What is making that image white? Is it that "it reflects xxxx under normal circumstances"? If so, 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. — AmadeusD

I'd say that the statement, "This pen is red," is opaque, in some sense simple or sui generis. It's not a scientific statement; it's not an anti-scientific statement; it's not a statement about light reflection, etc. The mistaken assumption that the statement is somehow reducible is leading to strange inferences in light of scientific findings.

For example, "By that statement you were saying that 'red' in no way involves the reflection of light, and so now we know you were wrong." The simple answer is, "No, the statement is not saying that 'red' in no way involves the reflection of light." The revisionists want to say that it is wrong to call the pen red, but they have no clear sense of why or how it is supposed to be wrong. ...And the quasi-idealist attempt to say that everything relating to redness is in the mind, and nothing relating to redness is in the pen, is a desperation attempt which surely cannot stand.

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

I don't think we can know about things we cannot know either. That's what it means to be noumenal.

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. — Leontiskos

The red is what you perceive in your mind. It is that phenomenal state. So, look at an apple and the red you perceive is the red.

The word "red" is what I type, but it is not my fingers moving. It is the letters R - E - D. The input causes the output, but the input isn't the output.

That there is an object X that causes you to see red and an object Y that causes you to see white doesn't mean that X is red and Y is white. It's for that reason we don't say my fingers moving are the word "red."

If you want to say that X and Y are different to the extent one makes you see red and one white, that's fine, but that doesn't mean X is red, where "is" means "to be." X is a bunch of electronic impulses in the computer code example and it doesn't look red. It looks like code, or maybe just computer parts.

my mind creates a red experience for me in response to a(in this case, a very specific) frequency of light reflected of a cooked sugar surface. It isn't in the Skittle. — AmadeusD

So, you and Michael are claiming that the properties/features/physical characteristics regardng the surface layer of red pens cause us to see color, and the color is nothing more than a mental event/phenomena.

Things reflecting certain ranges of the visible spectrum cause us to see red, or green, or violet. That seeing of color, according to you, is nothing but a mental phenomena.

Rather than claim that the pen is reflecting the red part of the visible spectrum causing us to see red, you'd rather say that there is no red part of the visible spectrum, rather there are certain ranges that cause us to see red.

Is that about right?

I understand what intentionality is. I don't understand what intentionality has to do with the discussion we're having.

A book is about a person, but the properties of the book are not the properties of the person. Experience might be about (or of) some distal object, but the properties of the experience are not the properties of the distal object.

Experience has colour properties. These colour properties might "represent" or "stand for" properties of distal objects (e.g. a surface that reflects light of certain wavelengths), but they are nonetheless distinct entities, and it is the colour properties of experience that constitute our ordinary, everyday understanding of colours. We just often naively assume that the colour properties of the experience are the properties of the distal object. This is what physics and the neuroscience of perception has proven false.

The mistaken assumption that the statement is somehow reducible is leading to strange inferences in light of scientific findings. — Leontiskos

Agreed. But the semiotic position would be that "red" is reducible to some kind of sign relation we have with the world.

This ought to help clarify the stakes. The brain evolved to make sense or its world in terms that increased a species fitness. So there is no reason to think red exists as part of some wavelength frequency detection device.

But given that the brain's colour centre is sited right in the shape and contour decoding path of the object recognition region area, there is reason to believe that hue discrimination is all about the ecologically-relevant function of making shaped objects pop out of their confused surroundings.

Red is a useful sign that here is an object that now sticks out like a sore thumb as it is covered by a surface with a rather narrow reflectance bandwidth. Everything around it is kind of green, because well that is a sign that plants have their own evolutionarily optimal setting for the photopigments used in photosynthesis. And then red is the natural contrast that plants would used to signal the ripe fruit they want dispersing.

So all qualia ought to be reducible in this ecologically semiotic fashion. The logic should be clear from the environments we evolve in. Organisms are engaged in sign relations with each other, with other organisms, and with a world in terms of all its pressing threats and urgings.

This is why physics doesn't answer the crucial question. And nor does treating the signs as world-independently real – actual idealistic qualia.

But a science of sign relations is possible. And that reduces what we sense and feel to ecological and evolutionary explanations.

We can, and do, use the phrase "red part of the visible spectrum" to mean "620-750nm light". Pens do reflect 620-750nm light, and so we can, and do, say that pens reflect the red part of the visible spectrum of light.

But this isn't our ordinary conception of the colour red. Our ordinary conception of the colour red is that of the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur. This is how we can make sense of coloured dreams and hallucinations, of synesthesia, of variations in colour perception (such as the dress), and of scientific studies like this.

The problem is when someone argues for something like naive colour realism/realist colour primitivism, or that there is a "correct" way for an object that reflects 620-750nm light to look. These views do not accept that the percept is a percept, instead thinking it a mind-independent property of the pen (or at least to resemble such a property). And these views are contradicted by physics and the neuroscience of perception.

We can, and do, use the phrase "red part of the visible spectrum" to mean "620-750nm light". Pens do reflect 620-750nm light, and so we can, and do, say that pens reflect the red part of the visible spectrum of light.

But this isn't our ordinary conception of the colour red. Our ordinary conception of the colour red is that of the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur. This is how we can make sense of coloured dreams and hallucinations, of synesthesia, of variations in colour perception (such as the dress), and of scientific studies like this. — Michael

Is that the only way to make sense of those things mentioned?

What's the difference between seeing red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur?

Rather than claim that the pen is reflecting the red part of the visible spectrum causing us to see red, you'd rather say that there is no red part of the visible spectrum, rather there are certain ranges that cause us to see red. — creativesoul

This makes sense to me, yes. It seems a pretty good description of what's actually happening rather than some formulation of "how i think of it". I'm not suggesting you are claiming one or the other here, just clarifying.
If red is just a part of the light spectrum (x to x frequencies) that's fine - but it means our epxerience of it is something else. If we're just singularly referring to different things, I'm unsure there's a solution other htan to adjust the language to note that. Though, to my mind, that's the case. The numbers which represent the range on the spectrum are what they are. The experience which is (usually, under 'normal' conditions) triggered by objects which reflect that range can't be the same thing. So, personally, i have no issue with things how they are - they seem to encapsulate the way i think about it as well. Though, this is going to obviously influence how much weight i put on either side of the coin.

If red is just a part of the light spectrum (x to x frequencies) that's fine — AmadeusD

Well. If red is part of the light spectrum, and certain things reflect that range, and we're capable of detecting that range, that's how we see red things. They would be reflecting that range even if we were not looking. That seems a problem for the view I've been reading from Michael, and I presumed(perhaps mistakenly?) you're in agreement with his view as shared here in this thread.

If red is part of the light spectrum, and red is a color, then light has/is color. That's a problem for Michael.

Sure seeing a red pen is not equivalent to a red pen. Moreover, seeing red is not equivalent to red. That's a problem as well.

We can, and do, use the phrase "red part of the visible spectrum" to mean "620-750nm light". Pens do reflect 620-750nm light, and so we can, and do, say that pens reflect the red part of the visible spectrum of light. — Michael

Then you're equivocating. Earlier you've put forth the claim that light has no color. The visible spectrum is light. Red is a color.

Color, according to you, is a mental percept... nothing more. The visible spectrum is not.

I think I've seen enough here. Thanks for the interesting discussion/thoughts.

Be well.

Well. If red is part of the light spectrum, and certain things reflect that range, and we're capable of detecting that range, that's how we see red things. light — creativesoul

This struck-out seems an empirical correction, to me. It's significant to how we conceptualise, though.

They would be reflecting that range even if we were not looking. — creativesoul

They would. And if you want to say they are still Red, in the absence of experience, I then require something else to refer to the experience. Seems simple enough to me... They clearly are not the same thing, so we shouldn't refer to them by the same term. I would not want to say they are Red, in that context at least and possibly, at all (depending on whether or not I decide on some stringent version of this that I like better than others (such as a new word for stretches of the light-spectrum that aren't number ranges)).

I presume you're in agreement with his view as shared here in this thread. — creativesoul

I'm not sure we're totally aligned, but I think i'm much closer to his position than others trying to (ironically, given the post above this) equivocate between a spectrum of light, and a mental experience.

Sure seeing a red pen is not equivalent to a red pen. Moreover, seeing red is not equivalent to red. <-----that's a problem as well. — creativesoul

In the Indirect Realism thread, I noted this issue (that I think is linguistic) and posited a better form(in my opinion):

We look at objects;
We perceive the reflected/refracted/whatever light;
We see the images our mind puts together for us to make sense of the first two.

This seems to adequately delineate what i think are three distinct aspects of what we colloquially refer to as "seeing a Red pen" (content arbitrary - we're just using that example in the exchange).

The red is what you perceive in your mind. It is that phenomenal state. — Hanover

Says who? Not the dictionary or common use. Certainly red is perceived by the mind, and certainly we have phenomenal experiences that include red-perceptions, but it does not follow from any of this that red is nothing more than a color percept, a purely subjective experience.

That there is an object X that causes you to see red and an object Y that causes you to see white doesn't mean that X is red and Y is white. — Hanover

I think it does. Is there any real argument to the contrary?

The base question here asks what 'red' means in the phrase, "This pen is red." The phrase means something like, "This pen possesses the color-property we call 'red'." 'Red' is a color-property of visual objects. I don't know how much more can be said about it.

Now you want to say that after we learn that the redness of the pen results from the manner in which the pen reflects light, we have somehow invalidated this claim. What is your actual argument for why the claim is invalidated? Is there a real argument here?

It's for that reason we don't say my fingers moving are the word "red." — Hanover

'Red' is a sign, and the typing of your fingers are the efficient cause of that sign. The difference between the creation of a sign and the sign is very different from the difference between a red object and the stimulation of the eye which beholds it.

If you want to say that X and Y are different to the extent one makes you see red and one white, that's fine, but that doesn't mean X is red, where "is" means "to be." — Hanover

What do you say it would mean for X to be red? If you have no answer to this question then your claims here are not meaningful.

X is a bunch of electronic impulses in the computer code example and it doesn't look red. It looks like code, or maybe just computer parts. — Hanover

In the code example you are confusing the code with the LCD output that it produces. The code isn't white, but the LCD output is.

There is something Matrix-esque occurring here. "Hey dude, the apple you are eating isn't real, it's just code. It's the code that's real!" We could argue about whether this claim holds good in The Matrix, but there is the simpler route of noting that we do not live in The Matrix. Pens are not computer code. Is the claim about wavelengths more real than the color-claim? Only if we hold to some cousin of Scientism. But the more pertinent question asks why we are supposed to think that the two claims are even opposed.

The problem is when someone argues for something like naive colour realism/realist colour primitivism, or that there is a "correct" way for an object that reflects 620-750nm light to look. These views do not accept that the percept is a percept, instead thinking it a mind-independent property of the pen (or at least to resemble such a property). And these views are contradicted by physics and the neuroscience of perception. — Michael

Suppose you stopped appealing to scientific studies that do not seem to support the points you think they do. Would there be any arguments for your position? Where are the real arguments to be found?

Suppose that apokrisis is right that the ability to see fruit is bound up with the ability to distinguish the red range. In that case there is something normative or "correct" about the fruit-eater's ability to distinguish the red range. Or that green relates to the photopigments used in photosynthesis, and is therefore related to sunlight, the sunlight which is also normative for our color perception?

The point here is that the inference to the conclusion that there is nothing appropriate about the human ability to distinguish color is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the science. I'm guessing there is no sound scientific argument with the conclusion, "...Therefore, color perception is purely arbitrary and subjectivistic." You are claiming to know things that you do not know. The colors in nature are not necessarily arbitrary, and our perception of them therefore need not be arbitrary either.

Agreed. But the semiotic position would be that "red" is reducible to some kind of sign relation we have with the world. — apokrisis

True, and I don't deny that.

This ought to help clarify the stakes. The brain evolved to make sense or its world in terms that increased a species fitness. So there is no reason to think red exists as part of some wavelength frequency detection device. — apokrisis

Right. One can think of color along the lines of a number of different measures, but I see nothing special about the wavelength frequency approach. It is a quantitative measure relating to the visual operation, but need not be the center of gravity for sight or color.

But given that the brain's colour centre is sited right in the shape and contour decoding path of the object recognition region area, there is reason to believe that hue discrimination is all about the ecologically-relevant function of making shaped objects pop out of their confused surroundings. — apokrisis

This is how I tend to think of color, and it is how many of the ancient philosophers thought of color (i.e. color is the basis of shape).

Red is a useful sign that here is an object that now sticks out like a sore thumb as it is covered by a surface with a rather narrow reflectance bandwidth. Everything around it is kind of green, because well that is a sign that plants have their own evolutionarily optimal setting for the photopigments used in photosynthesis. And then red is the natural contrast that plants would used to signal the ripe fruit they want dispersing. — apokrisis

Interesting. I had been thinking about the green photopigment, but not the red of fruit.

So all qualia ought to be reducible in this ecologically semiotic fashion. The logic should be clear from the environments we evolve in. Organisms are engaged in sign relations with each other, with other organisms, and with a world in terms of all its pressing threats and urgings.

This is why physics doesn't answer the crucial question. And nor does treating the signs as world-independently real – actual idealistic qualia. — apokrisis

These are good points and arguments.

I want to say that the person devoted to some variety of Scientism labors under a strong fact-value distinction and claims that any sort of normative or value-laden predication must be false, and that the phenomena in question are then ultimately arbitrary. They appeal to "the science" to support this, in a circular fashion. I don't think these arguments are valid, but once a teleological reality is introduced as part of the genetic cause of the phenomena in question, the conclusion of the invalid argument is actually shown to be false. For example, a fixation on the quantitative notion of wavelength frequency can lead one to the conclusion that colors are arbitrary, but then the teleology of an ecological-evolutionary basis for both the faculty and objects of sight comes in to explain why colors are not arbitrary. (Regarding the faculty of sight, one could also consult the use of different colors in advertising.)

I think this is all well and good. Bona fide anti-teleological arguments are invalid, or at least inductive and to that extent incomplete. Ecological and evolutionary arguments can show why things like color are not arbitrary. But then as a theist I hold to a more fundamental teleological reality, which also points towards a diverse and multifaceted world. Ergo: I am not committed to the idea that the ecological-evolutionary explanation is the complete explanation. Perhaps alternative analyses will simultaneously hold true in the future.

Put differently, there is the thesis that it is arbitrary that blood and fruit are red, that leaves are green, and that the sun produces the color of light that it does. According to this thesis, it could equally be just the opposite. I don't see this as a scientific thesis, and I'm not even convinced it is a falsifiable thesis. At best we have no evidence for or against such an unqualified thesis, nor for any contrary thesis that operates at such a high metaphysical level. One could reasonably say that we have no evidence against such a thesis, so long as they also admit that we have no evidence for such a thesis. It is a non-scientific question. This is why I distrust the newspaper headline, "Science proves color is arbitrary!" (Not that you are saying this - the ecological/evolutionary argument goes far to show that color has a strong contextual significance. But the simple invalidity is also worth noting, even before falsification.)

Here's the initial question:

Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?” — Mp202020

And here is my initial answer:

If "red" is just in your mind, when you ask for a red pen, how is it that the person you are asking hands you what you want? — Banno

and then:

If you ask for a red pen and are indeed usually handed a red pen, then red is not just in your mind; at the least it is also in the mind of the other person.

But also, the red pen satisfies both you and your helper. We agree that the pen is red, so "red" belongs to pens as well as to minds.

So there is something odd about claiming red is no more than a perception. — Banno

I've since added that there is nothing in the physiological accounts offered hereabouts that is contrary to this, apart from the conclusion "Color is in the perceiver..." (Kim et al)

What is being rejected here is not the physiology. What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives.

The quote from Kim et al continues: "Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus." Kim goes on: "The present study dissociated the perceptual domain of color experience from the physical domain of chromatic stimulation at each stage of cortical processing by using a switch rivalry paradigm that caused the color percept to vary over time without changing the retinal stimulation." Good stuff. Speaking roughly they claim to have separated the visual stimulus from the reported colour. Not all that surprising. Such experiments focus acutely on the physiology, and in so doing ignore the wider story.

And that's the main point here - that the place of colour in our wider world and life is not captured by calling it "subjective" or that colour is nothing but "mental percepts".

I'll again invite folk to have at least a cursory look at the Stanford entry on Colour, if only to note how long it is, and the sheer number of differing views on display. "There has been a strong resistance among philosophers, both to the Eliminativist tendency within the scientific tradition, and the related subjectivism." Colour is a much broader topic than can be explained by elimination or subjectivism.

What is being rejected here is not the physiology. What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives. — Banno

No, it doesn't do that at all and that's also entirely irrelevant to what is, at base, an empirical question. Is a wavelength of light the colour we perceive, when we don't perceive it?

Obviously not. Additionally, several physiological descriptions of light and sight, coupled with the knows facts of perception, fly entirely in the face of your position including those provided by Michael [url=http:// ]here[/url]

You're obviously free to reject them, but there is an extremely steep uphill battle for anyone claiming the experience of red is the wavlength of light which triggered it. To such a degree that I would call you Sisyphus.

I want to say that the person devoted to some variety of Scientism labors under a strong fact-value distinction and claims that any sort of normative or value-laden predication must be false, and that the phenomena in question are then ultimately arbitrary. — Leontiskos

Agreed. And an excellent definition of Scientism. Semiosis aims to be a science of meaning. And so it assumes that anything we value as an idea or habit must have pragmatic value as "a way of life". Even if it doesn't meet the approval of Scientism.

But as I argued earlier, semiosis is balanced precariously between idealism and realism. It is having to make its own case as something beyond either of those two monisms. The thing that is different in its triadic structuralism.

My bold claim is just how quickly this project has been progressing these past 50 years.

Ecological and evolutionary arguments can show why things like color are not arbitrary. But then as a theist I hold to a more fundamental teleological reality, which also points towards a diverse and multifaceted world. — Leontiskos

OK, theism would be our sticking point then. I doubt I could have had a more atheistic upbringing. :smile:

But pursuing that line would be futile unless you were defending some point where a deity must intrude into the workings of nature. If God is unnecessary for consciousness, fine feelings, or the Platonic necessity of mathematical patterns, then where is His role in causality?

Natural philosophy can push the need for divine cause pretty much completely out of the picture. Especially if even the Cosmos is a Big Bang evolutionary story – the telic inevitability that comes with it describing a natural thermodynamic arc of an ultimately hot and small event falling endlessly into a heat sink – a Heat Death just as ultimate – of its own creation.

Once the entire history of the Universe is reduced to the dialectical simplicity of a "great inversion" – the hot/small halving and doubling its way to the cold/large – then any divine intervention or finality is really pushed to the fringe. Efficient and final cause are now the start and finish line of the one larger "motion" of a mutualised symmetry breaking.

The Planckscale as the supposed efficient cause – the triggering quantum event – is also just as much the final cause in that it is indeed as hot or energy dense as it is spatiotemporally small. And the same applies at the Heat Death when the Planckscale is just inverted to become 1/Planckscale. The de Sitter vacuum state of being as large as it is cold and devoid of energetic potency.

So all causality appears to be wrapped up in this physics. It is pure internalism. No divine hand needed either to light the blue touch paper, nor call time in a final judgement.

Of course Scientism struggles to articulate this as a story of the Big Bang because it is so bad at recognising final cause. The principle of least action and action at a distance are still a bit embarrassing to talk about, even if they are essential to normal physics.

But Natural Philosophy encourages the idea that the Cosmos is a Darwinian event, and even a structualist story – in particular, a dissipative structure story. And I like the idea that pansemiosis is another way of labelling the physics of dissipative structure. Although it responds just as well to other labels like systems science, infodynamics, hierarchy theory. Plenty of folk quietly feeling the same elephant.

But anyway, that would be my next challenge. Where does any divine cause seem needed in a Cosmos that keeps seeming to be explained in the terms of a self-organising structure of relations?

If it can be shown that the Cosmos is not just some random thermal event, but instead the self-organising story of a world managing to exist because it constructs the very heat sink upon which its existence is contingent, well where is even a God of the gaps a necessary character in the collective narrative?

What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives. — Banno

And the problem here is this bogus notion of "our everyday lives". As humans we are semiotically organised across at least four levels of reality encoding. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. At least four levels of "language" are involved in constructing our "everyday mentality".

So much is assumed by this idea of there actually being this thing of our "everyday lives". It reeks of the social privilege that it claims to transcend.

What's the difference between seeing red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur? — creativesoul

Nothing.

What is being rejected here is not the physiology. What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives. — Banno

But the question under consideration isn't "what are all the ways that we use colour terms in our everyday lives?".

Rather, we are using the word "colour" to refer to something in particular and are asking what that thing is. Both the naive colour realist (which is the "common sense" position) and the colour eliminativist/subjectivist are using the word "colour" to refer to the same thing; that sui generis, simple, qualitative appearance. The naive colour realist just falsely claims that this thing isn't a percept but a mind-independent property of material bodies.

As a comparison, when we ask what the Morning Star is we are referring to a planet and are asking what it is (not knowing that we are referring to a planet and not a star). We don't respond to such a question by arguing that the term "Morning Star" is also used to refer to the archangel Lucifer.

What's the difference between seeing red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur?
— creativesoul

Nothing — Michael

And what's the difference between hallucinating red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur?

Or between dreaming red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur?

I understand what intentionality is. ...
Experience might be about (or of) some distal object, but the properties of the experience are not the properties of the distal object. — Michael

No-one says that the word 'red' has the properties of the distal colour that it refers to.

Evidently, you don't understand intentionality.

The intentionality of perception means that there's a difference between the experience that you have, and what that experience is about. Even if nothing is seen and you only remember or imagine a colour. You conflate these two senses in your blind marketing of percepts.

And what's the difference between hallucinating red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur?

Or between dreaming red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur? — creativesoul

Nothing.

Hallucinations, dreams, and non-hallucinatory waking experiences all involve neural activity in the visual cortex, producing colour percepts.

The intentionality of perception means that there's a difference between the experience that you have, and what that experience is about. — jkop

I know. And colours, as ordinarily understood, are properties of the experience, not properties of what the experience is about. The naive colour realist commits a mistake in thinking these experience properties to be distal object properties.

That's precisely why physicists and neuroscientists say such things as "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."

your internal depth perception is what creates the experience of distance — AmadeusD

What creates the depth perception of pain inside your lungs instead of a pain inside your bowels?

I know. And colours, as ordinarily understood, are properties of the experience, — Michael

Evidently, you don't know. :roll:

One does not see the properties of one's own seeing, but the properties of what the seeing is about, the colour.

One does not see the properties of one's own seeing, but the properties of what the seeing is about, the colour. — jkop

I see colours when I dream and hallucinate on mushrooms. I see white and gold when I look at the photo of the dress. I feel pain. The schizophrenic hears voices.

If I have a fear of dogs and I feel that fear every time I see a dog, is the fearsome dog an object like a red pen, with the fearsomeness and the redness within the object, or is the fearsomeness within me the perceiver only?

If I internally create the fearsomeness but not the redness, how do you decide which traits of the perception go into the internally created bucket and which go into the objectively existing bucket?