That is, apples don't look red in the dark, yet they are red — Andrew M

That's two different meanings for the word "red". One is how it looks to us, the other is having the property of looking red to us under normal lighting conditions. That is to say, the chemical structure of the red apple's surface is such that it reflects visible light of a certain wavelength.

Its an inference, and yes that opens the door to skepticism and idealism, but it is what it is.

Indeed. Animals with color vision don’t need language to tell colors apart.

What framework would that be? — Srap Tasmaner

Dennett’s

But there's a general, philosophical way of asking, is that red ball really red? — Srap Tasmaner

It's asking whether the red ball is red in the way it looks red to us. Which is different from whether red is the result of a pigmentation instead of reflective surfaces, which is interesting, but a separate matter.

If the answer is no, then we're looking at some sort of subjective account of redness, and the difficult question arises as to how to account for that.

But it does show where red originates. It doesn't travel from the apple into the head, riding along photons and electrons.

Neutral Monism is the position that something which is neither mind nor matter gives rise to both. In my view, Tegmark's mathematical universe and Wheeler's It from Bit qualify. Math and information as the bedrock of reality doesn't seem like either mind or matter. But one could just as well say it's something beyond our comprehension. Maybe Kant's noumena.

I also think that quantum fields are pretty far removed the normal stuff materialism was based on.

...eliminative materialism...

Folk suppose that if they can't sensibly talk about qualia then the eliminative materialists have won.

But that ain't so. — Banno

So we don’t eliminate red, but red is not a property of either the objects we see, or the properties used in explanations given for vision. So where does the red come from?

And by red, I mean the color we see, not the word, lest anyone be confused by talk of language.

So what happens when your visual cortex is stimulated directly, and you have a red visual experience? It is, after all, dark in the brain as you noted.

Because there's no color quale intermediary/representation we're aware of instead?

Depends on how nuanced we wish to get with language. We are seeing the cat via thermal imaging, but it's not what we normally see. Black cats don't usually look like glowing shades of red.

A question for you: Is the cat really black, or is it reddish? IOW, what makes our normal vision privileged?

They can be seen with thermal imaging goggles.

does Odo know what it is like to be a bat? — Banno

Yes, that's it! Changelings would make the best philosophers. They could just morph into whatever and tell us.

I don't recall them ever exploring Odo using non-human senses. I know something he was a piece of furniture or a glass on Quark's tray.

Apparently, 7 of 9 retained her taste sensations, but they might be enhanced by the Borg nanoprobes.

For instance, Locutus was introduced as an individual to give a face to the Borg in assimilating humanity; but why bother, if there already was an individual who could represent the Borg consciousness? — Banno

Uhhh, are we really going to do the thread like this? Okay.

That is a good point. I'm guessing the writers hadn't thought up the Queen yet. And what made humanity so special? Wouldn't they do that for all species? Have one Locutus individual for Romulans, Ferengi, etc?

A better question is, what would it be like for Odo? Do his sensations change as he modifies his form? And can changelings be assimilated? Who would win in a fight between Kirk and Picard?

They sure do like to put "red" in front of their red shades.

Ideal pink lemonade though ...

I love the Borg. One wonders what it's like to be the Queen (starting at 1:39):

The lemonade shade produced mild synesthesia in me, as it trigged a slight lemonade taste/memory.

Silly.

Yes, just a few that stand out enough to be named for their use in paints and web design.

Right. I've seen that mentioned several times, but googling right now I find this BBC article (below) which says about 1 million from combinations of 100 basic colors. It also mentions some interesting stuff about ultraviolet and infrared detection by humans under certain connditions. And it claims that tetrochromats can see 100 million.

A healthy human eye has three types of cone cells, each of which can register about 100 different colour shades, therefore most researchers ballpark the number of colours we can distinguish at around a million. Still, perception of colour is a highly subjective ability that varies from person to person, thus making any hard-and-fast figure difficult to pinpoint.

The average number of colours we can distinguish is around a million
"You'd be hard-pressed to put a number on it," says Kimberly Jameson, an associate project scientist at the University of California, Irvine. "What might be possible with one person is only a fraction of the colours that another person sees.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150727-what-are-the-limits-of-human-vision

Our eyes can make out ten million shades of color. I wonder how many shades have names? Here's a site with a bunch of shade names grouped by color:

https://graf1x.com/list-of-colors-with-color-names/

The red ones:

That's because you ignore the naive realist assumption in ordinary language that apples look red because they are red, because the world is at it looks to us, end of story. But it's not. It's just the beginning of the story.

What difference does that make here? In both cases, the apple is red due to how it interacts with light. — creativesoul

But it's only red because that's the color we see. We see that color because of the way or visual system works. If our visual system was different, we might not have an rgb vocabulary. The rest of the EM spectrum does not have color labels, because we don't see the rest of the electromagnetic radiation interacting with the environment.

That's something which is getting lost here. The apple just doesn't reflect light of certain wavelength. It also has other light reflecting off and going through it and what not. Insects and birds can see colors we can't. The full EM spectrum is all around us, but we only see a small fraction of it.

The word "red" picks out a physical aspect of the apple, not how it appears (which is a qualifier meaning "seem; give the impression of being", not a reference to a mental entity or mental experience). — Andrew M

The apple appearing red came long before optics. You have the cart before the horse. It's like arguing that sunrise means the Earth revolves around the sun, or solid means objects are filled with mostly empty space, held together by tight EM bonds. There would be no "sunrise" if if the sun didn't appear to move through the sky, similarly we wouldn't have quite the same word for "solid" if we utilized X-Ray vision instead. Nor would apples look red.

I think aliens would say, "Those creatures kill each other pretty much continuously, and not very efficiently. They bumble around exhausting enormous resources to do it.

"Meanwhile their climate is changing rapidly and they're just sitting there." — frank

Maybe the aliens can get off their butts and beam us plans for an economical fusion reactor along with the wormhole machine, instead of just judging us from afar. *Borat voice* Assholes aliens.

1.3k
Why wouldn't a "naive realist" (a phrase which strikes me as an oxymoron) sim — Ciceronianus the White

Naive realist means an unreflective assumption that the world is pretty much as it appears to us humans. A direct realist would be aware of the various critiques of naive realism, armed with counter arguments in favor of the world looking at least somewhat as it appears to us, without there being some sort of mental intermediary.

Maybe like this: the apple is red but I just can't see it. — jamalrob

What does it mean for the apple to be red when there is no visible light reflecting off it? For that matter. What does it mean for the apple to be red when nobody is looking at it?

Selective ordinary language philosophy.

Relational realism would mean colors are real for certain perceptual systems when perceiving under normal lighting conditions? I can dig that.

Also sounds like an ontological commitment to color realism on Andrew’s part.

The belief that a dictionary contains the meaning of a word. Naive. Indeed, silly. We don't need more holy books — Banno

So how is it so can look up a word I don’t know in the dictionary, read it’s definition, then use it meaningfully in conversation?

Seems like a rather holy experience to me. Especially when it’s Urban Dictionary.

Or to put it a different way - the US took the lead in winning the Cold War. Something which the whole world should be thankful for. If you have any complaints about how the US acted during the Cold War you should take it up with Mr Marx. — Paul Edwards

The US and the USSR put the entire planet at risk with their nuclear arms race. Luckily, none of the close calls triggered an actual launch. One could argue that nukes have prevented a third world war, because it's too terrible a price for the major powers to pay. But even so, it's a big gamble, and one we still live with, because who knows what could escalate matters in the future.

I'll just leave this hear since it will be covering some of the topics in this thread.

Minds and Machines

An introduction to philosophy of mind, exploring consciousness, reality, AI, and more. The most in-depth philosophy course available online.

Topics include:

The Chinese Room
The Turing Test
Mind-Body Dualism
The Identity Theory
Functionalism
Knowledge
Belief
Color
Perception
Consciousness
'What it's like' to be a bat
The Knowledge Argument
David Chalmers on dualism — https://www.edx.org/course/minds-and-machines

One where it goes beyond preventing an individual in the street from being raped, because you might have to bomb a neighborhood, among other things.

Let's take the paradigmatic cases of WW2. Most people think the Nazis (and their allies) were worth fighting, and if any war was just, it was that one. But there was a terrible price in doing so. An estimated 40-50 million civilians died, and this culminated in two nukes being dropped on cities. This after fire and carpet bombing cities, all done by the good guys.

Maybe it had to be done, but it's not so easy if you start out knowing that will be the cost. At the very least, the potential cost should be seriously taken into consideration before committing to such action.

Because it involves countries.

Intervening in other countries is not analogous to helping an individual here. That paves over a lot of complexity.

I don't think it was worth it, outside of targeting Al-Queda, which would have been special forces/limited military action.

Would you want to generalize this to say that US involvement always makes things worse? Or would you say that it's fine under certain conditions? What would those be? — jamalrob

I don't know. I tend to support pacifism and non-intervention. But reality is messy.