Maybe Wittgenstein's approach is more fruitful, "The apple is red"... — jorndoe

Clearly more fruitful.

Because you keep asking the hard question. We don't have an answer to it.

All I am explaining is what the science shows; that pain and colour are percepts that occur when there is the appropriate brain activity; they are not mind-independent properties of knives and pens. — Michael

I ask the hard question because he keep stating that pain and color occur with appropriate brain activity. If the hard problem isn't solved then it is a logical possibility that color and pain doesnt necessarily occur with brain activity. It might occur with any type of computational process, like in a robot.

I asked if a robot can experience pain if it is informed it is damaged. You avoided the question.

If another human experiences something completely different than you when they are injured, can you say they feel pain? This is why I ask the question about what pain and color are. If someone can experience a different feeling when injured and you still qualify that as pain then why not a robot with a working memory that stores information temporarily to work out a response. What FORM does that information take in its working memory? Conciousness is a type of working memory.

So the ultimate question you need to answer is does it really matter what FORM the percep takes if it is caused by an injury and the percept is not the injury but information ABOUT the injury? Does that qualify as pain?

Does it matter what FORM the percept takes if it is caused by an interaction of reflected light with a lens and a sensory information processor?

The case you are making implies that humans and their brains are special in that they have this special power to create colors and pain when science has also shown that humans are not so special in the grand scheme of things.

Heavy emphasis of "partially." Words aren't useless. They are massively important to communicate with one another. Words are an interpretation of mental states into symbols. The mental states stay behind and the symbols do the best they can to project one's thoughts to another. Much is lost in translation. — Hanover

You keep confusing what is lost in translation with what is irrelevant to the situation. I don't need to know about how you feel about your loss to know where to find where they are buried. I don't need to know where they are buried to know how you are feeling about losing someone you love because I have lost loved ones too, so I understand what you are feeling. Why do we even have words the refer to mental states if something is lost when using them? How do you even know what is lost, if anything, without knowing the contents of another's mind when telling them about your feelings?

If I made it to the grave sight after telling me how to get there nothing was lost in translation. If I say "I understand how you feel" when you tell me how you feel nothing was lost in translation.

Let's take someone with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. They don't feel pain but they can still be injured and can still be made aware of their injury another way, e.g. by seeing their broken leg or by being told by a doctor.

So if you're trying to reduce pain to something as simple as awareness of injury then it doesn't work.

Straw man. If the information about the damage comes from tactile sensors rather than reflected light in its camera eyes, does that qualify as pain? If the robot sees its injury does it experience colors? Your mental gymnastics isn't helping the discussion progress.

If the information about the damage comes from tactile sensors rather than reflected light in its camera eyes, does that qualify as pain? — Harry Hindu

What do you mean by "information"? Are you referring to the chemical neurotransmitters like glutomate that are released and sent to the brain? They, themselves, are not pain. The experience of pain occurs when there is the appropriate neural activity in the insular and secondary somatosensory cortexes, which usually occurs in response to these neurotransmitters, but direct electrical stimulation of these cortexes without any preceding tactile sensor involvement also causes pain.

See Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Pain Processing

See also synesthesia, which seems relevant to your questions.

Is arguing about semantics that interesting? — Lionino

You know there's more at stake. Philosophy of perception is philosophy of mind, a tangle of philosophies of language, science, and some metaphysics.

Semantic externalism is one argument that can support the belief that colours exist outside the mind. But also internalists distinguish between the internal experience that you have and the internal object of the experience.

Conscious states have intentionality, i.e. they're about things. So even in case the experienced object is a construct of the brain, there's a difference between its constitutive sense and its intentionalistic sense. *

In the case of seeing the colour red, the brain constructs the experience (seeing), but doesn't construct the colour, it doesn't have to, since the colour emerges from the brain's encounter with the external state of affairs (light, cone- ells etc). Hence the experience is direct.

*) edit

Except when we say that the pen is red we are not (ordinarily) saying that the pen has a surface layer of atoms that reflects light with a wavelength of ~700nm. — Michael

Nor are we saying that it doesn't, which is what you seem to falsely believe. We mean that the pen has a property of redness, and the specialist is simply explaining what that property is constituted by (i.e. it is constituted by light reflection of a certain wavelength).

e.g. when we explain variations in colour perception, such that some see a white and gold dress and some see a black and blue dress — Michael

Explaining variations in color perception and predicating redness of a pen are two very different things, and the former is much less common. Confusing the two leads to problems.

the colours they see are mental percepts — Michael

No they're not. Were you to give an argument for such a position it would be invalid. If I am 100 feet away from the Statue of Liberty and you are a mile away from the Statue of Liberty, the size of the Statue will appear different to each of us, but it does not follow that we are merely seeing a percept.

If we were only seeing our own percepts then we would not be able to read posts on TPF:

1. If the black and white colors on TPF did not exist, then I would not be able to read posts.
2. But I can read posts.
3. Therefore, the black and white colors on TPF do exist. — Leontiskos

---

There is one side insisting that red is the experience that we have of red and the other side that red is the thing that causes the experience, for several pages now. — Lionino

What I find remarkable is the claim which says that it is science which proves that red is a "color percept" and nothing else. It is that magical appeal to "The Science" which keeps cropping up all over public discourse.

We mean that the pen has a property of redness, and the specialist is simply explaining what that property is constituted by (i.e. it is constituted by light reflection of a certain wavelength). — Leontiskos

That's not the sense of redness that is our ordinary, everyday conception of colour. Our ordinary, everyday conception of colour is that of the mental percepts that light stimulating the eyes causes to occur, and that also occurs in dreams and hallucinations and synesthesia, and that allows us to understand what it means for some people to see this dress as white and gold and others as black and blue.

So you want to say something like "the pen is red, but not actually red". This is enough to convince me that your account is mistaken. And shows well the sorts of word games you will play in your metaphysics. — Banno

I just read Myles Burnyeat's, "The sceptic in his place and time," (quoted here). His topic is "insulation": that whereby one insulates philosophical claims from everyday claims and everyday claims from philosophical claims. I think Michael is the premiere representative of insulation on TPF.

In the final section of his article Burnyeat looks at the history, and concludes that insulation did not emerge with Pyrrhonism, Descartes, Hume, or Berkeley.* These all contributed in paving the way towards insulation, but they did not hold it. It was only with Kant that true insulation finally came onto the scene.

Which brings us, as many will have foreseen, to Kant. It was Kant who persuaded philosophy that one can be, simultaneously and without contradiction, an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. That is, it was Kant who gave us the idea that there is a way of saying the same sort of thing as real live sceptics like Aenesidemus used to say, namely, ‘The knowing subject contributes to what is known,’ which nevertheless does not impugn the objectivity of the judgements in which the knowledge is expressed. Where Aenesidemus would cite the empirical factors (jaundice and the like) which obstruct objective knowledge, the Kantian principle that objects have to conform to our understanding is designed to show that our judgements are validated, not impugned, by the contribution of the knowing mind. But Kant can make this claim, famously difficult as it is, only because in his philosophy the pre-supposition link is well and truly broken. ‘The stove is warm,’ taken empirically, implies no philosophical view at the transcendental level where from now on the philosophical battle will be fought. Empirical realism is invulnerable to scepticism and compatible with transcendental idealism.47

In this way, with the aid of his distinction of levels (insulation de iure), Kant thought to refute scepticism once and for all. The effect, however, was that scepticism itself moved upstairs to the transcendental level. — Burnyeat, The sceptic in his place and time, pp. 343-4

* I think Burnyeat overlooks the "two truth theory" of the Medieval period, which was almost certainly a precursor of insulation.

I just read Myles Burnyeat's, "The sceptic in his place and time," (quoted here). His topic is "insulation": that whereby one insulates philosophical claims from everyday claims and everyday claims from philosophical claims. I think Michael is the premiere representative of insulation on TPF. — Leontiskos

This is no longer a matter of philosophy. Science has solved the problem. All I am doing here is explaining what the science shows to those who persist in committing to armchair theorizing.

Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway

There is no color in light. Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus. This distinction is critical for understanding neural representations, which must transition from a representation of a physical retinal image to a mental construct for what we see. Here, we dissociated the physical stimulus from the color seen by using an approach that causes changes in color without altering the light stimulus. We found a transition from a neural representation for retinal light stimulation, in early stages of the visual pathway (V1 and V2), to a representation corresponding to the color experienced at higher levels (V4 and VO1).

Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology

People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive.

Color

One of the major problems with color has to do with fitting what we seem to know about colors into what science (not only physics but the science of color vision) tells us about physical bodies and their qualities. It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess. Oceans and skies are not blue in the way that we naively think, nor are apples red (nor green). Colors of that kind, it is believed, have no place in the physical account of the world that has developed from the sixteenth century to this century.

...

Physicists who have subscribed to this doctrine include the luminaries: Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, Newton, Thomas Young, Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz. Maxwell, for example, wrote:

"It seems almost a truism to say that color is a sensation; and yet Young, by honestly recognizing this elementary truth, established the first consistent theory of color. (Maxwell 1871: 13 [1970: 75])"

This combination of eliminativism—the view that physical objects do not have colors, at least in a crucial sense—and subjectivism—the view that color is a subjective quality—is not merely of historical interest. It is held by many contemporary experts and authorities on color, e.g., Zeki 1983, Land 1983, and Kuehni 1997.

That's not the sense of redness that is our ordinary, everyday conception of colour. — Michael

I don't think you managed to read my post.

Our ordinary, everyday conception of colour is that of the mental percepts that light stimulating the eyes causes to occur — Michael

When someone says, "This pen is red," they are not saying, "This pen accompanies a mental percept of 'red'." "Red" does does not denote a mental percept. Try a dictionary, for once.

All I am doing here is explaining what the science shows... — Michael

All you are doing is being confused by the science. Your inference is that because the sight of red requires a form of mental processing, therefore 'red' signifies a percept and not a property. This is just more bad philosophy; an invalid argument.

The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive.

Again, it does not follow that colors denote percepts.

How can I experience colour!? What if I never experienced red colour, and you asked me for a red pen? I would feel a big feeling of anxiety in my chest because I would not know what to hand you. But I know that pens are for writing. Why do you want it red? Choosy boy. — javi2541997

Yes, this is a profound issue with claiming Red is 'out there'. If it were, the description would pick it out from the world. But it doesn't. It picks it out of experiences which is why we don't all agree on what Red is (or, at least, what shades come under the banner). If Red is only in the experience, then your anxiety is, while misplaced imo, reasonable. The problem of other minds rears it's head...
But, I did note somewhere (i think anyway lol), that Red as 'out there' is optimal, in the sense that it allows us to actually refer to it without consistent skepticism. Every now and then something comes aong with the blue/black white/gold dress phenomenon though, and somewhat brings this to light.

I also had a realization last night: My right eye is significantly worse than my left. It cannot perceive colours as brightly or as saturated as my left eye, and it also perceives objects as smaller than does my left eye.

Which one is 'correct'? Is 'worse' the right word? I have no idea, but i like the bright saturation of my left eye more. But it feels artificial now, like saturation level on a television.

There is no external red. At best, there is an external object that elicits a phenomenal state of red. Just like pain. There is no external pain. At best, there is an external object that elicits pain. — Hanover

Color (Merriam-Webster)
1a. a phenomenon of light (such as red, brown, pink, or gray) or visual perception that enables one to differentiate otherwise identical objects

Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? (Note that your word "elicits" already tells us that there is an external basis for differing color perceptions.)

has a property of redness — Leontiskos

That is definitely not what "this pen is Red" means, or what a specialist is explaining. The specialist explains that Redness doesn't reside in the pen - redness is an experience triggered by the properties of the pen. The is how most experiences work. Why would colour be different? Joy isn't in a dog, or a child. It is triggered in me by the properties in those things. Similarly with satisfaction due to say symmetry. The symmetry isn't satisfying - my mind is satisfied by the properties instantiated in the symmetry. Symmetry is a good example, because we're usually visually fooled into the experience of satisfaction by symmetry. Actually symmetry is very rare in the world, but our minds 'create' the experience when triggered by certain external properties. They can't refer to the experience - they are the basis for it. Are we trying to create a circular relationship?

Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? — Leontiskos

It's neither. THe difference in teh pens is their respectively ability to reflect wavelengths of light. Unless you're equating the visual experience of Red as a 1:1 match with 430 THz of light, I'm unsure what's being posited... And if that is being posited it may be worth leaving off this discussion.

If the information about the damage comes from tactile sensors rather than reflected light in its camera eyes, does that qualify as pain? — Harry Hindu

What do you mean by "information"? Are you referring to the chemical neurotransmitters like glutomate that are released and sent to the brain? They, themselves, are not pain. The experience of pain occurs when there is the appropriate neural activity in the insular and secondary somatosensory cortexes, which usually occurs in response to these neurotransmitters, but direct electrical stimulation of these cortexes without any preceding tactile sensor involvement also causes pain. — Michael

What I mean by information is the form pain takes and the form colors take and the form smells and tastes and sounds take in your consciousness. What I mean by information is the aboutness that your sensory impressions take in that your sensory impressions are not the pen or the injury, but ABOUT the pen and the injury. When you feel pain are you not informed that you have an injury? When you see the red of the apple are you not informed that the apple is ripe? You can be informed about being injured in other ways by sight as you pointed out, but the sensory impression you experience is dependent upon the type of sense that is being used - your nerve endings in your skin vs your eyes.

I should point out that when I stub my toe, I feel the pain in my toe, not my head. I don't confuse a stubbed toe with a headache. That is another point in that our senses also provide information about location relative the brain. The world appears located relative to the eyes, but we know that the world is not located relative to the eyes. The way the visual field is displayed - the form the visual information takes - as the world located relative to the eyes is what gives it the "first-person" feel.

I should point out that when I stub my toe, I feel the pain in my toe, not my head. — Harry Hindu

No, you don't. You feel the pain in your mind. Pain doesn't obtain in the cells of your toe. This kind of confusion is not unsurprising, or without its reasons, but is clearly wrong. A toe does not feel pain without a mind.

Then how do you not confuse a stubbed toe with a headache? There is an feeling of a location that the pain resides. What I am saying is that the relative location is information the same way that your visual depth is information that informs you of the distance of objects relative to your eyes. Our senses even provide a level of fault tolerance where I can feel the pen where I see it.

‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’ would be almost too much for a Pyrrhonist to swallow. — Post on Indirect Realism

...The idea here seems to be that we first state that the pen is red, and then we learn something about the way the eye or the mind processes color, and we then conclude that our statement must have been false. This is a very odd idea. It involves the strange notion that our statement must have been opposed to what we went on to learn.

I'm not sure what "aboutness" has to do with anything being discussed here. This history textbook is about Hitler, but it isn't Hitler; it's bound pieces of paper with ink writing.

Why do we even have words the refer to mental states if something is lost when using them? — Harry Hindu

I don't understand the reasoning behind this question. You're asking why speak at all if our speech isn't 100% accurate and complete in terms of what it conveys? My response would be because knowing something is better than knowing nothing. Why did we have black and white photography before color photography came out? Because something is better than nothing. And, I'd say, I don't labor with the belief that current color photography is 100% accurate in what it depicts. It's 2 dimensional, for example.

As in my example earlier of the air traffic controller looking at blips on his radar screen. No one believes that airplanes are blips, but we can all see the value in having him look at those blips.

If I made it to the grave sight after telling me how to get there nothing was lost in translation. If I say "I understand how you feel" when you tell me how you feel nothing was lost in translation. — Harry Hindu

Genesis 1:2

English Standard Version: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."

New Revised Standard: "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters."

Good News Translation: "the earth was formless and desolate. The raging ocean that covered everything was engulfed in total darkness, and the Spirit of God was moving over the water."

Septuagine Bible w/Apocrypha: "But the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the water."

Will the real Genesis 1:2 please stand up? That is, the one where nothing gets lost in translation.

Then how do you not confuse a stubbed toe with a headache? — Harry Hindu

The same way you don't confuse the car on your left from the car on your right: the direction of stimulation is extremely influential on how we perceive the stimulus. Throwing one's voice is a good example of where this is writ large - despite there being no voice coming from the direction one perceives (when on the receiving end!) - that is what one perceives. We can even be tricked about hte direction stimulus is coming from. Not being able to locate an itch is another perfect example. "I can't put my finger on it" has developed out of this experiential norm.

On-point to your comment, your internal depth perception is what creates the experience of distance - not the distance itself. It is your mind interpreting it which is why perspective can get really fucked up really quickly in the right physical circumstances. The mind does what it thinks it should be doing. It is not veridical in the philosophical sense.

I should say, if your argument is in line with Banno's hand-waving idea that we can somehow magically see things veridically, despite that being in direct contradiction of hte science of perception, I'm unsure we'll get far - which si fine, just want to avoid you wasting your time here if so.

Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? (Note that your word "elicits" already tells us that there is an external basis for differing color perceptions.) — Leontiskos

Consider 2 sets of computer code, one that projects an image of a white pen on the screen and a second that projects a red pen on the screen. Which code is white?

I should point out that when I stub my toe, I feel the pain in my toe, not my head — Harry Hindu

That's a cool trick the nervous system does. Pain is handled by a special neuron called a nociceptor. People who have chronic pain develop nervous superhighways so that any pain stimulus in the area jumps onto the same path. In other words, they lose the ability to correctly locate the pain. That problem can eventually progress until they have what's call "generalization" where they can't locate pain at all. It's just everywhere.

:up:

Consider 2 sets of computer code, one that projects an image of a white pen on the screen and a second that projects a red pen on the screen. Which code is white? — Hanover

Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code.

Do you think that pens do not really exist, and the mind is just projecting them? That there is no difference between a dream or a hallucination and reality?

See:

The idea here seems to be that we first state that the pen is red, and then we learn something about the way the eye or the mind processes color, and we then conclude that our statement must have been false. This is a very odd idea. It involves the strange notion that our statement must have been opposed to what we went on to learn. — Leontiskos

Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code. — Leontiskos

While i understand that you've removed what was a problematic formulation, this boils down to the same problem.

What is making that image white? Is it that "it reflects xxxx under normal circumstances"? Well, no. It is the light itself... So, the question is weirder now.
But for either the light, or a reflective surface of X property/ies, normativity is doing a lot of work there, and it also does not describe what we're trying to describe in any way. I find this a real problem. It may simply be that colours cannot be described other than by way of examples being generalised.

Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code. — Leontiskos

In this analogy, the code is the noumena and the color is the phenomenal. The point being that there is no reason to claim any property on the noumenal. The pen and the perception of the pen need bear no relationship to one another.

Do you think that pens do not really exist, and the mind is just projecting them? That there is no difference between a dream or a hallucination and reality? — Leontiskos

I've not argued idealism, but I do wonder what can be said of the reality that realists speak of.

I'm not sure what "aboutness" has to do with anything being discussed here. — Michael

You're not discussing what the rest of us are discussing: perception, under General philosophy. But you claim the topic is not philosophical, hence your disregard for argument and reference to the authority of science..But that's not so scientific either.

Regarding aboutness, see Intentionality

In this analogy, the code is the noumena and the color is the phenomenal. — Hanover

But I am not a Kantian. I do not believe we can know about things that we cannot know (noumena).

The point being that there is no reason to claim any property on the noumenal. The pen and the perception of the pen need bear no relationship to one another. — Hanover

But even here your example fails, because just as there are distinguishing properties of red and white pens, so too are there distinguishing properties of red and white images, and also distinguishing properties of the two sets of code that generates those different images.

If the same set of code produced the two different images then your example would aid you; but it doesn't. There is absolutely no evidence for saying that there is nothing external about red, and all evidence to the contrary. Two pens which are alike in every way except color have different external properties that account for their different colors. Even Michael would presumably agree that the two pens possess different properties, and that it is precisely the differing external properties that result in our differing color percepts.