On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:24:36 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: > > > > On 6/19/2019 6:07 PM, Pierz wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 7:12:33 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote: >> >> Red is red. >> > > No I don't think it is. I do understand your point of view. Indeed > subjectively red does seem to be red, some kind of irreducible. Yet it is > far from unambiguously clear that this is really the case. Imagine if you > could only see in shades of red. How long would it take before red became > black-and-white? Imagine if all you could ever be conscious of were > redness. Without contrast, is such a state of consciousness possible? Just > pure intrinsic redness, existing in and of itself, outside of any > relationship with other colours, other qualia? If you only have one colour > receptor in your visual system, you have only one differentiator of > elements in your visual field - brightness. If you have two colour > receptors, like a dog, what colours do you see? Red and yellow? Blue and > yellow? The specific wavelengths of course do not matter here - it's no > guarantee that just because a dog has a receptor for what we call "blue" > light, that it perceives what we call blue when it sees that colour. Indeed > I doubt it, because blue is a differentiator of a trichromatic system, and > specifically our, human trichromatic system. I believe that the colour red > has its particular qualities by virtue of evolutionary associations with > red. What is red in nature? Blood, fire. Red stimulates us to pay > attention. Green soothes us because of its deep evolutionary association > with safe, sheltered environments. I am not reducing qualia to "nothing > but" here, let alone "nothing at all", like Dennett, but I am saying that > they are part of a field of relationships and exist only by virtue of those > relationships. Take the relationships away and "red" dissolves - and I > believe you could prove that by wearing red-lensed glasses for a week. > > > Exactly. And compare some other colors. My father was red/green color > blind (which is fairly common) so ripe strawberrys looked the same color as > the leaves to him. Is orange orange? English didn't even have a word for > orange until the fruit was imported from China. > Ha! Now that's one I didn't know. I was aware that blue only makes an appearance in language (everywhere) quite recently. There's no blue in ancient Greek (it's the "wine-dark" sea in Homer, not the blue sea). But these are linguistic matters - no-one I expect is denying that people *saw* blue before they had a word for it.
Chaucer writes of a sunset color between red and yellow. And some people > have four different color receptors, instead of just three. But even > though there are many gradations and associations, does that mean there are > *only* relations? There is no red? > I did not say there is no red - though Dennett does. I am saying red is defined by its relations. We *feel* something, which when interpreted in the visual channel, is experienced as colour. The case of people with four colour receptors in interesting, because it appears the experience of that extra colour is quite weak. I think that is because there are no (or very few) relationships between that colour (whatever it is) and our evolutionary history, so people can see a difference, but it's not a very interesting one. It's a pure visual differentiator, without the experiential richness of the other colours. So the expectation that seeing a new colour would be a fascinating, extraordinary experience is belied by that. Our emotional and visual spectra already fully saturate one another so to speak, so there's not much to be gained by turning on another one. On the other hand, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJQYBWUqdIE. In those cases, people really are seeing the richness of a new colour for the first time, because they are colours their brains are already programmed to see and respond to emotionally. > > Brent > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2ab4a7a8-183f-4cbe-8d8d-0975bab82d31%40googlegroups.com.
