COLOUR

[ruby sparks]

If 'redness' is a property of the ball then it is still red when there is no light or when illuminated by a blue light.

Indeed.

 

[fromderinside]

Not.

False premise: 'redness' a property of the Ball. Colour a property, not an identity, probably, Property red? never!

With respect to light, balls absorb some light frequencies and reflects others producing the appearance of different colors depending on overall viewing conditions. Viewing conditions include the attributes of the light which is being reflected in which the viewer is observing the event. A car that is seen as red in white light (sunlight) appears blue in sodium light illumination at night.. Just basic physics. No ups no extras. What the observer sees is consistent with what she sees in context of overall lighting conditions and the properties of balls to absorb some frequencies of light. Fortunately we don't go looking for apples at night indoors or in parking lots.

Just thought you guys needed to take a deep breath before you have human minds creating color.

Go ahead. Illuminate that 'red' ball with sodium light and get the mind to report to you it's a red, er, blue ball.

As to the philosophical question of colour one needs to know (specify) with what one is dealing before either having doubts or making proclamations.

 

[untermensche]

View attachment 28485

Ex nihilo. The color we call "blue" is "telling" the rods/cones in your eyes what it is. The rods/cones in your eyes in turn are translating that information into a chemical language for your brain to unpack.....

Not possible with evolved traits.

The light coming off that page has no way to tell cells how a brain should interpret it.

It can either stimulate a cell or not stimulate a cell. That is all light can do.

Many humans are color blind.

If everyone was color blind everyone would say that is "blue" but they would not be talking about what a person with "normal" color vision calls "blue.

Same "information" being passed but two different interpretations of "blue".

Blue is a neural interpretation of light stimulus that has no color information within it. Light stimulus just has different wavelengths that evolving brains have by chance interpreted into the experience of different colors. Very little EM radiation is interpreted into color.

 

[untermensche]

Not.

False premise: 'redness' a property of the Ball. Colour a property, not an identity, probably, Property red? never!

With respect to light, balls absorb some light frequencies and reflects others producing the appearance of different colors depending on overall viewing conditions. Viewing conditions include the attributes of the light which is being reflected in which the viewer is observing the event. A car that is seen as red in white light (sunlight) appears blue in sodium light illumination at night.. Just basic physics. No ups no extras. What the observer sees is consistent with what she sees in context of overall lighting conditions and the properties of balls to absorb some frequencies of light. Fortunately we don't go looking for apples at night indoors or in parking lots.

Just thought you guys needed to take a deep breath before you have human minds creating color.

Go ahead. Illuminate that 'red' ball with sodium light and get the mind to report to you it's a red, er, blue ball.

As to the philosophical question of colour one needs to know (specify) with what one is dealing before either having doubts or making proclamations.

Minds don't create color. They experience color.

And brains create everything minds experience.

Brains create colors. Just like they create the experience of sound.

Without brains and minds there is no color anywhere.

 

[Copernicus]

Asking whether color is a property of objects or perceptions strikes me as a false dichotomy. Ruby's original question was basically asking whether  eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) makes any sense. I tend to be skeptical of eliminativism, because it really depends on a matter of perspective. Water doesn't exist from the perspective of a hydrogen or oxygen atom or even an H20 molecule. Water is an emergent pattern of interaction between massive amounts of such molecules interacting with human bodies in a way that produces interpretable sensations. The mind creates the concept of water (and everything else) on the basis of how human beings interact with their bodily sensations. If you refuse to take the perspective of a human observer, then you can easily imagine the elimination of anything you want. The problem with eliminativist conundrums is that they only appear as conundrums when you shift perspective on reality without realizing that or how your perspective has shifted. The false presupposition is that there is only one perspective from which to answer a question like "Is color a property of the object or the mind?"

 

[untermensche]

Nothing is eliminated by saying color exists only as a neural construction.

The experience of color is as "real" as the experience of pain.

 

[fromderinside]

Mind is a construct as is experience of anything.

The brain processes information external and internal via mechanisms that are sensitive or responsive to particular kinds of information such as that of specific energy levels of light, color. Every person has processes with properties similar to those of others. If language is used to share experience it is probable that labels would be similar for the experience shared by each.

Since light is separable physically by material means color is a property anywhere such mechanisms exist. That is color can be studied, measured, generated, etc., like any other form of matter/energy.

The only thing that is invented is the notion that bands of energy rather than frequency or energy level is used as the means through which scientists make use of such energy in human and physical study. It is a convenience not an experience.

If it becomes necessary to examine every energy level for the sake of understanding those rules will be and are being modified. Similar discussions can be had for all our senses.

After all I am a neuroscientist retired.* I don't hold to such notions as the science of reason or experience, these are clearly domains for armchair philosophers or get rich quick quacks. One may as well study lumps on the skull or bones/stones thrown down by someone in a costume

*^{_{I'm pitching my domain}}

 

[untermensche]

Mind is a neural construct.

Like color.

There is no way for light energy to force or even cause an evolving animal to produce a certain color in response to it.

All light can do is strike cells and excite them.

Once excited it is up to the neural system to create something that a mind can experience.

Color is pure neural creation. Like sound and taste and smell.

A molecule does not have a taste until a brain exists that can create the experience of taste for a mind.

All experience is experience by a mind.

 

[fromderinside]

No dear untermensche mind is a mental construct. Both mind and experience are constructs based upon what humans (construct) make of what the the behaving, (another construct) human, (yet another construct) does.

Trying to make science from created constructs is a fools errand. One has to impute something for constructs to work, some form of emergence, a homunculus or man-in-machine to even consider them.

I prefer to avoid such. Instead I construct operational constructs like function to signal I am concocting rather than doing science. I impute the power of a molecule to function - which I believe can be adequately operationally defined - to transform one form of energy into another and put it in a system (definable) that senses, makes energy meaningful as behavior (definable).

Thusly I pursue Hume's rather than Descartes' construction. What happens within photoreceptors is a twisting of molecules producing potentials which engage transmitter substance to the presence of specific energy photons. The point is the activity is specific for each photoreceptor. Scientists have taken responses such as these and constructed a model reflecting activity that is then related to energy. Rather than saying all this it is easier to say things like "red sensitive" and "blue sensitive".

There is no emergence here.

 

[untermensche]

It is not a mere construct that "I" experience the color blue.

It is how it must happen.

For there to be any experience there must be that which experiences and that which is experienced. This dichotomy and separation must exist for experience to exist.

 

[fromderinside]

I agree. For the BS construct to stand all you say must be. I'm not one who fixed behaviors like does a psychiatrist. I'm a simple neuroscientist - retired who happens to like  Operationalism.

The sense of self is an interesting concept. It is evolved. It is an integrated systems level function which favors the rise of language. However we need not reconstruct it every time we consider a sense.

If some time you want to get into self workings we can explore the history of neurophysiological study of consciousness perhaps back to the early work of Magoun and Rhines (1946) at UCLA.

AN INHIBITORY MECHANISM IN THE BULBAR RETICULAR FORMATION: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jn.1946.9.3.165

or perhaps a recent study overviewing research over the last 70 years of so.

CONTROL OF SLEEP AND WAKEFULNESS:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621793/ (2013)

 

[untermensche]

Does a molecule have a taste if there is no evolved animal able to turn it into the experience of taste?

Does a frequency of light energy have a color if there is no evolved animal capable of transforming it into one?

 

[Politesse]

Is a lion eating an injured gazelle faun sad even if there aren't any humans around to call it sad? I don't even see this as the same as those more direct examples of sensory perception, as it is color categories that are being proposed as obectively real, not just the fact of the photons themselves being percerived and turned into information. Humans disagree about many color assignations even among themselves, because their boundaries are fundamentally arbitrary divisions of a real but continuous spectrum, not objectively definite categories. To make the analogy to taste, you'd have to ask whether a thing objectively "tastes savory" or "tastes sweet", not just whether there is someone around to do the tasting.

 

[untermensche]

Is a lion eating a baby gazelle with a limp sad even if there aren't any humans around to call it sad?

The human did not transform the light into a lion. The light revealed the lion. The color created helped reveal it better.

 

[untermensche]

Is 'Indigo' a real color or just a shade of blue?

 

[Politesse]

Is a lion eating a baby gazelle with a limp sad even if there aren't any humans around to call it sad?

The human did not transform the light into a lion. The light revealed the lion. The color created helped reveal it better.

Now this, I agree with. That we can perceive lions as a result of light and use learned color categories to aid in sorting out unnecessary information from our perception is a genuinely objective fact. You don't have to be of any particular culture or even any particular species to observe that fact. Where you get into trouble is when you say that its presumptive status as a "giant scary yellow lion" is similarly objective.

 

[untermensche]

Is a lion eating a baby gazelle with a limp sad even if there aren't any humans around to call it sad?

The human did not transform the light into a lion. The light revealed the lion. The color created helped reveal it better.

Now this, I agree with. That we can perceive lions as a result of light and use learned color categories to aid in sorting out unnecessary information from our perception is a genuinely objective fact. You don't have to be of any particular culture or even any particular species to observe that fact. Where you get into trouble is when you say that its presumptive status as a "giant scary yellow lion" is similarly objective.

The colors are there without any learning. Just like the subtle flavors in the wine are there.

And some learn to sort them out better than others.

 

[Swammerdami]

... The sense of self is an interesting concept. It is evolved. It is an integrated systems level function which favors the rise of language. However we need not reconstruct it every time we consider a sense.

I found that the early chapter(s) of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of (Subjective) Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind helped me understand the nature of subjective consciousness (sense of self). Jaynes also discusses the origin of language and much more. What is expert opinion on those teachings?

 

[fromderinside]

Does a molecule have a taste if there is no evolved animal able to turn it into the experience of taste?

Does a frequency of light energy have a color if there is no evolved animal capable of transforming it into one?

No. However I've already covered that area of 'experience' when I pointed to how we use it re: energy.

 

[fromderinside]

... The sense of self is an interesting concept. It is evolved. It is an integrated systems level function which favors the rise of language. However we need not reconstruct it every time we consider a sense.

I found that the early chapter(s) of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of (Subjective) Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind helped me understand the nature of subjective consciousness (sense of self). Jaynes also discusses the origin of language and much more. What is expert opinion on those teachings?

I don't deal with 'teachings'. If you have a point of material empirical interest I'd be happy to look at it.

If you want to persist with 'experience' I suggest you float your own boat.