Philosophy- What Do we See?

Thomas you seem to miss that explaining a phenomena does not amount to experiencing the phenomena...explaining the wavelength of light is not what light is in our brain...experiencing is different from say mathematically or medically describing...an equation is not "blue", there´s a transformation process in between.

Then accurately you should know that it is n´t the same although certainly very similar...

What do we see with our own eyes?
An Example: I could say that the colour I see is Blue. However, it is just a noun for this colour. To someone else the blue I see could be completley different. To them it could be my version of Green. But we can never know as Colour is unexplainable.

your , our ability to see this certain colour is determined the the colour cones in our eyes

joefromchicago wrote:

It's easy? Fine. How would you describe "blue" to a person who is blind from birth?

I would describe "vision" in terms of analogies with his sense of touch. Then I'd describe "color" in terms of analogies with sound, or perhaps with radio. To be sure, it would take a while, and the person's understanding of colour would remain imperfect. But it wouldn't be a deep mystery to him.

Let me rephrase the question: By what tests would you decide what the visual experience of blue is, and that "blue perceived by Joe" is identical to "blue perceived by Fil"?

No, because my definition requires an incoming signal from the photoreceptors for 460-nm lighwaves, through the optical nerve, into the visual cortex. If her visual cortex can't detect or process the signal, she's blind.

The near-infrared light, of course. Obviously you've sorted the lightbulbs in order of increasing wavelength, each 100-200 nm longer than the other. Near-infrared, perhaps 800nm, is the next obvious choice.

joefromchicago wrote:

That certain light wavelengths yield the color "blue?" How would these color-blind physicists know what "blue" is?

They have defined blue to mean "whatever wavelength stimulates type-blue photoreceptors like the ones we've just examined under our electron microscope". Additionally, the color-blind physicists could test the soundness of their definition by shining a 460-nm light onto non-colorblind persons and asking them: "What color is this light?"

Thomas wrote:

The near-infrared light, of course. Obviously you've sorted the lightbulbs in order of increasing wavelength, each 100-200 nm longer than the other. Near-infrared, perhaps 800nm, is the next obvious choice.

Who said I sorted the lightbulbs, or that they are in any order? I just said there's a series of buttons and a series of bulbs. I didn't say anything about how they were arranged. Would you like to take another try?

And thus you prove my point. The only way that these scientists would know what type-blue receptors are is by first knowing what blue is.

And how would they check their results? As you say, by asking a non-color blind person.

That's not describing a color, that's describing a process. After that explanation, the blind person would have some idea of how sight works, but would still have no clue what "blue" is.

If we give two people a number of differently colored swatches and ask them to point to the one that is blue, they would probably choose the same one, but we wouldn't know if they're both seeing the same color. One, for instance, might see "green" where the other sees "blue," and vice versa. They, however, would agree on what is "blue."

On what basis do you expect me to guess?

No, they know it categorizing photo-receptors by the kind of wavelength they respond to, and by labelling one of those categories "blue".

That's just a shallow consistency check. It doesn't affect the definition in any deep way. If the non-colorblind interviewees said, "no that's actually our red", the color-blind physicists would happily re-label the photoreceptors. But that would only change labels, not the phenomenon the label is on. And shuffling labels around is nothing deeper than a trivial word-usage game.

I suspect this is an argument from lack of imagination on your part. In my own experience as a physicist, I've had to work a lot with physical phenomena my body has no sensory organs for---especially electrical circuits and light outside the visible range. I'll grant you that in the beginning, working with spectrometers, multimeters, and oscilloscopes seemed like "just a process" to me. But over the years, as I familiarized myself with these tools, I came to internalize their signals more and more. At some point, they came to seem pretty much like extensions of my own body, and their signals pretty much like perceptions of my own. Sure, I still need an oscilloscope to "see" alternating currents and voltages. But then again, other people need to put on glasses to see the books before their eyes. Who is to say where to draw the line?

Or, to approach the same problem from a different angle: Are you familiar at all with Oliver Sacks's work? Sacks is a neurologist whose books describe in detail, not just what his patients' neurological symptoms are, but also how those symptoms mold their personalities and biographies. Assuming that you have read some of Sack's writings: When you read them, are you sure you have no idea what it's like to be those people?

Fair enough. If you think the statements "we can't answer the question" and "we can't even intelligibly ask the question" make the same point, there's little I can say against that.

Thomas wrote:

On what basis do you expect me to guess?

I don't expect you to guess at all. I expect you to utilize the scientific method to make a determination.

Thomas wrote:

No, they know it categorizing photo-receptors by the kind of wavelength they respond to, and by labelling one of those categories "blue".

How do they decide on the label?

Thomas wrote:

That's just a shallow consistency check. It doesn't affect the definition in any deep way. If the non-colorblind interviewees said, "no that's actually our red", the color-blind physicists would happily re-label the photoreceptors. But that would only change labels, not the phenomenon the label is on. And shuffling labels around is nothing deeper than a trivial word-usage game.

You continue to prove my point. Of course the scientists would re-label the receptors if, through observation, they determined that those receptors responded to red light rather than blue light. But that's because they already know what red and blue are.

Then you've asked me a trick question. Your problem is underspecified, so the scientific method has insufficient information to work from.

They start by picking a random one. Then they stick with it. The initial labelling is intellectually shallow---for all I care about, they might as well pick it by flipping a coin.

In your framework, what happens if you give half of those color-aware persons a drug? Let's say it messes with their forebrains, causing them to sincerely tell the physicist "I see red" when the physicist shines a lamp with 460nm-only light? Do you engage in epistemic relativism and say, "their perception is as good to me as the control group's perception"? Or do you say "the drugged people are wrong---they may believe they're seeing red, but what they're really seeing is blue."? My answer is that they're wrong, and that the control group is right.

Thomas wrote:

They start by picking a random one. Then they stick with it. The initial labelling is intellectually shallow---for all I care about, they might as well pick it by flipping a coin.

I'm sure even you don't believe that. Scientists wouldn't start by labelling a photoreceptor "blue" if they had no reason to think that those receptors were not somehow associated with that color, no more than a neuroscientist would label a brain "abnormal" unless he knew something about that brain's pathology to begin with.

Does the drug mess with their ability to see colors or just to their ability to report what they see accurately?

The original assignment itself is arbitrary.

The drug messes with the part of the forebrain that processes the input from the optical nerve. Their brain's language center accurately says what that part of the forebrain thinks it perceives.