COLOUR

[ruby sparks]

It would be analogous to flavor.

No, it would not, actually, because "flavor" is yet another different category that combines information from several different sensory input devices in much the same way as "pain" (e.g., your nose; the taste buds; etc). With color, however, the only differentiators are the cones/rods.

It's actually as if I hadn't recently made a list here of some of the other ways colour can be produced in the brain.

Also, you should google definitions of the word analogy.

The fact that this occurs, however, does not exclude the possibility that it is modelling accurately (more or less) an objective condition.

No one is saying otherwise.

Iow and once again, BOTH propositions can be true at the exact same time; we subjectively model an objective world.

The possibility that it's both has been accepted. Whether, for colour in particular, it is or isn't both (ie whether colour is both a brain experience and an objective property of the world outside brains) is the OP issue we are discussing.

There is a model in which colour is only in brains, and that light merely has other properties which contribute to making colour, and that's the model I'm inclined to agree with. You, on the other hand, prefer a slightly different model.

 

[ruby sparks]

OK. So is "in the brain" to mean receptors?

Er, no. No one said that.

One can't really argue that something that produces specific information about light isn't material.

I think it has been said to you that no one is arguing for that almost as many times as a red photon (ie a redon) oscillates per second. Yet here you are, bringing materiality up again.

You should try homunculi again next. Maybe someone was doing those. No wait, no one was.

Ok how about denying that there are objective conditions that are being responded to. Surely someone is doing that. Damn, no one is.

Proof. That's the one. Someone is saying they can prove something. I think. Or maybe not.

 

[ruby sparks]

I have thought of a possible experiment that might be useful here.



So, if you can see that image on your screen, move more than an arm's length away from the screen. Something like 4-6 feet (or the equivalent in metres) would be ideal.

Now, assuming you can still see the image from that distance, lift up one of your arms, point your hand (the one on the arm that's been raised) towards the centre of the image and extend just the forefinger only.

Say, out loud, either to yourself or to another person or persons watching the experiment, 'the red is over there'.

The same process could be repeated for other similar images of objects, for images of different objects, or by a cohort of human subjects.

 

[fromderinside]

We'd probablably shut up if you quit writing "the brain did it"

But, there you went again.

But you see it's not about light properties. It's about properties through which the human brain interprets colors presented to her. She has no choice. She senses colors. It's the onlly light to which humams can be individually aware. Like you wrote many time this isn't about light it's about whether the brain makes color.

I provided an objective model that leaves the properties of light out of it, one that says the brain only has access to color defined as bands of light spectra provided by sesnors.

so what is it about redons? Are you still talking about light properties when human brains have no access to light properties?

I mean, every time. By you the same dodge. "Quick conjure up the magic faerie to explain. Someone saw the color carriage."

 

[ruby sparks]

We'd probablably shut up if you quit writing "the brain did it"

But, there you went again.

I'm not sure I did put it that way, actually. Maybe you can quote me?

But if I did at one point, you are of course right that that it would only be true in one sense (akin to saying 'the oven makes cakes'). The actual processes involved can be reduced down to a multitude of much more specific components.

Or if you like, 'it happens (or is made in) in the brain', because as you say there is no brain homunculi doing or making anything, as per the oven analogy (whether a very complicated modern oven could be called a type of agent is another matter, it arguably could).

Or some of it happens (or is made in) the brain. As you pointed out, the eye is not usually considered part of the brain, even though it is part of an organism's visual system.

Though I would say that the end result happens in the brain and only in the brain. Allowing that the brain is at the same time more or less constantly interacting (including via feedback and feedback loops) with other things outside the brain (as well as inside it). So it's an ongoing set of processes, for as long as it lasts. And even then, there isn't a time when nothing happens (unless the organism is dead). Even the so-called resting state of inactive neurons which at other times play a role in light processing involves the maintenance of a negative electric charge in their axons, apparently.

 

[fromderinside]

Or some of it does. As you pointed out, the eye is not usually considered part of the brain, even though it is part of the visual system.

Visual systems are not my problem. They are yours. They are made up by the brain. We are only taking about what the brain senses which is not light, but color. Your OP makes a pretty ridiculous assertion that the brain makes up what the brain is presented to sense.

If you are permitted to say light properties don't include color, I am permitted to counter that light isn't sensed by the brain. Only color, operationally defined, is sensed by the brain. As we all know transducers don't sense they only convert.

 

[ruby sparks]

Or some of it does. As you pointed out, the eye is not usually considered part of the brain, even though it is part of the visual system.

Visual systems are not my problem. They are yours. They are made up by the brain. We are only taking about what the brain senses which is not light, but color. Your OP makes a pretty ridiculous assertion that the brain makes up what the brain is presented to sense.

If you are permitted to say light properties don't include color, I am permitted to counter that light isn't sensed by the brain. Only color, operationally defined, is sensed by the brain. As we all know transducers don't sense they only convert.

If you want to claim something, no matter what it is, you go ahead and do that. If you think the brain senses colours that are in the stimuli, go you. After all, you said pain is in (or is) the stimuli also. As has koy.

It's definitely not the same model (or associated set of descriptors) I'm currently supporting.

No one said light was sensed by the brain by the way, but never mind. You can just add that to the long and growing list of things you apparently think someone said but actually didn't.

 

[fromderinside]

You said light sense by implication when you rattled on about light properties.

bah-lue-gah

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

THE OBJECTIVE CONDITION IS THAT THE OBJECT IS COLORED. YOU CAN'T PROVE IT IS NOT. YOU CAN'T PROVE THAT IT IS.

NOR CAN PALMER. NOR CAN ANYONE.

Fucking hell.

ETA: So, no, nothing anyone asserts can exclude that "colour is anywhere else other than in brains." It does not matter what Palmer says, he cannot prove that the object is not colored or that color ONLY exists in the brain.

There's that proof straw man again.

It's not a strawman, ruby. It would be a strawman if I said that you had argued that there was proof. What you have been arguing is that Palmer's statement excludes color from being an objective condition, which is false. False that his statement serves to legitimately exclude color as being an objective condition.

But at least now you're not misreading Palmer.

I never was, but you have been and that's the point. No one can exclude color from being an objective condition. No one can state that color ONLY exists "in the brain."

I don't mean that trivially, I mean that it is not a measurable, verifiable assertion due to the hard problem. Palmer can only legitimately state that color is a brain experience, NOT that color is ONLY a brain experience. He has no legitimate basis to make such a declarative just as you have no basis to make it.

It's not even a "model" as you put it in a subsequent post.

Do you understand what that means?

You (and Palmer) can legitimately state that color is at least a phenomenological experience that occurs somewhere in the brain. You (and he) cannot, however, legitimately state that color is only a phenomenological experience that occurs somewhere in the brain. That would require objective proof, which is not possible to provide.

ETA: Here's proof from your OP. I'll bold Palmer's words where he delineates a difference, but not the one you subsequently latched onto:

People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive".
...
Claim 1: objects are not themselves coloured, they do not have colour.
...
I think claim 1 is the easier and more recognised to be the case. I might hold that one quite strongly.

The problem, obviously, hinges on this sentence fragment:

color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights.

But he immediately qualified that assertion and, indeed, the whole of his book--including definitions provided prior to that quote--is about qualifying that assertion by making delineations between "input" information and "output" information; between the strictly scientific and the psychologically experiential.

He literally states: "The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive."

Yes, color is a psychological property of our visual "experiences" when we look at objects and lights. Whether or not it is ALSO a "physical property of those objects or lights" however is not testable and therefore not a valid assertion to make AND an assertion his own book (and subsequent writings) disavows/contradicts or otherwise leaves open/qualifies.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Say, out loud, either to yourself or to another person or persons watching the experiment, 'the red is over there'.

Oy. Ok, so, first of all, because that's a picture on a computer monitor, it's simultaneously a reflected source (i.e., the picture is capturing reflected light off of the strawberry) that is being directly "beamed" (emitted) into our eyes. So it's an example of a reflected color being directly emitted.

Second, it's a false dichotomy. The proper, exhaustive response would be--if someone were to hold up an actual strawberry--"The red that is (re)created in my brain is the result of photons bouncing off of the strawberry, an action likely changing their wavelengths, so technically I am likely not registering the object's intrinsic color state, but rather the color state that is being reflected off of the object. It may also be over there as well, but due to the hard problem of consciousness, I cannot make that determination definitively, so I can not legitimately assert anything at all regarding the objective condition of the strawberry's true color state."

Having exhaustively provided the proper answer, I could then turn to technology to measure the reflected wavelength to see if it matches my body/brain's translation of the information received/acquired, but the technology is necessarily similarly limited to measuring only the photons that are reflected off of the object, not the object itself.

The question as to the true color state of the object itself is forever inaccessible to us and our technology. We can, perhaps, measure photons--and thus wavelengths--that are being absorbed by the object and make an educated guess/inference regarding a possible true color state by combining the wavelengths that are absorbed with the wavelengths that are reflected, but that still would not permit us access to a comprehensive understanding of the objectively true color state of the object itself.

But, of course, we don't really need to do such a thing. That strawberries are red due to the reflected photons that bounce off them is sufficient delineation for any practical concerns of categorization.

The problem for you (and Palmer) is to argue why a reflected color state is any significant impediment and not merely a problem of categorization. Iow, what difference does it make if the "true" color state is measured by the object's reflective properties?

 

[skepticalbip]

Or some of it does. As you pointed out, the eye is not usually considered part of the brain, even though it is part of the visual system.

Visual systems are not my problem. They are yours. They are made up by the brain. We are only taking about what the brain senses which is not light, but color. Your OP makes a pretty ridiculous assertion that the brain makes up what the brain is presented to sense.

If you are permitted to say light properties don't include color, I am permitted to counter that light isn't sensed by the brain. Only color, operationally defined, is sensed by the brain. As we all know transducers don't sense they only convert.

If you want to claim something, no matter what it is, you go ahead and do that. If you think the brain senses colours that are in the stimuli, go you. After all, you said pain is in (or is) the stimuli also. As has koy.

It's definitely not the same model (or associated set of descriptors) I'm currently supporting.

No one said light was sensed by the brain by the way, but never mind. You can just add that to the long and growing list of things you apparently think someone said but actually didn't.

It is apparent that it is futile to try to reason with your two advisories here. Both are only engaging in ad hoc assertions. Neither seems to have bothered to offer a specific definition for 'color' and stick with it throughout their 'arguments'. Or, indeed, I have seen no evidence that they have actually critically thought through their 'arguments'. If they define color as a wavelength of EM then it obviously is not a property of a strawberry or the human mind since neither are composed of EM radiation. If they define it as the ability of an object to reflect or emit specific wavelengths of EM then it is not a property of EM radiation nor the human mind since neither reflect those wavelengths. OTOH, if color is defined as the mind's interpretation of electrical signals stimulating certain neurons in the brain then color is not in EM radiation or a property of strawberries.

A strict definition of 'color' makes their rambling ad hoc "arguments" gibberish.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It is apparent that it is futile to try to reason with your two advisories here. Both are only engaging in ad hoc assertions.

??? That is clearly and demonstrably false as well as deeply ironic.

Neither seems to have bothered to offer a specific definition for 'color' and stick with it throughout their 'arguments'.

Color=wavelength. I have specified that countless times.

 

[skepticalbip]

Color=wavelength. I have specified that countless times.

And since there is no wavelength in the brain then speaking of the mind 'seeing' color would be nonsense. Also wavelength is not a property of strawberries so, by your definition, a strawberry could not be red. Only light at a specific frequency could be red, not a mental image or a strawberry.

You really don't think through your responses do you?

 

[fromderinside]

Color=wavelength. I have specified that countless times.

And since there is no wavelength in the brain then speaking of the mind 'seeing' color would be nonsense. Also wavelength is not a property of strawberries so, by your definition, a strawberry could not be red. Only light at a specific frequency could be red, not a mental image or a strawberry.

You really don't think through your responses do you?

Wow. There is no frequency, pitch, or timbre in the brain either. No odor. No pain. No touch, It's no better with strawberry either.

The problem with 'in the brain' is that it's captive to what it receives to process. There can be no color in the brain if there is no color in the world. The brain simply has no reference. OTOH if receptors use segments of light spectrum (color) to translate light to induce nervous impulses there is a source for reference from which to assign color in the brain.

If, as you people argue, the brain makes color, it does so as a consequence of how light is presented to the brain.

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

For me it's much simpler. The being can't input light into the brain because there is no way for it to either input photon energy or light frequencies to the nervous system. Rather the being can produce a transducer that is sensitive to particular segments of light spectrum, let's call them color, that are meaningful to the being for surviving.

Hell. I've solved both problems.

First the problem of whether color goes away because light information transduced is meaningful as determined by the fitness requirement to what are the several limited regions of frequency and energy beings discriminate. So we call these operationally defined material events color.

The second problem whether color exists in the brain goes away because what light is transduced is what is processed. The brain only processes what is given it by sensing organ which is what is called color.

All of the cute attempts to point to shading processes, illuminating processes and all other visual processes as rationale for keeping color in the brain are defeated by the fact that all of these bits of information are transduced at the eye. And if you invoke memory I remind you that memory reflects only what has been made available to it, which at root are passed via the sensing organs.

The fact that sight is deceived is no surprise. Every sense shows these problems

What I just posted can be empirically tested, has been empirically tested and verified. No need for feeling one's way through an argument.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Color=wavelength. I have specified that countless times.

And since there is no wavelength in the brain then speaking of the mind 'seeing' color would be nonsense.

Jesus titty-fucking christ. You are so far out of your depth it’s not even remotely funny.

 

[ruby sparks]

color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights.

But he immediately qualified that assertion and, indeed, the whole of his book--including definitions provided prior to that quote--is about qualifying that assertion by making delineations between "input" information and "output" information; between the strictly scientific and the psychologically experiential.

It's a distinction between input and output, yes, but it's not a qualifier about colour, because for him there is quite simply no colour in the inputs, only in the outputs (in the brain). That is why he explicitly says that. At no point does he say otherwise.

There is a commonly-made distinction between 'scientific colour' and 'experiental colour', yes, and you make that distinction, but Palmer doesn't, at least not in that text. Ever since you started reading what he wrote you've been trying really hard to parse it as if he is adopting that conventional model and associated descriptors, but he isn't.

 

[ruby sparks]

That strawberries are red due to the reflected photons that bounce off them is sufficient delineation for any practical concerns of categorization.

The problem for you (and Palmer) is to argue why a reflected color state is any significant impediment and not merely a problem of categorization. Iow, what difference does it make if the "true" color state is measured by the object's reflective properties?

The ways humans have conventionally categorised the world have generally been useful to them in practical terms. For at least tens of thousands of years and possibly much longer it was practical to think of objects as having colours before the conceptual shift (by those who have made it) to think of light as having colours instead. The former is now generally considered to be mistaken. The latter generally persists, especially outside modern cognitive science. That said, the OP model is not entirely unusual.

But in any case, this is not primarily about practicality, it's mainly about trying to understand the actual nature of things. That's a worthwhile endeavour in itself. As the physicist in the video animation said, 'as a physicist, my goal is to understand things at the most basic level possible'. Whether or not in the future a better understanding of the actual nature of reality assists in some practical way is a possibility, but that's arguably a slightly separate issue. In the meantime, assigning properties to wavelengths that they do not in fact seem to have is arguably as much a mistake as assigning those properties to objects.

And if we agree that the properties are different, but we nonetheless want to use a common descriptor for them, then that may be pragmatic, but it's arguably engendering a basic confusion and imprecision about properties. We might better keep in mind that they are in fact fundamentally different.

As such, Palmer is arguably not the one with the problem, you are, because your conventional model and its associated descriptors are imprecise at a basic level, and you are the one who is literally (as in via language) conflating two different things.

But we don't generally do it when it comes to pain, or fear, and many other psychological phenomena of experience, which we generally accept are only in brains, even though the external stimuli, the objective conditions, that play a role in causing them are as much in varied, nuanced existence as the stimuli that cause the psychological phenomena of colour experiences. Which is another problem for those people to explain why they do it for one sort of brain experience but not another. Merely claiming it's a category error doesn't cut enough of the mustard. They'd have to clarify (a) what their categories are and more importantly (b) show exactly why one belongs in one category but not the other.

It's also worth noting that pain and colour are generally or often categorised together as elementary psychological sensations.

One of the alternative ways out of that problem, to set aside supposed category errors and instead make a direct comparison by claiming that as colour = wavelengths, so pain = radiation, is unconvincing, because pain isn't by any reasonable definition the radiation which causes it.

 

[fromderinside]

Geez. How many times are we going back to ancient justification about humans being and above being an animal.

What we say we feel isn't at all relevant. That's our looking inword talking. We ARE the ones who talk about what we believe we are inside after conducting our little looking in ward observations, purely as scientists we tell ourselves..

Such is not experiment it is self testimony. It is just as fraught with individual 'I heard' stupidity as gossip across back yard fences.

That is why I say your "I believes" are just you feeling good about yourself. Not a verifiable fact within a second set of eyes looking in at you which is nowhere.

Being a psychologist qualifies one for very little in the scientific community. This is especially true of those who choose the armchair over the laboratory. Maybe you haven't read about then number of times philosophers have launched 'scientific philosophy journals' only to fall victim of the need to self analyze, then crash out of science by the attempt.

Your feeling is not relevant. Your testimony wrapped up in repeating I heard's is set aside. ruby sparks I agree with Kiyaanisqatsi. I write that only as as an opinion based on my reading of what he writes is, on the face of it, more relevant than what you write. As you know I believe that is about as relevant as sucking my big toe - if you saw me or read my age you'd know that 'toe sucking' had to be false - while looking inward. And the last is no more objective than any other part of this last paragraph. I'ts just me sayin'.

 

[ruby sparks]

Color=wavelength. I have specified that countless times.

And since there is no wavelength in the brain then speaking of the mind 'seeing' color would be nonsense.

Jesus titty-fucking christ. You are so far out of your depth it’s not even remotely funny.

I think he's right about the imprecision and lack of strictness. Your model obliges you to not only have two supposed types of colour, but possibly even three (the colour in your brain, the colour of the light, and possibly also the colour of the object). I think it's quite a messy model, especially as I think you have referred to both the latter as actual, true colour (you have said wavelengths = colour and you have also at least speculated that objects have actual, true colours).

I also think he has a point about the ad hoc nature of some of the objections. For example, one minute we can't talk of pain and colour together because it's supposed to be a category error and the next you claim pain is like colour in that both are the stimuli.

 

[skepticalbip]

Color=wavelength. I have specified that countless times.

And since there is no wavelength in the brain then speaking of the mind 'seeing' color would be nonsense.

Jesus titty-fucking christ. You are so far out of your depth it’s not even remotely funny.

Now that is deeply considered reasoning that explains how color is light, a property of strawberries, and an impression in the mind, all using the same definition for color.

If color is defined as an artifact of the detector (the mind) the description of the process becomes quite simple. Some light source (the sun) emits a broad spectrum of EM frequencies. The strawberry absorbs most of the energy at most of the frequencies but not so much a certain frequency. This frequency of EM radiation enters the eye and excites the cells in the retina to transmit an electrical signal to the optic nerve. This electrical signal travels along the optic nerve to specific neurons in the brain which fire. This firing is interpreted by the mind as a color. Color is created in the mind.

Now you try defining color and trace its travel from the source to your consciousness using your definition throughout since you do not accept that color is a creation of the mind.