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

See what I said to Banno about the distinction between the adjective "red" and the noun "red":

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. — Michael

Colours, as ordinarily understood in everyday life, are how things look, not how things reflect light. How things reflect light determines how things look, and so determines the colour seen, but reflecting light is distinct from colour.

When I think about the colour red I am not thinking about light reflectances; I am thinking about the visual percept.

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. — creativesoul

We see the same light but not the same colour. Therefore the light is not the colour. The light is the cause of the colour (much like the chemicals in the food are the cause of the taste), nothing more.

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 — Mp202020

Depends on what kind of medium we use. A group of blind speakers can use the word 'red' and speak successfully about the colour, its conventional or symbolic meanings etc. Experiences of the colour are not necessary in verbal languages. AI's use colour codes and don' t need to experience anything in order to be useful in graphic applications.


In aesthetic practices, however, we use samples or colour charts when words or descriptions are insufficient. The right use of a sample is to experience it, and the value of the similarity/difference between that experience becomes evident in our tastes, preferences, traditions etc.

A sample of red exemplifies the colour and it's various looks.

Colour codes are attempts to systematise manufacturing and communication about colours. Yet between a pair of colours referred to by the codes of a colour system there is a third possible colour. Moreover, there's no way to systematise colours with their looks. Hence It's better to experience an actual sample.

Yet between a pair of colours….there is a third…. — jkop

Hume, E.C.H.U., 2. 2. 16, 1748.

…..no way to systematise colours with their looks. — jkop

R.O.Y. G. B.I.V, from a prism?

In passing; just me, thinking out loud is all.

A sample of red exemplifies the colour and it's various looks — jkop

With regard to sound, most people would need to hear middle C in order to mimic it, but there are people who don't need that. If you ask them for middle-C, they can hum it exactly. A lot of these people have the same genetic anomaly.

Maybe the same is true of color.

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. — Hanover

I think that position is quite sensible. But if things such as shape are not on a different category from colour, doesn't that lead to a few absurdities?

For example, it is very well possible that where someone sees red someone else sees green, and no communication issue arises because the swap is always the same.

However, if someone sees and feels a round object where someone else sees and feels a square one, and the square-person told the round-person to grab the object by the edges, wouldn't the round-person be bewildered? Surely, when a square-person says corner the round-person would think of a round object, but the round-person can't think of anywhere special in that object (any given point on the surface of a sphere is the same).

Maybe the same is true of color — frank

Tetrachromacy is suspected to exist in a small percentage of the population. They might be able to distinguish between colours that to the rest of us appear identical.

Cool, but I meant someone who doesn't need a color sample to create a particular hue, like China red.

Nice!

When I think about the colour red I am not thinking about light reflectances; I am thinking about the visual percep — Michael

If you could accurately measure neuron firings in your hand, you could also "share" that pain — Echarmion

No, I don't think it is ever accurately transferred or shared. OR worth attempting as it seems out of spite, revenge, or anger that one would want to share their pain. Make another feel what they experienced, so they KNOW. Sounds like bad news to me...

You can try to make another feel the pain suffered but its up to them to open the flow and let in that experience. Like jkop said, expressed through one person's art, work, testimony, demonstration, tone, behaviors it is, i suppose, a "shared" pain, but it is not replicated accurately. To share the pain, it would require you to KNOW for sure what it takes to inflict that same pain onto another. Pain in different forms that I assume are not experienced quite in the same way.

The initial pain that a person suffered, physical or sentimental both require different methods of "sharing" this pain. We feel the pain, we relate, we sympathize with similar pains from one another, sometimes without intention or on purpose. Sometimes people WANT to feel the pain another person has suffered from. Who am I to judge?

The openness to receiving and allowing the flow (if you will) of the pain, in order to experience this "shared" pain. That requires both parties to trust or at the very least, take the word of another.

Passing pain and passing pens, both of them could bring undesirable outcomes. Passing the wrong pen, passing the wrong pain? As how can you know the person wont react to the pain in a way that is detrimental to their well-being? Is that what we wanted? To hurt people? Real nice.... :roll:

Empathy is the ability to experience what someone else is experiencing. Since someone elses experience is not open to view, we must access it indirectly via languages, verbal, pictorial, interpretation of gestures etc — jkop

jkop, do you think I correctly connected what you shared a few days ago in my response above to Echarmion? To me it seemed, the "shared" pain comment they meant was a physical demonstration or experience. Clearly not in the same circumstances, that may have heightened or lessened the initial pain from the start.

Is this the same as pain, like a heart break? Shared pain is through empathy, indirectly being experienced on different grounds. Is the "message" of the "shared" pain communicated at all? Can the message get across, as it could be "shared" or sent, even though it was not the exact same experience? Can't we get the gist of things? Is that good enough? Obvious to me now. I was re-reading the thread from the beginning and give that credit to jkop, as you mentioned empathy theory earlier to me. Cool!

However, if someone sees and feels a round object where someone else sees and feels a square one, and the square-person told the round-person to grab the object by the edges, wouldn't the round-person be bewildered? Surely, when a square-person says corner the round-person would think of a round object, but the round-person can't think of anywhere special in that object (any given point on the surface of a sphere is the same). — Lionino

That only points to the consistency among human beings when it comes to detecting gross properties of shape, but subjective consistency doesn't suggest objective existence. That is, if every last human being saw apples as red, you'd still conclude that the color were subjective, but then assume that their being red to human perception satisfied some universal need for humans.

Consider it this way, if we saw the world as an air traffic controller saw airplanes, as little blips on the screen, that wouldn't suggest airplanes were blips, even if every person saw it that way. That would just be our mode of perception designed for us to navigate our existence. The alarm that activates when another plane is approaching too fast is accepted as not being the airplane itself, but only an alert for us to be aware of the danger to our existence. It is as logically possible then to assume the visual we see of the oncoming airplane when it comes up to our face is not the airplane itself either, but is just our alert system activating.

If we accept evolution as true, the expectation would be that our senses would be designed for survival more than direct fidelity to the truth. Offensive smells are offensive not because it says anything at all about the object, but it could just be telling us about ourselves and what is beneficial to us or not.

My analogies do assume an external threat to our existence, but a construct could be created where they don't, but those threats are internal and they are modifying our behaviors as necessary. That is to say, if we're going to question reality, we can go as deep into the Matrix as our imagination allows us.

..someone who doesn't need a color sample to create a particular hue, like China red. — frank

Sure, some people have "photographic" memory, others remember what it feels like to see particular colours. With practice you can get better at it. Colour samples make it easier to work with colours, and unlike memories, samples are open to view..

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? — Echarmion

Brute perception of is physical interaction with light. My words were in response to Michael, who's been depending upon what he thinks the science says and/or supports. So, yes, we're talking about how the biological structures work. I suspect that there's much more to Michael's notion of "perception" than my own.

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

See what I said to Banno about the distinction between the adjective "red" and the noun "red":

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.
— Michael — Michael

I take it that you're clarifying your own personal use, here in this thread, but you are not making some claim true of everyone using the terms "red" and "painful". Correct me, if you would please, should my take on that be somehow mistaken. I don't think your use has been consistent, but I may be wrong on that.

Colours, as ordinarily understood in everyday life, are how things look, not how things reflect light. How things reflect light determines how things look, and so determines the colour seen, but reflecting light is distinct from colour. — Michael

Agreed. Color is not the same as how things reflect light.

When I think about the colour red I am not thinking about light reflectances; I am thinking about the visual percept. — Michael

Understood. As you should be if you're using the term to pick out/refer to "the visual percept" That may answer my wondering if I'm taking you the right way.

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.
— creativesoul

We see the same light but not the same colour. Therefore the light is not the colour. — Michael

I don't think that argument is valid.

We see the same light but not the same color. We agree on that. Therefore, seeing the same light is not the same as seeing the same color. The term "seeing" is being stretched beyond coherence. We do not see all the ranges of wavelengths entering our eyes.

We do not detect all the ranges of wavelengths entering our eyes at any given time. We also do not all detect the same ranges even when perceiving the same light at the same time. Therefore, perceiving light is not equivalent to detecting ranges. If color is light. Then seeing colors is on par with detecting certain ranges and not equivalent to perceiving light.

Or...

You and your friend are not perceiving the same light.

The light is the cause of the colour (much like the chemicals in the food are the cause of the taste), nothing more. — Michael

So, you're saying that at least some of the constituents comprising the food are not the food. To me, eating food is part of the cause of tasting it. The other part is how the olfactory and gustatory biological structures work. Seems to me that throughout this thread, your position completely disregards all the things outside the head. Things that are not mental, all of which are necessary for subjective experience to first emerge; that are necessary for illusions and dreams to first emerge; that are necessary for mental percepts to emerge.

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 — Mp202020

Cheers. There is a famous argument called the beetle in a box, from Wittgenstein.

What gives our words stability is their place in our common, shared talk of what is around us. One way Wittgenstein showed this by pointing out that if we remove the shared part, as is the case with the beetle in a box, then we have nothing left to tie the word to, and it drops out of consideration.

It's part of what is now called the private language argument. He summarises the idea neatly with "Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you don’t notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you."

The intuition you seem to have hit on in your first few posts here, like your response to , is that for example it wouldn't matter if the colour I see as red is the colour you see as blue, provided that we agreed as to which things to use the word "red" for and which things we would use the word "blue". That is, the words for colour don't drop our of contention in the way the beetle does because we have this shared use.

It seems you've also stepped beyond the mere physiology of colour that a few folk think solves the problem. That we have agreed on the frequency of red, that certain pigments will selectively reflect this frequency, that we can use the word "red" as a noun to talk about such things specifically, all this is irrelevant to the issue you raised.

You've see here the range of contrasting ideas there are around the topic. That's partly because of the spectre of the interminable idealism/realism debate that crops up here every few weeks. You summarised the arguments neatly. The grain of truth in @apokrisis's pragmatic thinking is that neither side of this debate has it quite right. You can see the idealist tendencies in and .

You've wisely stayed out of the conversation about pain. That folk think feeling a pain and seeing red are much the same perhaps shows a lack of reflection.

This is a topic that can easily run to fifty pages with little change or agreement.

What gives our words stability is their place in our common, shared talk of what is around us. — Banno

This may suffice for everyday life. But it would be a weird way for more ambitious communities of inquiry to organise. :roll:

So not sophistic enough for your taste?

What gives our words stability is their place in our common, shared talk of what is around us. — Banno

In the case of sensation, it's that common biology gives us similar experiences of redness and pain.

Thanks for the effort that you put into your post but I can't connect your reply to the example I brought up in my post, I agree that subjective consistency doesn't suggest objective existence but I feel like my example wasn't really addressed.

In the case of sensation, it's that common biology gives us similar experiences of redness and pain. — frank

Frank, how do you know that we do have "similar experiences of redness and pain"?

How else than by our common, shared talk of what is around us?

Frank, how do you know that we do have "similar experiences of redness and pain"? — Banno

Commonly believed, no reason to doubt it.

Commonly... — frank

Yep, a belief we have in common. Cheers.

So not sophistic enough for your taste? — Banno

Interesting way of putting it when it was your position being criticised for its sophism.

Sure you can have your own philosophical platform of "everyday commonsensicalism" where science and metaphysics just drops out of the conversation as "all us ordinary folk just agree on our language use".

But right there you are already faced with the difficulty that everyday speech in fact enshrines this odd metaphysics of a lumpen realism entwined with an equally lumpen idealism. Folk just comfortably talk about bodies with minds and minds in bodies, worlds with selves and selves in worlds.

Do you really want to shut up shop on philosophical inquiry at this everyday level and call it a day ... for everyone?

The beetle in the box is about the pragmatic limits of inquiry. But it isn't about those limits in terms of sloppy everyday commonsensicalism. It is about the hard limits imposed once counterfactually structured inquiry – Peirce's critical commonsensicalism – runs out of differences that can make a difference. Quite another kettle of epistemological fish.

So as in the case of agreeing to name red as red, despite the apparent counterfactual possibility that Bob may be "really seeing green" and Alice "really seeing blue", we can see why this possibility would come to seem an uncheckable one and thus rightly "fall out of the the conversation". There is no clear way to justify the claim one way or the other. Bob, Alice and Banno can't huddle together and compare notes in any fruitful fashion.

There is some kind of reflecting surface that has a narrowly constrained luminance property, robust under varied lighting conditions, and there are these three folk at least agreeing they would classify the perceptual experience under the one socially-constructed label. Whether the perceptual experience is really the same, and so counterfactually might not be the same, becomes irrelevant to the level at which the conversation is being conducted – the everydayness of given names to colours. Further inquiry looks blocked as counterfactuals are imaginable but not presentable.

But this is an extreme case. We can see that by how quickly things change as soon as we introduce any measurable counterfactuality at all. As in adding luminance information to the wavelength information.

You say that shade is primary red. The pure exemplar case as far as you are concerned. Bob says well it looks a tinge pink to him. And Alice says to her it looks a touch scarlet. What you see as being neither a little darker nor lighter than bang on central, they say sure, it's red. But a red that is a bit white, or a bit back. As you assert, it is not at all blue or green. But for some reason we could hope to discover, we do have a luminance disagreement that can be the subject of a discussion.

We could start checking eyeballs and optic tracts. Humans show surprising variation in their visual hardware. The colours out of two different eyes can be noticeably tinged for some. So it becomes perfectly possible to dig in deeper with the neuroscience and start accounting for that linguistic disagreement in terms of its more foundational neurocognitive basis.

Even the Hard Problemers are happy with science doing that as this is just then one of the Easy Problems science is so good at tackling. :razz:

But if everyone agrees that the fire engine over there is primary red – or even pure pink or pure scarlet, as we get very used to naming colours where about the first thing we are presented with in life is a crayon set and the expectation we will learn to speak about these sticks of wax in socially correct fashion – then our utterances lack counterfactuality. They lack explicit dialectical structure. The path to further inquiry is blocked as we assert no difference that could make a difference. Red is red just as the chair is a chair, the dog a dog, and lasagne is what awaits on the table for lunch.

So the beetle in the box story is simply about the limits of pragmatic inquiry in general. It applies to any scientific account as science demands theories expressed in the counterfactual logic which can thus be confirmed or denied in terms of the consequences that result. Does Nature answer yes or no to the well-put hypothesis?

Consciousness is not some unique problem for science. It is as bad for particle physics when faced with the apparently possibility of there being fundamental particles with no properties at all. What can one reasonably say or do to judge such a hypothesis one way or the other. It drops out of the conversation on standard pragmatic grounds.

But here we are discussing your defence of the idea that everyday language is already quite enough for you, and thus for anyone. If ordinary folk talk about minds in heads and heads on bodies with apparently no hesitations or qualms, then that becomes the agreeable metaphysics and everyone else can shut up and bog off.

Metaphysics is booted out of philosophy. Science is respected but expected to mind its own parochial concerns. Philosophy is reserved for ... well what exactly? Logic chopping and the polemics of ethics?

So yeah. Stop fobbing people off with this trite argument that the redness of red falls out of the conversation, and thus all the counterfactually grounded explanation that leads up to the arrival at such a limit also must drop out of the conversation.

That was the part of the conversation that was in fact the large discussion worth having. It was the metaphysics and the science that had already lifted the game in an interesting way.

The SEP article on fictionalism seems relevant here:

Here is a kind of puzzle or paradox that several philosophers have stressed. On the one hand, existence questions seem hard. The philosophical question of whether there are abstract entities does not seem to admit of an easy or trivial answer. At the same time, there seem to be trivial arguments settling questions like this in the affirmative. Consider for instance the arguments, “2+2=4. So there is a number which, when added to 2, yields 4. This something is a number. So there are numbers”, and “Fido is a dog. So Fido has the property of being a dog. So there are properties.” How should one resolve this paradox? One response is: adopt fictionalism. The idea would be that in the philosophy room we do not speak fictionally, but ordinarily we do. So in the philosophy room, the question of the existence of abstract entities is hard; outside it, the question is easy. When, ordinarily, a speaker utters a sentence that semantically expresses a proposition that entails that there are numbers, what she says is accurate so long as according to the relevant fiction, there are numbers. But when she utters the same sentence in the philosophy room, she speaks literally and then what she asserts is something highly non-trivial.

Some seem to insist on the fiction, denying the sense in asking deeper questions.

What does Wittgenstein's private language argument have to do with anything we're discussing here? We have words like "pain" and "sensation" that refer to things like pain and sensation. So either a) pain and sensation are not private things or b) our words can refer to private things. But also, of course, the phrase "private things" refers to private things.

Either way, it makes no sense to try to use Wittgenstein to prove that colours are not a type of sensation, comparable in kind to pain.

But more than that, as it stands your reasoning seems to amount to nothing more than "pens are red, pens are mind-independent, therefore red is mind-independent." This argument is a non sequitur, exactly like the analagous argument "stubbing one's toe is painful, stubbing one's toe is mind-independent, therefore pain is mind-independent."

Our eyes are detecting and responding to the same wavelengths of light. We see different colours because our brains react differently to the signals sent from the eyes, producing different colour percepts, and seeing colours is the occurrence of these colour percepts.

The science is clear on this. And thankfully so, as we are working on visual cortical prostheses that use direct electrical stimulation of the visual cortex, bypassing the eyes, to hopefully allow the blind to see (and in colour).

Thanks for the effort that you put into your post but I can't connect your reply to the example I brought up in my post, I agree that subjective consistency doesn't suggest objective existence but I feel like my example wasn't really addressed. — Lionino

Your question was, as I understood it, that you get how we can doubt the redness of the ball is part of the ball but we can't doubt the roundness is part of the ball.

Is that a correct restatement?

If it is, my response is to ask what you're relying upon other than your senses to distinguish primary qualities (the roundness) from secondary ones (the redness). And the follow up is to then ask why touch is more reliable than sight.

My point being that your brain is what interprets and your mind is where the experience lies. Why must there be a direct link from what is "out there" to what is in your experience when it comes to touch but not vision.

My prior post just pointed out that the extent to which the brain could interpret and translate the data input is unlimited.

Either way, it makes no sense to try to use Wittgenstein to prove that colours are not a type of sensation, comparable in kind to pain. — Michael

I think Witt's point would be that cognition is heavily influenced by language, which in turn reflects history, culture, and biology. Lacan says something similar, that language influences what you focus on, what you ignore, and what distinctions you make.

Would you agree that knowledge of color is somewhat language dependent? Some Asian languages didn't have words to distinguish green from blue. If you use the same word for both, that might diminish your awareness of a distinction, right?

If you use the same word for both, that might diminish your awareness of a distinction, right? — frank

I can distinguish shades of red.



I can see that there are 5 different colours (or hues if you prefer), not just a single red rectangle like below:

I can distinguish shades of red. — Michael

Without looking at your sample, identity each of those shades in this picture... without any words.

I don’t have individual names for shades. What is the relevance of your question?

Without looking at your sample, identity each of those shades in this picture... without any words. — frank

I don’t need words to see that there are lighter and darker shades of red. I don’t need language to see colour at all because seeing colours does not depend on language.