COLOUR

[untermensche]

It is an anthropocentric delusion to think what we experience MUST be out there.

When everything we experience is in there. Within our consciousness.

You need to show the color information within the energy.

Where is it?

The energy just throws a switch. It has no color information. I can't prove a negative. You have to show where the color information is in the energy and how that information is transmitted to a cell.

 

[fromderinside]

Light only refers to that Electromagnetic energy that produces visible light. As with all EM increased frequency means increased energy. Any detector that can detect and measure energy will report that as objects become hotter the produce light correspondingly. Any object radiating energy in the visible range will produce corresponding visible light that can be sensed by an energy detector. That energy will be reflected by visible light running from infrared to ultraviolet corresponding to its radiating temperature. The colors are in running order from low IR to high UV in accordance with the energy they reflect as radiation.

That humans and life see color is due to the advantage such light provides to surviving.

If it were all in the mind there would be no advantage added prior to the beings with mind. But evolution demonstrates that such is not the case. There are many organisms that use light with little or no brain to advantage. There is a record of survival demonstrates the continuous advantage light provides across the history of evolution including development of brain.

As for light and color science is served by the study of the color matter as it exists in stars and interstellar matter. For instance a type I A supernova is currently the best index of distance from us of stars and galaxies. We make use of red shift to calibrate, with the brightness of the IA supernova, the distance those stars are from us.

 

[untermensche]

Colorless energy that excites the retina and causes the retina to send signals to the brain to produce the experience of vision is called "light". It is an anthropocentric definition. The definition is all about the human experience and says nothing about the energy.

The energy is just something hitting a switch. You can't make it more than that. And to think it is more than that is laughable naivete.

Color is something a brain creates when a switch is pushed by colorless energy.

What hits the switch in the eye has no more to do with color than a hand hitting a switch and turning on a red light.

 

[untermensche]

Light only refers to that Electromagnetic energy that produces visible light. As with all EM increased frequency means increased energy. Any detector that can detect and measure energy will report that as objects become hotter the produce light correspondingly. Any object radiating energy in the visible range will produce corresponding visible light that can be sensed by an energy detector. That energy will be reflected by visible light running from infrared to ultraviolet corresponding to its radiating temperature. The colors are in running order from low IR to high UV in accordance with the energy they reflect as radiation.

That humans and life see color is due to the advantage such light provides to surviving.

If it were all in the mind there would be no advantage added prior to the beings with mind. But evolution demonstrates that such is not the case. There are many organisms that use light with little or no brain to advantage. There is a record of survival demonstrates the continuous advantage light provides across the history of evolution including development of brain.

As for light and color science is served by the study of the color matter as it exists in stars and interstellar matter. For instance a type I A supernova is currently the best index of distance from us of stars and galaxies. We make use of red shift to calibrate, with the brightness of the IA supernova, the distance those stars are from us.

Nobody is claiming that the neural production of the experience of vision is not helpful for survival.

But the experience of vision is a neural production. All experience is something the brain is creating. No brain so such thing as experience.

 

[fromderinside]

Broken record with no evidence presented. Support your argument with evidence.

 

[untermensche]

Nothing to prove.

Anybody with even a tiny knowledge of anatomy knows a receptor cell is just a switch.

You need to prove that somehow a hand that throws a switch to turn on a red light has some connection to red.

You think EM radiation and experience are the same thing.

It is a bizarre naive notion.

 

[fromderinside]

Switch my arse.

Thou dost headline way too much. https://www.britannica.com/science/photoreception/Structure-and-function-of-photoreceptors

I highlight the part of light to nerve conduction that kills the switch construct.

Many ganglion cells in primates also show colour opponency—for example, responding to “red-on/green-off” or “blue-on/yellow-off” and signaling information about the wavelength structure of the image. Thus, in the stages of processing an image, the components of contrast, change, and movement appear to be the most biologically important.

Those elements change reception from a switch to providing information about the color and activity nature of what is being transduced by the mammalian, including human, visual receptor system.

I will grant that there is descending neuronal information available at the level of ganglion cells in the visual system. The interaction seems to be just like that of other sensory systems in that information is available to modify and tune what is coming in with what has already been transmitted to the NS. You need to understand that descending communication destroys the idea of switch as well.

Don't be too eager to pounce on this as the brain telling the sensory system what is what since most of the descending information is from the next way station up in the nervous system, most of which contributes very little directly to access of consciousness.

We are done here.

 

[untermensche]

All you have shown is receptor cells can recognize variation in wavelength of a very narrow segment of the EM spectrum.

A complicated switch is just a switch. There is no color information in waves of energy. There is only variation in wavelength, thus variation in frequency since it all moves at the same speed.

You are done.

I am still here laughing at the idea that energy has color. All it has is variation and cells have evolved to recognize that variation.

Color production is something a brain does when stimulated by colorless energy. Color is a pure experience, like pain. There is no correlate in the external world to pure experiences.

You have no argument or evidence demonstrating anything else.

 

[Jayjay]

I am talking about what color actually is.

Color is what a brain creates when the receptor cells in the eye are stimulated by a certain frequency of light.

No, you are asserting that this is what color is. But it's not a commonly accepted definition; it's your own private one. That alone doesn't make it a bad one though. We can hypothesize various definitions and see where they lead. It's not entirely without philosophical merit to think that outside world doesn't exists, only our brain's interpretations of it, because we can't really perceive anything directly, only via our mental faculties. It would be a solipsist view, but not entirely nonsensical.

What makes your particular view nonsensical is that you are also saying that some properties of matter are real, like shape or weight. You are excluding color from this group for completely arbitrary reasons.

EDITED TO ADD: In other words, you are confusing the label for the thing with the thing itself. An idea of a car in your brain is not the car. The label for the shape of an object is not actual object. The idea of a 1kg weight is not a 1kg weight. And likewise, your label for the color red, is not the same as the actual color red.

Yes. I am making true assertions about what color really is.

I don't care about inaccurate common understandings.

The size of an object is not something created by the brain. The size is out there. Any observer will give you the same measurement for size if they use the same scale. The same is true about shape and texture. These are properties of objects in the world.

And color is no different. Two observers using the same photon detector will give the same measurement on color, even if one or both of them are color blind, or entirely blind. It's no different from any other measurement.

But a color blind human that has never experienced blue will never understand what you mean when you say the ball is blue.

That reeks of mysticism and religion. "You can never understand the love of Christ because you are not born again."

A blind person can understand blue. They can read the theory on optics, and how eyes work, if they can get their hands on a braille textbook on the subject (or more likely, an audio book). There is nothing in "experiencing" blue that makes it special, or at least not any more special than "experiencing" a 1kg weight or that a giraffe is taller than a dog.

 

[Jayjay]

the fact that you have to reformulate the sentence "some people can't see green" as "some people can't create green" should be a clue that your definition is color is not what most people think when they think of the word.

Regarding the clip, the way those glasses work is that they block a band of wavelengths near the peaks of M and L cone cells. This helps with a particular type of color blindness, where the those two peaks are near each other, by making it easier to distinguish each cell's activation. In other words, it doesn't help the person see a color that he didn't see before, just improves whatever color vision there was before.

Seeing, in human terms, is the experience of the external world created by the brain when energy of a certain frequency excites cells in the eye.

But bats use sound waves to make a representation of the world.

They "see" with their ears.

That guy in the clip is experiencing things he has never experienced before. Color.

No, he is not. He has seen color before, the glasses just makes it easier. The type of color blindness that these glasses help with is not lack of certain cone cells, it's just that the frequencies that their two types of cone cells (red and green) can detect are very close to each other. If they were completely lacking either type of cell, the goggles would do nothing.

 

[Swammerdami]

Debates on epistemology baffle me. But I am very comfortable with topics in information theory.

The reflective property of an object is not color in any way. It is a feature of an object but no information about color is contained in the energy that reflects off objects.

The information about color is in the brain.

Nonsense. If I send a telegram with my phone number to Bob, the information (my phone number) is present in the telegram before Bob opens it.

Similarly a fruit has color orange even when in a dark room because the information (what frequencies the peel's pigments would reflect were light present) is already there.

Hope this helps!

 

[untermensche]

Debates on epistemology baffle me. But I am very comfortable with topics in information theory.

The reflective property of an object is not color in any way. It is a feature of an object but no information about color is contained in the energy that reflects off objects.

The information about color is in the brain.

Nonsense. If I send a telegram with my phone number to Bob, the information (my phone number) is present in the telegram before Bob opens it.

Similarly a fruit has color orange even when in a dark room because the information (what frequencies the peel's pigments would reflect were light present) is already there.

Hope this helps!

Humans designed the phone and specifically designed the signal to carry that information.

Nothing designed EM radiation to carry color information. It does not carry color information.

EM radiation varies by wavelength. It has variation.

That is all the eye can detect. Variation of wavelength.

Color is created by the brain as an experience based on the variety of wavelength. Not based on color information.

Color only exists as an experience. What we call "light" is light only because it excites cells in the eye. Not because it has special features the rest of the spectrum doesn't also have.

I hope this helps because the idea that EM energy carries color information is an erroneous idea. All EM energy has is variation. The brain creates different colors to experience in response to this variation.

 

[untermensche]

Yes. I am making true assertions about what color really is.

I don't care about inaccurate common understandings.

The size of an object is not something created by the brain. The size is out there. Any observer will give you the same measurement for size if they use the same scale. The same is true about shape and texture. These are properties of objects in the world.

And color is no different. Two observers using the same photon detector will give the same measurement on color, even if one or both of them are color blind, or entirely blind. It's no different from any other measurement.

You cannot possibly know what color I am experiencing. And I can never know what color you are experiencing.

You make a very bad philosophical error.

You confuse the stimulus for color for color itself.

Color is something experienced.

It can't be measured in any way.

You can measure EM radiation in the world. But that isn't color. Color is an experience, like pain.

But a color blind human that has never experienced blue will never understand what you mean when you say the ball is blue.

That reeks of mysticism and religion. "You can never understand the love of Christ because you are not born again."

If your brain did not produce the experience of blue you would never be able to understand what blue is. This has nothing to do with mysticism. It is a fact.

As it is you have no knowledge or way to gain the knowledge that what you call the experience of blue is the same thing other people experience when they experience blue.

Color is pure experience. It is a subjective phenomena. It can't be studied in any way except by subjective reports.

A blind person can understand blue. They can read the theory on optics, and how eyes work, if they can get their hands on a braille textbook on the subject (or more likely, an audio book). There is nothing in "experiencing" blue that makes it special, or at least not any more special than "experiencing" a 1kg weight or that a giraffe is taller than a dog.

Reading about optics will never let you understand what the experience of blue is.

A deaf person cannot know what sound is and a blind person cannot understand any aspect of vision. Including color.

 

[untermensche]

the fact that you have to reformulate the sentence "some people can't see green" as "some people can't create green" should be a clue that your definition is color is not what most people think when they think of the word.

Regarding the clip, the way those glasses work is that they block a band of wavelengths near the peaks of M and L cone cells. This helps with a particular type of color blindness, where the those two peaks are near each other, by making it easier to distinguish each cell's activation. In other words, it doesn't help the person see a color that he didn't see before, just improves whatever color vision there was before.

Seeing, in human terms, is the experience of the external world created by the brain when energy of a certain frequency excites cells in the eye.

But bats use sound waves to make a representation of the world.

They "see" with their ears.

That guy in the clip is experiencing things he has never experienced before. Color.

No, he is not. He has seen color before, the glasses just makes it easier. The type of color blindness that these glasses help with is not lack of certain cone cells, it's just that the frequencies that their two types of cone cells (red and green) can detect are very close to each other. If they were completely lacking either type of cell, the goggles would do nothing.

No. He is seeing colors he has never experienced before.

Color is an experience.

It is not anything else.

The energy that causes the brain to create the experience of color is not color. It is just something that cause the brain to construct the experience of color. Bats construct what we call a visual experience with reflected sound waves. They easily fly in what we call the dark.

All experience is a creation of the brain.

 

[J842P]

Debates on epistemology baffle me. But I am very comfortable with topics in information theory.

The reflective property of an object is not color in any way. It is a feature of an object but no information about color is contained in the energy that reflects off objects.

The information about color is in the brain.

Nonsense. If I send a telegram with my phone number to Bob, the information (my phone number) is present in the telegram before Bob opens it.

Similarly a fruit has color orange even when in a dark room because the information (what frequencies the peel's pigments would reflect were light present) is already there.

Hope this helps!

Let me save you some time, what untermensche is doing is distinguishing between the perception that we call color and the physical stimuli that would tend to (normally) create that perception. I don't think it is entirely wrong, but a lot of this is just going to degenerate into semantic quibbling. I've seen this argument a million times.

Note, I don't think it's crazy to make such a distinction, indeed, we know for a fact that perceptions don't require any sort of stimuli, although I guess you could make the argument that the perceptual apparatus was molded by these stimuli, but we can imagine a world where we created some nervous system de novo that re-creates these same percpetual phenomena without it having ever had to evolve, so to speak.

 

[J842P]

Bats construct what we call a visual experience with reflected sound waves. They easily fly in what we call the dark.

All experience is a creation of the brain.

I'm not sure we can say that bats experience echolocation "visually". No doubt, it displays a lot of similar characteristics to visual perception. But the actual quality of the sensory experience, I maintain, is anyone's guess. And as primates, with our excellent and dominating visual system, it may just not be really possible for us to imagine it any other way.

 

[untermensche]

Bats can catch flying insects and avoid obstacles at high speeds with it.

It is clearly a highly detailed and accurate experience.

Better than human vision since bats are flying and moving faster than humans can move.

 

[untermensche]

Debates on epistemology baffle me. But I am very comfortable with topics in information theory.

The reflective property of an object is not color in any way. It is a feature of an object but no information about color is contained in the energy that reflects off objects.

The information about color is in the brain.

Nonsense. If I send a telegram with my phone number to Bob, the information (my phone number) is present in the telegram before Bob opens it.

Similarly a fruit has color orange even when in a dark room because the information (what frequencies the peel's pigments would reflect were light present) is already there.

Hope this helps!

Let me save you some time, what untermensche is doing is distinguishing between the perception that we call color and the physical stimuli that would tend to (normally) create that perception. I don't think it is entirely wrong, but a lot of this is just going to degenerate into semantic quibbling. I've seen this argument a million times.

Note, I don't think it's crazy to make such a distinction, indeed, we know for a fact that perceptions don't require any sort of stimuli, although I guess you could make the argument that the perceptual apparatus was molded by these stimuli, but we can imagine a world where we created some nervous system de novo that re-creates these same percpetual phenomena without it having ever had to evolve, so to speak.

It's not semantics.

It's science.

EM radiation does not have color information contained within it.

It can cause a brain to create a color but the energy has no color. The brain has evolved mechanisms that produce the experience of color. The energy just has variation.

Color only exists as an experience. Like pain.

Most can clearly understand this in terms of pain.

 

[Swammerdami]

Music might be defined in terms of the human perception of sound information. Mr. Untermensche might want to consider whether Beethoven or Mozart — who composed music without listening to it — were actually composing "music" or not.

It's not semantics.

It's science.

EM radiation does not have color information contained within it.

I think we all understand that Human Perception of Color requires a human!

What led to nonsense was your confused usage of the term "information."

With 600 posts already in this thread without coming to a consensus definition of "color", I doubt that detours into the definition of "information" would be appropriate in this thread.

 

[untermensche]

It is not human perception of color. It is what some erroneously call the perception of color.

It is the human brain creating color when there is no color, just radiation that varies by frequency.

Why does EM have to have color information within it for a human brain to create color in response to it? All it needs is variation. Human brains create all experience whole, like pain.

And sound is also something only in the mind, just like color. Beethoven did "hear" what he was composing. In his mind.