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.

There's nothing in the science that contradicts what I've offered here. It takes more than just biological machinery doing its job... mindlessly.

Subjectivism and eliminativism are both philosophical positions, so to speak. So, this...

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,

... strikes me as a very odd combination. Dennett laid waste to the subjectivist notion/tenet of qualia(tastes, smells, colors, etc.) using physicalist eliminativism in "Quining Qualia".




What's bothering me about this thread is the fact that many of us agree about the biological machinery and the irrevocable role it plays in all veridical perception, hallucination, and dreams. I'm interested in how that all works, from an evolutionary progression standpoint.

I almost want to treat the autonomous biological machinery doing its work as if it were some sort of living recording.

Hallucination and dreams are to veridical experience as a video recording is to experience. Sticking with that analogy renders some folk hereabouts wanting to equate the experience with the record thereof. I don't know if that's a great analogy, as they all fail when pushed far enough, but hopefully that makes some sort of sense.






You're making a number of excellent points. I appreciate the patience and willingness to do so. I'm sure I'm not alone.

...my concern is with the nature of a tomato's appearance. — Michael

As is mine. I've no idea how you arrive at the notion that color is nothing but a mental percept, which is to say that biological machinery alone is enough. Brains in vats.

Trying not to forget about this one:

My position argues from the point of view that even chaos can’t help but self-organise itself into some form or order. Chaos negates itself. Therefore order emerges. — apokrisis

Okay.

Yes. When learning about Peirce as a group of biologists and complexity theorists in the 1990s, the Peircean scholars making sense of his vast volume of unpublished work were mostly theology researchers. Deely was one. — apokrisis

That makes sense.

It depends how much information we have about the situation. If you know that the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism is the simplest possible chiral form, then it is not a surprise that the Big Bang did not stop evolving until it arrived at that final simplicity.

If you know that the chemical reaction with the most bang for buck on the planet Earth is the redox reaction of carbon-oxygen bonds, then it is no surprise that life on Earth kept evolving until it not only could harness this reaction but even set up the planet to have its Gaian balance of oxygen and carbon.

So the basic entropic race drove the Cosmos towards an ultimate symmetry breaking simplicity, and Life, as the negentropic response, was driven towards its maximum negentropic advantage.

The goals existed in dialectical fashion. And they forced Nature through a whole set of unlikely hoops so as to arrive there. — apokrisis

Okay, good. This helps me understand your thermodynamic approach with a bit more resolution.

Science earnt its keep by being the epistemology that delivered a mechanised world. Teleology could take a back seat as technology was the pragmatic point. Humans existed to supply the point of a world of machines.

But when it comes to now incorporating telos into science, the mathematical inevitability of topological order or dissipative structure is how that is happening.

That could be seen as a thumbs up for Platonism, divine immanence, idealism, or whatever. Or it could be seen as the arrival of a structuralist understanding of Nature that rides on the back of stuff like Lie groups, thermodynamics, path integrals, and Darwinian selection. — apokrisis

What would you see as the adjudicating factors between the two conceptions?

If we are approaching it from a purely scientific angle, then my hunch here is that Platonism requires at least some form of meaning- or explanation-recursion, and one which points in the direction of transcendence. This would be something like the Platonic rationale for rejecting a brute fact scheme. If such a thing is not present then I don't know where a scientific argument for Platonism would come from.

Just for fun, here is a phenomenological discussion of why new car colours suddenly look so weird and wrong.

Just for fun, here is a phenomenological discussion of why new car colours suddenly look so weird and wrong. — apokrisis

I haven't watched the video yet, but my guess is that it has something to do with them being nardo putty-looking ass whips.

Yep. Once you have heard it said, you can never unsee it. :chin:

No, it doesn't. I seriously do not think you are taking enough time to read these replies. I am directly, stringently addressing this point in each reply and you seem to miss it entirely. I have given you several inarguable examples of why pain is not always unpleasant and further that this isn't part of it's nature. If you reject this, fine, but you need to actually tell me why all the examples and reasons are wrong. You have not. The quote you used directly contradicts your position by my existing in this discussion. You can't be missing that, can you? You're replying, after all, to someone who does not always experience unpleasantness along with pain. — AmadeusD

What you are insisting in this discussion, that pain does not necessarily involve unpleasantness, simply indicates that you and I have a different understanding of the what the word "pain" means.

You keep referring to examples you have given of pain without unpleasantness, but I can't find any such examples. All I see is assertions.

In order that we can discuss our difference in opinion as to what "pain" refers to, you need to provide for me a definition, or some examples. Tell me what sort of sensation is "pain", if it is not an unpleasant sensation as the dictionary defines it. Or, is it not a sensation at all? Is pain a bunch of neurological processes? If so, then what distinguishes the neurological process called "pain" from other instances of the sense of touch?

Pain does not require unpleasantness to obtain. It simply doesn't. I don't know why you're claiming this against empirical evidence of millions of humans experiencing pain without unpleasantness - and in fact, experiencing pleasure from pain. This is just... why are you trying to simply erase a load of facts about other people's experience, including mine? Are you trying to say I'm lying? — AmadeusD

Again, you are simply insisting there is empirical evidence from millions of humans, and saying that I am denying it, without providing any such evidence. The fact that in many cases, pleasure comes from pain, does not prove that pain is not unpleasant. Plato covered this very thoroughly, because at his time there was a believe that pleasure was nothing but a relief from pain This would imply that all pleasure comes from pain, and pain is a necessary requirement for pleasure. as the pleasure comes from the relief which is actually the pain ending.

But Plato demonstrated how there is pleasure which does not require pain. What this indicates is that "pain" is not a proper opposite to pleasure. However, it does not demonstrate that pain does not consist of unpleasantness. Unpleasantness may still be posited as the proper opposite to pleasure, and since there are unpleasant feelings which are not pain, pleasure may be derived as a relief from these feelings rather than from a relief from pain.

Pain is a sensation directed at the host attending to an injury. — AmadeusD

Oh good, here's a sort of definition. It's not adequate though, for two very important reasons. First, 'the sensation of an injury' does not suffice because there are many internal pains like headache, stomachache, commonly called "pains" which are not due to injury. Second there are many instances when "the host attending to an injury" does not involve pain. If we look at natural healing, the first and most obvious is coma. Also, in the natural process of healing a wound there is always much time with no pain, and often an itch (which is not pain) develops. Further, there are unnatural instances, when the injury does not cause pain, such as the use of painkillers. They are called "painkillers", not "host attending to an injury killers", because they do not prevent the host from attending to the injury. In other words, it should be very clear to you now, that there is no specific sensation associated with "attending to an injury", so this would make a very faulty definition of pain.

It's a tricky thing. I absolutely, almost sexually, enjoy the pain of scalding water on the tops of my hands, my inner thighs, behind my shoulders and right on my hip bones (to the point that i had very midly burned myself many times in pursuit of it (opportunistic pursuit, to be sure)). It is definitely pain. But it is definitely not unpleasant. Its a tool telling me to stop fucking running scalding water on myself lmao. EVENTUALLY this can get unpleasant - as, when my skin starts melting, my brain kicks it up a few notches. Fair, too. I'm not exactly the most caring about my own body in this way. I self harmed for years. another notch on this club. — AmadeusD

Finally, an example for me to look at. What you are doing with this example, is taking your faulty definition of pain, "the host attending to an injury", and saying, 'I have had injury before, without unpleasantness, therefore pain, which is the sensation of the host attending to an injury does not require unpleasantness. I think we've all experienced injury without pain. Sometimes, I'll accidentally cut myself without even noticing it, until I see blood. So all your example really does, is prove that your definition is wrong. We can, and do, have injury without pain, and your example is a demonstration of this this. So this is just more evidence that there is no specific sensation which can be defined as the host attending to an injury, as injury causes many different sensations, crossing all sorts of boundaries.

What would you see as the adjudicating factors between the two conceptions? — Leontiskos

Well it would really be nice to know how Plato conceived of the Khôra in relation to the Eidos. Was it more a void or an Apeiron? Was there some move he began making from the transcendent imposition of structure on the material world to the immanent emergence of structure by way of privation?

All this seems in play in Plato and Aristotle. And everyone interprets according to their preference. But that is the basic difference I would say. A dualism of transcendence or a triadicism of immanence.

I don't care about how Wittgenstein viewed perception and colours. He was not a physicist or a neuroscientist and so he didn't have the appropriate expertise. To think that somehow an examination of language can address such issues is laughable. Do you want to do away with the Large Hadron Collider and simply talk our way into determining how the world works? — Michael

Since this is a philosophy forum, I will provide some interesting nuance views of color and mental percepts from for philosophers who were admirers of the achievement of science.

From the Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell:

“If there is a subject, it can have a relation to the patch of colour, namely, the sort of relation which we might call awareness. In that case the sensation, as a mental event, will consist of awareness of the colour, while the colour itself will remain wholly physical, and may be called the sense-datum, to distinguish it from the sensation. The subject, however, appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar. Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for assuming that they do. The functions that they appear to perform can always be performed by classes or series or other logical constructions, consisting of less dubious entities. If we are to avoid a perfectly gratuitous assumption, we must dispense with the subject as one of the actual ingredients of the world. But when we do this, the possibility of distinguishing the sensation from the sense-datum vanishes; at least I see no way of preserving the distinction. Accordingly the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour, an actual constituent of the physical world, and part of what physics is concerned with. ”

From Word and Object by W. V. Quine:

"If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be just that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect system efficacy in the development of theory. But if a certain organization of theory is achieved by thus positing distinctive mental states and events behind physical behavior, surely as much organization could be achieved by positing merely certain correlative physiological states and events instead. Nor need we spot special centers in the body for these seizures; physical states of the undivided organism will serve, whatever their finer physiology. Lack of detailed physiological explanation of the states is scarcely an objection to acknowledging them as states of human bodies, when we reflect that those who posit the mental states and events have no details of appropriate mechanisms to offer nor, what with mind-body problem, prospects of any. The bodily states exist anyway; why add the others?"

From Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer:

"To determine, for instance, whether two people have the same color sense we observe whether they classify all the colour expanses with which they are confronted in the same way; and, when we say that a man is colour-blind, what we are asserting is that he classifies certain color expanses in a different way from that in which they would be classified by the majority of people. It may be objected that the fact that two people classify color expanses in the same way proves only that their colour worlds have the same structure, and not that they have the same content; that it is possible for another man to assent to every proposition which I make about colours on the basis of entirely different colour sensations, although, since the difference is systematic, neither of us is ever in the position to detect it. But the answer to this is that each of us has to define the content of another man's sense-experiences in terms of what he can himself observe."

And Lastly, from Seeing Things as They Are by John Searle:

"Question 2 How does the account deal with color constancy and size constancy? I will consider these in order. Imagine that a shadow falls over a portion of the red ball so that part of it is in shadow and part not. Did the part in shadow change its color? Well, obviously not, and it is obviously not seen as having changed its color. All the same, there is a difference in the subjective visual field. The subjective basic perceptual properties have changed. The proof is that if I were drawing a picture of what I now see, I would have to include a darker portion of the part in shadow, even though I know that there has been no change in its actual color. It is extremely misleading to describe this phenomenon as "color constancy", because of course the experienced color is precisely not constant. It is because of my high-level Background capacities that I am able to see it as having the same color even though at the lower level I see it as having in part changed its color. I want to emphasize this point. At the basic level, the color is precisely not constant, neither subjectively nor objectively. It changes. It is just at the higher level that I know, because of my Background abilities, that it still keeps the same color."

I've no idea how you arrive at the notion that color is nothing but a mental percept — creativesoul

It's not my conclusion; it's what the science says, and I am simply reporting on that. I have no idea why you and others think that you can figure out how perception works by sitting in your chair and thinking really hard.

Russell is not saying what (I think) you think he's saying. When he says "the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour" he is saying that colour just is that sensation. This is perhaps clearer in a later work where he says this:

Scientific scripture, in its most canonical form, is embodied in physics (including physiology). Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call ''perceiving objects'' are at the end of a long causal chain which starts from the objects, and are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism', i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself; when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

I don't have a copy of Searle, but according to this:

Searle presents the example of the color red: for an object to be red, it must be capable of causing subjective experiences of red. At the same time, a person with spectrum inversion might see this object as green, and so unless there is one objectively correct way of seeing (which is largely in doubt), then the object is also green in the sense that it is capable, in certain cases, of causing a perceiver to experience a green object.

This seems to be arguing that colours are mental phenomena and that the predicate "is red" is used to describe objects which cause red mental phenomena.

On colour, Quine has said this:

But color is cosmically secondary. Even slight differences in sensory mechanisms from species to species, Smart remarks, can make overwhelming differences in the grouping of things by color. Color is king in our innate quality space, but undistinguished in cosmic circles. Cosmically, colors would not qualify as kinds.

Your quote of him is him arguing for eliminative materialism, which I have previously accepted is a possibly correct account of so-called mental phenomena (e.g. pain just is a type of brain activity, and so colours just are a type of brain activity).

It's not my conclusion; it's what the science says, and I am simply reporting on that. I have no idea why you and others think that you can figure out how perception works by sitting in your chair and thinking really hard. — Michael

:smirk:

I don't have a copy of Searle, but according to this:

Searle presents the example of the color red: for an object to be red, it must be capable of causing subjective experiences of red. At the same time, a person with spectrum inversion might see this object as green, and so unless there is one objectively correct way of seeing (which is largely in doubt), then the object is also green in the sense that it is capable, in certain cases, of causing a perceiver to experience a green object.

This seems to be arguing that colours are mental phenomena, and that the predicate "is red" is used to describe objects which cause red mental phenomena. — Michael

:roll: According to Searle, colours are systematic hallucinations, and what characterizes hallucinations is that you're having experiences without experiencing anything, not even percepts.

colours are systematic hallucinations — jkop

And hallucinations are what? A type of mental phenomenon, not a mind-independent property of tomatoes. Therefore colours are a type of mental phenomenon, not a mind-independent property of tomatoes.

you're having experiences without experiencing anything — jkop

This is such a nonsensical sentence.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

The next step, I believe, after freeing oneself from naive realism, is to free oneself from materialism altogether, and understand that the so-called "effects of the stone upon himself" are not properly called "effects" at all. The percept is a freely constructed creation of the living being, rather than the effects of a causal chain. This understanding enables the reality of the concept of free will. The living being's motivational aspects, which are very much involved in all neurological activity, and appear to allow the being to act with a view toward the future, (understood in its most simple form as the will to survive), cannot be understood as the product of causal chains. This is what science reveals to us, through its inability to understand such aspects in determinist terms.

My position argues from the point of view that even chaos can’t help but self-organise itself into some form or order. Chaos negates itself. Therefore order emerges. — apokrisis

I read Ramsay theory, what little I understand of it, as saying that in any chaos can be found some order. And that would seem to be different from any idea of "self-organization." Is your order, then, Ramsay-like an inevitable accident? Or is it something else? - setting aside for the moment just how order/chaos is determined and by whom.

On colour, Quine has said this:

But color is cosmically secondary. Even slight differences in sensory mechanisms from species to species, Smart remarks, can make overwhelming differences in the grouping of things by color. Color is king in our innate quality space, but undistinguished in cosmic circles. Cosmically, colors would not qualify as kinds.

Your quote of him is him arguing for eliminative materialism, which I have previously accepted is a possibly correct account of so-called mental phenomena (e.g. pain just is a type of brain activity, and so colours just are a type of brain activity.

Indeed, Quine goes even further say that colours are “neither natural kinds nor any significance to theoretical science.” But if this is the case, why not eliminate this talk of mental percepts of colour, this is not what science is investigating.
— Michael

Russell is not saying what (I think) you think he's saying. When he says "the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour" he is saying that colour just is that sensation. — Michael

The point of this example is to show that Russell is concerned about the grammar of colour, so we can get it right about what science is actually investigating.

Is your order, then, Ramsay-like an inevitable accident? Or is it something else? — tim wood

I’m talking about dynamics. Dissipative structure, far from equilbrium systems, maximum entropy production principle. That class of self organisation in nature.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/783285.Order_Out_of_Chaos

The point of this example is to show that Russell is concerned about the grammar of colour, so we can get it right about what science is actually investigating. — Richard B

The topic is about perception, not grammar. Science explains perception. This has nothing to do with language at all. We can imagine that we're deaf, illiterate, mutes if it helps you move on from this distraction. We still see colours. I don't need to be able to say "this box looks red" and "this box looks blue" for me to see a visual difference between them. The development of the words "red" and "blue" to name the difference comes after the fact, not before.

But that is the basic difference I would say. A dualism of transcendence or a triadicism of immanence. — apokrisis

Okay, fair enough. This is something we should revisit at a later date, preferably in a more apt thread.

The topic is about perception, not grammar. — Michael

Again from Russell’s Analysis of the Mind Lecture VII The Definition of Perception

“The notion of perception is therefore not a precise one: we perceive things more or less, but always with a very considerable amount of vagueness and confusion.”

Russell’s analysis is a conceptual one, not experimental.

“When a mental occurrence can be regarded as an appearance of an object external to the brain, however irregular, or even as a confused appearance of several such objects, then we may regard it as having for its stimulus the object or objects in question, or their appearances at the sense-organ concerned. When, on the other hand, a mental occurrence has not sufficient connection with objects external to the brain to be regarded as an appearance of such objects, then its physical causation (if any) will have to be sought in the brain. In the former case it can “be called a perception; in the latter it cannot be so called. But the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. Until this is realized, no satisfactory theory of perception, sensation, or imagination is possible.”

From what I gather, Russell is reluctant in calling “mental percepts” perception at all. And seems to want to move in the direction of Quine and just be concerned with brain activity. Again Russell is not performing science here, but has a lot to say what perception is all about in a general sort of way.

“When a mental occurrence can be regarded as an appearance of an object external to the brain, however irregular, or even as a confused appearance of several such objects, then we may regard it as having for its stimulus the object or objects in question, or their appearances at the sense-organ concerned. When, on the other hand, a mental occurrence has not sufficient connection with objects external to the brain to be regarded as an appearance of such objects, then its physical causation (if any) will have to be sought in the brain. In the former case it can “be called a perception; in the latter it cannot be so called. But the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. Until this is realized, no satisfactory theory of perception, sensation, or imagination is possible.” — Richard B

Whether you call it "perception" or not is irrelevant. Call it "blugh" for all it matters. The only thing that is relevant is that the visual quality that we naively think of as being a mind-independent property of a tomato's surface is in fact a mental phenomenon either reducible to or caused by neural activity in the brain, usually in response to optical stimulation by light. This is what the science shows, and no appeals to grammar or beetles in boxes or anything of the sort can prove otherwise.

The only thing that is relevant is that colour is not a mind-independent property of tomatoes but a mental phenomena caused by neural activity in the brain. — Michael

This is a rather neat summation of the mistake of thinking that either colour is a mind-independent property of objects, or colour is a mental phenomena caused by neural activity in the brain.

There are alternatives. Many have been listed Here.

But perhaps the generic form of the mistake is in thinking that there can be one explanation that will work for all the many and various ways in which we might use colour words.

One cannot do philosophy without giving due consideration to the language with which one does philosophy.

It's not my conclusion; it's what the science says — Michael

No, it's not.

Science shows that certain biological structures are necessary for all perception. Makes perfect sense in my book.

It does not follow that there are no differences between hallucinating, dreaming, and seeing red things. Science does not say that. You do. Your arguments have recently led to absurd conclusions. I've thought of this more and more recently.



Well put.

It does not follow that there are no differences between hallucinating, dreaming, and seeing red things. — creativesoul

I haven't claimed that there is no difference. We've been over this. They differ in what causes the mental percept.

No, it's not. — creativesoul

Yes, it is. See all the quotes here.

Maund: "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."

Newton: "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour."

Kim et al: "Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus."

Palmer: "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."

Maxwell: "Color is a sensation."

How much more explicit does this need to be for you?

But perhaps the generic form of the mistake is in thinking that there can be one explanation that will work for all the many and various ways in which we might use colour words. — Banno

And this is the mistake that you are forever making. This has nothing to do with the various ways in which we might use colour words. This has nothing to do with language at all. This is about vision and whether or not its qualities are mind-independent properties of tomatoes. We naively think they are, but physics and neuroscience has shown that they're not.

The fact that the word "blue" is sometimes used to mean that someone is sad or that the word "green" is sometimes used to mean that someone is inexperienced simply has no relevance at all to the discussion.

It does not follow that there are no differences between hallucinating, dreaming, and seeing red things.
— creativesoul

I haven't claimed that there is no difference. — Michael

Sir. You most certainly did.

You drew a hard fast equivalency between four different things. When I asked you what the differences were between them the answer was the same.

"Nothing"

That is most certainly to claim that there are no differences!

Fer fuck's sake!

We've been over this. They differ in what causes the mental percept.

Indeed we have. Very little attention has been payed to this. You've yet to have responded to the important parts. Ignoring issues does not make them go away.

Searle presents the example of the color red: for an object to be red, it must be capable of causing subjective experiences of red. At the same time, a person with spectrum inversion might see this object as green, and so unless there is one objectively correct way of seeing (which is largely in doubt), then the object is also green in the sense that it is capable, in certain cases, of causing a perceiver to experience a green object.

This seems to be arguing that colours are mental phenomena and that the predicate "is red" is used to describe objects which cause red mental phenomena. — Michael

Okay.

He acknowledges and talks about both internal and external components of color vision and seeing color. He makes good points regarding the subjective aspects of color vision/seeing red as well as the objective ones.

Nothing he says aligns with the mistake your entire philosophical edifice, informed stance, rests its laurels upon. See the top of this post.

Sir. You most certainly did.

You drew a hard fast equivalency between four different things. When I asked you what the differences were between them the answer was the same.

"Nothing"

That is most certainly to claim that there are no differences!

Fer fuck's sake! — creativesoul

You asked me for the difference between an hallucinated red and a red percept. There is no difference because an hallucinated red is a red percept. I didn't say that there's no difference between seeing a red pen and hallucinating a red pen.

You should try reading more carefully.

You should try quoting more carefully.

One cannot do philosophy without giving due consideration to the language with which one does philosophy. — Banno

Yes, and I don't grant the others that this is a uniquely or idiosyncratically Witgenstenian truth.

-

- Thanks. You as well.