I really think everyone is over-thinking my initial thought. I mean nothing more to say than that our individual subjective experience of “red” may differ than than the external cause that which gives is “red.” Thus we may agree on what is “red” whilst being none the wiser that our actual experience of red is different, and we'd never know.

Wittgensteinian is interesting to the extent he lets you know the logical conclusions of analytic philosophy where the only objective is to define your terms and forget about the world — Hanover

Do you mean that he revealed this about analytic philosophy with his criticisms, or do you mean to characterize his own philosophy as exemplifying this "objective"? The former is an interesting take, but the latter seems obviously wrong.

I really think everyone is over-thinking... — Mp202020

Surely not???

This couldn't possibly happen on this forum. :razz:

This is the issue:

If someone with normal color vision looks at a tomato in good light, the tomato will appear to have a distinctive property—a property that strawberries and cherries also appear to have, and which we call “red” in English. The problem of color realism is posed by the following two questions. First, do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have? Second, what is this property? (Byrne & Hilbert 2003: 3–4)

The question "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have" is not answered by saying that the word "red" can refer to different things. Your entire approach to the problem is misguided.

The two main positions with respect to this problem are colour eliminativism and naive colour realism. Physics and the neuroscience of perception support the former over the latter.

I really think everyone is over-thinking my initial thought. — Mp202020

True, but your initial thought is expressed with words such as 'experience' which can be used in two different senses. That's why some of us talk past eachother, and a few vacillate between the two senses without noticing it.

Your initial question is about the relation between mind and experience: Is the experience outside of the mind?

That could be easy to answer, if we'd use the word 'experience' consistently.

It could also help if we notice that the initial question refers to the relation between experience and mind, not other relations, such as experience and word, experience and object, or word and object.

Do you mean that he revealed this about analytic philosophy with his criticisms, or do you mean to characterize his own philosophy as exemplifying this "objective"? The former is an interesting take, but the latter seems obviously wrong. — Jamal

I think he revealed it through his working it through to its conclusion. I didn't take him as a critic of analytic philosophy though, just more taking it where it went.

I think you meant that though, just using "criticism" to mean logical analysis as opposed to one skeptical of it.

Yet that would be a very interesting suggestion, which is likely wrong, but to think his point wasn't we ought abandon metaphysical analysis based upon his analysis, but what he really set up was a reductio ad absurdum that his followers mistook and they embraced his absurd conclusions instead of rejecting analytic philosophy as he meant to show was absurd.

I like that suggestion actually.

I like that suggestion actually. — Hanover

My updated suggestion is that you're talking out of your hindquarters.

But we can tell when we are dreaming. — Banno

During the dream, we often cannot tell that we are dreaming.

When the dream has been long past, we may confuse memories of that dream with memories of real life.

So we can't, in all circumstances, tell when we are dreaming.

My updated suggestion is that you're talking out of your hindquarters. — Jamal

I said I liked the suggestion, not that I thought it correct. The idea that a whole movement has been created from misunderstanding sarcasm is an entertaining thought.

so I’ve come to realize although admittedly the various spawned conversation topics have been very interesting.

so I’ve understood lol!

appreciate the kind words Banno. This specific response was lost on me amongst the many unintentional pages belonging
to this thread, however I view it as a pleasant sign that I brought up something meaningful to a lot of wonderful people such as you all. I very much appreciate the interaction from the community here!

You seem to misunderstand my point. Dreams can be about things but dreams are still mental phenomena, caused by neural activity in the brain.

So your claim that distal objects are the intentional objects of waking experience and so therefore colours are mind-independent properties of these distal objects is a non sequitur.

Intentionality simply has no relevance to the dispute between colour eliminativism and colour realism. — Michael

Well, we still have the hard problem to contend with here. If colors are not parts of pens, then how can they be parts of neurons, or neural processes?

How were you able to determine that your dreams are dreams and not the same as your waking experiences? How did you determine that a mirage is not a pool of water but bent wavelengths of light? The same goes for a bent stick in a glass of water. How were you able to determine what is what and what is not? Was it using ONLY one sense? Did it involve ONLY using your senses?

If you're conceding our perceptions might just be a pragmatic stimulus to navigate the world, which may or may not bear any resemblance to the object, then we're agreeing. If the pen is not red, but just appears red, then you're not asserting a direct realism. — Hanover

I never was asserting direct realism. What I was asserting is that we can still get at what objects are by using only our experiences of them. Indirect realism coupled with determinism is how you do it. Causes necessarily determine their effects. Effect carry information about their causes. Only by interpreting the correct causal pattern can we get at the way things are.

Asking how things are independent of looking at them is a silly question. You are assuming that there is something lost in translation when there it is just as likely that there isn't anything lost. How do you know that anything is lost in translation if you can't experience it? It's only an assumption. You have to know the truth to be able to lie. You have to know that something is missing to say that something is missing. How do you know that something is lost in translation?

Everything that is real has a causal power. We can get at the existence things we can't see by observing the things they interact with and the effects they leave behind. If the information you get allows you to solve some problem, or accomplish some goal, then that is all you need. Nothing was lost in translation.

Just think of all the trivial things you do throughout the day that you accomplish and never wonder about what was "lost in translation". Are you able to drink a glass of water. Does the water make it from the pitcher to the glass and then from the glass to your mouth? Do you get to and from work without any issues? Are you able to recognize your loved ones? Are you able to use your smart phone to accomplish tasks? How is it that you are able to make it to this website every day? All of these things you do and do them successfully day in and day out. So how can you say that there is something lost in translation?

Information is everywhere causes leave effects. Most information is irrelevant to what your current goal is, but relevant to some other goal. It's not that something is lost in translation. It's that something is lost in misinterpretation. When we misinterpret what we are experiencing, we are not getting at the true causes. It is more likely that we will fail. Maybe not the first or second time, but eventually we will realize that our interpretation does not work all the time and we will try to come up with a better interpretation. This is basically what science does. There is nothing lost in translation because every cause leaves some effects that we can experience. It is only the interpretation that can be wrong and make it appear that what our senses tell us is wrong. But by making more observations and incorporating logic do we overcome what we believe to be an illusion produced by one of our senses. The distinction between empiricism and rationalism is a false dichotomy. Both are used in together to get at the truth, or to acquire knowledge.

I'm finding it hard to tell whether you're partial to an indirect, or a direct conception of perception. But, given my own position i'll respond to what I see:

The first part: Fully agree. Understanding that C fibres fire, travel to the brain, and hte brain creates an illusion of "pain in the toe" rather than "signals from the toe being translated to pain to ensure I address the injured toe" has nothing to do with whether there is pain "in the toe". There plainly is not.

However, these are scientific explanations: The way pain works shuts down the option of direct perception of it. Hanover has made a similar point, and also noted that it just goes ignored - hand-waved away instead of confronted.

The science of perception, optical physiology, psychology and (in this context) the mechanics of pain fly in the face of a 'direct perception' account. It isn't even coherent, which has been shown several times. I personally find it helpful to continue the discussion, because it helps to streamline and economize responses to clearly inapt descriptions of experience. Intuitive, yes, but as helpful as folk psychology in understanding what's 'really' going on.

BUT, even with ALL of that said, if the point is that perception is necessarily indirect, then science can only get us so far. Observations are all we have - and I think Michael and I hit a bit of a curvy dead end with this issue. But, personally, I'm happy to just say science is the best use of our perception in understanding regularities of nature. Not much more could be said, unless we're just going to take the socially-apt chats about it at face value for practical reasons. In that case "science is objective" makes sense - but is just not true. — AmadeusD

It seems to me that the distinction between direct and indirect realism is useless. Would you say that you have direct or indirect access to your mental phenomenon?

How did scientists come to realize how pain works and that our experience of it is incorrect if all they have to go by is their own observations which you are calling into question? Somehow we were able to still get at how pain works for you to make these assertions so confidently.

The location of the pain in my foot is brute. I interpret the pain as being located in my foot because most, if not all, of the other times the pain was located in my foot I had an injury on my foot. Now, there could be a time that I am mistaken that my foot hurts with no injury. Instead the injury is in my lower back where inflamed tissue, or a herniated disk is pressing on a nerve and causing sciatica. So, by using more than one sense, and logic, I can still get at the truth. As I said before, we have more than one sense for fault tolerance - to check what one sense is telling us, and we have the ability to reason, to compare past experiences with current ones, and to predict what experiences we can have.

Well, we still have the hard problem to contend with here. — Harry Hindu

Yes, because we don’t have an answer yet.

If colors are not parts of pens, then how can they be parts of neurons, or neural processes? — Harry Hindu

If pain is not a part of knives then how can it be a neural process?

Your question doesn’t make much sense.

Was it using ONLY one sense? Did it involve ONLY using your senses? — Harry Hindu

Sense and reasoning.

So we can't, in all circumstances, tell when we are dreaming. — Lionino

Perhaps. But that is very much not the same as the claim that we can never tell the difference between having a dream and being awake.

You say you use words in some way other than saying them? — Hanover

This seems telling. Yes, we all use words in ways other than to simply make statements. You know that. We use them to do all manner of things, from making promises to declaring war.

But that is very much not the same as the claim that we can never tell the difference between having a dream and being awake. — Banno

Good thing I never made that claim then.

Someone once commented privately that you have a mind like a freight train, powerful but incapable of considering anything to the side of its tracks.

You see colour realism and colour eliminativism and nought else.

Again, take a look at the SEP article, which sets out a few of the problems with eliminativism and some of the alternatives — seven main theories each with many variants.

So again, I am not rejecting the physiological account. I am rejecting the nothing but in "colours are nothing but mental phenomena". And doing that leaves "Colours are mental phenomena, at least in part".

And a perusal of the article will show that I am in good company.

Good thing I never made that claim then. — Lionino

Yes, but unfortunately there are many who take this view, that dreams cannot be identified, as proof of something metaphysical, even if they rarely state what. It's one of the most repeated memes hereabouts, usually followed by an ellipsis rather than a conclusion...

If it were proof of something, it would be something epistemological, not metaphysical.

You say you use words in some way other than saying them?
— Hanover

This seems telling. Yes, we all use words in ways other than to simply make statements. You know that. We use them to do all manner of things, from making promises to declaring war. — Banno

You changed what I said to salvage what you said.

I didn't make any claim about types of statements, performative or otherwise. I said it odd to suggest that words could be used in ways other than saying them. Whether I report of your marriage or pronounce you married, in either case I say it.

In any event, you said "Use is determined by... well, what we do. Not by what we say we do."

What we do with words is say them (or write them). Their usage after spoken is another thing. And so we can go back to what we were talking about, and that is definitions because that's all we're limited to.

The definition of "red pen" is that thing that is out there that appears in my head as red. You disagree, but that disagreement is not philosophical. It's that you think I don't speak English like I ought to. You think I use my words inconsistent with the way my community of speakers does. I disagree, so now we are in some sort of sociological investigation, where we go out into our respective communities and figure out how it is we arrive at the words we do and then we can debate who's correctly identified the way we're to talk.

And that is the whole thing of it. You've argued consistently that this whole metaphysical debate is off limits and that the proper way to go about knowing about the world is to figure out how we use words. So let's put that to the test now that you've got full buy in from me. "The pen is red" means we have a pen object and a red subjective state because my community relies upon neuroscientists to tell me what my brain does and that's how I use my words.

We're now just in a contest as to who can write the best dictionary for the task at hand.

This is one of those seemingly innocuous topics that finds itself to be a pivot between quite different philosophies, and indeed between quite different philosophical methods.

The thing that stands out to me is how few folk are addressing the actual argument I presented, in any more than a trivial fashion. I like to bring in to question the notions of subjectivity and objectivity, the division of the world into internal and external things, and the notion of private and public concepts. Your OP gave me that opportunity. So many folk take these divisions as central, even undeniable. but due consideration shows that they cannot be maintained in a coherent way.

If we were able to divide the world into subject and object, internal and external, private and public, and to put colours firmly in the subjective, internal, private zone, then all would be good for many folk here.

But colours are demonstrably a part of the objective, external, public world.

Hence the question: 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?

And despite the pages of protestation, I think it still stands.

A flick through the pages will show many arguments directed towards me as if I had maintained that colour is nothing but an objective, external, public notion. That is not what I have been maintaining, so those arguments miss the their target.

I have not offered a substantive account of the nature of colour. I do not need to, in order to show the poverty of the scientistic view. Indeed I think there is reason to doubt that any theory of colour will be complete.

So there remain philosophical puzzles here. It is just that they are not answered by understanding the physics.

If you like.

I'm not sure what your view is. Too many posts to keep track of.

You changed what I said to salvage what you said. — Hanover

I changed it to show that language is more central to this issue than you seem to hold. To say that 'all we do with words is to say them' is to trivialise the way our world works.

It leads to silly, solipsistic statements such as

The definition of "red pen" is that thing that is out there that appears in my head as red. — Hanover

How does @Lionino know how the pen appears in your head? Your definition doesn't even get to stand up, let alone take a step forward.

Precisely. It is difficult to reject the seduction of direct experience- it is in some cases self-proving and axiomatic. However, there is the rare occasion that the certain aspects of the truth of experience can be validly called into scrutiny, which many may find a difficult dichotomy to grapple

Yep. One might note three stages here. The first is unreflective belief that colour is a part of the thing; the second, the realisation that what we see is in some way an interpretation or projection, and the third, that despite this colour remains an aspect of our shared world.

Cheers to you!! I’m very curious to hear your interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, it very much falls in this realm. This is not the appropriate thread for such overarching topics, but would love to connect personally on deeply challenging topics like emptiness/impermanence and how we can relate to our world with such understanding.

I spent time with Tibetan Buddhists and did a fair bit of introductory meditation, but was put off in the end by the stories and metaphysics. I'm not the person to talk to if you want a reinforcement of Buddhist ideas. Have a chat with @Wayfarer, maybe.