 pages into this discussion?
Quoting AmadeusD
If you were able to accomplish your task using your senses then was it really a best guess or an accurate perception?
If these problems only arise in philosophical discussions and not in everyday life, then maybe there's an issue with philosophy. Most philosophical problems are the result of a misuse of language. Our survival in a hostile environment is evidence enough that we have more than a best guess about the state of our environment. I would argue that instinctive behaviors that evolved as general responses to a static environment are best guesses whereas humans have evolved to allow us to be more adaptable to changing environments to the point where we no longer need to adapt to our environment. We mold the environment for ourselves.
I am arguing that despite the "indirect" nature of perception we can get a "direct" sense of what the case is by understanding that determinism is the case (which is why time can seem to have no direction as effects are as much about their causes as causes are about their effects) and that effects carry information about their causes. "Direct" and "Indirect" are in quotes because I find that they unnecessarily complicate the discussion. I find it very difficult to believe that humans have been able to shape their environment to such a degree simply based on "best guessing". Are we having an effect on our environment or not?
Quoting AmadeusD
What would be the point in showing you pain? The pain is for me, not for you. I am the one injured, not you. The pain is about the state of my body, not yours. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I could bash your same thumb with the same hammer and you'd have a good idea of what I was feeling, but that would not be the point of me informing you that I am in pain. The point would be to seek assistance. This is what I mean that philosophical language use tends to muddy the waters here.
Besides, if pain is only in the mind, then the stimulus is only in the mind. When I ask you to show me the stimulus, you are referencing your own visual experience - the visual location of the injury, which is in your mind. As we already discussed a while back visual depth is in your mind so you run into the same problem with any sensory experience you have. Based on what you have said in that we cannot show you pain it does not follow that we can show you the stimulus.
Let's say I have a severe injury on my back. I cannot see the injury but I can feel it. Adrenaline may be masking the severity of the injury by masking the pain. You, however, have a clear view of the injury. Who has more accurate information about my injury? If you can have more information about my injury because of the level of detail human vision provides over the sensation of pain, then what does that say about the direct vs. indirect distinction when it comes to knowing what is the case?
This is another example of the category error conflation between an object-predication-intention and an efficient-cause-intention.
<"The pen appears red" does not refer to the pen but to a percept>
When we speak about the pen we are speaking about the pen, not about percepts. Pens and percepts are two different things. Maybe you (erroneously) think everyone should replace all of their color predications about pens with predications about percepts, but this in no way shows that when people talk about red pens they are doing nothing more than talking about percepts.
I don't plan to draw this out, but Banno's argument is worth affirming. I've had enough discussions with you to know that this conversation is going nowhere. In fact while having discussions with you in the past I received PMs from others, "Just be aware that conversations with Michael go nowhere. Don't inflate your expectations."
Yes, and as you seem to imply, this is a rather different claim than Michael's. It is the claim that we should stop thinking of redness as a property of pens, as opposed to the claim that red refers to a percept in common use.
'Red' is a word which does not refer to a percept.
If we like we can talk about red-qua-percept, and this is obviously to talk about a percept.
Quoting AmadeusD
Look, pens and percepts are different kinds of realities, reflecting different categories. The categories are not interchangeable. And observe what happens when you try to interchange them:
[/list]
Now I truncated your sentence for brevity, but note that (1) is true and (2) is false, and this is because pens and percepts are not interchangeable. A pen is an item we write with, whereas a percept is not. "Red pen" and "red percept" are two fundamentally different kinds of linguistic entities.
Yes, and that's the fallacy. See the SEP article on color:
This is what we naively do, and physics and neuroscience has proven it false. When you talk about red pens you are talking about both pens and percepts, whether you realise it or not.
Yes. Perception cannot be explained by armchair philosophy. It can only be explained by physics and physiology, and so I am simply reporting on what the scientists have determined. I'll do so again:
Vision science: Photons to phenomenology:
Color:
Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway:
Opticks:
They are literally saying "color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights", "color is a sensation", "color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus", and "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour."
I cannot be misrepresenting them by quoting their own words. They mean exactly what they say.
Your only retort seems to be that we talk about colours as if they are properties of pens. And yes, we often do. And we're wrong, as the science shows.
It's you who are claiming that the tomato is red but not really red; these are your words, your word game. All I'm doing is pointing out how silly that is. You pretend not to be involved in a discussion about language but your view hinges on your use of a single word.
I'd say they have absorption spectrums within the 'spectrum space' that people typically classify as red.
They have a somewhat distinctive absorption spectrum as individuals, although they don't have perfectly homogenous surfaces, and different areas on the surface of the tomato will vary in absorption spectrum to some extent. However most of the subregions of the surface of the tomato, despite being somewhat different in absorption spectrum, still fall within the spectrum space typically classified as red.
(Or at least, that is what I would say if I was particularly in the mood to be pedantic.)
It seems more an effort to discuss at the level of neurobiology. And so the "language" or semiotics of perceptual experience.
Of course hue discrimination appears in our language games too. Ask any interior decorator. They have 100 names for shades that are nearly white.
But words are the currency of a socially-constructed level of world-modelling. Neurobiology concerns the far more complicated science of neurobiological world-modelling.
You keep mixing these categories, or just in fact bluntly pretending there is nothing worth talking about beyond your narrow comfort zone. But without a neurobiology of perception, there can be no social game of comparing beetles in boxes. The private/public distinction would be metaphysically moot as the grounds for it would simply fail to exist.
They're not my words. I said that the tomato does not have the property that it appears to have. The property that it appears to have is in fact a subjective quality, and so is a percept, not a mind-independent property of material surfaces.
You are showing yet again that you are equivocating. As you have mentioned before, the predicate "is red" doesn't just mean one thing. What the dispositionalist means by "the tomato is red" isn't what the naive colour realist means by "the tomato is red". According to the former meaning, "the tomato is red" is true. According to latter meaning, "the tomato is red" is false.
My concern isn't with the sentence "the tomato is red" precisely because the sentence is used to mean different things by different people (and you haven't explained what you mean by it); my concern is with the nature of a tomato's appearance. This is explained by physics and physiology, not by language, and eliminativism is consistent with the science (with projectivism explaining the way we think and talk about colours).
There's nothing in the science that contradicts what I've offered here. It takes more than just biological machinery doing its job... mindlessly.
Subjectivism and eliminativism are both philosophical positions, so to speak. So, this...
... strikes me as a very odd combination. Dennett laid waste to the subjectivist notion/tenet of qualia(tastes, smells, colors, etc.) using physicalist eliminativism in "Quining Qualia".
What's bothering me about this thread is the fact that many of us agree about the biological machinery and the irrevocable role it plays in all veridical perception, hallucination, and dreams. I'm interested in how that all works, from an evolutionary progression standpoint.
I almost want to treat the autonomous biological machinery doing its work as if it were some sort of living recording.
Hallucination and dreams are to veridical experience as a video recording is to experience. Sticking with that analogy renders some folk hereabouts wanting to equate the experience with the record thereof. I don't know if that's a great analogy, as they all fail when pushed far enough, but hopefully that makes some sort of sense.
You're making a number of excellent points. I appreciate the patience and willingness to do so. I'm sure I'm not alone.
As is mine. I've no idea how you arrive at the notion that color is nothing but a mental percept, which is to say that biological machinery alone is enough. Brains in vats.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay.
Quoting apokrisis
That makes sense.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, good. This helps me understand your thermodynamic approach with a bit more resolution.
Quoting apokrisis
What would you see as the adjudicating factors between the two conceptions?
If we are approaching it from a purely scientific angle, then my hunch here is that Platonism requires at least some form of meaning- or explanation-recursion, and one which points in the direction of transcendence. This would be something like the Platonic rationale for rejecting a brute fact scheme. If such a thing is not present then I don't know where a scientific argument for Platonism would come from.
I haven't watched the video yet, but my guess is that it has something to do with them being nardo putty-looking ass whips.
What you are insisting in this discussion, that pain does not necessarily involve unpleasantness, simply indicates that you and I have a different understanding of the what the word "pain" means.
You keep referring to examples you have given of pain without unpleasantness, but I can't find any such examples. All I see is assertions.
In order that we can discuss our difference in opinion as to what "pain" refers to, you need to provide for me a definition, or some examples. Tell me what sort of sensation is "pain", if it is not an unpleasant sensation as the dictionary defines it. Or, is it not a sensation at all? Is pain a bunch of neurological processes? If so, then what distinguishes the neurological process called "pain" from other instances of the sense of touch?
Quoting AmadeusD
Again, you are simply insisting there is empirical evidence from millions of humans, and saying that I am denying it, without providing any such evidence. The fact that in many cases, pleasure comes from pain, does not prove that pain is not unpleasant. Plato covered this very thoroughly, because at his time there was a believe that pleasure was nothing but a relief from pain This would imply that all pleasure comes from pain, and pain is a necessary requirement for pleasure. as the pleasure comes from the relief which is actually the pain ending.
But Plato demonstrated how there is pleasure which does not require pain. What this indicates is that "pain" is not a proper opposite to pleasure. However, it does not demonstrate that pain does not consist of unpleasantness. Unpleasantness may still be posited as the proper opposite to pleasure, and since there are unpleasant feelings which are not pain, pleasure may be derived as a relief from these feelings rather than from a relief from pain.
Quoting AmadeusD
Oh good, here's a sort of definition. It's not adequate though, for two very important reasons. First, 'the sensation of an injury' does not suffice because there are many internal pains like headache, stomachache, commonly called "pains" which are not due to injury. Second there are many instances when "the host attending to an injury" does not involve pain. If we look at natural healing, the first and most obvious is coma. Also, in the natural process of healing a wound there is always much time with no pain, and often an itch (which is not pain) develops. Further, there are unnatural instances, when the injury does not cause pain, such as the use of painkillers. They are called "painkillers", not "host attending to an injury killers", because they do not prevent the host from attending to the injury. In other words, it should be very clear to you now, that there is no specific sensation associated with "attending to an injury", so this would make a very faulty definition of pain.
Quoting AmadeusD
Finally, an example for me to look at. What you are doing with this example, is taking your faulty definition of pain, "the host attending to an injury", and saying, 'I have had injury before, without unpleasantness, therefore pain, which is the sensation of the host attending to an injury does not require unpleasantness. I think we've all experienced injury without pain. Sometimes, I'll accidentally cut myself without even noticing it, until I see blood. So all your example really does, is prove that your definition is wrong. We can, and do, have injury without pain, and your example is a demonstration of this this. So this is just more evidence that there is no specific sensation which can be defined as the host attending to an injury, as injury causes many different sensations, crossing all sorts of boundaries.
Well it would really be nice to know how Plato conceived of the Khôra in relation to the Eidos. Was it more a void or an Apeiron? Was there some move he began making from the transcendent imposition of structure on the material world to the immanent emergence of structure by way of privation?
All this seems in play in Plato and Aristotle. And everyone interprets according to their preference. But that is the basic difference I would say. A dualism of transcendence or a triadicism of immanence.
Since this is a philosophy forum, I will provide some interesting nuance views of color and mental percepts from for philosophers who were admirers of the achievement of science.
From the Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell:
“If there is a subject, it can have a relation to the patch of colour, namely, the sort of relation which we might call awareness. In that case the sensation, as a mental event, will consist of awareness of the colour, while the colour itself will remain wholly physical, and may be called the sense-datum, to distinguish it from the sensation. The subject, however, appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar. Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for assuming that they do. The functions that they appear to perform can always be performed by classes or series or other logical constructions, consisting of less dubious entities. If we are to avoid a perfectly gratuitous assumption, we must dispense with the subject as one of the actual ingredients of the world. But when we do this, the possibility of distinguishing the sensation from the sense-datum vanishes; at least I see no way of preserving the distinction. Accordingly the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour, an actual constituent of the physical world, and part of what physics is concerned with. ”
From Word and Object by W. V. Quine:
"If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be just that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect system efficacy in the development of theory. But if a certain organization of theory is achieved by thus positing distinctive mental states and events behind physical behavior, surely as much organization could be achieved by positing merely certain correlative physiological states and events instead. Nor need we spot special centers in the body for these seizures; physical states of the undivided organism will serve, whatever their finer physiology. Lack of detailed physiological explanation of the states is scarcely an objection to acknowledging them as states of human bodies, when we reflect that those who posit the mental states and events have no details of appropriate mechanisms to offer nor, what with mind-body problem, prospects of any. The bodily states exist anyway; why add the others?"
From Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer:
"To determine, for instance, whether two people have the same color sense we observe whether they classify all the colour expanses with which they are confronted in the same way; and, when we say that a man is colour-blind, what we are asserting is that he classifies certain color expanses in a different way from that in which they would be classified by the majority of people. It may be objected that the fact that two people classify color expanses in the same way proves only that their colour worlds have the same structure, and not that they have the same content; that it is possible for another man to assent to every proposition which I make about colours on the basis of entirely different colour sensations, although, since the difference is systematic, neither of us is ever in the position to detect it. But the answer to this is that each of us has to define the content of another man's sense-experiences in terms of what he can himself observe."
And Lastly, from Seeing Things as They Are by John Searle:
"Question 2 How does the account deal with color constancy and size constancy? I will consider these in order. Imagine that a shadow falls over a portion of the red ball so that part of it is in shadow and part not. Did the part in shadow change its color? Well, obviously not, and it is obviously not seen as having changed its color. All the same, there is a difference in the subjective visual field. The subjective basic perceptual properties have changed. The proof is that if I were drawing a picture of what I now see, I would have to include a darker portion of the part in shadow, even though I know that there has been no change in its actual color. It is extremely misleading to describe this phenomenon as "color constancy", because of course the experienced color is precisely not constant. It is because of my high-level Background capacities that I am able to see it as having the same color even though at the lower level I see it as having in part changed its color. I want to emphasize this point. At the basic level, the color is precisely not constant, neither subjectively nor objectively. It changes. It is just at the higher level that I know, because of my Background abilities, that it still keeps the same color."
It's not my conclusion; it's what the science says, and I am simply reporting on that. I have no idea why you and others think that you can figure out how perception works by sitting in your chair and thinking really hard.
Russell is not saying what (I think) you think he's saying. When he says "the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour" he is saying that colour just is that sensation. This is perhaps clearer in a later work where he says this:
I don't have a copy of Searle, but according to this:
This seems to be arguing that colours are mental phenomena and that the predicate "is red" is used to describe objects which cause red mental phenomena.
On colour, Quine has said this:
Your quote of him is him arguing for eliminative materialism, which I have previously accepted is a possibly correct account of so-called mental phenomena (e.g. pain just is a type of brain activity, and so colours just are a type of brain activity).
:smirk:
:roll: According to Searle, colours are systematic hallucinations, and what characterizes hallucinations is that you're having experiences without experiencing anything, not even percepts.
And hallucinations are what? A type of mental phenomenon, not a mind-independent property of tomatoes. Therefore colours are a type of mental phenomenon, not a mind-independent property of tomatoes.
Quoting jkop
This is such a nonsensical sentence.
The next step, I believe, after freeing oneself from naive realism, is to free oneself from materialism altogether, and understand that the so-called "effects of the stone upon himself" are not properly called "effects" at all. The percept is a freely constructed creation of the living being, rather than the effects of a causal chain. This understanding enables the reality of the concept of free will. The living being's motivational aspects, which are very much involved in all neurological activity, and appear to allow the being to act with a view toward the future, (understood in its most simple form as the will to survive), cannot be understood as the product of causal chains. This is what science reveals to us, through its inability to understand such aspects in determinist terms.
The point of this example is to show that Russell is concerned about the grammar of colour, so we can get it right about what science is actually investigating.
I’m talking about dynamics. Dissipative structure, far from equilbrium systems, maximum entropy production principle. That class of self organisation in nature.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/783285.Order_Out_of_Chaos
The topic is about perception, not grammar. Science explains perception. This has nothing to do with language at all. We can imagine that we're deaf, illiterate, mutes if it helps you move on from this distraction. We still see colours. I don't need to be able to say "this box looks red" and "this box looks blue" for me to see a visual difference between them. The development of the words "red" and "blue" to name the difference comes after the fact, not before.
Okay, fair enough. This is something we should revisit at a later date, preferably in a more apt thread.
Again from Russell’s Analysis of the Mind Lecture VII The Definition of Perception
“The notion of perception is therefore not a precise one: we perceive things more or less, but always with a very considerable amount of vagueness and confusion.”
Russell’s analysis is a conceptual one, not experimental.
“When a mental occurrence can be regarded as an appearance of an object external to the brain, however irregular, or even as a confused appearance of several such objects, then we may regard it as having for its stimulus the object or objects in question, or their appearances at the sense-organ concerned. When, on the other hand, a mental occurrence has not sufficient connection with objects external to the brain to be regarded as an appearance of such objects, then its physical causation (if any) will have to be sought in the brain. In the former case it can “be called a perception; in the latter it cannot be so called. But the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. Until this is realized, no satisfactory theory of perception, sensation, or imagination is possible.”
From what I gather, Russell is reluctant in calling “mental percepts” perception at all. And seems to want to move in the direction of Quine and just be concerned with brain activity. Again Russell is not performing science here, but has a lot to say what perception is all about in a general sort of way.
Whether you call it "perception" or not is irrelevant. Call it "blugh" for all it matters. The only thing that is relevant is that the visual quality that we naively think of as being a mind-independent property of a tomato's surface is in fact a mental phenomenon either reducible to or caused by neural activity in the brain, usually in response to optical stimulation by light. This is what the science shows, and no appeals to grammar or beetles in boxes or anything of the sort can prove otherwise.
This is a rather neat summation of the mistake of thinking that either colour is a mind-independent property of objects, or colour is a mental phenomena caused by neural activity in the brain.
There are alternatives. Many have been listed Here.
But perhaps the generic form of the mistake is in thinking that there can be one explanation that will work for all the many and various ways in which we might use colour words.
One cannot do philosophy without giving due consideration to the language with which one does philosophy.
No, it's not.
Science shows that certain biological structures are necessary for all perception. Makes perfect sense in my book.
It does not follow that there are no differences between hallucinating, dreaming, and seeing red things. Science does not say that. You do. Your arguments have recently led to absurd conclusions. I've thought of this more and more recently.
Well put.
I haven't claimed that there is no difference. We've been over this. They differ in what causes the mental percept.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, it is. See all the quotes here.
Maund: "It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess."
Newton: "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour."
Kim et al: "Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus."
Palmer: "Color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights."
Maxwell: "Color is a sensation."
How much more explicit does this need to be for you?
And this is the mistake that you are forever making. This has nothing to do with the various ways in which we might use colour words. This has nothing to do with language at all. This is about vision and whether or not its qualities are mind-independent properties of tomatoes. We naively think they are, but physics and neuroscience has shown that they're not.
The fact that the word "blue" is sometimes used to mean that someone is sad or that the word "green" is sometimes used to mean that someone is inexperienced simply has no relevance at all to the discussion.
Sir. You most certainly did.
You drew a hard fast equivalency between four different things. When I asked you what the differences were between them the answer was the same.
"Nothing"
That is most certainly to claim that there are no differences!
Fer fuck's sake!
Indeed we have. Very little attention has been payed to this. You've yet to have responded to the important parts. Ignoring issues does not make them go away.
Quoting Michael
Okay.
He acknowledges and talks about both internal and external components of color vision and seeing color. He makes good points regarding the subjective aspects of color vision/seeing red as well as the objective ones.
Nothing he says aligns with the mistake your entire philosophical edifice, informed stance, rests its laurels upon. See the top of this post.
You asked me for the difference between an hallucinated red and a red percept. There is no difference because an hallucinated red is a red percept. I didn't say that there's no difference between seeing a red pen and hallucinating a red pen.
You should try reading more carefully.
You should try quoting more carefully.
Yes, and I don't grant the others that this is a uniquely or idiosyncratically Witgenstenian truth.
-
- Thanks. You as well.
My "stance" is repeating what those more knowledgeable of the matter have said:
Maund: "It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess."
Newton: "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour."
Kim et al: "Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus."
Palmer: "Color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights."
Maxwell: "Color is a sensation."
Quoting Michael
None of them did.
The second and third are at odds.
You believe em both?
I edited this, so please keep this in mind.
Alternatively, Newton, From Opticks, said,
“From what has been said it is also evident, that the Whiteness of the Sun's Light is compounded all the Colours where with the several sorts of Rays whereof that Light consists, when by their several Refrangibilities they are separated from one another, do tinge Paper or any other white Body whereon they fall. For those Colours ... are unchangeable, and whenever all those Rays with those their Colours are mix'd again, they reproduce the same white Light as before.”
He acknowledges and talks about both internal and external components of color vision and seeing color. He makes good points regarding the subjective aspects of color vision/seeing red as well as the objective ones.
Nothing here to support the presupposition that four different things are equivalent. That's what you've done.
Searle eviscerates the Bad Argument - "that the existence of hallucinations and other arguments show you never see the real world, you just see your own sense data" - which looks to be the very case that @Michael is attempting to make, that we never see red, only ever percepts-of-red.
I asked what the difference was between seeing red stuff[hide="Reveal"](what happens when we look at red stuff)[/hide], hallucinating red stuff[hide="Reveal"](which never happens while looking at red stuff)[/hide], and dreaming red stuff, [hide="Reveal"]which also never happens while looking at red stuff[/hide].
"Nothing" was your reply.
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
Sigh.
This would be a neat argument for why colors and percepts are not the same thing. The percept of the ball changed, but its color stayed the same.
Cherry picking one liners as a means of putting forth a position. Doesn't work very well if the authors do not agree with one another.
But the example gives is telling.
So now provide the link to the study in which some neurobiologist looked at someone's mental phenomenon while the subject was looking at a ripe tomato as observed red mental phenomenon.
If red cannot be a property of tomatoes the how are they the property of neurons?
Yes, the hard problem has not been solved yet your explanations assume that it has. That's the issue.
Colors are a type of information.
No, the change is the shadow falling over a part of the red ball, making that part look dark red. That's what there is to see.
The "percept" (or mental phenomenon) is the seeing, not the colour that one sees. Even if the colour is a systematic hallucination, it is not a percept. What makes it systematic is the fact that the hallucination is causally constrained by the eye's interaction with wavelength components of light.
What makes causality and determinism necessarily materialistic? My thoughts naturally lead to other thoughts. Certain experiences are prerequisites for certain thoughts. It seems to me that my thoughts can "bump into" other thoughts and create novel thoughts. New thoughts are an amalgam of prior thoughts and experiences. It seems to me that causality and determinism could be just as immaterial as material.
It seems as if you are rather arbitrarily cutting off consideration of the scientific picture somewhere in the brain or at the retina.
However the light source being reflected off of the tomato and into the eyes is no less a relevant part of the scientifc understanding of what is happening.
OK then, just take "materialism" out of that post, and replace it with "determinism", if it offends you.
What if I said that the tomato appears ripe? Do we really need to make it clear whether we are talking about the appearance or the tomato when talking about the tomato to others?
Yep. There is naught to talk about but our experience of anything. Otherwise, Noumena.
The speculative metaphysics going on in here to support the idea that colour is "out there" is really weird. It's gotten very boring though as no one seems to be understanding each other, and I apologise to anyone who wanted a direct reply. Having read these last two pages, I cannot understand how half of you tie your shoes :nerd:
To have a true understanding of the human condition.
A true understanding does not simply consist of "things are as they are".
Yet the ball does not change colour...
It might change colour if someone painted it, or if the surface faded in the sun.
So we have an superficially enigmatic situation in which the ball does not change colour but the colour changed. Is this a paradox? Not at all. We understand the background of each description, and we acknowledge the truth of both: this is what a red ball in part shade looks like.
Which brings out again the falsehood of thinking there is one notion of colour to rule them all.
So some locutions would have more phenomenological accuracy? Curious that you might want to contradict yourself so blatantly.
Brilliant stuff, Apo. :rofl:
You're welcome.
I little more exposition on Searle's view of colors:
From Seeing Things as They Are:
"Color is a bit tricky because of such phenomena as spectrum inversion and color constancy, and we will get into those issues in the next chapter. Let us now examine our visual experience of the red ball. Is the visual experience itself red? Emphatically, visual experiences are not colored. Why not? Colors are observable to all, and visual experiences are not. The color red emits photons of about 6500 angstrom units and the visual experience emits nothing. So it is wrong to think of the visual experience as itself colored. Also, to think that visual experiences are colored is almost inevitably to commit the Bad Argument because one has to ask who is seeing the color."
(The Bad Argument Searle refers to is any argument that attempts to treat the perceptual experience as an actual or possible object of experience.)
He continues, "First, for something to be red in the ontologically objective world is for it to be capable of causing ontologically subjective visual experiences like this. The fact of its redness consists at least in part in this causal capacity (with the usual qualifications about normal conditions and normal observers) to cause this sort of ontologically subjective visual experience. There is an internal relation between the fact of being red, and the fact of causing this sort of experience. What does it mean to say that the relation is "internal"? It means it could not be that color if it were not systemically related in that way to experiences like this. Second, for something to be the object of perceptual experience is for it to be experienced as the cause of the experience. If you put these two points together, you get the result that the perceptual experience necessarily carries the existence of a red as its condition of satisfaction."
An absolutely crystal example of Searle's inability to think clearly. He very much likes his hand waving.
Quoting Richard B
It is uncanny how close this sort of thing is to Aquinas. I think Searle would've been edified to read the pre-modern realists who dealt with some of the same problems in a less skeptical age.
Yep, I often thought if Wittgenstein wanted to theorize instead of just describe he might have moved in the direction that Searle has.
I will have to take your word about Aquinas as I am only familiar with his arguments for the existence of God.
This is based on Searle's ontological distinction between modes of existence. Entities like mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates have an existence independent of any experience. They are ontologically objective. Entities like pains, tickles, and itches exist only insofar as they are experienced by a subject (for Searle this is either a human or an animal). They are ontologically subjective.
Of course it's relevant, but it's not colour. Just as stubbing one's toe is relevant to explain pain, but isn't itself pain. Pain and colour are what happen in the head after.
Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway
This has nothing to do with intentionality. This has to do with colours.
Yes, that's what I said in that previous post:
"the predicate 'is red' is used to describe objects which cause red mental phenomena."
But our ordinary, everyday conception of colours is that of the ontologically subjective visual experience, not a material surface of electrons absorbing and emitting various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.
This is how we can make sense of such things as the inverted spectrum, or different people seeing a different coloured dress when looking at the same photo emitting the same light.
That's just sad.
The science has shown that naive colour realism is wrong and that eliminativism and subjectivism are right. Projectivism explains why we are initially naive colour realists, and dispositionalism provides a reasonable post hoc description of how we use such predicates as "is red".
I guess that having been informed about the relevant science for a long time, it's rather baffling to me that so much energy is going into such a philosophical discussion.
It baffles me that people still think it's a matter for philosophy, as if we can use a priori reasoning to figure out the nature of sensory experiences and their relationship to distal objects. It's even more baffling that some think that this can be determined by an examination of language.
And perhaps most baffling of all is those who accuse me of misrepresenting the science, as if Maxwell literally saying "colour is a sensation" is not the father of electromagnetism literally saying that colour is a sensation.
I agree with your take on the issue, but philosophy isn't just about using apriori knowledge. It's partly about stepping back from science to understand the biases it operates with.
That brings up the issue of understanding the biases of those who step back from science
Right, in white light that has the energy of daylight the pigments emit photons of about 700 nm. In shade (ambient light) they emit photons with less energy. Hence the red is darker or less saturated in the shade.
A damaged eye, brain injury, spectral inversion, colour blindness, hallucination, illusion etc. may impair one's ability to see things as they are, but an impaired ability won't change what there is to see: a coloured world of pigments, shapes, varying behaviour of light.
From Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
After exiting the cave, and "seeing the light", the philosopher returns to the cave, with the intent of teaching others what has been revealed to him.
Not sure what you mean by "pigments" here, but it's usually things like stars and torches and lightbulbs and fire that emit photons, not powder.
Yet I don't know of any good arguments against nsive realism, so perhaps it's worth investigating (but in a separate thread) :cool:
There are no arguments against naive realism; there is experimental evidence against it. Physics and neuroscience disproved it a long time ago.
I'm not talking about stars, torches, nor lightbulbs. but pigments. Pigmented surfaces exposed to light emit light, unlike glossy surfaces that reflect light.
A pigmented surface is uneven, incoming photons bounce and scatter on it according to the wave-like behaviour of light. That's why a rough plastered wall, for instance, emits/spreads more light on its surroundings than a smooth glossy wall which instead reflects incoming light.
Walls of plaster, wood, stone etc may both emit and reflect light in various degrees, but that's because their pigmented surfaces (which emit light in the above sense) can be grinded or treated or covered with glossy materials (reflecting light).
I think the term you're looking for is "fluorescent", not "pigmented". If we're talking about the powder, conventional pigments don't emit light (although there is such a thing as fluorescent pigments).
Not sure how any of this is relevant to the topic though.
No, I'm not looking for a term, and plaster walls are not fluorescent..
But plaster walls don't emit (visible) photons, which is why I can't see them at night when I close the curtains and turn off the light. Like most other things they just reflect the (visible) light from some other source.
Yes. That's also part of phil of sci.
They do in the sense I describe above.
Quoting Michael
..which is not the sense I describe above.
Makes me think of the many revelatory ideologies (freudian, marxist, individualist, religious etc), categorically assuming underlying biases, power relations etc. no matter what. They just "know' that what one says or writes is a function of one's biases, not of the meanings of the words.
You could hardly be recognized as biased if your expressions were meaningless.
One does not even have to speak. They have already diagnosed whatever one says as a function of identity, sexual phobias, privileges, self interest, inherited sin etc. Thus any criticism can be dismissed as biased, regardless of the truth of the words.
The bolded portion needs unpacked.
The physical retinal image does not come from within the perceiver. It is not that image being recorded. Rather the physical retinal image is the recording. Color perception is being recorded.
Color requires both, colorful things(things capable of being seen as colorful by a creature so capable) and a creature so capable.
One could say they no longer need the artist. One could say that because the music is being experienced via using an ipod that the music is in the ipod and not the world...
One could say...
I'm not okay with that, because rainbows and visible spectrums are colorful. They may not exist without being looked at, which is fine, but they most certainly do while they are.
There are all sorts of things within one's experience that are not located just in the head. Color is one.
I miss Isaac in these discussions.
:up: :100:
That's just begging the question.
Rainbows are just refracted light, with longer wavelengths at the top and shorter wavelengths at the bottom. It's an incidental fact about human physiology that retinal stimulation by light causes colour experiences, with different wavelengths being responsible for different colours.
That's why Newton said "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured" and why Maxwell said "colour is a sensation". You might not be "okay" with this, but them's the facts.
And here's an image that you might find enlightening:
There's that vicious circularity again.
Quoting Michael
Sure, all that. Have a look at How To Speak Of The Colors, by yet another expat from downunder, with a leaning towards Kripke. It begins with the very wise thought:
This goes towards explaining the intransigence exhibited hereabouts - we might all be right...
So there is some conceptual work to be done, some plumbing to be set in order, if we are to understand colour.
Hence the need for armchairs.
Then is there a way in which @Michael is right, that without the creature capable of seeing colour, there are no colours? Well, yes, but it's quite difficult to articulate this; put the green tomatoes in one box and the red tomatoes in another, and close them in - are the tomatoes in that box still red, despite being unobserved? Of course.
Some might have us believe that what is before us are patches "dense and yellowish in colour... composed of chalk, lead white, ochre and very little black..." with "bone black, weld (luteolin, Reseda luteola), chalk, small amounts of red ochre, and indigo" and "ochres, natural ultramarine, bone black, charcoal black and lead white". This is the description of "Girl with a pearl earring" from Wikipedia. If someone were to claim that there is nothing more to the painting than this list of compounds, they would in a sense be right, but also very wrong.
This is closely related to and in another thread:
Quoting cherryorchard
When Michael says that colors are percepts or that we only ever see percepts and never colors, he is in a very real sense committing himself to the position that we only ever see colors indirectly.
That makes sense.
Quoting Richard B
Here is an example where Aquinas is considering the question of whether the impression is related to the intellect as that which is understood or that by which it understands. The Bad Argument would reflect the idea that understanding terminates in the impression. In terms of this thread we would ask whether the percept is what is seen, or whether the percept is that by which we see:
Quoting Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.Q85.A2 - Whether the intelligible species abstracted from the phantasm is related to our intellect as that which is understood?
I would say Michael, and others, are committed to a particular metaphysical worldview I like to call “The Private Theater.” In this worldview, they imagine they are in a theater where they alone are watching a series of images being projected onto a screen. Based on their memory, they have been in this theater all their lives. With time they have learned to use language and logic from rather useful pedagogical images. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this language and logic has revealed a rather uncertain existence. Ideas of cause and effect have made them realize that these projected images have some kind of cause of some unknown nature. What could be these images “really” be like they wonder. If only their scientific laws could remove this doubt, but unfortunately no matter how many times they predict future images, the next one could undermine everything. Doubt creeps in again. But if one thing they can gain comfort in is the certainly that what appears to them in the theater is always certain.
It's not circular, just as noting that the predicate "is painful" is used to describe things which cause pain mental percepts is not circular.
The fact that we say "is red" rather than something like "is redful" seems to have you confused.
Naive colour realism certainly isn't true. Even the paper you quoted seems to agree with that:
The science is clear that with respect to these phenomenal qualities, eliminativism and subjectivism are correct.
We see colours "directly", just as we feel pain "directly".
I'm not committed to any metaphysics. I'm only committed to physics, and as the SEP article on colour explains, "the major physicists who have thought about color ... hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess", which is why such luminaries as James Clerk Maxwell, the scientist who first developed the theory of light as electromagnetism, said "colour is a sensation".
That's it. You are reading something into my words that just isn't there.
:rofl:
Coming from one who assumes what's in question and admittedly does not have an argument.
Well, I am agreeing with "without the creature capable of seeing color; there are no colors". Colored things are also necessary. Searle seems to say much the same thing.
Michael's not right. He's said there's no colored things aside from mental percepts.
They are inherently capable of being seen as red by a creature so capable. They do not look red unless they are capable of being seen as red by a creature so capable and they're being looked at.
If there's nothing more to being red than being capable of being seen as red by a creature so capable, then they are always red, regardless of whether or not they're being looked at. I think that's where Searle is on that. What's below seems to support this. I'm fairly certain that I've listened to that series of lectures on more than one occasion. Many thanks to UC Berkeley...
Quoting Richard B
If being red requires looking red, or being seen as red, then unobserved things that are capable of being seen as red are not red unless they're being observed. I think that's where I am.
:lol:
We see our color percepts?
Yup. There's the Cartesian theatre. Homunculus lives on...
Why do you enjoy running into the hard wall of the hard problem?
You keep posting scientific studies while ignoring the science of quantum physics with the observer effect and state "collapse". Maybe neurobiologists and quantum physicists should start sharing notes.
It all reeks of a misuse of language. Where is the "we" relative to our colors? What use is the word, "directly" here? How does it help us understand the process?
Having a true understanding of the human condition would come first and from that extrapolate whether our actions are free or determined. I don't want to steer to far off-topic but what is meant by "free" in "free will"? It seems to me that the more options you have the more free your will appears to be, but it would be illogical to believe that you would have made a different choice given the options (information) you had at that moment - as if the same causes (options and circumstances) would produce a different effect (decision).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What else would a true understanding consist of if not an understanding of how things actually are?
Feel free to keep your grammatical fiction, it may serve you well.
Yes, this captures it well. It's not an indirect seeing of color; it's an inability to see beyond percepts.
Feeling pain does not entail a "Cartesian theatre" or a homunculus, even though pain is a sensation, and seeing colours does not entail a "Cartesian theatre" or a homunculus, even though colour is a sensation.
You're arguing against a strawman.
I don't know what you're talking about. This has nothing to do grammar. This has to do with physics and physiology. Maxwell knew better than you about how the world works, especially when it comes to light. As he says, colour is a sensation.
Not quite. I'm saying that colour and pain are percepts. We can still talk about tomatoes being colourful and stubbing one's toe being painful; we just have to interpret such talk according to something like dispositionalism, whereas you seem to be interpreting tomatoes being colourful according to something like naive realism, and it this naive realist interpretation that the science has disproven.
It is not the case that colour is a property of tomatoes but only that tomatoes have a surface that reflects ~700nm light, and this light happens to cause red percepts in most humans, with different organisms possibly having different colour percepts in response to that same light, e.g. see the difference between the visible spectrum for humans and dogs, or even the dress that some see to be white and gold and others as black and blue.
Science studies stuff like brains, nerves, cells, molecules, etc… Not sensations and mental percepts. But scientists certainly are free to talk about sensations and mental percepts, anyone can be a philosopher.
With regards to “grammatical fiction”, this is one of Wittgenstein ideas he expressed in PI 307,
“Are you not really a behaviorist in disguise? Aren’t you at the bottom really saying that everything except human behavior is a fiction?” - If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.”
And what does that have to do with anything I have said here, in particular that comment that you replied to? I am simply reporting that "the major physicists who have thought about color ... hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess" and that Maxwell has said "colour is a sensation".
Are you saying that Maxwell and most major physicists are wrong? Are you suggesting that somehow Wittgenstein's analysis of language can tell us about the physics of tomatoes and the physiology of visual experience, including colour experience?
Quoting Richard B
Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway
This is really very meaningless. It's like saying that a good act is one capable of being seen as good by a creature so capable. Notice, you take something purely subjective, a creature's capacity for discernment, and create the illusion that the discernment "red" is a property of the thing, rather than being the judgement produced by the subject.
You do this by saying that the thing itself is "inherently capable of being seen as red". However, if you think about this statement, we could say it about anything. Anything in the universe, whatsoever, has the capacity to been seen as red, by a creature which is capable of seeing it as red. And so the statement is completely meaningless.
Yep, is “color in a perceiver”? Well, sure if you open the skull to see the brain, it may appear grayish. But I suspect they are saying something rather metaphysical here, unverifiable. And now we are in the “Private Theater” realm. Imagining all sort things we wish we can describe with a private language. But I will agree they are talking about physical stimulus, neurons, and reports of color, a scientific way to describe how a human experiences color.
No, what they're saying is that the subject sees colours when there is activity in the V4 and VO1 areas of the visual cortex. Normally these areas are active in response to retinal stimulation by light, but that's incidental to seeing colours.
Quoting Michael
Am I?
Quoting Michael
Percepts are in the head.
Yup, and good points.
You've misunderstood.
Color experience requires both, colorful things(things capable of being seen as colorful by a creature so capable) and a creature so capable.
Things capable of being seen as red are those with physical surfaces reflecting the appropriate wavelengths of the visible spectrum. A capable creature is one capable of detecting and/or distinguishing those wavelengths.
I would say something else as well. A human community who has a general consensus in color judgment. Without this general consensus, there is no language game of colors.
No, that doesn't make any sense. Obviously, having a true understanding of the human condition requires knowing about free will, as a part of the human condition.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What is meant by it, is irrelevant to this point. Since it is commonly said that human beings have free will, then we need to know what is being referred to in order to understand the human condition, of which free will is said to be a part of.
Quoting creativesoul
This doesn't affect the point I made. "Things capable of being seen as colourful by a creature so capable" is really a meaningless statement. Different creatures could see different things as colourful. And when you consider that absolutely anything could be seen as colourful, you will start to understand that the "thing capable of being seen" is not even necessary for the experience of colour. That's what Descartes demonstrated in his "evil demon" thought experiment, which is now commonly presented as "brain in a vat". The reality of dreams and hallucinations demonstrates that your stated condition is really not required.
Quoting creativesoul
That's only by your definition of "seeing red". But that definition is clearly debatable, so who knows what range of experiences could be known by other creatures as "seeing red".
I've already addressed this. I'm neither inclined nor required to go over it again. It's a matter of existential dependency and elemental constituency. Dreams and hallucinations are existentially dependent upon veridical perception. To the rest...
Of course it depends on the sense of the terms I'm using. As if that counts as a problem.
That is an unwarranted assumption. It is quite possible, and even likely I would say, that dreams are prior to sense perception.
You're assuming that free will is part of the human condition. I'm saying that it likely isn't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is commonly said that God exists too, but I'm sure you are aware that there some contention on this issue. It was once commonly said the Earth was flat. The fact that something is commonly said does not necessarily imply that what is said is a fact. This is an argumentum ad populum.
What you believe about "free will" is irrelevant. We do have the capacity to choose, and we all know and accept this. Some call this 'free will", if you want to just call it "the capacity to choose", that's fine. Whatever, way that you describe it, or try to understand it, it's part of the human condition which we need to understand in order to adequately understand the human condition. The fact that some people say we have free will, and others do not, is very strong evidence that the human condition is not understood, and we need to know the truth about this matter before it will be understood.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That is exactly the point I am making. We need to know the truth about these things before we can claim to have an understanding of the human condition. If we knew the truth about free will, then we'd have a much better basis for a claim about understanding the human condition. Since we do not know the truth about this, we cannot claim to have an understanding of the human condition.
I have some thoughts on perception that i wanted to post, so here it goes. It seems to me that there has to be a core ability/principle in man that turns raw sensation into perception. If colors are all in the head then an object doesn't "look like" anything. But then our eyes, perhaps the greatest organ, does not know reality. Does it see shape at least? In combination with touch, perhaps. But colors are just as much "there in front of us" as the solidity on which the colors lie. Things wouldn't even be black and white or translucent on there own. "In themselves" no sight could see them. So it seems to me that that there must be a soul in man that sees through the eyes and touches the object of vision in ocular activity. Science says all we see is light and that the objects are images in the brain (the world is in the brain?). George Berkeley was key in the development of this. But when I say soul I
Do not necessarily mean something spiritual. It could be a core principle that is more than spiritual (actually divine) or it could be a material principle (stemming from QM?) which is even more truly material than the world we are trying to know. That there is something unique in man in this way (although unique only as special and foundational, for animals may have it too) can be shown by how children learn language. We all know that if we come across ancient scrolls on which is written a language unlike any we know, we could never translate it. Yet this is the very situation a child is in. If i show a toddler a ball and say "ball", how does the child know that the word ball refers to that object instead of only to its extension, firure, solidity, or number. If i say to him "you jumped", how does he know the word "you" doesn't apply to the jumping? Of course this all happens in a complex context over time, but i still believe everyone would be autistic so to say without a natural core principle uniting our minds to each other. Even if a child is resting on the mother's breast and she says "love" as the child is feeling love, could not the word love mean rather "mother" instead of the act of love itself. Without a place to start we could never have common communication with each other. So I believe and think that we all have bodies that have all kind of natural intelligences in them, and the that mind is a limitless faculty that is designed to know people and the world itself. If we can't know the world, how can we know other people?
The capacity to choose isn't just a human condition. Other animals make choices too. Computers make choices by running software with IF-THEN-ELSE statements which are options given some set of circumstances. When you make choices, you do the same thing. You measure your options against the current circumstances and ultimately choose the one that best fits the circumstances. Logically, you will always make the same choice given the same set of circumstances and the same set of options, just like a computer. And just like a computer, you choices can become predictable.
So the question isn't, "do we have the capacity to choose". It's "do we have the capacity to choose freely", whatever that means. Hopefully you can enlighten me.
You're still make irrelevant comments. The fact that human beings are animals is an essential aspect of the human condition. So, presenting the fact that other animals make choices, as do human beings, does nothing to suggest that this is not a part of the human condition. Neither does the fact that human beings make machines which also appear to be making choices.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I believe this proposition is fundamentally flawed. There is no such thing as two distinct instances of "the same set of circumstances". That is a fundamental aspect of reality, and also of the human condition, ensured by the nature of time. Any set of circumstance is unique, and not repeatable as "the same". Do you disagree with this?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You seem to be willfully ignoring what I am saying. We do not understand the capacity to choose. Therefore we do not understand the human condition. In order to understand the human condition we need to first understand the capacity to choose. "We" includes I. Therefore I cannot "enlighten" you on this matter.
...which is what I was doing in suggesting that we look at how other animals make decisions. If how animals make decisions is similar to how humans make decisions then that can shed some light on the human condition. This is why we use animals as test subjects to get at some aspect of the human condition without harming humans.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not willfully ignoring anything. It is you that is ignoring my request for you to explain what you mean by free will. If free will simply entails making decisions and I have shown that computers can make decisions does that mean computers have free will? You either agree that it does and we can then settle the case as one of where you use different words than I do to explain the same process, or disagree and you would have to come up with a better explanation as to what free will is. The ball is in your court.
Let me just add that if you want to say that a computer doesn't actually have choices or make decisions then I would expect you to then define what you mean by "choices".
But we still don't know how animals make choices. And, it's doubtful that selections made by other animals can even qualify as decisions. To choose, and to decide, have very different meanings.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I answered this. It's the capacity to make choices. Some say it's free will, others do not. That there is not agreement on this indicates that we do not understand it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Computers do not make decisions. To decide is to come to a resolution as the result of consideration. Computers are incapable of consideration. Computers do not even choose, they simply follow algorithms. To choose is to select from a multitude of options. There are no options for a computer, it must follow its rules. Even a so-called random number generator is a case of following a set of rules, and not a true choice
It appears like you just like to throw words around willy nilly, pretending that you can argue logically by giving the same word different meanings. That's known as equivocation. You can say that a computer "decides" if you want, and we say that a human being "decides", but obviously what is referred to by that word in each of these two cases, is completely different. So to say that the computer's activity is relevant to what we are discussing, would be equivocation.
That's a weird assertion considering that the definition of "choose" is to decide, according to Merriam-Webster:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/choose
So the ball is in your court again to explain YOUR distinction between what it means to choose as opposed to decide because I have no idea what you're talking about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
MOST people do not say that is free will. Most people define free will as "The capacity to make choices that are neither determined by natural causality nor predestined by fate or divine will." So "free will" isn't just making choices as there are choices that are forced and those that are not. You seem to be saying that "free will" entails both forced and unforced choices.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You also said,
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So if we do not understand the capacity to choose how can you say whether or not a computer makes choices or not? I asked you to define what you mean by "choose". If I can learn to predict what you will choose does that no imply that you are following some predictable pattern (algorithm) in making your decisions? Give me an example of one instance where you made a decision and tell me what it was like for you. Explain the process that you used in making your decision.
This discussion has strayed too far off topic.
Yep. And understanding the order of events is paramount. The role that language can and cannot play in our lives; particularly early on. That seems crucial to me.
We are picking out color - to the exclusion of all else - each and every time we gather red things. We even use the same biologically activated structures(brain areas). Such activities go hand in hand - so to speak - with correctly, appropriately, and hence sensibly... uttering "red". There are other ways to use the word.
We are not picking one or the other. We are connecting them. All red things share that in common, even if the common denominator boils down to being capable of causing those capable of having subjective color experiences of red to do so.
I think Searle would distinguish between the subjective and objective aspects of experience.
Red things are not in the head even if they do not look red unless their being viewed.
:up: Right, how could it be sensible to say anything looks like anything outside the context of being seen?
I'm amazed that some in this thread seem to think there is a fact of the matter concerning whether unseen things are coloured. Of course in ordinary parlance it is said they are, but that doesn't mean that what is being claimed is that unseen objects look red or any other colour.
An unseen tomato is not invisible per se. An unseen tomato does not look red it is red.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=8066898573347962
Did anyone mention RGB? The screens of modern phones, tablets, computers, TVs etc use three colour channels: red, green, blue. There's no yellow light emitted from these screens, yet they can depict yellow objects, and we see them as yellow. But the truth is that those are faint green colours looking as yellow.
Try this. Open a picture of a yellow colour swatch on your phone, zoom in so that the colour covers the entire screen. Then go into a dark room or closet, and let the light from the screen shine on a (white) wall. The light on the wall does not look so yellow. It's faint green.
Well, whether you’re convinced by it is irrelevant. What matters is that both a) I see a can of red Coke and b) the photo does not emit 620-750nm light are true. So one’s account of seeing the colour red cannot depend on 620-750nm light.
The factual explanation is that the colours we see are determined by what the brain is doing.
Unless having already seen red is necessary for the illusion to work.
Quoting Michael
In part.
By this do you mean that 620-750nm light must have stimulated my eyes for me to see the colour red? Why do you think that? What’s the relationship between 650-720nm light and the colour red?
Must have already in past...
That's how gestalts work.
They're both elements for the emergence of red experience(s).
Sure, like getting stabbed or burnt or whatever are elements for the emergence of pain experience(s). But pain is nonetheless the experience. My claim is only that these colour experiences are our ordinary and everyday understanding of colours. When I think about the colour red I'm not thinking about atoms and electrons and photons or anything like that; I'm thinking about the experience.
Although re-reading this, maybe I've misunderstood you. Are you saying that these are three distinct things?
1. 650-720nm light
2. The colour red
3. Red experiences
Well, they're different sets of meaningful marks(names). For me, the last two are inseparable, whereas they are both existentially dependent on the first.
I agree, if by "is red" we mean is capable of causing red experience in those capable of having them.
a) is false. You don't see red. One colour, or a bundle of colours, can look like another colour. For example, at dusk, dawn, under coloured lights, in pointilistic paintings, RGB screens etc.
Quoting Michael
That's also false. The blind can't see anything no matter what their brains are doing.
Colour is the look, not a wavelength of light (which you seem to be saying here). There is usually a correspondence between the two, but dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and cases such as the dress show that this correspondence doesn't always hold.
Quoting jkop
See cortical visual prostheses.
The blind can see if their brains are directly stimulated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene
Similarly, the profoundly deaf can hear using direct stimulation methods.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant
This is due to the uncontroversial scientific fact that perception is created by the brain regardless of whether the stimulus enters the brain through the normal means of sensory organs or whether it is hot wired directly through a probe.
One might perceive that he is running while in fact he is dreaming. In that case it would be an error to say he is running. It’s the same with sight and hearing. So while one might perceive that he is seeing or hearing with direct stimulation of some part of his brain, it is in fact untrue that he is. The environmental stimulus and the means with which it interacts with a fully-functioning sensory organ is a large part of acts such as “seeing” and “hearing”, and ought not be confused with some other stimulus. Stimulating a brain with some of the methods indicated is just an artificial way to illicit some of the biological effects of an actual, natural stimulus, but is in fact not the same act.
Why does that matter? It is still normal to describe someone with a cochlear implant as hearing things, and the same for those with an auditory brainstem implant.
If you only want to use the words “see” and “hear” for those with normally functioning sense organs then you do you, but it’s not wrong for the rest of us to be more inclusive with such language.
If I have a cochlear implant and perceive you say "hello" through my "artificial" means, and I say "Nos said 'hello,'" my statement is true under both correspondence and coherence theories of truth. That is, my saying you said hello corresponds to what actually happened and my use of language is consistent with your own.
We would have a different result if I hallucinated you saying "hello. "
None of this demands a direct realism. To demand a direct realism forces a definition of "artificial" to simply mean "other than typically human, " which in no way can be assumed to be more accurate than other methods. To call one method artificial assumes there is an otherwise natural and correct way, but that assumption is the entirety of this debate. That is, what is contested is whether the world as it appears is as it is or whether it has been artificially manipulated by the internal processes.
My position is that all perception is "artificial" if that term means it is an unaltered representation of reality.
This is equivocation on "seeing." For example, a blind person does not see when they dream, as your verbiage would have it. Sleeping pills are not a cure for blindness.
Quoting Hanover
This is an equivocation on "created." There is a lot of equivocation going on between you and Michael.
In sight the brain processes external signals, it does not create images. In that case the images require both the brain and the external stimulus. In hallucination the brain does create images, for in that case the images require no external stimulus. Your whole facade requires equivocation between these two very different cases. If there were no difference between seeing the wolf and hallucinating the wolf, then you would be right. In that case we would not even have two different words, "seeing" and "hallucinating."
Yep. :up:
It's odd that we even have to have these sorts of conversations.
I don't think telling the blind that they can see is a great idea. Mimicking such function is obviously helpful, offering a better quality of life, but it is because the facts are apparent—the blind have trouble seeing—that they were able to get the help in the first place.
The question is not whether I said "hello" but whether you heard me say "hello". But hearing me say "hello" and recognizing the signals from a mechanical device stimulating your auditory nerve are two different acts. Evidence of this is that one has to relearn how to "hear" using such a device.
By "artificial" I am speaking of the mechanism, for instance the cochlear implant. It was designed, built, and inserted by a human being, whereas the organs were not. In any case, the only things manipulated by internal processes, whether artificial or natural, are internal processes. That's the only extent to which internal processes can manipulate the world.
The deaf can't hear without a cochlear implant but can hear with one. It's quite simple.
Of everyone with a brain, there are some blind and deaf people who can be helped by aids to sight or hearing, and others who cannot. To understand the difference between the two is to understand why sight and hearing are not reducible to the brain. If they were reducible to the brain then everyone with a brain would be able to see and hear, and everyone who is blind or deaf would be helped by brain-based aids.
The question isn't whether seeing via an electrode, through glasses, through your screen window, or through your naked eye are different. They all obviously are. The question is whether there is an ontological difference that impacts the truth value of the judgment that requires differing descriptive words.
What distinguishes the dream with the electrode example is the claim "there is a chair" does not correspond with reality in the dream, but it does with the electrode.
If you wish to preserve the term "see" only for those instances where it is visualized through the naked eye, then why stop there, but instead create 1000s of gradients of the word "see" to preserve each type of corrective lens or optic surgery someone might have?
That is, to say "I 'see' the chair" with my thick eyeglasses and you to say you "see" the same through your cataracts, then that too would equivocate the term "see" as you're arguing it.
It's not equivocation to say that the schizoprenic hears voices. That's just the ordinary way of describing the phenomenon.
Verbs like "to see" and "to hear" don't just refer to so-called "veridical" perception.
If they can hear, why do they have a cochlear implant?
Does the "electrode" result in sight or a hallucination? (And why is this question important?)
That doesn't follow.
They hear because of the cochlear implant, much like I can see the words on the screen because of my glasses.
No, "hears voices" is a euphemism for "hallucinates." You are confusing yourself.
No one is arguing brains can hear without input of any sort. The argument is that no can hear without a brain.
But who is arguing that persons can hear without brains?
I'm not confusing myself because I haven't claim that "hearing voices" isn't a euphemism for "hallucinate".
I am simply saying that it is ordinary in English to use the verbs "to see" and "to hear" in a much more inclusive manner than the more restricted sense that you and NOS4A2 insist on.
You've claimed that the "hears" in "hears voices" is just like the "hears" in ordinary predications about hearing, which is false, because "hears voices" is a euphemism for hallucination.
No I haven't.
Indeed. The question is whether or not there is an ontological difference between veridical perception, dreaming, and hallucinating.
The difference is the things. In the first, they are always included. In the second and third, they are never included. Seeing rainbows always includes rainbows. Dreaming and hallucinating rainbows never does.
Pretty simple.
Same with hearing voices, hallucinating voices, or dreaming them. The voice is absent in the latter two, but always present in the first.
So when the blind dream are they seeing? They are obviously interacting with percepts, and you think percepts are seeing, so apparently the blind are seeing when they sleep.
Quoting Leontiskos
They are seeing in the sense of having a visual experience but not seeing in the sense of responding to and being made aware of some appropriate external stimulus by way of their eyes, much like the schizophrenic is hearing in the sense of having an auditory experience but not hearing in the sense of responding to and being made aware of some appropriate external stimulus by way of their ears.
You can see the words on the screen because your eyes still function enough to be able to see. No amount of glasses can help the those with total blindness see, however.
But other mechanisms such as a cortical visual prosthesis can help (or will be able to help in a few decades). Much like a cochlear implant helps where an ear trumpet can't.
Okay good, and this is true even if their percepts are identical, yes? Therefore to see an external object is not merely a matter of percepts, yes?
There are cases where nothing will help. Again:
Quoting Leontiskos
It will definitely help and will improve the quality of life of those who cannot see. But if seeing is using the eyes to perceive the environment, that isn’t sight. That’s all I’m saying.
All that is required to have a visual experience is for there to be the appropriate neural activity in the visual cortex, and all that is required to have an auditory experience is for there to be the appropriate neural activity in the auditory cortex.
Most of the time this neural activity is a response to sensory stimulation of biological sense organs, but sometimes it is a response to other things, whether those be artificial sensory aids, drugs, sleep, or mental illness.
And as I've said, you're welcome to only use the verb "to see" in that sense if you like, but there's nothing wrong with the rest of us being more inclusive in how we use such language.
Quoting Leontiskos
Note that just as one can have a visual experience of an object without seeing an external object, so too one can have a visual experience of a colored object without seeing an external colored object. I can hallucinate a horse and I can hallucinate the horse's brownness, and this is different from seeing a real horse and seeing its real brownness. The distinction you are making applies equally well to color.
Absolutely. I have no qualms with people using those verbs. Philosophically speaking, however, my concern is only if it is true or false, and the use of those verbs falls under one category and not the other.
Does the same hold of color?
--
The reason color is not a percept is because humans know that there are things which alter our percepts without altering the external objects of our percepts, and because of this the most common use of the word 'color' has a super-perceptual referent. For example:
Quoting Leontiskos
When a shadow falls over a ball we do not say that the color of the ball has changed, because we differentiate our visual perception of the ball from the ball's color. We know that things like paint change the ball's color whereas shadows do not. This is just like the indirect realism argument regarding perspective (i.e. the way that distant objects appear smaller).
"Color is a percept" is a false statement, just as, "Objects are percepts" is a false statement. Nevertheless, there is a manner in which color is more "perceptual"/subjective than shape. Color is more one-dimensional than shape given that it cannot be perceived by any other sense, and it is interpreted by the brain in a more idiosyncratic manner than shape is (i.e. it is more dependent on the particularly human cognitive apparatus than something like shape). But it is incorrect to take these subtle differences and turn them into crass statements like, "Science has proved that color does not exist!"
The bolded word is where Michael oversteps. Things in the word, and the people around us, also have a say in what colours we see. The brain is not the sole determiner colour.
Does a baby see color?
I assume babies can't see color because "Things in the word, and the people around us, also have a say in what colours we see." Since babies don't know words and words determine what we see, babies can't see, color or otherwise.
This seems like the same equivocation between determination and influence that Banno pointed out to begin the exchange.
The claim seems to be that things in the world influence what we see, and our linguistic community influences the names of what we see and the aspects we pay attention to. It does not follow from this that babies do not see.
Kinda where we came in.
Because red was defined in the example as certain wavelengths.
Do they see red?
Do cats see red even without words?
You made an argument, I pointed out why it was a bad argument, and then instead of responding you asked a question. Was your argument a good argument or a bad argument? Does your conclusion follow?
Yup. My reply was "in part"...
You indicated language was a necessary element in the formulation of a perception and I offered an example of perception occurring without language.
You didn't relent with my example, so I asked why my example was inapplicable, and you said "whatever."
Is what you're saying simply that sometimes language affects our perception and sometimes it doesn't?
Where did I indicate that? This thread has been running on poor reasoning for dozens of pages, so I think it's time to address the reasoning itself. Where did I say or imply that language is a necessary element for perception? Where is your reasoning coming from?
Quoting Hanover
Where do you believe you did that?
The question here is how you interpreted Banno's claim in order to impute to Banno the conclusion that, "babies can't see, color or otherwise." What sort of strawman is intervening to produce such an incredible conclusion? If it doesn't follow from what Banno said, then what is happening, here?
I thought that that 'issue' had been long since resolved. Seeing. Dreaming. Hallucinating. The former always includes some thing, whereas the latter two never do.
But, with this thread, evidently not.
Edit: And it looks as if the conversation will continue. That's how threads such as this function, with folk who know the one, true answer talking past each other.
'Things in the word, and the people around us, also have a say in what colours we see."
Yes, and I gave my interpretation of Banno's statement here, which included a critique of your interpretation:
Quoting Leontiskos
You responded with a question. Would it help if I added that it neither follows from this that babies do not see color?
How do you get from Banno's statement to your inference that, "babies can't see, color or otherwise"? What is your reasoning?
If that is not the reasoning that takes you from Banno's statement to your inference, then what is the reasoning that takes you from Banno's statement to your inference?
Is the dispute just over the word "necessary" in conclusion #2?
If it is, then that's sort of obvious. Why would I demand that language not be a factor in how we interpret the world? My position has always been that perceptions are indirect interpretations of reality, which would include how we rationally assess them. It's obvious sometimes we think linguistically. It's also obvious sometimes we don't.
Define "precepts" how you're using it here. That's not a term I've used or argued for.
Okay, well I have no idea how (2) is supposed to follow from (1).
Quoting Hanover
No one has said you would. The question is why you think (2) follows from (1).
As to Banno's statement, you fully ignored the heart of it, "Things in the world [...] also have a say in what colours we see."
At this point it seems like you are trying to continue agreeing with Michael despite not agreeing with him on much of anything.
I think the reason Michael's threads never get fully resolved is because Michael refuses the transparency that is a prerequisite for such resolution. In this thread the refusal was in place from the start: instead of making arguments for his position he would only ultimately make arguments from authority from "the science." He was never willing to try to explain how his conclusions followed from "the science." If you don't set out your argument you cannot be critiqued, and if you cannot be critiqued then you can never be wrong.
You are not following what I've said. My point is only that perception is a mental construct.Quoting Leontiskos
When did I adopt Michael's position? It seems you're conflating my position with his.
We specifically disagreed regarding the relevance of this discussion, with him clarifying his sole objective was in identifying the scientific position on perception.
The ball just has a surface layer of atoms with an electron configuration that absorbs and re-emits particular wavelengths of light; these wavelengths being causally responsible for the behaviour of the eye and in turn the brain and so the colour experienced.
Physics and neuroscience has been clear on this for a long time.
We might talk about the ball as having a colour but that's a fiction brought on by the brain's projection and the resulting (mistaken) naive colour realist view of the world.
I haven't claimed otherwise. I have explicitly stated that ~700nm light is the usual cause of red colour experiences (because it is the usual cause of the brain activity that corresponds to red colour experiences).
I have simply quoted what the scientists have said about colour. I'll do it again for you:
[quote=James Clerk Maxwell]Colour is a sensation.[/quote]
[quote=Isaac Newton]For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that Colour.[/quote]
[quote=Stephen Palmer]Color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights.[/quote]
As the SEP article on colour explains:
If you disagree with the science then simply say so, but don't pretend that the science isn't saying what the science is saying. How much more explicit does the above need to be for you?
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, because the scientists are the ones who have carried out the experiments to figure out how the world works, so they better know what they are talking about. You can't determine what colours are just by sitting in your room and using a priori reasoning.
As @Michael argues, color is not within the external object, but it is within brain. That I am agreeing with. If you limit the term percept (which was what I was trying to understand by asking for a definition) to those perceptions you receive solely from your senses, then I suppose I do disagree with Michael to the extent that I allow that some of my interpretation of the external data might arise from language (and all sorts of other mental processes).
That Michael might allow interpretation of the external object by the sense organs alone and not allow it to also be interpreted by language just seems an odd limitation (if that's at all what he's even saying, as that doesn't seem correct). I see no need to limit how the interpretation occurs, whether it be by language or otherwise.
That is, what seems critical here in response to the OP (and we can't lose sight of the fact that the OP asks the question in this thread, regardless of how meandering the conversation might have become) which is:
Quoting Mp202020
To that question, the answer is that the color red does NOT exist outside the subjective mind if the color is entirely caused by the senses OR if it is caused by language. An admission therefore that language causes us to perceive red in a way peculiar to our language lands red as a subjective entity.
That was the question, not whether red is in its entirety mitigated only by the sense organs. It can be affected by language as well, and that would result in the same answer to the OP.
All I am saying is that a deaf illiterate mute can see the difference between a red box and a blue box. That visual distinction has nothing to do with language and everything to do with what the brain does (in response to what the eyes do in response to what the light does in response to what the box does).
Or for a more self-evident example, I can see the difference between two shades of red despite not having an individual name for each shade.
All this talk of language is utterly irrelevant.
I agree with that, but whether I'd foreclose the role of language in the perception of all things, I don't know I'd go so far and I don't know it matters for the purposes of the OP.
My hesitation is in defining the phenomenal state in terms of just raw images in one's brain. It's not like I just see red in a vacuum, but there are all other sorts of things going on in mind, many of which I'm interpreting as I see the thing.
That is, if I see a cardinal, I don't just see the red of the bird, but I see the whole bird and I also have all sorts of thoughts about what that thing can do and what it is at the same time. I don't just get a raw feed of red.
But to say that I must have language to see a bird is equally wrong. Babies see birds. Why the fetish with language as a particular influencer of reality, I don't really know.
Sure, but I don't think all that other stuff has anything to do with the colour, and the discussion is about colour.
But I don't think phenomenal states of a single ingredient exist. The perception is complex, but to the extent you want to hypothesize a perception of red devoid of any other mental activity, then I guess it could exist without language, although I don't think such a thing could exist at all.
We see a red box and a blue box. The colour is the relevant visual difference between the two. I don't think that this visual difference has anything to do with language. The difference is entirely in how the boxes reflect light and then how our body responds to that light.
Specifically it would be our neuronal response to the stimulus that determines how we see the color. I'm trying to understand why it matters in this discussion whether our neuronal response to light is altered by our language skills. I admit that it is doubtful the language bone is connected to the seeing bone, but what would the philosophical import be if it was?
As with hearing, for example, I hear someone say "hello" and I would expect that would elicit my language skills despite the word being just air waves. Whether my mind is so constructed to reduce visual inputs into symbols or representations as well so that they're in some way linguistic in the most general sense, I don't know or see what it matters here. That is, maybe I see red and it makes me mad, or happy, or it reminds me of the time I cut my finger and its visualization is imbued with subjective representations.
Or maybe I'm overthinking this and the point of this discussion is just to tell the Wittgensteinians that their assumptions regarding language are non-scientific horseshit?
Maybe that's true, but I'm more arguing against those who seem to be saying that because we say such things as "the box is red" then it must be that the colour red is a property of the box and not a property of our bodies.
That's my issue as well.
What I actually think linguistic philosophy holds is simply that "the box is red" means the "box" is "red." That is, they're never actually talking about boxes or redness as a metaphysical entity, but they're instead just talking about how we define words and use words. Under this framework, when @Banno says the box is red, his comment is deflationary, meaning to claim "the box is red is true" is meaningfully indistinct from saying "the box is red." All you can do is define your terms and agree on usage.
When you say the box is red and that it's a product of the mind, that attempts to establish a subjective metaphysical reality to the redness, whereas, from the best I follow, Banno attempts to say "the box is red" just means the box is red as defined and distinguishing which part is subjective and which is objective is folly.
The correspondence theory of truth holds no value in this way of thinking, and so the talking around each other follows.
If this weren't the case, then the obviousness of the brain's role in determining perceptions would be conceeded, but the fact it isn't means there's a larger refusal to even consider the underlying metaphysical structure of objects.
All we have are words in this world, which is an interesting puzzle to construct and sort of admire, but it's largely horseshit as far as it is true.
Of course the experience or the appearance of colour is not within the object. So it all comes down to what you mean by saying that colour is or is not in the object.
So I'll go along with an analysis that says that red is a property of most ripe tomatoes, depending on variety.
Some folk claim properties must in some way inhere in the individual in question, and so suppose that while the tomato might be round and firm, it is not red. That strikes me as unneeded philosophical theorising.
I'll also say things such as that this is a closed box of red tomatoes. Some philosophers will claim that such knowledge is impossible. I find their accounts unconvincing.
All this by way of pointing out that while being red involves the firing of certain neurones in an individual brain, there are in addition an assortment of other issues. Colours are more than individual mental percepts.
46 pages. Even @Mp202020 gave up long ago.
Yup. Red balls cause color experience.
Quoting Michael
Not "a" as in singular, but rather 'a' as in a two sided fiction. One side claims color is in visible objects. The other side claims color is in the brain.
They are both half-ways right, and completely wrong. Color - as we know it - is within color experience. Veridical color experience includes red balls. The 'scientific' account in the above quote is commensurate with that.
Hallucinating red balls is one kind of color experience that never includes red balls. The 'scientific' report in the above quote does not take that into account. According to that report, hallucinating and or dreaming about a red ball is not a color experience. There is no surface layer of red ball atoms within one's dream. There are no red balls in hallucinations thereof.
What you've put forth in support of your own claims stands in direct contradiction to them.
THis alone should be sufficient to show Michael's error. The ball is red.
Isn't that like: we may talk about the sun rising, but that's a fiction?
I guess so. We say the sun rises in the east when it's really that the earth is spinning. We say the ball is red when redness is really a product of the brain.
Well, yes. It is true that the sun rises in the East; and we say it is true that the ball is red. What is "really" doing there? Prioritising one narrative over another?
Quoting Hanover
If everything is the product of the brain, then what simulates the brain is the product of the brain. Your narrative leaves you unable to interact with the world. But of course for you the world is just a product of the brain.
You built yourself a self-consistent self deception. Solipsism.
Yes. We have the common figures of speech and then the narratives that help out in the areas of science and engineering, plus aesthetics: the statue is beautiful, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If you squash them together you get directly opposing truths.
Yeah, and I think it's clear that my use of the term "everything" references perceptions, which is all you experience, not all that there is , as it's clear I've distinguished between the brain and the stimulus, which means I've admitted to something other than the brain, thus denying solipsism.
I'm not a mind monist. There are bodies. Yours and mine.
Speaking of deception and all things Descartes, which many blame for this whole mess anyway. You are aware that the positing of the great evil deceiver did not lead Descartes to solipsism?
Yes. And you can say the statue is beautiful while knowing that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Don't ask me. I'm just a word in your game, constructed from usage without metaphysical composition.
I do thank you for speaking my name so that I come into existence.
Yep. Although the two are not exactly analogous. We can agree the fork is on my right while still maintaining that it is on your left. We can agree that the statue is beautiful for you while I find it only curious. If we swap places, we will swap what we say about the forks, but not what we say about the statue. If subjective and objective mean anything, this is a case in point.
Quoting Hanover
Language games do not involve only words. They are locked into the world by what we do. So fortunately or unfortunately, you are not mere words.
What we do is "debate." What debating is how we use the term. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Hanover is ""Hanover" iff Hanover is "Hanover." What be Hanover without "Hanover"?
Silence!
Aesthetics starts with the way the world makes us feel. We're capable of discussing rules of aesthetics because we tend to feel the same about lines of grace and symmetry.
The reason our little notes on perception always center around red is that it's associated with a close to universal feeling: it's hot. Red comes from mind meeting world.
That's wise.
Another 'theory' is that we relate oranges and reds to ripe fruit. I have no idea how far this has been tested though. On the surface it seems like a reasonable assumption ... but they can be wrong of course.
And stubbing one's toe is painful, but pain is still a sensation. We've been over this so many times. Your reasoning is a non sequitur.
Quoting Michael
Sorry - is your claim now that pain is also a fiction? :chin:
No, and nor is my claim that colour is a fiction. My claim is that pain and colour are sensations, and the fiction is that colour is not a sensation but a property of the ball.
And much like "stubbing one's toe is painful therefore pain is not a sensation" is a non sequitur, so too is "the ball is red therefore colour is not a sensation".
Meh. So so.
Is the world outside your head without color in your view?
Perhaps we would be able to numb the sensation of color like we could the sensation of pain, and see the world how it really looks.
Not sure what you mean by "how it really looks", just as I wouldn't be sure what you'd mean by "how it really smells" or "how it really tastes".
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes, and without smell and taste and pain.
I just mean seeing it without the sensation of color. What do you suppose it looks like?
I don't even know what a colourless visual sensation could be, and so I think without colour sensations you'd just be blind.
I would say that you are not following what you are doing, for your <post> in question is obviously not primarily about the thesis that perception is a mental construct. Instead of standing by your interpretation of Banno's claim and answering for it you've retreated back into your motte. I don't intend to keep chasing you back and forth.
People with complete achromatopsia are not blind.
I wonder if someone with achromatopsia views the world more accurately given that it is without color.
Achromatopsia tends to come with other visual problems, so generally probably no.
Although if someone had complete achromatopsia without other visual problems, I suppose there would be special cases where there might be some advantage to achromatopsia. However, there's a lot of visual detail available to those with normal color vision that would not be available to someone with achromatopsia.
For example, is the grey of a ripe tomato distinguishable from the grey of an unripe tomato? I don't know, but it would surely be more difficult than distinguishing a red tomato from a green tomato.
Hmm. Hesperus and Phosphorous. Evening Star. Morning Star. Venus over time.
Those who see red and green as grey ARE picking between the same apples. The red apples look grey to some. So do the green ones. I agree that distinguishing between shades of grey could be more difficult than distinguishing between a red apple and a green one, unless you see red and green as grey. Then you are distinguishing between the same apples. The red apple is also grey.
The apple is ontologically objective. The color of it, not so much. The color of it causes the subjective color experience of the creature capable of having color experience. Color has to be meaningful to the candidate under consideration. This demands a theory of meaning that is capable of taking that into proper account.
Evolutionary progression is key. We have to be able to at least outline the color experience of language less creatures and ourselves alike and we must do so by acquiring understanding of how things become meaningful to language less creatures.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. I'm picturing a scenario where there are multiple different fruit, some of which would be seen as green (unripe) and others as red (ripe), by people with normal color vision. Unripe fruit aren't the same as ripe fruit, so I don't know what you mean by "the same" here.
As an aside, I decided to look up the spectral sensitivity of rod cells (which would be the only functional photoreceptive cells for someone with complete achromatopsia).
Because rod cells have little to no sensitivity to the red part of the spectrum, a red fruit would appear much darker shade of grey than a green fruit, to someone with complete achromatopsia.
Right. I'm just reinforcing the idea that red apples can also be grey apples for the appearance of color totally depends on both, the biological structures(biological machinery) of the observer as well as the physical properties of distal objects.
The red apples are the exact same apples as the grey ones, for the appearance of color is inherent in neither, the distal object nor the observer. Consider this: "That's a red apple" and "That's a grey apple" are both perfectly true when spoken by two people. All it takes is one with the condition you've put forth, and another more commonly/typically functioning individual asserting those claims while ostensively pointing at the exact same apple. The atypically sighted person would have to be informed that what they see is called "grey" by normally sighted individuals, but I've labored this point enough. Save that, and they may call it by the same color name.
There is no correct way to see color. There are typical ways. There are ways that most normally functioning adult humans see colors. Because the same objective physical properties combined with the same outside circumstances/conditions can result in the exact same objects appearing to be different colors to different people at the same time, from the same vantage point, we can know that color does not belong to objects and objects alone. The power to cause color experience in a creature so capable does.
I don't think anything I've claimed is incommensurate with our current scientific knowledge base. Although it may contradict some ancients who believed in things like ether, sensations, and what have you.
Uncle Harry.
I'm gullible. They all coulda been pullin my leg.
Like Aristotle? Putnam? Searle? McDowell? To ascribe child-like ignorance to those who defend naive realism is not so educated.
In the philosophy of perception, 'naive realism' is the name for the idea that the relation between observer and object is direct.
I still like the term naive realism. I think it is apt since it's not doing justice to any adequate theory of realism. An adequate theory of realism would have to treat the perceiver as a genuine agent, not an entirely passive recipient of a purely objective world in all its glory.
Hence, why I think critical realism and new realism are better positions since they're seeking a better understanding of what it even means for something to be real. A realist account of perception will have to consider what the agent themselves brings to the encounter in terms of subjectivity, context, history, affordance, cultural sediment etc.
What are you saying, that "direct realism" is better terminology? I suppose it's better because the word "direct" clearly exposes the faults. Obviously, there is a medium between the supposed "thing" which is seen, and the perception of it. People here are describing that medium in terms of wavelengths, so we might imagine that the visual aspect of "the real" consists of waves.
Quoting Bodhy
Yes, this is a much better starting point. Instead of thinking of the subject as being passively subjected to a world of activity, therefore producing an effect from that causation, it is much better to think of the agent as actively causing the world, as perceived. Then we can look at the way that the supposed external world of activity affects, or has an effect on, the perceived world which the agent creates for itself.
I'm not seeing how the latter is better. It sounds solipsistic to me.
I'd think it better to recognize that neither of those options is very realistic, or the only options.
Yep.
Seems to me that physical events cause mental events and mental events cause physical events. Not one or the other. Both.
Searle fills that bill nicely.
Have you read any of the above mentioned philosophers on perception? Try this.
Quoting Bodhy
They're better, because they're better at satisfying what you already assume? :roll:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, 'direct' is equally misunderstood by uncharitable opponents. I think 'naive' is fine, because in the philosophy of perception it does not refer to ignorance.
Considering the color fictionalism position, if the world is without color then I suppose a scene of greys is what it must look like. And the implications are crazy. We must have evolved into beings who paint the world with color, and somehow were able to stay within the lines this whole time. In fact we must have invented color at some point. Of course it’s all untenable.
You seem to be under the impression that there’s a way things look distinct from the way things look to us. That makes as much sense as saying that there’s a way things taste and smell and feel distinct from the way things taste and smell and feel to us.
Vision isn’t special.
I don't take credit for that analogy.
No, just that it is possible to see thing more accurately, for instance if the world is without color, maybe it would better to see it without color. Why would a species need color?
There are plenty of species that don't need vision at all. Why is there a question of a species needing color?
There are species that have color vision because for those species it was adaptive to have color vision, and via biological evolution such sensory capacities evolved.
What does it refer to then?
The is a question of a species needing color because, from the perspective of color fictionalism, color is a fiction. I’m just not sure why a species would adapt to a fictional view of its surroundings.
Versions of direct perceptual realism (e.g. McDowell's disjunctivism, or Searle's non-disjunctivism).
Compare it with indirect perceptual realism, which is sometimes called 'scientific' despite the fact that it does not refer to science per se but the philosophical assumption that perception is indirect since scientists can manipulate the conditions of observation and evoke non-veridical experiences or hallucinations. But from artificially evoked experiences or hallucinations it doesn't follow that all experiences are hallucinations, nor that we never directly experience objects and states of affairs.
In both of these cases the words 'naive' and 'scientific' are used metaphorically (or rethorically), not literally.
Is it possible to smell and taste things more accurately? Does the world contain smell and taste even when we're not smelling and tasting things?
I'd think it would make more sense to be dubious towards the color fictionalism theory one has in mind.
Light comes in a spectrum of wavelengths. Objects reflect some of those wavelengths more completely than other wavelengths. Our visual systems are able to capture some of the detail of how white light interacts with objects, and it provides an adaptive advantage that our visual systems do so. However, we might say that our visual systems do so crudely.
We might imagine a species with 'superior' color vision, in which each photoreceptive cell in the retina is a spectrophotometer, and can transmit to the brain lots of high accuracy data about the intensity of each spectral component of the light landing on each photoreceptor. There would be an information overload problem though. Such a species would need much thicker optic nerves than we have, in order to transmit such highly detailed visual information to the brain. Furthermore, the brain of this imagined species would need to be much bigger than ours, in order to make use of all the highly detailed data coming in via those thick optic nerves. Brain is metabolically expensive (and in the case of humans, already verging on too big to pass through a birth canal) so although we can imagine such a species it isn't a plausible outcome of biological evolution.
Instead we have visual systems that allow us to gather a useful amount of data about the optical environment while retaining the ability to run away from things that want to eat our brains.
I guess I just don't see the metaphor here, and the use appears to me to be literal.
Well, yes, dogs have better hearing and smell.
I was strictly speaking about colors, though. If color is a fiction, why are we adding fiction to whatever it is we’re adding the color to?
The eagle has 20/5 eyesight, more rods and cones, and see much better. According to color factionalism they invent color, too, and somehow paint the images with their brain, but why would animals with such great sight distort their sight with color?
It's clearly useful to visually distinguish objects which reflect 400nm light and objects which reflect 700nm light. Colour sensations is how we do that.
Take this for example:
It's not that either humans or dogs (or neither) is seeing the "correct" (mind-independent) colour when looking at an object that reflects 500nm light; it's just the case that 500nm light causes different colour sensations for humans and dogs.
I don't see how it is useful to distort the picture with a fiction.
A fiction is something invented or untrue. Color is a fiction. So it follows that the less color the less fiction, and therefor more accurate. Given that the dog sees a less variety of color according to your spectrums, and color is a fiction, it follows that the dog sees less fiction. Isn't that so?
My opinion is the opposite: that the dog is less-equipped to see the world, not only because it has only a fraction of the cones we do, but because it sees less of the world as a result.
I don't think color is a sensation because sensations occur within the body, while colored objects occur outside the body in a space independent of the mind.
Objects outside the body just reflect different wavelengths of light. This light causes one type of colour sensation in humans and another type of colour sensation in dogs.
Quoting NOS4A2
No it’s not, it just isn't what you claim it to be.
Quoting NOS4A2
Your reasoning is akin to arguing that because pain is not a mind-independent property of fire then it is not useful and a distortion and a fiction to feel pain when we put our hands in the fire.
1. “the apple is red” means “the apple reflects ~700nm light”
2. The apple is red because it reflects ~700nm light
3. The apple reflects ~700nm light because it is red
But dogs can see in the dark. They forfeit one advantage for the sake of another.
But their location suggests that the color is outside the body, not inside. What we do with paints, phosphors, pigments, suggest that the color is out there among the surfaces of the objects these adjectives are meant to describe. On the other hand, there is no indication color sensations exist.
It sure looks like it is. Yours neither looks like it is nor makes any sense.
But I'm speaking about vision. Pain is no doubt located in the body, but it isn't clear that color is. So it is a false analogy. We'll stick to color since that's what the thread is about.
We just use those things to change the way an object’s surface reflects light. That does not suggest that colour is a mind-independent property of the object’s surface.
Perhaps you could explain which (if any) of these you believe:
1. “the apple is red” means “the apple reflects ~700nm light”
2. The apple is red because it reflects ~700nm light
3. The apple reflects ~700nm light because it is red
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes there is. Dreams, hallucinations, variations in colour perception (e.g. the dress), and studies such as this. This is why James Clerk Maxwell in On Colour Vision (1871) said "it seems almost a truism to say that color is a sensation".
And as the SEP article on colour explains:
Why would we need to change the properties of the object if color is not a property of the object?
I don't know the correct answer but all of them seem good enough for me.
Very few examples and most if not all of them are the result of a body in a state of sleep, deprivation, or hallucination. The body is no doubt fascinating but it’s just not enough for me to doubt common sense, personally.
Besides, sensations aren’t red any more than the word “red” is. Sensations or experiences do not have any properties to begin with. If we are to abandon common sense and the world for pseudo-objects and things without properties we're going to need much more than that.
We need to change how the object reflects light because the wavelength of the light that stimulates the eyes is what determines the type of colour sensation elicited.
Pain is a sensation, it hurts to put my hand in very hot water, I add cold water to reduce the temperature, and so I no longer feel pain when I put my hand in.
Quoting NOS4A2
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Do you accept that pain is a sensation? Do you accept that a bitter taste is a sensation? I am simply pointing out that colour is another type of sensation, specifically a visual sensation. This may not be "common sense", but common sense does not determine the facts, and in this case common sense conflicts with the scientific evidence. I trust the scientific evidence.
If you want to reject the scientific evidence in favour of common sense then go ahead, but it's the less rational position to take.
I’m trying to figure it out I just don’t understand how a sensation can have the property “color”. It isn’t clear what if anything we’re talking about with the phrase “color sensation”. We can’t point to it, examine it, or even think about whether it is the kind of object that is able to have such properties in the first place. So how can one verify whether such a thing even exists?
I think of sensations as events in the body, but colored object appear outside of it. I’ve never seen or felt or tasted a colored sensation before.
I know common sense isn’t its own argument, but I don’t know how to deny that the colorful things outside my brain are not colored. And I am presented with evidence every moment of my waking life that objects, not sensations, have the property “color”. I don’t think believing what one is told or accepting an argument from authority is particularly rational, so I’ll go ahead and continue to believe what I do.
And this is where you're making a mistake. Visual sensations are events in the body (specifically events in the visual cortex). Depth is a characteristic of visual sensations, and so it seems as if there are coloured objects outside the body. But this is as misleading as phantom limbs.
You appear to be under the impression that visual perception is fundamentally different to other modes of perception, such as pain, smell, and taste. It really isn't. Each perceptual system simply involves different organs responding to different stimuli eliciting different types of sensations.
Quoting NOS4A2
Believing what scientists say about what their scientific studies have determined about the world (including perception) is rational. It is rational to believe in the Big Bang, evolution, atoms, electromagnetism, superposition, and so on, even if any of it conflicts with "common sense", and even if one hasn't carried out the experiments oneself.
In quantum physics reflection is actually an interaction between light and electrons, explained as simultaneous absorption and emission of photons. Each photon of light interacts with all the electrons at the surface of the reflecting object, but there is a time difference depending on how far away the part of the surface is from the source of the photon. The frequency of photon emitted from the electron depends on the energy level of the electron. It's very complex, but something like that.
Do you believe the colored objects themselves are events in your body? Or just the color?
No, I think color and pain are fundamentally different. You seem to think they are fundamentally the same.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/
That's nuts.
I know. Now we've got to start over this whole thread now that we learn you don't need eyes or a brain to see.
:grimace:
Those of us who are plants?
They can start their own thread.
I would add, that an indepth understanding of the science behind perception brings perspective about our ability to work around the limits of our perceptual capabilities. A result of such understanding for me, is that time spent arguing over direct or indirect realism seems like time that might be better spent developing an understanding of the relevant science, and humanity's ability to work around our perceptual limitations.
But then I'm inclined to say things like, "I looked at it on the [oscillo]scope and saw that the amplifier was clipping.", with confidence that the person I would say that too wouldn't have much trouble understanding what I mean. So perhaps I speak nonsense?
From the indirect realism thread, we have a similar perspective on this topic.
Yet part of what confuses these threads is that there really are colored objects outside the body, in the sense that there are really objects which reflect light in ways that allow them to be discriminated. Moreover they really do look the way they do: appearing this way (to humans) is a stable, mind independent property (just not independent of all minds, it is like a social reality)
There is no good reason to believe this. It's just like what atheists say about people who believe in God, you just believe this because it makes you feel more comfortable.
If by "coloured objects" you just mean "objects which reflect light which cause colour sensations" then sure. But that's dispositionalism, not naive colour realism.
Quoting hypericin
Yes, and stubbing one's toe really is painful. But pain is still a sensation.
Rather than "objects which reflect light", it might be better to say that we distinguish through our eyes, the energy levels of groups of electrons responding to their environmental conditions. I believe it is important to notice that we attribute mass to "an object", and electrons have very little, if any, mass. Since the mass of an object is attributed to the nucleus of the atoms, it is very important to understand this revelation of modern science, the fact that we do not see the massive "object". The eyes are sensing something else completely, and presenting that to the conscious mind as the appearance of a coloured object. This is the way that the senses are said to deceive us, through the creation of what we call "appearances".
Rather not. The micro scale is just one scale, one perspective, not more or less privileged than the human, planetary, or cosmic. What scale we talk in depends on context. On our human scale, there are not just protons and electrons, but vast assemblages of them which behave in the ways that are meaningful and relevant to us.
Quoting Michael
Sure, but I feel people conflate two or all three of these different senses in which there really are colored objects out there (one of which is false), which contributes to the endless frustration of these discussions.
That's the problem. Depending on which "scale" we "look" at things from, what we "see" is vastly different. The terms "look" and "see" are meant in the sense of looking and seeing with the intellect, rather than with the eyes. The sense of sight provides us with the way that things "appear" from a very specific "scale", or perspective, and since we rely heavily on that sense, we are deceived into thinking that this is the "correct" way that things "look". But as you now correctly point out, from different scales, things "look" vastly different, so we need to resolve all the inconsistencies between the various different "looks", before we can claim to know how things really "look".
That's why I objected to your post claiming that things really do "look" the way we perceive them to look, through the sense of sight.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course, I didn't say that.
Quoting hypericin
Read more carefully before knee-jerk replying.
I stand by my interpretation. This is what you said:
Quoting hypericin
This is what I said:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Notice, you made a statement about what there really is, or specifically "there really are...". And you said "...they really do look the way they do...". That is what I objected to. In my last post I explained why we cannot truthfully make assertions about the way things really are, or how things "really look". And that is exactly what you did.
You are confusing the chronology. This is what you said in reply to your quote of me:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is no good reason to believe objects really selectively reflect light? Or that objects really appear the way they do to us?
There is no "true" way objects look, I agree with you. This is due not just to scale, but to the multitudinous perspectives one can have on an object (scale is just one dimension of these perspectives). Perception itself is radically perspectival, the redness of red, and the spherical appearance of a ball, is a perspective, and a co-creation between you and the ball. That is how perception to conscious beings necessarily works, in a world where there is no such thing as how things "truly" appear (to any of the senses).
What is the difference between the colour "red", and the concept of "red"?