Is my red the same as yours?
I know that everyone's eyes are slightly different and even each of our eyes are slightly different from each other, but since developing a retina disease and having color and fine detail issues I was wondering if the perception of color is as defined as the wavelengths that produce it?
I assume the eye can always see color better. Eagles have 5 times as many cones and maybe we can get closer to the same perception of colors the more information we are able to gather? I assume the eyes and brain may work to convert light into information as efficiently as possible, but is there anything that says our perceptions aren't also something that can be organized in terms of efficiency? Anyway to imagine an experiment to prove how the mind perceives color?
It offers comfort to think I see the same as the next person when looking at a painting.
I assume the eye can always see color better. Eagles have 5 times as many cones and maybe we can get closer to the same perception of colors the more information we are able to gather? I assume the eyes and brain may work to convert light into information as efficiently as possible, but is there anything that says our perceptions aren't also something that can be organized in terms of efficiency? Anyway to imagine an experiment to prove how the mind perceives color?
It offers comfort to think I see the same as the next person when looking at a painting.
Comments (79)
The analytic answer is that there is no my red; that rather, red is a notion constructed by our communal use of language.
The analytics - that would be Wittgenstein, Austin, such like folk.
Is there a Banno's mother? (as a concept)
Just that there is more to red than sense perception.
I didn't say there was no such thing as red.
I didn't say there was no such thing as Banno's mother.
Do you?
Yes, violet/blue have shorter wave lengths, and reds have the longest. I don't think birds see reds as well as humans do though they see more ultraviolet light.
And we all experience phenomena differently. You can see this when you start discussing with another person. They can never quite experience the things you're are at that time.
Often it doesn't make a difference, colors are one such example and we get by fine with traffics lights (the majority of the time). But even then people will quarrel over the color of a dress to use an example from the past five years.
And of course our perception changes over time too. So you might quarrel with yourself, especially if you keep a lot of notes and journals which I am an apt to do.
Heh, heh. Ask a neurobiological question and get some rando pushing philosophy of language.
Sorry about your retinal disease. I’m sure it is more than a linguistic notion.
Quoting TiredThinker
You are asking what is in the end an impossible question because no one else can see inside your head to check. But we can say enough about how the eye and brain process colour experience to at least limit the scope for a difference.
There are for example tetrachromates who have a fourth pigment. The prediction from neurobiology, from how the peak sensitivies of the four cone pigments were arranged, was that they ought to be able to discriminate an awful lot of extra shades of orange that regular folk can’t see. And light mixtures were devised to find subjects for whom this was so.
The tetrachromates said things like that was why they must have struggled in the shop to get the right thread to colour match a garment. The shop assistant thought the orange was a perfect match and couldn’t see how far off it was.
So we can’t get inside heads to say experiences are the same. But we can use discrimination tasks to see if people experience the same distinctions.
I imagine a group of tetrachromates developing their own language to name the varieties of orange from 'crumby to 'gooey' or whatever. And Some tetrachromate philosopher will of course want to know, " is my crumby orange the same as your crumby orange?"
I think @Banno's point is more that the only sense in which senses can sensibly be said to be 'the same' is that they pick out the same things consistently. There is no internal red versus external red, only a relational red that relates our sensual relations; we can talk only to the extent that our sensory worlds coincide. Red is the 'same' for everyone who can see and say that London buses are the 'same' colour as tomatoes and blood.
How do we know that my same is the same as your same?
Just as we use our fingers to point we use language to point. So it's more like our communal pointing to a colored experience. The OP is asking how do we know that what we are pointing to is the same? Being that words are just other sensory impressions, we use sensory impressions to point to other, more complex, sensory impressions. Language is used to communicate complex ideas more efficiently.
Is the way I perceive the scribble or sound, "red" the same (or similar to the) way you perceive it? How about how we first perceived how "red" was used? Was that the same or similar?
When we say, "The apple is red", are we saying that the apple is a scribble/sound, or made of scribbles/sounds, a communal use of language, or what? If "apple" is a communal use of language and "red" is a communal use of language, then all you are saying when using any scribble/sound, is that "The communal use of language is a communal use of language".
Quoting TiredThinker
Red is an interaction between the world and your sensory system. Once the apple-light system interacts with your eye-brain system, it no longer is the same interaction as the interaction of the apple-light system with my eye-brain system. We are two separate beings, and our systems process the information of the apple-light system separately. So to ask if your red is the same as my is red is silly question to ask.
If we want to know about the apple-light system prior to interacting with any eye-brain system, then we shouldn't be asking questions about color, as color is a property of an eye-brain system interacting with the world. This is impossible as every thought we could possibly have takes the form of those sensory impressions, of how the body interacts with the world.
I think that is the issue with QM, in that it hasn't quite accepted that consciousness itself is a causal part of what we experience and how we perceive the world, in that we can never experience, or talk about, the world just by itself.
All experiences include information about the body as well, and trying to understand which information is about the apple and which is about me, can sometimes be difficult. At what point in talking about the apple are you ever talking about just the apple not also talking about yourself, or your perception of it?
Humans generally have three cone types and see colors under well lit conditions. The primary bio-physical layer is established by photopsins, which are light sensing proteins. Each photopsin has a particular probability of absorbing each photon that goes by; this probability changes as a function of frequency and the photopsin. When absorbed the photopsin folds (isomerizes), releasing a chemical that begins a chain reaction leading to your cone signals. There are three photopsins involved here; erythrolabe, chlorolabe, and cyanolabe. Since they either fold or not, and each is sensitive to a broad range of frequencies (just by different amounts), the eye isn't really measuring wavelengths; the best way to describe what this is a measure of is simply to point to the photopsins... it's a three dimensional measure of three kinds of photopsins folding.
A lot of stuff happens from here to your brain, but fast forwarding through all of this, at the other end (in the brain) there are more adjustments made to color, as made evident by the subjective perceptual properties of optical illusions of color. The main categories of such adjustments seem to have to do with color being a virtual property of objects. Specifically, color adjustments seem to be consistent with the effects that shadows and lighting have on the "eye color" (the three-dimensional measure cited above). To speak loosely at an intuitive level (invoking a pseudo-teleology), it's a misnomer that the color visual system is attempting to reconstruct wavelengths, or model the wavelengths of light. Our color visual system apparently does not care one iota what the wavelengths really are, and why should it? What our visual system seems to focus on, instead, is recognizing and distinguishing objects. If the same object projects a different one of those three-dimensional values mentioned in the first paragraph, your brain tries to "fix" it by calculating a virtual invariant that particular objects should have particular colors.
Quoting apokrisis
"Red" is part of a language game played by a community.
Does the same go for Locke's primary properties?
Sure. There is a distinction to be made. But is it due to a "language game" or is it due to neurobiology?
One starts to sound awfully Whorfian about colour perception otherwise.
I'm going to think on that. Good question.
Both?
But I guess you have your Procrustean metaphysics and every conversation must be cut to fit. :hearts:
What did you make of Quoting Forgottenticket
Red is frequency of light. There are different Reds with frequencies that approach purple which are higher frequencies and frequencies that approach IR light and those are lower frequencies. Cameras see your red as my red however i suppose its possible i see red as blue and you and a friend of yours sees red possibly as someone elses yellow. Basically the frequencies are consistent but the eye and brains interpretation might be different from person to person. I suppose this might be why there are color blind People.
But you keep avoiding direct questions.
Quoting apokrisis
As well as those of others.
Not sure what you mean:
Quoting Banno
...but how do you play this game?
Here is someone who knows what he is talking about! :strong:
This is bang on. It is not about seeing "colour" as it is in the world. Reflectance is simply a valuable property to make things in the world "pop out".
The appealing idea is that primates re-evolved red-green hue discrimination after shifting back from a nocturnal to diurnal lifestyle. If you want to see ripe fruit in distant trees, the three pigment visual system looks well designed to make that kind of discrimination as effortless as it could be.
So colour is primarily about making quick sense of shapes - discriminating the reflectance properties of surfaces and so being able to see through to the objects that might have that particular kind of surface.
Red objects reflect red light and absorb blue light and all other frequencies. Roses essentially cause red light to bounce off of them. Black objects absorb all light. White objects reflect all frequencies. Our eyes and brains interpret frequencies.
Red is frequency of light. There are different Reds with frequencies that approach purple which are higher frequencies and frequencies that approach IR light and those are lower frequencies. Cameras see your red as my red however i suppose its possible i see red as blue and you and a friend of yours sees red possibly as someone elses yellow. Basically the frequencies are consistent but the eye and brains interpretation might be different from person to person. I suppose this might be why there are color blind People.
But our eyes and brains interpret a world of objects. If representing actual frequency were so important, why would the eye sample the world at just three wavelength peaks?
Evolution could produce a vast array of photopigments. But it seems to want to use as few as possible. Explain that.
Quoting turkeyMan
But cameras see those colours because they are also designed to capture light using three "pigments" with the same very narrow response curve. We designed that wavelength selectivity into them so we would get a result that was tailored to our neurobiology.
Get real close to any TV screen. The only colours you can see are the three different LEDs.
Where did all the pinks, yellows, turquoise and a million other discriminable hues go? They aren't in the actual light being emitted by the screen. What now?
And to the degree we all share the same neurobiology, it is at least more plausible than not that our inner experience is going to be the same. We have that weak argument.
Then we can make a stronger argument in terms of our ability to discriminate hues - to be able to say the same thing in picking out the reflectance properties that make one surface vividly unlike another.
Red to Purple/violet is thousands or millions of frequencies. When the frequencies hit you eyes it produces a picture. I don't have a youtube video to show the geometry involved in how are brains and eyes produce the picture from all the frequencies. As far as how the brain and eye works your best bet is to use a visual aid like youtube. As for red blue and violet, they are a product of many frequencies. There are probably 1000s of different frequencies just for red. Some animals see IR (lower frequency than red), while other animals see ultraviolet which is higher frequencies than purple. Perhaps some animals can also see radio waves. Radio waves are a lower frequency than IR and Red. Gamma rays are way above ultra violet rays and i'm not sure they can be seen by any animal. These waves are 3 dimensional (kind of like a spiralling loop de loop. In some ways the only difference between a reddish color and a blueish color is that blue has higher frequency.
I spent a lot of time studying it as science, thanks.
welcome.
Animal eyes aside, assuming that ones vision quantitatively keep getting more information and we focus within the human wavelengths. I want to assume we all as a species get closer to the same perceptions of each color. As for the dresses that had to do with sense of contrast and possibly a bad photo. That was a mental recalibration which might be more accurate if we had more cones to identify color.
Tetrachromic people have more distinction in the yellow/green parts of the spectrum. Like I said more color information can maybe lead to more exact information, and hopefully the same perception of those colors. Some think most humans used to be tetrachromic and lost a cone unlike many fish which still have 4 cones. It is also said the color blind people (2 fully functional cones) can see camouflage better than normal visioned people. But that is likely a matter of needing less brain power to identify with less vision.
We might all know blue from green. And then on the border between the two, jump in different directions in terms of which is the primary hue.
People can have different colour perception in each eye. Damage from rubella could put a yellow cast on the sight of one eye for instance.
Quoting TiredThinker
Single cone vision – monochromacy – gives us 200 shades of "gray". Dichromacy – having a long wave and short wave cone – gives us a blue-yellow spectrum that swells our visual experience to about 10,000 distinguishable shades. Trichromacy, adding a red-green opponent channel, multiplies the number of shades to several million.
Several million discriminable shades of reflectance is enough to keep even an interior decorator happy.
Tetrachromacy should have hundreds of millions. More than we would need surely. Evolution would favour the more efficient approach. Birds and bees have a use for extra photopigments up at the UV range. There was an evolutionary demand it would seem
Quoting TiredThinker
Or the fact that camouflage was designed to confuse their three-pigment system.
This is in fact an issue of basic philosophical import as it forces us to change our whole thinking about what "minds" are for.
We think of them as being about the brain wanting to know reality as it really is. And so the mind is a mental picture, a representation, of what is "actually out there".
But it is the opposite. The mind is a reduction of a pattern of physical energy into an "umwelt" or system of sign.
Colour as we experience is not real. It is not what specific wavelength frequencies "look like". Colour is a response to the world in terms of a series of discriminatory steps that produce a signal. Evolution is designing us so that we immediately recognise the plum is not an orange. We don't have to taste it, bite it, or squeeze it. A surface reflectance makes it completely distinct as one or the other.
Evolution doesn't care about the actual hue we experience. And so it is not even trying to ensure we all have the same exact experience in the privacy of our heads. That may be the case, but it isn't even necessary.
What evolution needs is that a difference just pops out. We instantly identify shapes and objects because they are a surface of "all the same colour". Or at least have a pattern and texture that reveals itself as a coherent story in terms of hue.
This is the exact opposite of the usual naive realism that people expect - where because colour is something we talk about so much, it is somehow basic to a proper representation of the world.
But the brain is all about understanding the world in terms of its meaning. So we want to see the world as a story of recognisable things. Colour vision is just a step of that larger process. We can decompose complex visual scenes to notice the "redness of red", the "turquoise of turqoise". But that in itself is not something important or evolutionarily meaningful.
Red becomes orange at around 480Thz. Wether we use the word “red” or “orange” for a 480Thz light might be a matter for contention. That we are talking about light at 480Thz, less so.
Primary properties it seems enter into discussion in a quite different way to Secondary properties - the simplest way to set this out is to say that the later is More subjective.
But I’m not too comfortable with that analysis. So I’m going to think on it some more.
Tetrachromic people do not see more colors over all. They just have more distinctions around the middle of the spectrum. They can't see a factor of 100 more colors than trichromic without literally that many more cones. Eagles only have 5x as many cones as us. I am strictly talking about trichromics who have healthy eyes.
You may be right. I'm just going on the literature of the time and my conversations with those doing the research, such as Dr Gabi Jordan and Dr Jay Neitz. It was 20 years ago.
This sounds suspicious to me. Why would the number of distinguishable colors be a linear function of total cone counts? (Incidentally our cone counts are asymmetric; roughly we have on the order of 3.5 million L cones, 2.5 million M cones, and 0.5 million S cones... the distribution along our retina is asymmetric as well).
Might want to check on colour constancy before going too far down that dead end.
David Gamez in What We Can Never Know provides three common reasons - and refutations - of Lockean primary/secondary properties:
Later, Gamez pace Mackie claims that Locke believed in the primary/secondary quality distinction not because of these arguments, but because of the empirical success of atomism + mechanism. Science is successful due to measurement and the mapping of a manipulation of abstract symbols back to reality, but this does not tell us whether our ideas of primary qualities resemble the way the world is.
Take Boyle's theorem, PV=k. Pressure is found by finding a ratio of the effect an object has on a glass tube of mercury, while volume is found by comparing the dimension of an object to a given standard. But pressure could be found based on the sound of the gas, and volume its color, as long as they map to the same numbers. Both methods would give the same predictions.
e.g. it is unimaginable, in that Kantian way.
Good book imo, maybe you'll like it.
Might even be worthy of its own thread, if the issue can be articulated well enough.
Quoting TiredThinker
Quoting InPitzotl
Me, too. If they can make more distinctions, then they would presumably be able to invent more words for those distinctions. As Un said,
Quoting unenlightened
There's the case of the "Bronze sky" and "wine-dark sea" in Homeric poetry, and green in the Himbas. Colour differentiation is cultural, and a Tetrachromic culture would presumably be able to differentiate more colours adn hence have a wider vocab for colour.
So i'll read TiredThinker as saying that they do not see into other parts of the spectrum, hidden from us muggles, but are capable of greater nuance over the same colour range.
Roflmao. Language use is part of our physiology.Quoting Banno
Sounds physiological to me when you're taking about a species and its social behaviors.
And that we can see them.
How do you know that our experience of seeing other people and how they behave is the same?
But what is the difference between the information that pops out vs the information that doesnt if not a difference in wavelength? What is it that is so important to be aware of? It seems like shape provides one bit of information while the color provides a different bit. The size of an apple isn't dependent upon its color and vice versa. Large apples that are ripe have a different color than those that are rotten. Being able to distinguish between ripe and rotten is useful.
Turn out the lights and color of the apple changes but its shape remains the same. I can ascertain the shape of the apple without color by using my hand and my hand can feel the other side of the apple that couldn't see, so which sense provides a better representation of an objects shape - vision or touch? Why would we need both? Is how the apple feels in your hands when the lights are out the same way it feels to me?
Like words, we aren't really interested in the scribble itself. We are interested in what it the scribble means. The brain isn't interested in the wavelength, but what it means - ripe or rotten.
Quoting apokrisis
What do you expect from someone that thinks language is a game?
Beetle In A Box but that would mean, as Martin Ssempa once said, confusion of the highest order.
Colour reveals the surface and so helps you see the shape.
Imagine you had a bag of toy animals all in the same green plastic. You have to sort them fast and find the turtle by its shape.
Now imagine the same bag but now the turtle is red.
The shape is enough information. But shapes all seem to bleed into each other - because the shape is what’s “real” about the object. We see “shape” in all its infinite variety.
Colour by contrast is much more abstract because the discrimination is based on just three opponent channel processes. For hue, the brain is making a binary judgement of red or not-red. And if it’s not-red, it’s green. The same with blue vs yellow and dark vs bright. Mix the three binaries and you can still get a million discriminable states. But that on-off switch at the heart of perceptual judgements is why different hues leap out in a way that shapes are less able to.
Shapes are 3D. We have to decode that turtle from all sorts of angles. Real shapes are often mobile. We have to recognise our cat even curled in a ball. But surface reflectance is 2D and so simpler to decode from any angle.
So the argument is that we see colour not because that is what is there in the world. Rather that once having evolved an eye that could resolve shape with a lens, then adding binary reflectance judgements on top started to chop the visual world into automatically delineated chunks of surface. Much better than a bag of green toys even if we have the sharpest vision for seeing their shapes.
Even judgements of weight are deeply psychological - secondary qualities - as shown by Weber-Fechner’s Law. We experience the proportionate difference between two weights rather than their absolute difference.
If we experienced weight as it “actually is”, a 2kg difference would always feel like 2kg, whether it was 4kg in one hand and 6kg in the other, or 50kg in one and 52kg in the other.
The more you dig into psychophysics, the more psychological or “subjective” even the primary qualities become.
You will never guess who co-wrote a classic paper on weight judgements.
Peirce made the argument that sensation is all about the perception of difference rather than sameness. It is indirect from the get go as it relies on contrast.
https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1006
Quoting Banno
Okay, but that would be wrong too. We have tests for deuteranopia (a particular form of "anomalous dichromacy") that don't involve slicing somebody's eye apart and putting it under a microscope... the common ones just have a bunch of dots with some symbols like numbers displayed in them in a "different color".
And yet, a deuteranope can see the entire rainbow just like we can; it's not like deuteranopes see holes in the rainbow or the same colors repeating in it. So to extend this as an analogy, were humans all (perceptual) tetrachromats, they should be able to design similar tests for what would be "anomalous trichromacy".
Tetrachromats do see into other "parts" of the spectrum, hidden from us muggles, because neither trichromats nor tetrachromats are seeing the spectra; what they are able to distinguish is baked into the name. Tetrachromats are seeing a "4-sampling" of the spectra and trichromats a "3-sampling". Contrast this with how our hearing works... we can not only hear different pitches, but we can make out the individual notes being played in a C major chord and, likewise, can still pick the individual notes out if this chord is walked up and down the scale. But hearing is mediated by a sampling across the entire "aural spectrum"; the frequency components in sounds map to specific locations in our cochlea, and we sense the sound made at each location. Our aural senses actually do seem to "care" about the frequency as well; a higher pitched sound sounds higher. Mind you, there's a perceptual limit to how this works (we can't make out the individual "notes" being played in pink noise), but the apparatus is there to distinguish frequencies. Color is very much not like this; our hue perception forms a circle (not a scale) with spots in it along the violet portion that don't correspond to pure frequencies; and whereas along this circle some colors look blended, it's not in a way that maps to the "individual notes" in the spectrum analogous to how the C major chord sounds... we might see components in orange, for example, but the orange your RGB monitor renders doesn't look drastically different than a monochromatic orange.
Why is red experienced as red?
That is, we can say so much about why red isn’t blue, and red is as un-green like as it gets. All the available neurobiology of opponent channel processing and such like gives us a physicalist explanation of hue difference - an ability to contrast and compare.
But red still winds up having an identifiable quality that seems fixed (disregarding “grue” and other philosophical attacks on that). It is irritating but physicalism finally gives out at the final step when we would want to account for the ineffability of red as the actual qualia that it is for us.
Pragmatically, one can defend physicalism on the basis that we need differences that make a difference to motivate a casual explanation. There has to be a change in state, a contrast, to even get the businesses of an explanation going. The Hard Problem arises at the edge of inquiry where there just is no differences that are available. At which point we must fall silent. And that is better than treating the Hard Problem as a philosophical “gotcha” - the collapse of the entire physicalist project.
But still. The redness of redness must tantalise. Do you have any position on this?
Seems nonsensical that my red could be your red exactly.
Though, when occurring as a consequence of interaction with something extra-self, you might partake in a similar interaction with that.
Et voilà, we can use verbiage like "red" when talking about those experiences of those things. (y)
So, it's not so much that "my red is the same as yours", more that there's enough interactional stability that we can find coherent ways to talk about it.
[sub]
• we can correlate such experiences with wavelengths/frequencies of light to a fair extent
• synesthesia is when such interaction triggers additional, uncommon experiences
• color blindness is when someone can't differentiate colors that others commonly can, opposite tetrachromacy
[/sub]
I agree that this is a critical point, but it may not touch the fundamental point - at least so far as the Hard Problem is framed.
It is really important that colour experience is socially constructed through language use. We all learn to talk about red as "that experience of redness we all share".
That is, the qualia problem is based on red being a primary kind of mental quality. That is the way we learn to talk about it. Yet also, when do we ever just "see red". We are always seeing some shade of red, with some texture, some shape, some actual surface and situation.
To really show what we might mean, we can pull out a red crayon, point to a red post box, flourish a paint sample. We will present the redness as something all of its own - a discrete mental quality - by exhibiting it on a flat and untextured surface in clear white light with no shape or even meaning to distract us from the contemplation of the "pure experience of red".
This carefully stage managed state of mind is what the language of red presumes. And yet a whole philosophical economy gets built on it as the prime example of the mind~body problem.
Shapes and sounds and other sensations can be seen as just straight representation of the world (even though they are not at all). We can imagine a computer doing shape recognition or sound identification because the patterns are in the stimulus.
But the philosophy of mind conversation always circles back to its best possible example - not even the mixed hues like turquoise and brown, but red and green, blue and yellow.
And yet the primary hues are never found in nature except in some kind of embedding context of shape, texture, luminance, etc. (Or as display colours used by animals as explicit signals.)
So a kind of con is always going on here. (Even though I most reluctantly agree this doesn't finally dissolve the Hard Problem entirely. One can't just wish it away. One must continue to work on it. :grin: )
Bridging the gap seems a bit out still.
Supposing we could, could we then also disprove solipsism? (Vice versa?)
There seems to be a relation of sorts anyway; implications of "a bridge" might shed light on other things.
There’s definitely a bridge in my book. But it is neurosemiotic. Ain’t no one wants to talk about that. :wink:
Interesting. Didn't know Dr Jay Neitz talked about tetrachromic vision. I think he may have cured color blindness in squirrel monkeys though.
He did the genetics and was searching for test candidates who had expressed two variants of the "red" photopigment gene.
The way that the developing retina could wire itself up and make use of whatever genetic variety got expressed was of course of clinical significance. For example, if you could make use of that to fix colour blindness by injecting the missing gene.
Quoting TiredThinker
Neurobiology would want to seize on the regularities or invariants of the natural world.
I mentioned Fechner's Law as an example of how the brain latches onto proportional difference rather than actual difference - a log relation that makes perceptual judgement "scale free".
So we can recognise a tiny elephant the size of a fly as easily as a huge elephant as big as a mountain. The brain already stabilises the world in terms of what it really wants to extract - object identity. An elephant just strikes us as the same thing when seen at any size. The perceptual system has already filtered out the actual size because our recognition processes have built in a scale free memory representation.
The golden ratio is then perhaps something we have a similar built in sensitivity to. We can see even and symmetric patterns of growth because our neurobiology has already homed in on what is the most regular features of our environment. That makes it easy to pick out departures from such norms.
Quoting TiredThinker
I certainly agree. (Although colour perception is perhaps the most fiendish of the sensory processes. It's complexity is significant.)
Only the bit you posted. I generally agreed with that. My position is that the primary/secondary distinction is a matter of degree as all perceptual qualities are psychological judgements or semiotic signs, never the Kantian thing in itself.
As I always stress, that is so by necessity. The brain can’t model the world in informational terms while it remains physically entangled in the world as some kind of entropic event. There has to be what Howard Pattee calls an epistemic cut. And that is so for biology or life in general. It is a “law” of theoretical biology if you like.
When the lights are out, all you experience is black with no shapes. Black is a color, no?
Seems to me that that could be done with just two colors - black and white. So then why the estimated 10 million colors that humans can distinguish? What use would that be if not additional information about the environment that just shape and two colors can provide? It seems to me that more distinctions we can make, the more information we have, and the more information we have, the better decisions we can make.
Like I said, turn out the lights and the color changes, so what changed - the object, the light, or something else? Color isn't about just the object, but also about the light and your eye-brain system's interaction with it. This is how the doctor can diagnose problems with your eye-brain system by asking you to describe your visual experience of objects.
Quoting jorndoe
Exactly. While you and I aren't the same experiencers of objects and light, the objects and light are the same and is the stability in our experiences. It is what we are talking about when talking about objects, not our experiences of them.
Quoting apokrisis
The experience isn't what is socially constructed. Babies experience colors before learning how to use colored scribbles to refer to those experiences. How does a child learn to use words without first being able to distinguish black ink marks from the white paper?
Quoting apokrisis
Not really. Those three components aren't just in an on/off state. They are stimulated in varying degrees, and those varying degrees of each are calculated to provide distinct information about each object, or parts of the object.
Quoting apokrisis
Our minds are part of the world and color is part of our minds, therefore color is in the world. Could we really talk about colors if colors were not part of the world? We talk about colors as opposed to wavelengths because that is what we experience, and in talking about colors, we are actually talking about wavelengths.
Also, in aid of trying to critique or deflate the second one (assuming the first to be answered roughly in the affirmative), is there any use in assimilating it to,
? Just an idea.
But it is easy to evolve extra photo pigments yet even as many as three Is unusual in large brain mammals. However dragonflies can have 30.
So evolution seems to say more is not necessarily better in this case. Maybe it is like science. The more you can predict from the least number of measurements seems like a good indication you have a great theory.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is a meta distinction. When folk talk about qualia, they are now talking about the experience of experiencing. Rather than just doing, it is now a rational exercise in contrast and compare.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sure. A “red” ganglion cell collating the information will have some baseline neutral rate of firing and fire harder depending on the degree of redness and slow it’s firing right down to the degree instead of greenness present. So “off” isn’t just a signal of no red. It is a signal of green. Hence afterimages.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That is trite. My whole argument is about how to make physicalism work and avoid having to take the usual Cartesian route. And you are failing to respond to the particular way I resolve the issue - a properly biological form of “information processing”.
A dragonfly may have 30 with their eyes to head ratio being much larger than other animals, but the ratio of brain-size with humans is much larger. So what evolution did for the eyes of a dragonfly may have done the same for the brain of a human. The human brain could probably perform the calculations to acquire the information that a dragonfly eye acquires without doing as many calculations because it's eyes do most of the work of distinguishing colors while it's the brain of a human that does the distinguishing.
Quoting apokrisis
Sounds to me that talking about the experience of experiencing is simply talking about memories. What they are doing is recall.
Quoting apokrisisTalking about wavelengths having degrees of redness is nonsensical. There aren't only three wavelenghts of visible light. There is a range of wavelengths and the human eye is sensitive to them all to some degree or another. So it makes no sense to assert that there are only three colors that a human eye can see. It's just that our eyes are more or less sensitive to certain wavelengths.
Quoting apokrisisI think we agree mostly and are simply disagreeing about how and what types of information are being processed, and for what purpose.
I’m trying to keep things simple. Sure the photoreceptors respond to a range of energies. But still, that energy is being sampled by three pigments with three peak sensitivities. And those photoreceptors are wired up in a logically antagonistic fashion to turn their energy responses into neural information.
So the energy reflected off surfaces is some characteristic spectra. Often a wide band of frequencies, but with some distribution peak. Say that spectra has an exact match that maximally triggers the red cone and positively suppress the green. Then we will see pure red.
Or we might just be observing the extremely narrow spectra of a red LED, tuned to deliver only energy at the peak wavelength. Again the experience will be pure red.
But note that we only see red. A single frequency stimulus is indistinguishable from the broad band stimulus. So you can’t say we are really seeing the frequencies at all.
We are seeing that a cone absorbed enough energy to fire. Somehow. And any green cones not only absorbed less, but through inhibitory cross talk, were actually silenced. Meanwhile the yellow-blue channel is silent due to a lack of triggering energy so not creating an experienced hue mix like orange or purple.
A clear signal is experienced. The sensation of red. And that’s it so far as the underlying wavelengths go.
Most colours in nature do come from surfaces that reflect a wide range of frequencies. So we see those drab and earthy mixtures that come in many shades, but aren’t that distinctive. Then a rainbow splits white light into bands of frequency. That makes for narrower energy peaks and you start to get a cleaner response in terms of the four primary hues and their simplest intermediary mixes. Keep narrowing and you get whatever triggers red with the least possible admixture.
So sure. All frequencies contribute to a cone’s response as energy. But the information is constructed at the ganglion level from the computations of three pigments and their peak sensitivities. The world gets left behind. It gets left behind to the extent that the computation creates a fourth virtual pigment to act as the yellow cone needed as the opponent partner to the blue one.
That shows you how the computational logic trumps the physical energies in telling us what colour - or reflectance properties - some surface has.
It is a tricky business. But energy has to be translated into information the brain can understand. It has to be encoded. Thus an epistemic cut is required.
In the experiment, the researcher shines a light of a particular frequency, say X and asks participant A to mark the colour of the light in a colour palate provided by the researcher. Something like this -
The researcher notes down the what participant A has marked and asks her to name the colour. Let’s say she says it is red.
Now the researcher conducts the same experiment on participant B who does not know what participant A has said. Now if participant B also marks the colour of the light in the colour palate identical to that of participant A and names is as red, would we say that the frequency of light X gives rise to a perception in participant A and B which they both identify as the same thing?
And anyway it would have been their cadmium red.
My red is not the same as my red, by the way.
I found it in deep hue, btw.
Phew! That was a rollercoaster!
First of all, inversion of colors between individual's is completely possible but the mechanism behind it could be different. Is it a change in the eyeball that is responsible for sending a signals of red when it was suppose to send a signal of blue due to some mutation? If so, this would certainly have the effect of inverting red/blue for that person (assuming the effect happened both ways).
But what about the effect taking place in the brain? Well, one possibility is that certain brain conditions produce certain phenomenal experience of colors. In this case, you could ask if these some conditions took place for the same people, would it always yield to same color experience for each of them? Of course its also possible that in peoples minds it is structured that the brain would produce the conditions sufficient for Red Qualia while in others the same visual input would cause their brains to produce the conditions for Blue Qualia.
I find it very unlikely that evolution would have most people varying in how their eyes transmitted visual information to the brain and how their brain reacted to visual information in such a way so I assume that most people have more or less the same mental and eye reactions to certain light. So I also assume that they have more or less the same Qualia as a result of those reactions. This is because if the type of Qualia that was produced for certain reactions in the brain varied so much it wouldn't be able to be used for evolutionary benefit. If there is any variation in people seeing different colors for different light, I assume it would be due to mutations in how the eye transmitted information to the brain or how the brain was structured to react to certain types of stimulus sent from the eyes.
What's also interesting is that this same question isn't usually applied to other Qualia, like taste Qualia. Is your taste of Fried Chicken the same as my taste of Friend Chicken? I think this is because its difficult to see the function or benefit of specific visual Qualia when compared to each other where for taste and smell Qualia because the function of the essence of those Qualia are easier to comprehend. Sure there is variation in how some people react to the taste of Fried Chicken, some may like some may not, but most people don't ask if your taste of Fried Chicken is the same as my taste of strawberry cake .
Sure, having X number of different colors that you can experience can allow you to see a lot of detail, but what's the difference if you mix them up? Why did evolution make our sky 'blue' and our dirt 'brown'?
The evolutionary benefit of color Qualia being what they are may be difficult for us to understand, but I would be surprised if there wasn't at least some selection that went into it.
Does considering that make you want to back away from realism?
It was like walking through a post apocalyptic landscape. I started talking to a manequin at one point.