COLOUR

[Swammerdami]

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.

This sounds almost condescending.

If you're unfamiliar with Jaynes' work, just say so.

ETA: I shall guess that the word 'teachings' seemed peculiar to you, and this peculiarity led you to take a prejudicial view. Did I guess right? The term may be rarish, but it is found in some journal articles, and has an obvious meaning.

 

[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?

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

You can't tell anybody else anything about "experience" they don't understand as well as you. Excitement or stimulation is not anything close to experience.

Experience is a totally unexplained phenomena.

But it is always some thing that experiences some other thing. That is experience.

One has to explain (not hint at some early features) consciousness to understand experience. And consciousness is not understood at all.

 

[fromderinside]

The term may be rarish, but it is found in some journal articles, and has an obvious meaning.

It's not the rarish usage of teaching, It is the very idea that a book prepared before the discovery of 'empathy' cells in all ascending and descending neural pathways of many mammals or the work of Benjamin Libet, Wegner, etc. is on point in any respect on nature of 'subjective experience'.

I was reacting to the construct 'subjective consciousness' as anything other than a placeholder for underlying neural processes. I've already lumped 'mind' and 'experience' to my intellectual scientific trash pile while attempting to recast neural processes underling the so called sense of self in operational terms.

Dualism is dead. There is NO MAN IN THE MACHINE!!!

 

[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.

You can't tell anybody else anything about "experience" they don't understand as well as you. Excitement or stimulation is not anything close to experience.

Experience is a totally unexplained phenomena.

But it is always some thing that experiences some other thing. That is experience.

One has to explain (not hint at some early features) consciousness to understand experience. And consciousness is not understood at all.

That's quite a bait and switch there untermensche. It makes no difference if there is person there to sense it or biological tissue of any sort to interact with it to reflect a reaction to it. Both experience/react to the changes. As for explaining one need go no further than find cells that react the same to stimulation which also react when seeing/hearing/feeling stimulation to another.

I've been impressed with the process of sense resolving since I worked on finding a learning engram by recording up and down sensory pathways in the late seventies where we found descending information impacting ascending activity through from receptor (vision excluded) to cortex. That should have opened us to realizing that cells that react to stimulus also can react to stimulus via other senses. It's a simple evolutionary problem to link reactions to chemical and affective processes.

We must always remember those who came before us. James-Lang vs Cannon-Bard instantly comes to mind.

 

[untermensche]

Seeing cells reacting anywhere is not knowing how cells create a thing that experiences red.

 

[fromderinside]

Like anything hard untermensche it takes a lot of hoops being jumped through to get to the biological generation of experience. I've dropped a few of them as nuggets for you to explore.

Enjoy (another hard thing to remove from the woo woo land of philosophy and teaching).

 

[untermensche]

You have no clue how the phenomena of experience is generated.

Pointing at the activity of cells is not an explanation.

Explaining it is an explanation.

 

[fromderinside]

It isn't a huge leap from finding in receptors substances sensitive to several particular frequencies of light in sense organs. Then finding these connected to integrative networks along sensory pathways thence to cells that respond both to those light processing cells that are also responsive to others reacting to the same light to regions. Consequently one finds where both of the above processes are tied in to effector systems and memory systems to come up with the necessary recipe for experiencing light.

Take that together with those systems also being connected to other systems that control sleep and wakefulness and one has the necessary ingredients to show cell processes necessary to underlie 'experience'. All the processes I've pointed to exist in the evolved brain. You'll fined it's related to what Crick and Koch did when they identified tegmentum as necessary for consciousness.

Each and every process I've outlined above have been found, connected and studied. All one need do is examine the literature to verify how and in what order these nervous system mechanisms dot heir work within that literature. Doing so would be infinitely more satisfying than waving hands saying experience is out of reach so we need to invent a Mazzie an untestable construct whereby such is found.

 

[untermensche]

It is a huge leap between finding a cell that reacts to light and understanding a consciousness that enjoys a painting by their favorite artist.

We understand a bit about how cells react to light.

We understand a bit of where information goes after hitting the eye.

But we have no clue how a brain creates a consciousness that experiences and knows it is experiencing color.

Experience is not understood except subjectively.

We fully understand how we (a consciousness) experiences the world around us but don't know the first thing about how a brain creates a consciousness that allows it.

Saying this or that area in the brain is active is not an explanation of anything. It is a mere observation of activity.

 

[untermensche]

Claim 1: objects are not themselves coloured, they do not have colour.

Claim 2A: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

Claim 2B: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon of consciousness only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

I think claim 1 is the easier and more recognised to be the case. I might hold that one quite strongly.

Claim 2A is, I think, not something that can be shown to be the case by any reasonable standard and is therefore (I would separately claim) an unresolved issue, but it is my inclination to go along with it and so I will start off defending the statement quoted above (which is apparently in blue).

Claim 2B is slightly more onerous, and may be even more up for debate, imo.

Does anyone have any views on the topic?

For 2A what reasonable standard would you accept?

If light energy is not colored, and it is not, then the experience of color must be a neural creation.

Color is therefore only something experienced by consciousness.

And the whole topic of color quickly becomes a conversation about consciousness.

And that is a topic everybody has first hand knowledge of but nobody understands how a brain does it.

 

[fromderinside]

\

... we have no clue how a brain creates a consciousness that experiences and knows it is experiencing color.

Experience is not understood except subjectively.

We fully understand how we (a consciousness) experiences the world around us but don't know the first thing about how a brain creates a consciousness that allows it.

Saying this or that area in the brain is active is not an explanation of anything. It is a mere observation of activity.

Moving behavior from expressed to behavioral consciousness is no more than moving attended information through language to utterance through behavior such as vocal, visual or body. We experience what we have just sensed and we behave depending on how we process what we've filtered from sensed.

Consciousness is no more than outcome of the lottery of input and processing of what remains. Our consciousness only consists of those things we have sensed, then attended that are further processed and are becoming memory.

As for color we know that we have several frequency bands of visual frequency channels that communicate with each other forming a template for selecting color from a pallet.

The brain isn't a movie theatre. It is a behaving engine controlling and processing information which becomes considered usable upon which it operates based on what has recently or usually been passed through excited pathways. A little gaming here.

I think of consciousness as a recent attended history recital.

 

[untermensche]

That is no more than saying: We see because the brain creates the visual experience.

It may be accurate but it explains nothing about how cells create a consciousness that can experience red.

Consciousness and experience.

Two unexplained phenomena intertwined.

 

[fromderinside]

Cells are merely members of a organized structure that organizes over time to bring forth complex waking experience. If you want to delve in to the various elements I presented you will probably be able to satisfy yourself that this organization arose over evolution. Most certainly you will find primitive components of experience and self in species of earlier origin that are we.

Its why I chose comparative/sociobiology as one of my teaching areas.

We are just a single species. Wakefulness, self, consciousness, arose over the period of evolution of living things. We are just the most recent example. My guess is that if cetaceans had arms and hands with opposing thumbs they too would be celebrating the fruits of their language right now.

 

[untermensche]

Yes. Cells do something then consciousness arises.

Some care what the cells are actually doing to get a consciousness to arise.

And some see that as trivial and don't care.

One thing cells are doing is turning a colorless frequency of energy into the experience of color.

 

[fromderinside]

Actually receptors cells, not neurons, provide the color information to the brain. A quibble but an important one. Cells that process inputs from receptors learn to treat differences in location and information these differently located receptors provide into information about a particular scene at a particular place and time which subsequently becomes the basis for the brain assigning color therefrom. The basis for these assignments are probably assigned trough differences in such as in transmitter material between brain cells and particular receptors.

I contend that because particular receptors carry particular rhodopsin the brain learns these cues ultimately, after repetitious stimulation, leads language cells to report them as particular color. I like this particular description because dendrites have memory capability and several sorts are required to specify information arising from one receptor as color x. I also believe this process begins while the fetus is still in the womb.*

*^{_{what I'm suggesting here is that the stimulation of the receptor need not contain specific frequency (color) information because the receptor cell is responsive to a particular color due to the active element receiving stimulation possesses color information.}}

 

[untermensche]

Receptor cells are excited by certain frequencies of energy.

All they can tell the brain is that they have been excited.

The brain makes sense of the excitement of millions of cells and creates the experience of a blue sky.

 

[fromderinside]

... All they can tell the brain is that they have been excited. ...

Bad presumption. Messenger molecules used to transmit excitation messages can include information about the receptor type. The behaving living thing is an amazing combination of specific and general communication within and between cells, even regions within cells.

 

[untermensche]

The visible spectrum is a biological accident.

It just so happens cells evolved that reacted to a tiny part of the EM spectrum. The EM spectrum is all the same thing. All electromagnetic energy. None of it colored. Some of it the human brain turns into the experience of "sound". Bats turn what we call "sound waves" into a visual experience. It is all just contingent accidents of evolution.

Without a brain there is no such thing as visible light. No entity without eyes would think such a thing exists as "visible light" merely by looking at the electromagnetic spectrum. Human eyes react to a tiny part of it. And human brains make an experience out of the reactions.

 

[fromderinside]

Amazing. What we eat absorbs bits of light which is why living things can tell edible from inedible among other things. Don't need a brain to detect bits of light, chemicals work just fine by absorbing and permitting detection of light. Most living things with brains or not depend on these detections.

We have color whether humans name it or not. I wonder what the experience of a grasshopper is when it munches down on a bit of leaf. It must have an experience since it doesn't munch down on a piece of bark. Also I'm pretty sure an eagle has seen a rainbow since it has very good color vision. My guess is that a rainbow, the existence of which is determined by physics, doesn't depend on anything biological would have as many colors as it does regardless of what or whether something biological is observing it.

 

[untermensche]

Plants by sheer evolutionary contingency use part of the EM spectrum for energy.

That doesn't make any of the EM spectrum "visible" without a brain.

Without a brain the whole spectrum is the same thing. None of it is colored.

It is only a brain that transforms a tiny part of the EM spectrum to "visible light".

It is only a brain that creates the experience of color.

No brain no color. Color is not something in the world. It is a neural phenomena like "pain".