I'm still stuck here:...small differences like these shouldn't be a problem for understanding. — khaled
You talk of your-experience-of-red; I talk of my-experience-of-red; yet you think the meaning of "red" is what they refer to.You see, the funny thing is that you presume we all use the same word, "red", for a certain experience; and yet you deny that we all have the same experience. But when we point out that the experience seems therefore to be irrelevant, you disagree. — Banno
I love the Borg. — Marchesk
For instance, Locutus was introduced as an individual to give a face to the Borg in assimilating humanity; but why bother, if there already was an individual who could represent the Borg consciousness? — Banno
does Odo know what it is like to be a bat? — Banno
I don't recall them ever exploring Odo using non-human senses. — Marchesk
How are we talking about the same thing?
The referent of "red" for you is on your account entirely distinct from mine; so how can they mean the same thing? — Banno
The word "red" picks out a physical aspect of the apple, not how it appears (which is a qualifier meaning "seem; give the impression of being", not a reference to a mental entity or mental experience).
— Andrew M
The apple appearing red came long before optics. — Marchesk
Sellars went through all this in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" too: "looks" talk, as in "the apple looks red to Andrew", is logically posterior to "is" talk. There's no way even to make sense of it otherwise. What does it mean to say that an apple looks red except that it looks like it is red? — Srap Tasmaner
What colour it is is how it appears under some specific "normal" conditions; what's the problem with that? — Janus
No, the apple appears red to the colourblind person, just as it does to us "normal" people. That is to say it appears as a colour that he calls red, just as it appears to us as a colour we call red. It just so happens that those two colours, those two appearances are not the same. — Janus
Further, we find on analysis that the term "appears" doesn't designate subjective "appearances". It is instead a term that lets us say how two different situations are, in some sense, similar.
— Andrew M
This can't be right because you have said that the apple appears different to a colourblind person than it does to a "normal" person. — Janus
You haven't said what it would mean (beyond the merely conventional usage) to say that an apple is red when no one is looking at it or when it is in the dark. — Janus
I think 'seeing redness' is a valid way of talking about certain visual perceptions. But it is abstracted from the usual context where the redness belongs to an object of a particular size, shape texture and so on, and the red is of a particular tone, intensity, hue and so on.
One way of simply seeing red would be to place someone in front of a screen emitting red light, or painted red, that fills the visual field entirely. I certainly don't believe in subjective visual perceptions that are somehow "in the brain" and stand as intermediaries between us and the objects we see.
The other meaning of 'qualia' is something like 'raw percept' where what is seen is not seen 'as anything'. I guess this is only possible in rare instances, or with infants, because most everything we see is always already conceptually mediated. — Janus
What difference does that make here? In both cases, the apple is red due to how it interacts with light.
— creativesoul
But it's only red because that's the color we see. — Marchesk
Talk of "redness" is existentially dependent upon language use. Reflecting the frequencies we've named "red" does not. — creativesoul
Doubting one's own physiological sensory perception requires metacognition. Cognition comes first
— creativesoul
I don’t understand the significance of this — khaled
The difference is that how the apple appears can change under different conditions. Whereas the apple's color does not. — Andrew M
But I reject the subject/object distinction that's implied by subjective "appearances" (i.e., mental entities or mental experiences). — Andrew M
You want to privilege one usage of the term over the others, and that says more about your own preference than it does about common usages. — Janus
However that use is derivative from situations where we observe an object in normal lighting which is where color distinctions are originally made. That's the reference point in the world. Without that reference point, you have to contend with the private language argument. — Andrew M
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.