July 06, 2004

• Terrific first post, amphiboly.
• Could I see red where you see green? Cool, I tormented my friends about this back in the day. I'm glad to see people still thinking about it.
• Oh, man, I had an upper level "philosophy of the mind" class that was sooooooooooooo exasperating because most of the class couldnt get past the "how do you know my red is the same as your red". Also, most of the class was not philosophy majors, so Im not sure why they were even allowed to sign up. (its not, people. Its probably similar, but all of our eyes/lenses/rods/cones/nerves are different). Also The minds I edited by Douglas Hofstadter (and maybe Dennett, though he has a couple papers in there). Good stuff, thanks.
• *bangs head repeatedly on desk, reminiscing about Philosophy I classes*
• A lot in these articles seems more like scienctific issues than philosophical. Maybe we see definitions differently too?
• To be honest, most philosophers I know would describe philosophy as on a continuum with science nowadays. Then again, I'm not one of those "Oneness of being's being" kind of guys, and they are out there. At very least, we see a need to consider most scientific results as some kind of specialized data in our theories. I am one of the people who taught those intro courses... Apologies for those in my discipline who are considerably less than ideal teachers.
• I lost my sanity to the qualia condundrum many years ago. Excellent post, amphiboly. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat should be compulsory reading for all. And, for some reason, I am reminded of that sample taking from Total Recall, the little freaky mutant Kuato repeatedly saying 'Open Your Mind'...some band made a song out of it.
• I was one of those English majors in the philosophy of mind seminar (I'd like to say I held my own, but my questions probably sounded laughably stupid to everyone who knew what they were doing). Fascinating shit. I think my brain exploded about six times in every lecture.
• most philosophers I know would describe philosophy as on a continuum with science nowadays That's probably more sensible. Scientists take note.
• amphliboy (Ah, god, so hard to spell.) I'm so going to bookmark all of your links. And, I think this is a 42 out of ten points post. I will now go off and spend several years thinking about this stuff, and come back wiht an answer that ties it all together, to my satisfaction. Until then, you are my hero! ,
• yes, top post!
• Pure sophistry.
• soph·is·try n. pl. soph·is·tries A pastry shaped like a sofa. Also known as mind candy.
• Hey, look, do you really think this is deceptive reasoning? If you do, tell us why. Drive-by criticism is really annoying.
• I would venture that a significant portion of reality that exists regardless of our perceptions. A stone is a stone, whether we see it or not. It is a colossal vanity of we pitiful hairless apes to believe that a thing cannot exist unless we perceive it. Pshaw! The world of the real is greater than mere perception - flawed, channelled, tainted perception. Is your red my green? Perhaps. Does it change the color of the stone over which we debate? Not at all. It's color remains.
• Well, it could totally overturn fundamental concepts of fashion. If a person see red/green/blue (for example) as blue/red/green, is it in poor taste for him to match a red tie with a blue shirt? Because to him it would be a blue tie on a green shirt, which may not be so much of a faux pas. Also, differences in perception of color may also lead to lack of consensus over what is a "soothing" color, or an "aggressive" color? We can explore whether our perceptions of color as "cool" or "warm" are innate, or actually social constructs? And I think, Fes, for many things, perception is all. There was an experiment done on a picture of an old lady/young lady which had two groups of people seeing slightly different versions of the picture: one emphasising the young lady, one emphasising the old. When the original was screened, people started arguing about what they saw, refusing to see the other group's perception. So investigation on whether perception of an object is uniform or individual would be of some practical use. I think.
• I love this post. Thanks amphiboly.
• Many years ago, I had a car that I am convinced was brown. Not greenish-brown. Just plain brown-brown. My best friend was convinced the car was green. Not brownish-green. Just plain green-green. Neither of us is color blind, and except for this one occasion, neither of us has had experiences of seeing colors differently from other people (as far as we know). It put the whole qualia thing in a very concrete light for me. How does one ever know that one's perceptions essentially match those of other people? My friend said its best not to think about it too hard, as that way lies madness. I think I agree with her.
• I especially admire the way you worked Zombies into the post, amphiboly. Thank you. Now I must go and follow the path. *pulls cowl over bowed head, tucks TMWMHWFAH and towel into robe recesses, glides silently away*
• TMWMHWFAH = ?
• The Man Who Mistook ...
• But, Fes: the rock doesn't care what color it is. We're the ones that do. If you say it's brown, and I say it's sienna, we don't have much to argue about, since our definitions of color are pretty personal. But, where do our definitions of what we perceive come from? Is your brown different from my sienna, or my puce? How do we know that they aren't the same? Or that my perception of brown is the same as yours?
• But, sienna is a subcategory of brown, innit? So you'd both be talking about the same thing, just different levels.
• Domo arigato, goetter. Well, let's broaden path's analogy a bit then. Let's say she sees the rock as brown, and I see it as gray. Or (a similar problem with a friend and me), I see a piece of cloth as light blue, and she sees it as light purple. It may be that for people, there are different thresholds of color perception - when brown turns gray, or when blue turns purple. For me, it's a problem when the color is very light or very dark.
• "Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool. Kelvin Throop III (contemp.) " I have no idea who Kelvin Throop III is, but the quote came from a previous link by our own Alnedra.
• I seem to be experiencing deja vu. Am I alone in this? path, are you messing with my head? And how do you know the rock doesn't care?
• Administrator, take out that second one, please! But PatB if you're really into colors, sienna isn't brown. It's its own thing, as is puce. We've found words for different shades because we recognize that they're different. If that isn't the case, I think we'd have only the primary colors to talk about, so lavender wouldn't be any different than blue, or maybe red, or maybe white. But you have cautioned me that I may be getting too much into a pilpul here. Thanks for that. Really.
• PatB: I didn't ask the rock, but my guess is that it doesn't think about us at all. Or, if it does, we must seem pretty silly.
• Alnedra's point is right on target, which is why we have to talk about the inverted spectrum, as opposed to, say the randomly mixed and matched spectrum. There would be detectable behavioral differences between people with different, but non-inverted spectra
• "Pilpul (n.) Among the Jews, penetrating investigation, disputation, and drawing of conclusions, esp. in Talmudic study." path, I'm not cautioning you about anything! I swear! I never even heard of a pilpul until now! (and you better believe I'll use it the very next chance I get!) But is color something that exists all on its own? Isn't it just something used to describe a property of something else? Admin: please don't delete path's second post as it will make my replies look even more idiotic than they are. PS: I talked to the rock, and they said they don't think we're silly, just irrelevant. but cute, in a monkey way.
• Nice post. There would be detectable behavioral differences between people with different, but non-inverted spectra. Like what? Let me abstract this conundrum one step further. How do I even know if your visual field is configured in the same way as mine? Maybe the property you refer to as shape is what I label texture. All that's required to maintain this illusion (if it's one) is an internally self consistent network of associations. Solipsism hasn't been disproven, only de facto assumed false.
• Argh, sorry PatB, I didn't see your plea. I was going to say that to me, MoFi is blue, not lavender. I just go along with y'all because I hate being the odd one out.
• I don't think your internal configuration matters in this respect: the question of whether you're seeing the same colour or quality is decided by whether you're looking at the same thing in the external world. I'm a sceptic about qualia, myself. One reason is that since they're not part of the objective physical world, they have no causal effects on it - which means that whatever is causing you to write or speak about qualia, it can't be the qualia themselves, which seems odd. Second, although it seems easy to imagine you could see that something is red without experiencing 'qualic' redness, it seems to me harder to imagine you could see that something is red while experiencing qualic blueness. It all comes down to the puzzlement which arises from the fact that you can know all about red without 'knowing what red is like'. But IMHO, the latter isn't really knowledge in the same sense - it's having had an experience of real red. Reams more Plegmundian maundering about Mary the colour scientist, reality, the whole problem, etc etc is accessible at my place. *Hands self a mouldy banana for virtual self-posting... *
• "....sorry PatB, I didn't see your plea." I get that a lot.
• Phenomenology. Hey, bomb??? Let there be light: BOOM.
• Never understood how phenomenology could have that result. Ontology, maybe. Liked the giant orange beachball with claws, though.
• path: You'd probably find colour term aquisition in language really interesting, since it speaks to your assumptions about how we name colour. My wife did a reasearch paper on this, and it's intriguing, not least since there actually are a common set of paths where humans have always named colour terms the same way; eg we all get black, white, red as the earliest named colours. My own memory on the details is a little shaky (especially since the first four or five are always the same, but the next two can be in either order), but I'm sure languagehat can elaborate if he feels so inclined. And qualia seem like another one of those pointless po-mo thought experiments that have no more value than brain in bucket hypothesis.
• I don't think your internal configuration matters in this respect: the question of whether you're seeing the same colour or quality is decided by whether you're looking at the same thing in the external world. Quantum physics teaches us that all of us are participators in the universe. There is no such thing as detached observation. There might be an objective reality underneath, but you interpret it and interact within that interpretation. For a crude and limited analogy: consider a monolingual English-speaking person trapped in room 1, a monolingual Mandarin-speaking person trapped in room 2 and a magical black box that suitably translates their discourse, so neither know that the other speaks a different language. The only way one might possibly know that something's amiss is the conversation turns gibberish or meaningless*. And the only way either of them can recognize that eventuality is if their internal associations are consistent and functioning (after all, if we are talking about apples and you start talking about cars, first of all, my working memory has to get surprised with the disconnect). One reason is that since they're not part of the objective physical world, they have no causal effects on it - which means that whatever is causing you to write or speak about qualia, it can't be the qualia themselves Agreed, as much as time, space, matter and whatever else also must be caused from some deeper essence. But all knowledge comes from experience. Existence is experience. I can surmise I underwent NREM-sleep only because I'm awake afterwards. And in my experiential state, I label my habituated periods of discontinuity in experience as sleeping.
• Wow I used to worry about colour perception a lot, but never did anything about it, and it never came up in the philosophy lectures I did at uni ... (well it may have done, but I'd stopped going by then ...) So thanks a lot Amphiboly ... But in response to Alnedra: I shared a flat with a friend who was red/green colourblind at uni. He spent most of his time listening to Radio 4 (the BBC talk station, not the hip NYC band) and one day got v excited as he'd heard a programme that said kids learned more in rooms painted green ... so he vowed to make all his notes in green ink from now on. (I resisted the urge to tell him that actually attending some of his lectures might be a better strategy; I was in no position to comment) A few weeks later he showed me his notes saying 'look - they're all green, I'm learning so much more' ... I took a look - they were all in red ink ...
• a magical black box or a babel fish?
• Absolute reality is unreachable, because it's always already mediated by perception. Fortunately, given an initiation into a given cultural context, a certain amount of agreement can be found between its members. Thus we communicate with a reasonable degree of accord subtending our discourse, which may be said at once to be the effect, the limit, and the essential precondition of said affiliation. OK?
• Thus we communicate with a reasonable degree of accord subtending our discourse How would you know what an unreasonable degree of accord is like?
• It disconnects.
• What's a connection?
• Perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but your point is semantic and turns on my (entirely common or garden) figurative use of "reasonable" as "close enough so as to be more operative than not". Rather than "subject to the strict principle of rationality". Mes excuses.
• Gosh, such a rich field for commenting! As a color-blind former business-student-who-was-allowed-to-take-philosophy-of-mind, I could go in many different directions. PoM was lots of fun, but like lots of upper level philosophy classes, it is too easy to become certain about things that really can’t be answered, or uncertain of the things you need to “know” to function every day. As a pragmatist, though, I'll just recommend “Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life” by Steven Johnson. I’m only partly through it, but it’s a fascinating look at what we know about the brain, and what that means in terms of behavior.
• The other day, I looked outside at my garden, and all the daisies were bright green - everything else in the garden was the correct colour. They flipped back to yellow when I blinked though. Not that this has to do with anything here, really, but it looked nice.
• Speaking of perception differences, is anyone else seeing these annoying-as-fuck "“" - "”" characters instead of quotation marks/apostrophes, or is it just me and my microshit browser? They're green, by the way. Please hope the luddite that I am.
• I'm seeing them too, quidnunc. Its part of IE's special brand of loveliness, I believe.
• And I think, Fes, for many things, perception is all... people started arguing about what they saw, refusing to see the other group's perception. And yet? the picture is what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. It embodies picture-ness, and whether you and I see the older or younger woman affects the picture not at all. Now, I can see the words "Schrodinger's Cat!" burbling up within the collective, but I would venture that (a) this is a metaphor, and (b) Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is only applicable at the smallest levels of observation, subatomic etc. So investigation on whether perception of an object is uniform or individual would be of some practical use. I agree! Differences in perception give insight into differences in sensation and consciousness. But I don't think we should assume that our mere perception somehow defines reality. It can only do so for ourselves, and we (no matter how good our way of communication) live locked permanently in our own skulls. But, Fes: the rock doesn't care what color it is. We're the ones that do. Precisely! The color of the stone transcends perception. It remains the-color-of-the-stone whether and how we perceive it or not. But, where do our definitions of what we perceive come from? First? Cerebral interpretation of incoming visual data, as influence internally (by the various biological, chemical and electrical affectors of the data as it is translated into electrical impulse and processed by the brain) and externally (vagaries of light and shadow, heat and wet, various other environmental factors, etc ad infinitum). Second? Unique personal experience, stemming back to our first efforts as toddlers to name colors and tinctured by every brown-versus-sienna related incident, of which there could literally be millions. Last? By the capabilities of language and our expertise in it - in short, by our ability to effectively communication what it is we are perceiving.
• that's "communicate" what it is we are perceiving. Fingers got away from my brains there.
• Oh OK thanks dng. I should have realised that an apostrophe is what it is, that it embodied apostrophe-ness. The fact that I see it as "“" affects the apostrophe not at all!
• Microsoft can change the universe as it sees fit, in its own way. It has certainly shown the power to lock our perception of stuff into a single concrete way, for a large amount of people.
• I disagree; Microsoft (well, Apple really) has concretized an already widely-held organizational form and transplanted it to another medium to ease use. Folders and documents, indeed! Positively Gutenbergian. The universe, however, hasn't changed on whit. It remains the universe. *dunks quidnunc kid's head in the pool*
• dng, this is undoubtedly true and indeed the very quintessence of correctness. Unfortunately I perceive you as a small red pebble who does not care what colour it is. I must therefore dismiss your opinion, as pebbles are not reliable critics of software.
• (previous comment written with wet head, fingers etc)
• Wow, Why do I have to sleep when all the commenting rages on? I can't focus on one single comment to respond to.
• Does anyone have a towel?
• *hands towel to quidnunc* Well, I think its a towel
• Thanks again. *Runs around whipping other's backside with wet towel, slips, falls in pool, drowns*
• Ok, I take this one: The color of the stone transcends perception. It remains the-color-of-the-stone whether and how we perceive it or not. Actually, there's no color-of-the-stone as you put it. The quality we label as the color-of-the-stone is actually the reflection of inciding wavelights on the surface of the stone and what we make of it. Without those wavelights, and we perceiving them, the stone has no color at all. We can modify those wavelights as to make the rock look different. Although the stone participates by choosing from a range of lightwaves to reflect. But that doesn't amount to posessing a color per se since it is just a reaction to an extern phenomena. We can change how the rock reacts to light just by changing the amount of energy, heat, etc we subject it to. So, the color-of-the-rock depends as much circumstances before the light hits the rock as on circumstances after the light hits the rock (perception). The color-of-the-rock is not a property of the rock. Instead, it's the result of all the interactions that occur to the lightwave (and what produced it) since it was generated up until our own interpretation of it. It all forms part of the existance of the color, as Gyan would say (I presume).
• All this because of an apostrophe. See what you anti-neo-Platonists have done? Do you SEE??? *sobs* Without those wavelights, and we perceiving them, the stone has no color at all. I disagree. Even in the absence of light, the stone has a color. We just cannot perceive it. But color is part of what makes the stone. If we were two-dimensional creatures, we would only perceive the stone's height and width - but the stone would still HAVE depth. This, I think, is the difference between a perceptually-based reality and perception-exclusive reality.
• Now, I can see the words "Schrodinger's Cat!" burbling up within the collective
• Our perception-based reality is perception-exclusive reality.
• Posted this in the other thread before I realized this one involved topic of colour perception.
• Fortunately, the only pertinent question is, "What color is my penis?" If anyone were to find out the real answer, all creation would cease to exist. Don't worry, I shall never let anyone find out.
• Blue!
• dng: Within this collective?
• One day, I began to see everything in shades of Pantone 346C. That I had been up for 48 hours in front of a freakin' monitor, eating dunuts and swallowing coffee may have helped. That day I dropped everything and went on vacation.
• Gyan: You're absolutely right about solipsism being assumed false here. Or I'm right about it being assumed false. The kinds of behavioral differences generated by random mix-and-match spectra would be like those between color blind people and non-color blind people. As for a whole sensory modality swap -- it would be unlikely given the various levels of detail those parts of the brain are capable of (I'm assuming this all has something to do with the brain). The various levels of light we perceive are so subtle that we've never felt such subtle gradations in touch, smell, hearing, or smelling. If it has anything to do with the brain, we should notice a dwarfing of the V-sections compared to the other sections. Of course, if Chalmers is right and they're epiphenomenal, then I could in principle have many totally different modality feels than you. Zombies are actually the ones who really creep me out, since they go around talking as if they have conscious experience anyway. Essentially, it leads to an argument that you can't know whether or not you're a zombie. That is one of the few ultimately persuasive arguments I've come across in my discipline.
• PigAlien: We Monkeys refuse to be drawn in to a discussion of whether or not your ... er, package actually exists or not, never mind anything to do with color. The existance of your package is your reality, not ours. Ya'll started with the language thing and then dropped the banana. In linguistics, we discussed color and culture. Fantastic ideas there. If I remember right, there is no culture that doesn't have at least three color words. Some cultures lump blue and green together, even though they actually can perceive the color--as evident from a color chart--they don't bother to name the color. Surely that must somehow change the perception of reality. Or at least discussion of what you see. There's 2 blue lizards under the blue flower. No, that other blue flower. Which is actually green, the flower or the lizard? And if there's two lizards, which are we talking about, the aquamarine one, or the lime? Baby: philosophy of mind seminar--I think my brain exploded about six times in every lecture. That happened to me in psycholinguistics, too. I love linguistics, but am not really good at it. Philosophy is waaaay above me. The only thing I garnered from my philo classes was if you look at something hard enough, you can make it turn inside out and disappear. Monkeyfilter: Are you messing with my head?
• amphiboly, I think they're epiphenomenal. The brain is a mapping of experiential engrams. Experience drives the brain.
• ... it leads to an argument that you can't know whether or not you're a zombie. Umm, would not a penchant for raw brains be an indicator? I merely ask for information.
• My penis likes raw brains. It is not, however, blue. Any more guesses I shall neither confirm, nor deny. If I am a zombie under the control of my penis, and my penis is a zombie, then who controls my penis?
• BlueHorse - you might think philosophy is above you, but you brought up interesting questions. If a culture has, say, only 3 words for colors, how does that affect their perceptions, if at all? Or, does it say more about the relative importance of color in their lives? Monkeys, this has been so much fun! I can't tell you how much I love your curiosity, erudition and sense of play. PigAlien - I'm sure it's puce. I say that only because of the webcam. But I won't tell you where I posted the pictures.
• PigAlien - do you think you're the first guy to ask "who controls my penis?" (assuming you're a guy, if not, other questions come to mind)
• I just wanted to agree that Bluehorse's questions about language are really important, and not just to reveal relative cultural priorities. Not only descriptives (a bad word depending on how essentialist you are) like colour, but Kantian Ideas fluctuate between cultures: space, mono-directional time, causality. What you are capable of seeing, and understanding, is a pure product of your practical immersion in a specific (and limited) cultural experience, further limited by your physical attributes (you may see an inverted spectrum, but only in the context of a culture with a notion of what the 'proper' spectrum is). Yes, perhaps our World-as-it-appears (sort of Wolof and Gyan's experiential reality) is irrelevant to the colour of the stone or the lizard in fact (Fes' world-as-it-is), but what is the actual consequence, the difference between a universe with Platonic Ideals and one shaped by 'mere' creative experience? please forgive my gross distortions of your points of those to whom I've referred. Also, I love Dan Dennett (esp. Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and while I enjoyed the ideas in TMWMHWFAH, I find Sack's writing style sorta boring
• We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anais Nin
• um, dxlifer, that's from the torah.
• ...through a glass dimly?
• I had a mosquito bite me during lunch today. I squashed it good. ignorance is bliss.
• anais nin quotes the torah? makes sense to me. each to their own reality.
• There is a big difference between components of the stone that depend upon sensory preception and those that do not. Color, sound, smell do not exist without sensory apparatus to detect them. Lightwaves are bouncing off the stone, but they remain just waves, not colors, unless eyes are their to perceive them. Physical dimensions are different. A stone is still going to take up x amount of space, even if no one is there to measure it. However, The value x that we assign to that space is totally arbitrary. Gulliver may say that is a small stone. The Lilliputian may say that is a huge stone. They are both, from their frame of reference, correct. Of course this means that the stone occupies a different reality for each of them. A further complication, we think of things being perceived by five senses but there do exist others. Imagine a creature capable of near human intelligence, say a dolphin, that has senses humans don't. There seems to be a lot of evidence that many sea creatures can detect magnetic fields. If you could talk to the dolphin his reality, due to different senses would be different. HM, okay, that doesn't work because a dolphin would have such an extreme frame of reference it wouldn't be a fair comparison. However, there are experiments taking place where human subjects have received implants that allow them to, on a small scale, detect magnetic fields.
• As far as the zombies go our medical and sceintific tech is almost at the point where we can make 'em. It's not hard to imagine taking a brain dead individual and implanting electronics in his head so that his motor functions can be controlled and he be made to walk. I'm not sure what this does for the above argument.