piracy

The words "white and gold" and "blue and black" are referring to both, the light being emitted by the dress and perceived by the viewer.
— creativesoul

They aren't referring to both. — Michael

Bald assertion contradicting everyday observable events, falsified by them, in fact.

Some people use "white and gold" and "black and blue" to pick out specific things. Some use them to pick out particular wavelength ranges within the natural visible spectrum to the exclusion of all else. Some use them to gather groups of things reflecting/emitting the same wavelengths. Some use them to pick out certain parts of personal subjective experience; namely the ocular biological structure's role in our daily lives(seeing things).

We all use them to pick out white and gold and blue and black things. We just differ on which things.

When my colleague and I look at the photo of the dress we see different colours. The noun "colours" isn't referring to the light because we don't see different light...

How many different ranges of wavelengths are emanating from the dress? The dress emits but one, towards both - you and he - at the same time during the same viewing. Saturate our eyes with bright sunlight, and we'll notice changes on the receiver's end, not the source/cause.

Do all of the eyes that are perceiving the very same scenery at the very same time from nearly the same vantage point perceive the same light? Yup. They do not all detect the same ranges though.

There is this article about colour concepts and experience. Maybe it is of interest. — Lionino

The article makes my point that we have to acknowledge why there is this idealist/realist tension when talking about perception – why the redness of red is a Hard Problem quandry advanced by one side, and why the ballness of balls is matchingly put forward as something quite untroubling to the lumpen realist tendency.

As Peacocke points out, red just seems to be a psychological construct as all we can do is point to it when asked. It is out there in the world in some generally agreed way, but also essentially private like the good old beetle in the box.

But if asked to point to the circle in a collection of shapes, we can reach out and get our hands around it. A blind person could learn to discriminate circularity as a general concept. We can speak to the general essence of being circular as well as pick out suitable particular examples. The circle is the one with no pointy corners and smoothly symmetric like a ball.

Then as we continue on from shapes to objects, we all know that we can really get our hands around balls. We can feel their shape, weight, texture, even taste and scent. If circles where a bit Platonic as concepts, balls take on a hylomorphic and Aristotelian richness. Ballness becomes the essence of a very large class of possible objects.

And the fact that we are imposing this concept on nature – we sure as heck make all kinds of material balls – becomes what seems most salient. We have now swung across to the other extreme of the spectrum to the position that is most comfortable to the lumpen realist. The realm of chairs, kitchen utensils, puppy dogs and other medium size dry goods.

So idealists will focus on the redness of red to make their essentialist case. And realists will focus on the "ballness" of balls to make their accidentalist case. They will say sure folk can classify balls as a category, but plainly there is no such thing as ballness as a "real essence".

So perception gives both camps what feels like a strong ground in this argument between idealism and realism. But I say we have to dig deeper to get past the superficial language games. Any philosophical account must provide some unifying position on perception so that the redness of red and the ballness of balls can be understood under a single theory of cognition. Such as that of a biosemiotic modelling relation.

Our experience of red and of balls has to be either equally surprising or equally unsurprising. One way or another, we are asking them both to fit the same metaphysics.

Correct. Red is not a property of extra-mental (or mind-independent) objects but is a subjective affection which arises from a combination of our innate cognitive capacity and the powers (or properties) objects induce in us.

One can argue that this applies to all our senses. I think this is probably true, though the issue does get murky when it comes to touch. Not that we can't lose it, we can, and then we don't feel the objects we interact with, but the "extension" or solidity of the objects is very hard to "think away".

you have a red pen in your hand, you can pass the red pen to me. If you have a pain in your hand, you cannot pass the pain to me.

The analogy between pain and colour fails because there is a public aspect to colour that it not available for pain. — Banno

This has nothing to do with public and private. It has to do with a category mistake you're making.

We convey matter to our senses in different ways. If I want you to feel the pen, the pen must be put in your hand (or "passed" as you say). I click it for you to hear it. I wave it to spread it's aroma so you can smell it. I put it to your lips to taste it.

All those things can be shared or done privately. We can taste it and feel it together, or I can touch it or see it alone. That the experience of whatever the sensation is is ultimately private is obvious, but because you can't hold a pen up in the front of the room and we not all feel the pain of its point just means we don't experience pain by emitted light, soundwaves, or in an otherwise distant way.

I don't follow how it's more public for me and you to see a red pen simultaneously than for me and you to feel a warm swimming pool simultaneously. I recognize that often pain and direct touch sensations occur privately, but that distinction isn't consistent. I taste my drink privately but you could stick a second straw in the drink as well

You've simply identified that a scream is public and a caress private in the vernacular sense, but that doesn't identify a meaningful philosophical distinction. An important philosophical distinction would arise if I experienced a sensation you couldn't imagine due to an entire lack of consistent experience. In that case, we'd have a true beetle in the box, which is (maybe) what you're getting at.

I'm of the position that the pen is an amalgamation of sensate properties, underwritten by noumena. The phenomenal state is of those senses and it forms the identify of the pen to the perceiver, but this passing of public objects versus feeling of private pain doesn't form an important difference.

That we don't see pain distantly and touch color privately just means the category of pain is transmitted differently than the category of vision.

Red is not a property of extra-mental (or mind-independent) objects but is a subjective affection which arises from a combination of our innate cognitive capacity and the powers (or properties) objects induce in us. — Manuel

And yet all we have in our brains is neurons firing. Somehow that give rise to both the "subjective affects" and the "objective properties". If we see red as pure quality, and ballness as simple quantity, we are still left with the deeper fact that all that is happening in our heads is neurons firing. Just in different corners of the brain, as we can tell from the damage we can do by plunging something blunt into the "colour centre" as opposed to another spot that is the "object recogntiion centre".

Our philosophical positions are constrained by some pretty basic neurobiological facts. Somehow it is all just "neurons firing". The mystery to be cleared up starts there.

And that is the current neurobiological approach. Shifting the conversation to the enactive and embodied modelling relation that explains the neuron firing in terms of their neural architecture. How what they are doing is imposing a capacity for Bayesian reasoning on the world.

The idealists will complain that this leaves consciousness under-explained. The realist will dismiss it as instead an irrelevent complexification to them.

But because both camps agree that science should stay out of philosophy, at least they can agree on that.

Meanwhile, the science rolls on at a good lick. Sharpening our understanding of how things are.

Do you believe that pain is a mental percept or a mind-independent property of distal objects? If the former, does this lead to something like idealism? If not, why do you think that the claim that colours are also a mental percept leads to something like idealism?

I just don't understand your reasoning at all.

Some things, like pain, are in the head. Other things, like trees, are not. The science shows that colours, as ordinarily understood, are in the former group, not the latter. None of this entails abandoning realism entirely.

Sure. The relevance of that distinction here, however, escapes me. — Banno

The adjectives "red" and "painful" describe things like pens and stubbing one's toe.

The nouns "red" and "pain" refer to the mental percepts that pens and stubbing one's toe cause to occur.

Pain and colour are different. I can hand you the pen, but not the pain. — Banno

You cannot hand me the pain or the colour.

Why should there be a singular thing to which the noun "colour" refers, and which must therefore be either in your head or in your hand? — Banno

You used the noun "colours" to say that colours are more than just mental percepts. This is equivocation, like using the noun “trees” to say that trees are both woody perennial plants and branching diagrams.

This is different to simply saying that the nouns “colours” and “trees” can refer to more than one thing, which I have repeatedly accepted.

But colours as ordinarily understood in everyday life are mental percepts, not reflectances, and trees as ordinarily understood in everyday life are plants, not diagrams.

It is obvious in context that the OP is not asking if atoms reflecting light is mind-independent.

Not the same article, but this one is free to read:

Colour variation is the fact that what colour physical objects look to have depends on viewing conditions and a perceiver’s visual system. Both Colour Relationalists and Colour Eliminativists regard their analyses of colour variation as central to the justification for their respective views. Yet the analyses are decidedly different. Colour Relationalists assert that most instances of colour variation are veridical and infer from this that colours are relational properties of objects that are partly determined by perceivers. By contrast, Colour Eliminativists assert that colour variation is too unsystematic to ground the claim that many or most instances of colour variation are veridical. From this they infer that objects don’t have colours. I argue that the Eliminativist analysis is superior. On my view, the Relationalist account of veridical colour experience reduces to the assertion that objects have colour simply because they cause perceivers to have colour experiences of them. In this context, I argue, the resulting conception of veridicality is vacuous. More directly, the foundational idea of Eliminativism is the opposite claim: the fact that objects cause perceivers to have colour experiences of them is on its own not sufficient to justify or ground the claim that objects have colour. The Relationalist, I argue, has failed to justify anything stronger than this. In this debate we should thus side with the Eliminativist: objects do not possess colour; they merely cause us to undergo colour experiences.

And this quote may be of interest to @Banno and @Hanover:

It is fair to say that Eliminativists value adequate explanations of phenomena like colour variation more than, for example, offering a straightforward account of Common Sense Colour. In this regard, theirs is a “perception first” approach to colour (as opposed, e.g., to a “language first” or “no priority” approach). They need not (and generally do not) doubt that there are blueberries, that blueberries often cause perceivers to undergo colour experiences, or that our concept BLUE is often meaningfully applied, and to good effect, to blueberries. What they doubt is that blueberries are blue in a basic sense, believing instead that blueberries merely have the power to cause perceivers to undergo colour experiences. Insofar as we can explain what basic colours are, blueberries only have this causal role. No feature of blueberries is part of the basic nature of colour or of what constitutes basic colour.

Do you believe that pain is a mental percept or a mind-independent property of distal objects? — Michael

Pain is a mental precept.

Some things, like pain, are in the head. Other things, like trees, are not. — Michael

I'm just not buying into Lockean primary and secondary qualities where some qualities are deemed mind created and others inherent in the object.

Locke would acknowledge color is secondary, or mind dependent but would insist shape, size, motion, solidity, and number were primary, or not mind dependent.

I find that distinction arbitrary and impossible to support. A perceiver has no way of knowing what his mind created and imposed on an object and cannot begin to describe what a unperceived object would be.

All you know of the tree is the bundle of properties you perceive and since no property can be said to be primary, all the tree is as far as you know are those mentally imposed perceptions.

When you say the tree is mind independent, what is the tree? All you refer to are mind dependent aspects when you describe it.

The tree to you is just some vague whatever that makes the secondary properties in your mind appear.

Since you can't know of the existence of the vague whatever by perceiving it, you must have another way of knowing it. How do you know the noumena is there? Faith, necessity to salvage realism, or how?

I'm just not buying into Lockean primary and secondary qualities where some qualities are deemed mind created and others inherent in the object. — Hanover

But you just did with pain? You accept that pain is a mental percept. Presumably you accept that trees are not a mental percept?

Or are you actually an antirealist/idealist, rejecting mind-independence entirely? Because that seems like a matter for a different discussion.

But you just did with pain? You accept that pain is a mental percept. Presumably you accept that trees are not a mental percept? — Michael

I'm saying if a tree exists I have no idea what a tree is.

A "tree" is noumenal the way you're using it and it's greenness is phenomenal.

When you speak of its atomic level parts you know about, you're still speaking of the phenomenal.

All your talk of color and pain as being mind dependent is true, but you've not found in those properties some special exception. All descriptions of all objects are mind dependent. The speed of the subatomic particles in the tree are mind dependent as are their size and shape.

If your point is that color is mind dependent, mine is that every property you know of (as in truly every last one) is as well. Why focus on color specifically then?

Why focus on color specifically then? — Hanover

Because that's what this discussion is about. We're accepting realism in the general sense; atoms exist, reflecting wavelengths of light, and trees are a particular collection of atoms. We then want to know if colours are, as the naive realist believes, mind-independent properties of trees, or if they are mental percepts like pain.

As summarised by the SEP article quoted here, and as mentioned in the several scientific studies I've referenced, the physics and neuroscience is clear that colours are mental percepts, and I am going to trust what physics and neuroscience tell us about the world and perception (and certainly over a philosopher of language like Wittgenstein).

Correct. Red is not a property of extra-mental (or mind-independent) objects but is a subjective affection which arises from a combination of our innate cognitive capacity and the powers (or properties) objects induce in us. — Manuel

Is it a problem that we don't know if the world induces the same subjective data in each of us? Is that unverifiable? What we know for sure is that "red" plays a part in social interaction.

Carrying on from this, here are two different claims:

1. An object is red if it looks red
2. An object looks red because it is red

With the first, a sentence such as "the pen is red" just means "the pen looks red", and the word "red" in "the pen looks red" refers to the mental percept.

With the second, one must explain the "because it is red" part.

One offered explanation is dispositionalism, which gives us something like "the pen looks red because it is disposed to look red". But again, the "red" in "disposed to look red" refers to the mental percept.

Another offered explanation references wavelengths of light, which gives us something like "the pen looks red because it reflects 700nm light". Unlike previous examples, this is no longer a semantic claim, but an empirical claim, and in most cases it is true, but given variations in colour perception and so-called colour "illusions", a pen can look orange even though it reflects 700nm light, and so to reintroduce the terminology given in (2), a sentence such as "the pen looks orange even though it is red" is both meaningful and can be true. In this case, the word "orange" is referring to the mental percept and the word "red" is referring to the reflectance.

But also in this case, the use of the terms “because” and “even though” are questionable, as there’s nothing a priori wrong with these claims:

3. The pen looks red even though it reflects 700nm light
4. The pen looks orange because it reflects 700nm light

And so nothing a priori wrong with these claims:

5. The pen looks red even though it is red
6. The pen looks orange because it is red

I'm of the position that the pen is an amalgamation of sensate properties, underwritten by noumena. — Hanover

This is Hume's phenomenalism, and I agree with it. There's nothing in the visual field that says: tree. Tree is an idea.

This is Hume's phenomenalism, and I agree with it. There's nothing in the visual field that says: tree. Tree is an idea. — frank

I was thinking more along the lines that I was describing Kant's transcendental idealism, which, per Google's AI function "is a philosophical position that states that the mind structures the data our senses receive from the world, meaning that the world as we experience it is dependent on the way our minds work."

That would appear a direct response to Locke's suggestion that there are primary qualities that describe true reality, which Kant pushes away into the noumenal.

And the phenomenal state we have of the tree is not just a tree standing in some sort of isolation, but it's of everything we think about the tree and the millions of pieces of data we use to then form it into a conscious state of the tree (i.e. transcendental apperception).

The discussion of the subunits of the tree (the trunk, the limbs, the leaves, and then going all the way down to its most basic atomic substructures) isn't helpful to the question of what is the tree devoid of the mental interpretation. Regardless of where we place our microscope to look, whatever we see remains mediated by the mind.

I was thinking more along the lines that I was describing Kant's transcendental idealism, which, per Google's AI function "is a philosophical position that states that the mind structures the data our senses receive from the world, meaning that the world as we experience it is dependent on the way our minds work." — Hanover

I think it's both. The idea that a thing is a bundle of properties is Hume's Bundle theory. Kant, who was inspired by Hume, goes further in undermining Locke by pointing out that space and time are also built into cognition, they aren't things we learn through experience. So among the "millions of pieces of data we use to then form it into a conscious state of the tree" is an innate spacio-temporal setting, with associated causes and effects.

Is it a problem that we don't know if the world induces the same subjective data in each of us? Is that unverifiable? What we know for sure is that "red" plays a part in social interaction. — frank

It could be a problem is you choose to take it as a problem. We usually don't. If someone is in pain, say we can see a person is missing a finger or they got hit by a car, we take it to be serious and reason that if the same thing happened to us, we would react in the same manner.

Sure, we can't know for certain (anything in the empirical world) if my red is your blue. But strangely, this issue is rarely (if ever) brought up in regard to sound. If I hear someone sing a song I like, no matter how out of tune it may be, then I will be reminded of the song and think to myself ah yes that's Led Zeppelin or whatever.

So, we assume they are hearing the same song as us. I don't think sound is qualitatively more important than sight so far as our senses go. That is, I don't see why color should be a problem, but then sound is not.

And yet all we have in our brains is neurons firing. Somehow that give rise to both the "subjective affects" and the "objective properties". If we see red as pure quality, and ballness as simple quantity, we are still left with the deeper fact that all that is happening in our heads is neurons firing. Just in different corners of the brain, as we can tell from the damage we can do by plunging something blunt into the "colour centre" as opposed to another spot that is the "object recogntiion centre". — apokrisis

If you push most people hard enough, I think you could get them to say that even those things which we consider "objective" cannot be proven to be so, so everything does end up being some phenomena in the mind/brain.

I think that we have to "bite the bullet" and assume that there is something out there, which is independent of us. Whatever that something may be cannot solely be a product of my mind, for if it is in every single instance a mental thing, then I see no way out but idealism, of a Berkeleyan variety.

Neurons firing, no doubt. But plenty of other things go on inside brains that aren't neurons alone, which probably play a deep role in how our minds work.

The idealists will complain that this leaves consciousness under-explained. The realist will dismiss it as instead an irrelevent complexification to them.

But because both camps agree that science should stay out of philosophy, at least they can agree on that.

Meanwhile, the science rolls on at a good lick. Sharpening our understanding of how things are. — apokrisis

They can say that, but I'm not sure it makes much sense. One can do science without an explicit philosophy and one can do philosophy without an explicit science. But to say that because one should only stick to one or the other seems arbitrary and pointless to me.

It is forgotten that say, for Plato and Aristotle there was no distinction between science and philosophy. Nor was there one for Descartes, Hume or Kant.

It's after Kant that such distinction begins to be made explicit. However, I don't think "science alone" suffices for every or even most questions we have. It may have the best supported and reliable data set and theory but leaves plenty out too.

It could be a problem is you choose to take it as a problem. We usually don't. If someone is in pain, say we can see a person is missing a finger or they got hit by a car, we take it to be serious and reason that if the same thing happened to us, we would react in the same manner.

Sure, we can't know for certain (anything in the empirical world) if my red is your blue. But strangely, this issue is rarely (if ever) brought up in regard to sound. If I hear someone sing a song I like, no matter how out of tune it may be, then I will be reminded of the song and think to myself ah yes that's Led Zeppelin or whatever.

So, we assume they are hearing the same song as us. I don't think sound is qualitatively more important than sight so far as our senses go. That is, I don't see why color should be a problem, but then sound is not. — Manuel

The issue I was looking at is how "redness" gets its meaning. Are the truth conditions for "It's red" internal (by which I mean subjective data)? If so, it seems that assumes we all have the same or similar experiences.

If we don't have the same experiences, couldn't we still behave as if we do? Each of assumes this, but it never shows up in social interaction. This would mean that the truth conditions for "It's red" are external. I think the issue I'm talking about applies to all the senses.

@frank, I don't think "Is my red your red?" can make much sense, since the experiences are localized occurrences, a bit like "Is my apple digestion your apple digestion?" also is a weird question.
Maybe Wittgenstein's approach is more fruitful, "The apple is red" attains meaning by common use, it's how we learn to identify red, whatever exactly it all is.

I don't think "Is my red your red?" can make much sense, since the experiences are localized occurrences, a bit like "Is my apple digestion your apple digestion?" also is a weird question.
Maybe Wittgenstein's approach is more fruitful, "The apple is red" attains meaning by common use, it's how we learn to identify red, whatever exactly it all is. — jorndoe

If the experience of red is a private, localized experience, then how would "red" attain meaning by common use? How would that work in your view?

To your question yes, it's internal. The "external aspect", if one wants to make this distinction, would be to speak of wave-lengths and photons, which themselves don't have color.

If we don't have the same experiences, couldn't we still behave as if we do? Each of assumes this, but it never shows up in social interaction. This would mean that the truth conditions for "It's red" are external. I think the issue I'm talking about applies to all the senses. — frank

We do behave as if we had the same experiences even if my red is someone else's blue. But the color is not external to anyone, or any creature for that matter.

We, in our manifest image or folk psychology, act as if red belonged to things (roses, blood, etc.), but this belief, if taken literally, is false.

We may want to convey the redness and blueness, but what we actually do is exchange the word "red', "yellow", etc. and assume that by using "red", you see in your mind what I see in mine, but we can't be certain it will match.

I don't think we have good reasons to doubt that they are the same, or at least, very similar.

We do behave as if we had the same experiences even if my red is someone else's blue. But the color is not external to anyone, or any creature for that matter. — Manuel

Right, I agree. I'm not arguing that we do have different experiences. I'm thinking about the uncertainty, and also the general uncertainty associated with internal things. It's uncertain that what was red yesterday is the same red as today, and it doesn't appear that there is any fact of the matter. This is Kripkenstein.

One way out is to say that we're all dreaming the same dream. We really can read one another's minds. This is just to bring up how the problem ultimately comes from our worldview, that says we're each locked in to private worlds. See what I mean?

, not counting color/blind people, our interaction with our common environment has sufficiently similar results, that become identifiable experiences to each of us.
I suppose it's analogous to the digestion example — when we eat apples, roughly the same reliably happens, they're dissolved into whatever and absorbed by the stomach, transported around the body, etc (unless someone has an apple allergy), and we're less hungry. We (may) learn to associate pain with putting a hand on the hot stove, and hence (better) learn to identify/recognize hot stoves.
Some earlier babbling: 2023Mar2 (image), 2024Aug2, 2024Aug6
(I'm not sure "private" is quite the right word here, we're chatting about them intelligibly after all, but know what you mean.)

..the former being called "red things" and the latter being "things that look red". Sounds fine to me.

This seems to be what @Michael is fussing about in talking of nouns and adjectives.

I'm not seeing how it answers the OP. — Banno

In the OP @Mp202020 asks: "Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind..."

I replied it's outside, but might add that it's outside because I don't see my own seeing of a colour. I see the colour, which exists outside the seeing of it.

Same goes for other sensory modalities.

Also entirely mental experiences, such as imagining what a colour looks like. I don't imagine what my own imagining is like or looks like, I imagine the colour.

It's uncertain that what was red yesterday is the same red as today, and it doesn't appear that there is any fact of the matter. This is Kripkenstein.

One way out is to say that we're all dreaming the same dream. We really can read one another's minds. This is just to bring up how the problem ultimately comes from our worldview, that says we're each locked in to private worlds. See what I mean? — frank

Sure, "ordinary" everyday objects are extremely complex, consisting of many physical, chemical and sometimes even biological processes which seldom repeat in an exact same manner.

That's made more difficult due to our own eye, brain, internal state, emotions etc. Such that it may be impossible to say that the red bottle I see next to me is the exact same red tone I saw a few seconds later. Yesterday is even more difficult. But we approximate and tend to say that yes, this red rose is the same color I saw yesterday.

Sure, the dream analogy works fine. Heck, even a wacky (contradictory) solipsism: we are all solipsists, in a way.

we are all solipsists, in a way. — Manuel

In other words, I'm the king of the universe. I knew it!!

Banno I believe we speak the same exact language here. So long as a medium exists which allows us to agree on “red” then the similarity/difference between that experience of red holds no value

If you have a red pen in your hand, you can pass the red pen to me. If you have a pain in your hand, you cannot pass the pain to me.

The analogy between pain and colour fails because there is a public aspect to colour that it not available for pain. — Banno

I don't think that holds. The difference here is that we have a relatively easy way to "share" color (pointing at some colored object) but not for pain. But this is merely a practical restriction. If you could accurately measure neuron firings in your hand, you could also "share" that pain.

Bald assertion contradicting everyday observable events, falsified by them, in fact.

Some people use "white and gold" and "black and blue" to pick out specific things. Some use them to pick out particular wavelength ranges within the natural visible spectrum to the exclusion of all else. Some use them to gather groups of things reflecting/emitting the same wavelengths. Some use them to pick out certain parts of personal subjective experience; namely the ocular biological structure's role in our daily lives(seeing things).

We all use them to pick out white and gold and blue and black things. We just differ on which things. — creativesoul

But people can agree that something has "blue the wavelength" yet disagree whether it has "blue the colour".

Do all of the eyes that are perceiving the very same scenery at the very same time from nearly the same vantage point perceive the same light? — creativesoul

What do you mean with "eyes perceive light"? Are we talking about the eye as an organ? And are we talking about what happens when light waves interact with the eye or what kind of signal the eye transmits?