You're asking me which percepts the word "red" refers to. I can only answer such a question by using a word that refers to these percepts, and given that there is no appropriate synonym for "red", all I can do is reuse the word "red". — Michael

Yep. So you have not explained red by equating it with a red percept.

So on to the next problem. If red is a mental percept, who's mentality is it a percept in?

When you have no adequate response, you spit. Hegel is not physics.

The red percepts are red... — Michael

Then you are using the difinendum in the definiens; defining red in terms of the red percept, with the resulting vicious circularity.

Which of the many percepts are red percepts, ?

And of course, this is only the beginning of your problems.

There are lots of percepts, many of the same type. Every pain is a percept, every pleasure is a percept, every sour is a percept, every red is a percept. — Michael

Ok. So which ones are red? Only the red ones? Why isn't there a vicious circularity in claiming that red is the very same as red percepts?

Indeed - and educative, in explaining the use of commas. You probably know the old joke about the difference between "The wombat eats roots, shoots, and leaves" and "The wombat eats, roots, shoots and leaves".

For those from 'merca, in the English speaking world "roots" is a synonym for "fucks".

Yes they are. — Michael

Ok. Explain them. You said "the red mental percept". Is there only one?

It's unclear what electrons are when you take them out of the context of the scientific papers that talk about them. — Michael

Yep. But we do not use electrons to sort tomato seeds.

You want to equate the colour red with a thing you call a red mental percept. But they are not the very same thing.

I have only claimed that the red mental percept is our ordinary, everyday understanding of red — Michael

"...the red mental percept..."

There is only one?

It is very unclear what a 'mental percept" is, when you take it out of the context of the scientific papers that use it.

Hence it is rather hard to see how it could be the very same as the red used to sort tomato seeds.

I like wombats.

Well, if you're just going to dismiss the scientific evidence because it disagrees with Wittgenstein's nonsense story about a beetle then we're never going to agree. — Michael

But that's not what I have done. I have not "dismissed the scientific evidence". I accept it wholly. Have done, repeatedly, all the way through this thread, explicitly and repeatedly.

What is rejected is the assertion that red is nothing but a 'mental percept' - a term with a fairly specific use in certain experiments, but not in sorting tomatoes.

How is this not physics exactly? — apokrisis

:rofl:

I'll leave you to your crusade.

The science proves otherwise. — Michael

If the science shows that the red tomatoes are not red, then the science is wrong.

But of course, it is Michael, not the science, that is in error, with an overblown claim that can't be made to work.

They have a surface layer of atoms that reflect various wavelengths of light, but no colour, because colour is something else entirely. — Michael

Yep. Red is not the surface layer of atoms, and it's also not your mental percept.

My biosemiotic position arises within a community of reason that was Aristotelean and then became Peircean. So the reworking of Hegel would have been done by Peirce. — apokrisis

See how this is not physics? QED.

The question isn't "are tomatoes red?". The question is "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?" — Michael

Yep. They really have the distinctive property that they appear to. They are red.

you are then using this to equivocate — Michael

Not I. I'm using it the way it has been used since well before recent developments in physiology. If you hang your argument on the difference between "Is the tomato red?" and "is the tomato really red?" then you are going to have to explain how red tomatoes are not really red, and end up looking a bit silly.

The trouble is that you take "red" to refer only to "mental percepts", and that can't be made sense of.

No, claiming that they really have these colours is a misunderstanding of the nature of colour. — Michael

...and you go over the same undisputed physiology. Again.

The tomatoes are red. So is the pen. And the physiology is also correct.

It's the pretence that is irksome. Reworking Hegel is fine, if one is honest about it.

"do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?" — Michael

Well, yes. Tomatoes are usually red when ripe, especially the shop-bought ones. Other varieties might be orange, black or green, some with striated combinations of these colours. They are cultivated to this end, so reliably that the seed can be bought and sold. Some varieties of radish are white, some purple. Strawberries that are not red are tasteless.

Claiming that they do not "really" have these colours is a misunderstanding of the nature of colour.

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics? — apokrisis

You pretend to be doing physics; but you are merely reworking Hegel.

It seems not.

:yawn:

Was that post intended to say something, ?

But the colour just is that mental percept — Michael

Notice that this is not the conclusion of your account, but a presumption.

I am telling you what physics and neuroscience have determined. — Michael

No, you aren't. They have 'determined" no such thing. You are treating the presumption as if it were a conclusion.

You are taking the special case in which for the purposes of experiment researchers restrict "seeing red" to having a "mental percept of red" and taking this to be what "seeing red' is in every other case.

...falsely believed by the naive realist to be a mind-independent property of the tomato — Michael

An imagined naive realists and mind-independent properties. You haven't explained what that might be. Is your claim that "The tomato is red" is true only when someone is looking at it? So there are no red tomatoes in a box, unobserved? One can never order a box of red tomatoes without threatening metaphysical collapse?

I don't even understand what you're trying to say here. — Michael

Yep.

I might be hopelessly lost. — frank

I certainly am!

Threads such as this reach a point where the differences reach absurd levels. The basic point I would make is that colour is not entirely in the mind of an individual, but also functions at a social level. I think that pretty well undeniable.

The broader methodological point is that philosophical dichotomies such as subject/object. subjective/objective, internal/external, private/public are difficult to maintain on close examination; this is shown by the issues that arise for example if it is claimed that colour is only internal and subjective.

The claim from Michael and Hanover seems to be something like that colour is private (subjective, internal) in the same way that pain is private. But it seems to me that neither pain nor colour are entirely private, and further that there are quite important differences between our talk of pain and our talk of colour.

I suspect the usefulness of this thread has been passed, that there is little left to say.

This strikes me as special pleading and a category error — Hanover

Well, your confusing pain and touch certainly is an error. They, again, are not the same. So:

...you must make your perceptions available to the object to experience it — Hanover

This is exactly not the case with pain. It inflicts itself whether you "make your perceptions available" or not. Pain is not touch.

If we insist the red is in the pen (which is your thesis), the we must insist the pain is in the knife — Hanover

What twaddle. No, that's not the "thesis" (are we writing doctorates now? That explains the length of this thread). Pain is not in the knife.

I'm saying pain is no different than red. — Hanover

Ok. You go with such absurdism.

Much as

The fact that I pass Lionino the apple when he says in our non-English language "flurgle nurgle blurgle" is utterly irrelevant to the issue being discussed. — Michael

You are obligated to deny that being red is communal in order to maintain your limited account. And yet, overwhelmingly, we agree as to what is red and what isn't. Here are some shades of red:

Here are some shades of pain:

Notice that the shades of red are red? Do you suppose that the shades of pain are painful? No; the items in the first are red, the items in the second are not pain.

That it has to be pointed out that pain and colour are different shows the culpability of both your lines of thinking.

But this newer work makes some good headway on the metaphysical implications of ITP. I believe they say quite adamantly that there is no world sans observation, without observation/decoherence, we have the quantum state of indeterminate possibilities/properties. Upon observation, a classical state is registered: — Bodhy

Interesting. But "there is no world sans observation", and yet "without observation/decoherence, we have the quantum state of indeterminate possibilities/properties" - so isn't "the quantum state of indeterminate possibilities/properties" just the world as it is without observation?

If so, then it is not the case that we have no world without observation?

This brings out part of what appears so circular in Hoffman - he uses the physics of the world to show that there is no world. This leads me to supose he has missed something important. Or perhaps I have. Is physics like Wittgenstein's ladder, to be thrown away once climbed? That would be odd, given how effective physics is at doing things.

And now we have Meta claiming maps have height, but mountains do not, and AmadeusD claiming to be unable to tell colour from pain. Fine. I'll leave them to it.

All that is relevant is we speak consistently enough to play our word game. That is, don't speak of what I see. — Hanover

Yes! More small steps. A small progress. One can have a conversation concerning the beetle: 'But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing'.

It wouldn't be the name of a thing. No ontology of beetles.

You've committed to a linguistic model, — Hanover

That's your painting of the arch linguistic philosopher rather than anything real. "We have words and only words" is far from what is the case. We have pens. There are things shown, not said. Like what a pen is.

The beetle analog was written about pain, not colour. While to some extent there is an overlap, one can produce samples of colour and chat about whether these are red, and what shade of red. One cannot do the came with pain; what one sees is the manifestation of pain, the groaning and grimacing. One cannot see into the box.

Supose that we all do see colours differently, and named them accordingly - so what @Lionino sees as red, you see as blue, and you both use the name for what you see. This is to take @Michael's suggestion literally! If @Lionino were to ask for the red pen, you might say "There is no red pen here, but there is a blue pen, and from past experience I know that Lionino is content for me to pass the blue pen when he asked for a red. At the least, it shuts them up.'

But this is not what happens, at least in my case. I undertake no such ratiocination. If you do, or if Michael does, then so be it. At the least, that would explain why these threads are interminable. The question, then, is how it came to be that you learned these words?

But what we see is a red pen, not a blue. And this is not only a result of our physiology, but of the way in which we learn to use colour words.

You cannot pass me pain or colours. — Michael

Odd. Fine. Toot toot.

We agree... — Michael

I don't. And I'm not the only one. I pointed out the rather large difference between colour and pain previously.

Can you pass me the red pen in your hand? Can you pass me the pain in your hand?

These are quite different.

[quote="Wayfarer;926273"]Where I differ with cognitive realism is that I claim that objective facts are still in some fundamental sense dependent on cognition.[/quote] Well, yes, since facts are true and hence in some way propositional. Of course what you believe is dependent on cognition, cognition being what you believe. Speaking quite approximately, of course. There be devil's in the detail. Or at the least, in the overly long threads. Been reading Kafka?[media]

Where I differ with cognitive realism is that I claim that objective facts are still in some fundamental sense dependent on cognition. — Wayfarer

Well, yes, since facts are true and hence in some way propositional. Of course what you believe is dependent on cognition, cognition being what you believe.

Speaking quite approximately, of course. There be devil's in the detail. Or at the least, in the overly long threads.

Been reading Kafka?

I just see a fellow brother from far away through your words — Mp202020

I'm glad they made sense for you.

In some ways the structure of Tibetan Buddhism was a bit too close to my lapsed catholicism, a bit too ritualistic. I did like the incense and decor.

You might be interested to note that measurements of its height have varied considerably — Wayfarer

Of course. It just seems to me that if one sets out to measure the height of a mountain, one already presumes it has a height to be measured.

Colour is precisely measurable, — Janus

Glad you said that. I thought it obvious.

...length is not... — frank

Long ago, someone who has posted on this thread insisted that Mount Everest did not have a height until it was measured. Pragmatism and Pierce and stuff had led them to this opinion.

After I stoped laughing, I was left puzzling that they could have such an odd conception of length. Presumably for some folk, length is mental.

Anyway, nice analogue with the waterfall. So is a waterfall a primary quality of a cliff? Not during a drought, I supose. We might have some level of overall agreement.

I don't think you're familiar with the concept. — frank

Which concept? Current? Object? Conviction? Strained?

Are you going to defend pressure, heat and torque in the same fashion?

And just to be sure, I'm not claiming the distinction between primary and secondary qualities cannot be made, but that it is difficult to maintain, and not of as much use as other notions.

Current is an object... — frank

Hmm. Not convinced. Seems strained.

So are you suggesting that the electric current is known distinctly by the jolt felt? And that this is much the same way we know distinctly that some object is solid, or round?

Ok. Again, it doesn't work for me.

110v is for 'mercan big girls blouses. Real Men (or children) get the full 250v. Makes your hair stand on end, that does.

I don't think it can't be measured. I think it a curious candidate for a primary quality. "...roughly speaking, (primary qualities) are said to be real objective properties of objects and to be distinctly known" (SEP). I'm not sure how current is "distinctly known".

But that's just me. You go on ahead.