COLOUR

[Jayjay]

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?

Yes. We can build a machine to detect the color, even if no animal is able to do so. Optics are a well-known science and we have the detection technology also, and the only tricky part about that scenario is that we don't necessarily know the sensory capabilities of all the animals at the moment.

Taste is more complex but in principle the same.

 

[untermensche]

The machine does not detect a color. It detects a characteristic of the light and is programmed (by humans) to associate that characteristic with a certain color.

 

[steve_bank]

I disagree partly.

Light as wavelengths exists even if we do not.

Without a biological sense taste does not exist even if salt exists. Taste us the interaction of a substances with a sensory capacity.

 

[fromderinside]

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

Nonsense. A rainbow stills displays light systematically by hue. What you call contingency is what evolutionists call genetic drive. Evolution is driven by material advantage. If leaves didn't absorb specific frequencies of light opsins wouldn't be selected for, nor would photosynthesis have evolved. The final irony is that single cell organisms don't have brains yet the selectively make use of given bandwidths of light frequency. They use color to survive. I'm a functionalist and I don't need a name to point out that selective use of light frequency is the use of color.

 

[untermensche]

I disagree partly.

Light as wavelengths exists even if we do not.

Without a biological sense taste does not exist even if salt exists. Taste us the interaction of a substances with a sensory capacity.

Yes. The Electromagnetic spectrum exists without humans.

But none of it is colored without a human brain that turns EM energy that hits the eye into color.

Color only exists in the mind. As an experience. Nowhere else.

 

[untermensche]

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

Nonsense. A rainbow stills displays light systematically by hue. What you call contingency is what evolutionists call genetic drive. Evolution is driven by material advantage. If leaves didn't absorb specific frequencies of light opsins wouldn't be selected for, nor would photosynthesis have evolved. The final irony is that single cell organisms don't have brains yet the selectively make use of given bandwidths of light frequency. They use color to survive. I'm a functionalist and I don't need a name to point out that selective use of light frequency is the use of color.

The colors a person experiences are arbitrary contingencies.

A rainbow exists because human brains create one when the eye is struck by colorless energy.

No brain that creates color no such thing as a rainbow. It can't be found.

 

[untermensche]

A bat turns sound waves into a picture of the world and flies just fine in the "dark" not banging into anything. The dark to us is not dark for a bat.

It uses it's ears not it's eyes to create a picture of the world.

Humans use their eyes. The brain creates a picture of the world based on light waves, not sound waves. An evolutionary contingency. Like the experience of color.

 

[fromderinside]

A bat turns sound waves into a picture of the world and flies just fine in the "dark" not banging into anything. The dark to us is not dark for a bat.

It uses it's ears not it's eyes to create a picture of the world.

Humans use their eyes. The brain creates a picture of the world based on light waves, not sound waves. An evolutionary contingency. Like the experience of color.

Any living thing that can process specific frequencies of light and acts consistently with respect to that condition experiences that event. That would be true of a single cell animal or plant all the way up to dolphins. You've gotten yourself wrapped around a definition that is very limited therefore very false given that evolution happens.

To put a dot on it a rainbow happens because physical conditions are such that light is broken into observable bands by any light sensing living thing that detects it. In fact a rainbow is a rainbow because it is a physical consistent manifestation of light in nature. It need not be named or processed by life to be so. The eye, ear, ear, nose, skin, joint, brain are are not necessary for color, sound, touch, smell, vibration, deformation, etc. to be present. If they are measurable they are material.

Human scientists treat light as color as a convenience and as a profitable way to consider light since we are so involved in using it that way. The fact that is essential for humans to understand spectral light is not reason to doubt color can be operated on profitably knowledge wise as physical phenomenon. One does not deny light acts differentially to passing through a barrier just because the result is spectral banding. It is proper to name and study this as physical phenomena. Don't confuse a human thing like 'experience' as a condition for physical existence. Color exists independently from human experience.


Finally 'experience' does not inform me of sensors to study color. Any spectrally sensitive devise can show the same result as human 'experience' including the effects of adding white or black to present the effects on man of shade and hue.

 

[untermensche]

A bat turns sound waves into a picture of the world and flies just fine in the "dark" not banging into anything. The dark to us is not dark for a bat.

It uses it's ears not it's eyes to create a picture of the world.

Humans use their eyes. The brain creates a picture of the world based on light waves, not sound waves. An evolutionary contingency. Like the experience of color.

Any living thing that can process specific frequencies of light and acts consistently with respect to that condition experiences that event. That would be true of a single cell animal or plant all the way up to dolphins. You've gotten yourself wrapped around a definition that is very limited therefore very false given that evolution happens.

The bat is not processing frequencies of light to make a picture of the world. It is processing reflected sound waves. A bat "sees" in the dark with it's ears.

In fact a rainbow is a rainbow because it is a physical consistent manifestation of light in nature.

How would you tell an alien that does not process the light energy we turn into blue, indigo, or purple what blue, indigo, and purple are? They would see a rainbow as having 4 colors.

So what is it? Is a rainbow 7 colors or 4 colors?

Human scientists treat light as color as a convenience and as a profitable way to consider light since we are so involved in using it that way.

Color is an experience. Something the brain creates for the person to experience. Color is not in the world anywhere. It is only in the mind.

Color is like "pain" in that it is pure experience. Also sound and taste and smell are pure experience. The so-called senses.

Shape and texture and mass are different. They are experiences of things in the world.

 

[Jayjay]

The machine does not detect a color. It detects a characteristic of the light and is programmed (by humans) to associate that characteristic with a certain color.

I think you are using an non-standard definition of "color". What color is, is characteristics of light. If you define color as a fuzzy feeling in a human brain, it can obviously mean anything. But that's not a useful or a sensible definition precisely because it can be anything. A person who hears the word "sky" may have the same parts of his brain activated that denotes the color blue. But there is nothing in the sound waves or pixels that comprise the word "sky" to make that connection. It's all in the observer's brain. Another observer may associate it with some other color, or no color at all.

 

[Jayjay]

Color is like "pain" in that it is pure experience. Also sound and taste and smell are pure experience. The so-called senses.

Shape and texture and mass are different. They are experiences of things in the world.

No, they are not different. To say that color red is a particular wavelength of light, is just as objective (or just as subjective) as saying that an object is circular, or that it weighs a certain amount.

 

[untermensche]

Red is not something in the world. It is only something in minds. It is what the brain creates when the eye is stimulated by a certain frequency of energy. But the brain could have evolved to produce something else when stimulated by that frequency of energy. Red is a mere random contingency not something reproduced that exists in the world.

The shape of an object is in the world. It's mass is in the world. Matter is in the world. But matter has no color. Color only exists in minds.

 

[untermensche]

The machine does not detect a color. It detects a characteristic of the light and is programmed (by humans) to associate that characteristic with a certain color.

I think you are using an non-standard definition of "color". What color is, is characteristics of light. If you define color as a fuzzy feeling in a human brain, it can obviously mean anything. But that's not a useful or a sensible definition precisely because it can be anything. A person who hears the word "sky" may have the same parts of his brain activated that denotes the color blue. But there is nothing in the sound waves or pixels that comprise the word "sky" to make that connection. It's all in the observer's brain. Another observer may associate it with some other color, or no color at all.

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.

The light has no color. Objects have no color.

The world created by the brain has color.

You are not experiencing the world with vision.

You are experiencing a representation of the world created by the brain. The brain created representation has color. Not the real world.

 

[fromderinside]

Color is determined by matching a sample with a standard. Light at 490 nm is near the green standard. A leaf that displays reflected light that is 490 nm is called green. Humans who didn't know to chose to eat things that reflected 490 nm light because humans thought it edible. Many insects are also attracted to things 490 nm reflecting because they have receptors designed to detect such light. It would have been a whole lot simpler for humans to process if I substituted green for reflected 490 nm light but, the thing is both are equivalent. We don't experience green we report light coming from things that reflect 490 nm light as green. It is true we do appreciate many things green that are not strictly 490 nm light. It is one of those little treasures humans have evolved to codify and treasure.

It is true that the brain takes incoming and ongoing information and and presents it as what one is experiencing even though what it is presenting has little relation to what we are actually processing. The fiction is more in experience than it is in the representation of color. If color is experienced it is an experience because we have a combination of receptors and a system of processes that more or less faithfully report what the receptors processed. We prove this over and over by comparing what we experience with what mechanical manipulation of light suggests we would process if we had those photo receptive elements in our visual system.

 

[fromderinside]

The bat is not processing frequencies of light to make a picture of the world. It is processing reflected sound waves. A bat "sees" in the dark with it's ears.

You are repeating yourself. Nobody said they don't represent physical space using sound. However bats don't make a picture of anything like what one would see in the world. Their representation of what's around them is more like that of radar where external targets are refreshed periodically.

 

[untermensche]

The bat is not processing frequencies of light to make a picture of the world. It is processing reflected sound waves. A bat "sees" in the dark with it's ears.

You are repeating yourself. Nobody said they don't represent physical space using sound. However bats don't make a picture of anything like what one would see in the world. Their representation of what's around them is more like that of radar where external targets are refreshed periodically.

Bats fly around at high speeds. Make incredible maneuvers to catch prey. In what to a human is total darkness.

Of course their brain makes a very accurate representation of the world for them to do this.

With sound waves. Not with what to humans is light.

 

[untermensche]

Color is determined by matching a sample with a standard. Light at 490 nm is near the green standard. A leaf that displays reflected light that is 490 nm is called green. Humans who didn't know to chose to eat things that reflected 490 nm light because humans thought it edible. Many insects are also attracted to things 490 nm reflecting because they have receptors designed to detect such light. It would have been a whole lot simpler for humans to process if I substituted green for reflected 490 nm light but, the thing is both are equivalent. We don't experience green we report light coming from things that reflect 490 nm light as green. It is true we do appreciate many things green that are not strictly 490 nm light. It is one of those little treasures humans have evolved to codify and treasure.

It is true that the brain takes incoming and ongoing information and and presents it as what one is experiencing even though what it is presenting has little relation to what we are actually processing. The fiction is more in experience than it is in the representation of color. If color is experienced it is an experience because we have a combination of receptors and a system of processes that more or less faithfully report what the receptors processed. We prove this over and over by comparing what we experience with what mechanical manipulation of light suggests we would process if we had those photo receptive elements in our visual system.

Some people do not create green in that light.

 

[fromderinside]

Most use a cane unlike the guy you want us to watch since they are missing receptors necessary for processing that green in any light. Maybe someone should have taken the YouTube guy out to the parking lot at Velley college and asked him to see what color was that blue car parked under halogen lights.

 

[untermensche]

Most use a cane unlike the guy you want us to watch since they are missing receptors necessary for processing that green in any light. Maybe someone should have taken the YouTube guy out to the parking lot at Velley college and asked him to see what color was that blue car parked under halogen lights.

The experience of color is subjective and only occurs in the mind.

You could not describe what red looked like to an alien that saw the sun as what we call purple and had a brain that could not produce red. They would describe purple as "warm".

There are potentially all kinds of colors aliens could produce that we can't comprehend because our brains don't create those colors.

 

[untermensche]

You don't need a cane because you experience green as grey.