COLOUR

[skepticalbip]

colour is an actual property of objects

No. Frequency/color and energy are properties of light.

There is no problem with that if you first define what you want to label as color. But unless you are consistent in your reasoning and use that definition throughout then you are engaged in damn sloppy thinking. If you insist that color is a property of light then it is not a property of objects (objects are not light), not a property of the output of our photoreceptors (bioelectric potentials are not light), not a property of our mental experience (mental impressions are not light). By this definition of color, color only exists as light and nothing else.

 

[fromderinside]

Thank you for validating what we've been doing. We were talking about our experience of color not resulting of mind but of sensitive material's selective reactions to frequencies of light.

 

[skepticalbip]

Thank you for validating what we've been doing. We were talking about our experience of color not being of mind but of sensitive material reacting to frequencies of light.

Where the fuck did you get that? That may be what you are doing which would help explain some of the non sequitur statements you make. I am still questioning whether what we sense as color is just an artifact of our senses. We have no way of knowing if two different people have the same impression of a color.

 

[fromderinside]

When was the last time you saw two different boulders cast the same shadow? Makes about much sense as asking whether you and I see the 'same' color. We don't. We're different. Do we see color. Are the colors we see similar? Good enough. Now we can generate a sequence of colors that a population would consider a standard by just surveying people to tell us their judgement of several colors. Your eyes are different than mine. That's enough to put lie to any question about "do we see the same color." None of that adds any value to the idea mind invents color.

If you look at the middle of my screed you'll find how we can come to an understanding different people have the same impression of a color.

 

[skepticalbip]

When was the last time you saw two different boulders cast the same shadow? Makes about much sense as asking whether you and I see the 'same' color. We don't. We're different. Do we see color. Are the colors we see similar? Good enough. Now we can generate a sequence of colors that a population would consider a standard by just surveying people to tell us their judgement of several colors. Your eyes are different than mine. That's enough to put lie to any question about "do we see the same color." None of that adds any value to the idea mind invents color.

If you look at the middle of my screed you'll find how we can come to an understanding different people have the same impression of a color.

That is an example of damn sloppy thinking. Since you have defined color as a property of light our mental impression can not be color... Our mind is not composed of light.

Personally, I would still stick to my suggestion that color is a mental experience that is the final product of a process that is a series of events.

 

[ruby sparks]

colour is an actual property of objects

No. Frequency/color and energy are properties of light.

Thanks. So we also now agree that colour is not a property of objects.

Though earlier, you referred to "inherent colours of objects", and said that, "any object that has shape must have color".

Moving on, as promised, to transduction. This won't take long because I don't think I have any problems with any of your detailed descriptions of the processes.

But, you also said all the following:

"Color is in receptor output and it is used by the brain."

Transduction is "the transformation of light to color".

"The cones and rods transduce light to color".

"Rods and cones produce color".

"Humans can replicate full visible frequency spectrum emitted light..... by processing chunks of adjacent frequencies neurally as colors."



So you now seem to be saying that light is coloured and that what travels along the optical nerve is also colour.

But if you say light is coloured, then how can you also say that transduction is, "the transformation of light to color"?

Or if you mean that both light and the signals in the optic nerve are or contain information about colour (or if you like are colour information), then how can you say "Light becomes information by being transduced"?



Your model and your descriptors are all over the place and have been throughout the thread.

 

[DBT]

The physical world, energy/matter, a set of features and properties which a brain, with its own set of properties, interprets as shape, form, colour, movement, time.

 

[fromderinside]

So you now seem to be saying that light is coloured and that what travels along the optical nerve is also colour.

Aren't you shrewd.

You got through my "all over the place" and found that what I said "frequency is color". Transduction of light by af filter selects a single frequency or group of frequencies, green, from something similar to white light by receptor cells. This product, lets call it green, is then transduced to biopotentials reflecting that limited frequency/green information. The selected frequencies/green becomes information for the nervous system about what the selected receptor captured.

Before the brain one can devise ways to identify the light frequency too which the receptor is sensitive. As lay persons we know that because specialists provide data on spectral sensitivity of the receptor an probably can retrieve that information by substituting a device in place of opsin.

Now if you take that to plants and rocks you'll see color is inherent in white light or any emitter of broad spectra of light are similarly selected through absorption, diffusion, deflection, filter, or other form of transduction to present or reflect certain colors from the larger population of light frequencies/energies emitted by some source. This process applies as well to shading, shadow, blueing, etc.

Your model and your descriptors are all over the place and have been throughout the thread.

Yes they are and yet, as I note above, you figured it out.

All you need to do is look at light as a broad spectrum of frequencies or energies, a description of white light.

Now you need't worry about whether color is a property of light it is sun/betelgeuse/sirius/white/100 watt soft white/sodium light.

Now all you have to do is specify the spectra of source lighting to have tools to determine what will result. Just account for whatever filtering and transduction is imposed between you the object viewed and the source and, wallah, the correct answer.

All we did here was account for source, object viewed, and agents inserted.

Problem solved?

And you still want to argue because either you or I were clumsy in thought.

I say give it a rest.

 

[ruby sparks]

You got through my "all over the place" and found that what I said "frequency is color".

Yes, that is where you have finally planted your flag. Not that you hadn't planted it there before, you had, you were just planting it in other places too.

So......let's try a shutdown and restart.

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Is 'light is coloured' a good place to plant a flag?

Imo, yes, it is. Light as coloured is a good model, and quite a common one, including among relevant experts. Isaac newton, apparently, might have disagreed, or he might not, but in any case he died a long time ago so we can't ask him.

And of course that model does not mean 'colour' in the same sense as experienced colour. That model allows for at least two senses of the word, with the light-colour as the real, actual one and the psychological experience as a 'mere' representation of it. So the model is arguably not really weakened by having two senses of the same term once that distinction is made. Even if it uses two definitions, it's still arguably precise.

That model is a good one and has as much explanatory power as we are currently able to obtain, imo.

But it is not the only model that does that. There is another one, also held, in turn, by other relevant experts, which works equally well, and this is why the subject can as adequately be dealt with by them without reference to colour in light. And if or when colour is then considered in this model, it is essentially put on a par with pain and other psychological phenomena. No woo involved. Just commonplace, real, actual, everyday phenomena such as pain, which are surely not in the external stimuli that can result in them. Doing that may be making a category error, or it may not. As far as I can see, we can't conclusively tell one way or the other.

Finally, making a distinction between colour and colour information might be able to bridge at least some of the differences between the two models.

And there are also other models, in which colour vision (indeed all vision) is seen as being relational, or ecological, or explained using an externalist ontology (in which internal and external processes are seen as parts of the same system or systems).

In the end, all such models are explaining the same phenomena in slightly different ways, and indeed the models all have much more in common with each other than they differ. It may be that one has or will turn out to have some advantages over the other but at this time I don't think that's yet the case.

In the meantime, I think there is room to allow for different models. And I personally much prefer the OP one, for all the various reasons discussed in the thread. You don't. That's ok. We can agree to disagree over who has the better model. And scientists and academics of all sorts can do the same, and choose their lines of approach accordingly. And this is in fact what happens.

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What might still be interesting would be to allow for differences in models, set aside trying to win the argument about which is right and which is wrong, and merely compare and contrast the implications of each model. It may be that both or all would imply at least some of the same things, with the caveat that some of them can't be verified or agreed on, unfortunately.

For example, and to temporarily segue to an analogy with another sense (audition) and an old, unresolvable, philosophical chestnut, 'does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if there is nothing or no one there to hear it'? The answer seems to depend on how you define 'sound'. If one person (this would not be me) says yes, because they define sound as a property of frequencies of vibrations in a media, and another (this would be me) says no because to them sound is only the perception, they may both be equally right, in their own way, or that the matter can't be resolved.

But, could both nonetheless agree that there is 'silence' in the absence of a perceiver? It doesn't seem impossible in principle, given that they may both already agree that an object in the dark is not actually coloured.

 

[fromderinside]

There is another one, also held by other relevant experts, which works equally well, and this is why the subject can equally be dealt with by them without reference to colour in light. And if or when colour is then considered in this model, it is essentially put on a par with pain and other psychological phenomena. No woo involved. Just commonplace, real, actual, everyday psychological phenomena such as pain. Doing that may be making a category error, or it may not. As far as I can see, we can't tell one way or the other.

OK. I'm a psychologist. I understand the desire a psychological language be part of the model. It's just that I've also been a psychologist for along time and I see how models crash and burn almost on generational cycles. Some new fad arises, usually innocent, is taken over by a political force of some sort and becomes a movement. To wit: genetics become eugenics, and psychologists rush to plant their flag on a new language, racist it turns out, where drive and schedules become important.

No Thanks.

 

[ruby sparks]

There is another one, also held by other relevant experts, which works equally well, and this is why the subject can equally be dealt with by them without reference to colour in light. And if or when colour is then considered in this model, it is essentially put on a par with pain and other psychological phenomena. No woo involved. Just commonplace, real, actual, everyday psychological phenomena such as pain. Doing that may be making a category error, or it may not. As far as I can see, we can't tell one way or the other.

OK. I'm a psychologist. I understand the desire a psychological language be part of the model. It's just that I've also been a psychologist for along time and I see how models crash and burn almost on generational cycles. Some new fad arises, usually innocent, is taken over by a political force of some sort and becomes a movement. To wit: genetics become eugenics, and psychologists rush to plant their flag on a new language, racist it turns out, where drive and schedules become important.

No Thanks.

Fine, but the OP model is far from being a new fad. Isaac Newton, arguably the discoverer of the relationship between light and colour, apparently subscribed to it over 300 years ago. And I think that to some extent, what he said about it has been somewhat overlooked ever since, although only by some.

I am not sure what you fear might happen if it became the widely accepted model. But I do acknowledge that it could, yes, lead to the sorts of things you describe (and in some dubious cases already has) but then I think so could almost anything. The OP model, handled in a certain way, is no less scientific (or materialist) than the one you prefer instead. But it could be abused, by some, yes. But perhaps only if they stray away from certain standards or methods of enquiry. Humans can be irrational about anything. See: creation science.

Saying that certain phenomena are only internal to an organism is not necessarily a problem in principle and does not invoke foolish superstitions. It's already how pain can be and mostly has been understood and addressed in modern times, even in the strictest possible scientific or medical terms.

 

[fromderinside]

As rebuttal I give you an unvalidated scaling method exemplified by Cooper-Harper Handling Rating Scale/Flying Qualities rating Scale

It is important to note that a Handling Qualities Rating (HQR) can not be assigned to an aircraft, as in "That aircraft is a HQR 5 aircraft." Any HQR that is assigned requires a well defined, repeatable task, a well trained pilot that is actively engaged in accomplishing that task, and an aircraft.

You might recognize it's similarity with pain scales used by many Doctors and medical institutions.

Much of my psychology career was in A/C research and evaluation encumbered by such tools. Bridgman's operational approach to scientific method seemed promising. We used it developing and pursuing other quick and dirty, but well defined and validated, means for evaluating A/C and pilot performance. Paid off.

Our teams evaluated, developed and tested two and three variable methods developed IAW  Theory of conjoint measurement which theoretically should yield interval scale results. My approach was to dabble with different definitions for pilot workload or effort, system operability, and various meanings of stress. The dabbling was tested using  Path analysis (statistics). Those definitions showing low interdependence were applied in two and three dimension models to get at military mission effectiveness of emerging Stage IV development (pre operational test and evaluation) AC and mission systems.

The point. I was fairly well paid. Oh, and it's better to be able to defend your results when they can be tested using at least interval methods.

 

[ruby sparks]

Nm.

 

[ruby sparks]

The physical world, energy/matter, a set of features and properties which a brain, with its own set of properties, interprets as shape, form, colour, movement, time.

Yes, but not all brain phenomena seem to have the same sort of relationship to the properties of the external world.

Shape and form for instance. We see a chair. In our visual image, the chair has four legs. We readily agree (with caveats about not necessarily knowing for sure) that the actual chair does actually have four legs.

Now colour. We see the chair as red, but we understand that it is not actually red, that this is a mistaken belief resulting from an illusion, that the redness we see, which appears to be a property of the chair, is actually only in our brain.

 

[fromderinside]

To quick to take red as a property of the object. It's red but it's red because the light illuminating it is the sun or a lamp made by man to mimic the light of the sun.

Had we been on a planet in the vicinity of betelgeuse or in a studio using red light we might see it as blue or tan. It's as we see it because of the light and conditions around it, not because of the mind.

The mind only has access to what the eyes provide to it.

Doing the empirical stomp.

 

[skepticalbip]

... snip ...

The mind only has access to what the eyes provide to it.

That assumption makes it difficult to explain how those with synesthesia can hear colors. Certainly you aren't asserting that the chair is humming, but only for them, or are you?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150413214343.htm

There are also those with synesthesia who "see" musical tones as colors... others that see specific letters in specific colors even though they are printed in a text, like they may see all p's in red even though we see it in black.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The physical world, energy/matter, a set of features and properties which a brain, with its own set of properties, interprets as shape, form, colour, movement, time.

Yes, but not all brain phenomena seem to have the same sort of relationship to the properties of the external world.

Shape and form for instance. We see a chair. In our visual image, the chair has four legs.

Why is this so? Because the photons bouncing off the objectively existing chair paint that picture. Photons bouncing off of an objectively existing left front leg tell us that there is a left front leg and its relative distance to the other legs. Photons bouncing off of an objectively existing right front leg tell us that there is a right front leg and its relative distance to the other legs. Photons bouncing off of an objectively existing left rear leg tell us that there is a left rear leg and its relative distance to the other legs. Photons bouncing off of an objectively existing right rear leg tell us that there is a right rear leg and its relative distance to the other legs. Photons bouncing off of an objectively existing seat tell us that there is a seat and its relation to the rest of the chair. Etc.

A bombardment of quadrillions of photons in a steady stream "paint" the objective qualities of the chair and all of that information is "beamed" into our eyes and translated into "brain speak" and the brain recreates the image of that chair based upon the information from the chair, about the chair, because of the chair however the fuck you want to write it.

What does NOT happen--except in cases of malfunction of some nature, which is the exception that proves the rule--is that the brain sees a giraffe and not a chair with four legs.

So, does the chair exist ONLY in the brain? No, it does not. Because it's not a mutually exclusive proposition. The chair exists in the world AND it is an illusory creation of the brain. A model created by the brain based upon the information acquired about the object by the eyes.

So it is BOTH objectively existing AND subjectively experienced.

We readily agree (with caveats about not necessarily knowing for sure) that the actual chair does actually have four legs.

Because the object effectively tells us this fact. Do NOT play childish semantics games with the word "tells." You know what I mean.

Now colour. We see the chair as red

Why? Because the photons bouncing off of the chair have been changed by the chair's intrinsic color. That is the only way photon wavelengths get changed, by interacting with something that changes them, like a prism or water or, evidently, a chair. Some photons get absorbed by the chair's intrinsic color, while others get their wavelengths changed to the frequency we call red and it is those reflected photons--with those particular wavelengths--that in turn trigger our cones to encode the signal with that frequency.

Whether the chair itself is fully red is a condition we can't know. What color absorbs some photons while changing other photons to a red wavelength when they bounce off the "prime" color? Is it fully red or some other hue? Is it full-on yellow that when photons bounce off it in a particular light change the reflected photon wavelengths? Etc. We can only measure reflected changes after they have bounced off of (aka, "reflected") the chair.

Cones are dumb. They are simply translating the "input information" from the photons that have been changed by the reflection off of the chair to accurately match the photon wavelengths. Iow, they copy what's going on in the real world.

So how the fuck could they copy "red" if "red" does not exist in the real world? And if they aren't copying red from the real world, then, once again, how the fuck can a brain just make red up, such that a particular frequency is not going to tell the brain what it is, but instead the brain is going to make up a completely different color (you know, like when MALFUNCTIONING, which proves the rule), let alone ALL human (and many nonhuman) brains make up the same color?

We did not all sit down as a species and say, "Ok, so we all agree that wavelength 450 will mean this particular phenomenological illusion and we all now and forever forward will spontaneously generate that same illusion."

Monkey see, monkey do. Not magical instantiation ex nihilo in all human brains (and many other species' brains) now and forever forward.

 

[fromderinside]

The nervous system has access to color information as the result of light passing through specific bandwidth frequencies of light before language is present for the person to express her choice of sense value. Plenty of time to build a color library. Even one that is accessed inappropriately. So until you have measures from individuals through other than vocal or written modes you have no evidence. Actually I think synesthesia is an interpretation problem in association NS.

So many things psychological are blurted out because those who see such results have just got to get it out without noting their failures to account for prior experience in the individual. Good experimental control is important. If one wants to deal with senses one need to account for sense acquisition history. Probably would help to look at sense interaction and their development as well.

Since brain activity is ongoing prior to delivery one might just need to rule out visual receptor activation during that period as well.

Fun aside: I remember reading, as a freshman back in '59, about pecking in chickens being learned in the shell through analysis of position of heart and head and related embryo activity in one of the many attacks on instinctive behavior back during those years. No. Noone altered the placement of the head relative to the heart to verify.

 

[skepticalbip]

The nervous system has access to color information as the result of light passing through specific bandwidth frequencies of light before language is present for the person to express her choice of sense value. Plenty of time to build a color library. Even one that is accessed inappropriately. So until you have measures from individuals through other than vocal or written modes you have no evidence. Actually I think synesthesia is an interpretation problem in association NS.

So many things psychological are blurted out because those who see such results have just got to get it out without noting their failures to account for prior experience in the individual. Good experimental control is important. If one wants to deal with senses one need to account for sense acquisition history. Probably would help to look at sense interaction and their development as well.

Since brain activity is ongoing prior to delivery one might just need to rule out visual receptor activation during that period as well.

Fun aside: I remember reading, as a freshman back in '59, about pecking in chickens being learned in the shell through analysis of position of heart and head and related embryo activity in one of the many attacks on instinctive behavior back during those years. No. Noone altered the placement of the head relative to the heart to verify.

Again, I gotta complement you on your amazing hand waving, evasion, and misdirection. Unfortunately, actual reasoning is a different matter.

The chickens were cute though.

 

[ruby sparks]

... snip ...

The mind only has access to what the eyes provide to it.

That assumption makes it difficult to explain how those with synesthesia can hear colors. Certainly you aren't asserting that the chair is humming, but only for them, or are you?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150413214343.htm

There are also those with synesthesia who "see" musical tones as colors... others that see specific letters in specific colors even though they are printed in a text, like they may see all p's in red even though we see it in black.

It seems to me that in some models (perhaps those where it is said that, for example, 'the mind only has access to what the eyes provide for it') there is a tendency to explain processes in a very linear, uni-directional way ('in one end, out the other') which tends to involve saying that whatever inputs arrive at the organism externally are what are eventually processed, and by implication that nothing else but those external inputs is being processed. I might call this a 'brain as a camera' model.

But the brain is far, far too actively complicated for that. We could say that in any particular part of the brain that is or becomes involved in visual processing, where an external input arrives (having been transduced etc) there are many other internal inputs from other parts of the brain (to that particular part) that do not come from the external (visual) input at all, but from areas associated with memory, learning, emotion, etc etc. And importantly, signals to and from these areas are happening almost all the time anyway, they are not just activated by the visual input. The visual input is merely mixed into the ongoing flux of them.

In fact, that would be way, way too simplistic (given the sheer awesome complexity of the trillions of crisscrossing interconnections, feedback loops and waves of activity) even at the level of a single neuron, which typically has thousands of its own input connections, all of them functioning at every instant (even when in resting mode). In other words, that neuron has access to a multitude of other input sources, not just those related to the signals generated external to the organism, and not only activated by visual inputs, but happening already, in an ongoing way.

This is one given explanation for why the brain can create outputs that do not match the visual inputs, that are decoupled from them, such as seeing two colours when there is only one external input (colour cube and other related illusions), or retaining colours even though the input has changed (colour constancy). Perhaps the best example is the effect shown in the two images of the bowls of strawberries posted earlier. In that case the external input simply does not involve or include the frequencies normally associated with the colour perceived (one of the images is in fact completely monochrome). Also, as we have said, colour experiences do not need light as an input at all, do not even need it as a trigger. And synesthesia is only one example from many (I made a list at one point in the thread).

All of that tends to generally support the case that colour is effectively created in the brain (albeit normally using transduced light as one ingredient, and in the OP model uncoloured transduced light). Which is far from being an unprecedented process, since it happens routinely for many other brain phenomena, for which the properties created are quite simply not in the external stimuli and are therefore agreed and accepted to be wholly unique to the brain. This is as true of certain basic sub-phenomena (pain, fear, etc etc) as it is of arguably the grand-daddy of them all, consciousness.