The REDNESS of red

Yeah, but we "philosophers" would respond with Why must we blow up volleyballs and Where do they come from and why. And we "mystics" would say, Wow, it's so good to be a volley ball.

Happy obeisance (obiesance) (obiescence) , aw hell, one smiling bow

Gassho.

Re: The REDNESS of red


I did this one as a kid a lot too.

Tip: don't try to steal another kid's eyes to settle the issue. Grownups frown on that.

Re: The REDNESS of red


So true Craven. That's why I have no eyes today. That kid got one heck of a spanking though.

red - the colour, does not 'exist' at all. It is a perceptive delusion, perpetrated on the brain, by the optic nerve. "Red' is actually a vibration at a specific wavelength, and while we think we see 'red' we actually see an object defined by a distinguishing outline, a texture (caused by varying signals from discrete parts of the surface), shading (greyscale, caused by variation in the intensity of light falling on it), and colour (our brain's graphical feedback of the light wavelength, used to help classify objects.

The next generation of sentient beings which we create, will be able to distinguish infra red, to sense heat, and ultraviolet, to measure radiation; and will also have radio frequency modulators for communication, etc., etc.

I'm feeling a little jealous already!

Re: The REDNESS of red


Lol! And - then you realise that it ISN'T!!!!!! (IE, that you do NOT see the same colour as others)

Because - as a 7 year old - having been taught about blue/green - you are calling your damn little asthma pills - (phenergan) - "blue pills". And your mum is calling them green. Things fall apart - the centre cannot hold - you WANT to agree with your mum - and the doctor, who is enlisted into this struggle - but you just can't. This pill is BLUE. There is pressure. Adults laugh. They become red-faced. You CANNOT recant.

Fortunately, shortly thereafter, as you browse through your biology books - (I LOVED biology as a kid!) - you come across info re the cornea. How, as you age, especially if you are a smoker (both parents, and the doctor) it YELLOWS!!!!! Yellow and blue = what? YES! Green!!!!!! I realise I see the pills as blue because I still have a clear cornea. My parents and the doctor - well......


heehee - I STILL see them as blue!


Now - here is an experiment - one of my eyes sees colours as distinctly "warmer" in tone than the other - I think the left is the "warm" one.

Check it out yourself. STILL believe in colour?

it's all in your head wabbit!

[sorry, should have said - the eyes have it!]

BoGoWo

Wow! So many interesting views on the matter .. when I opened the browser today!

NickFun :

cjhsa :

fresco : Your views are always refreshing. Concerning this line of thought leading to nondualism - I must give it more room. because I wish there was qualia..

JLN : I am beginning to have a hint about the color of your world view. For now it's all about trust - I trust you are all intelligent human beings, actually experiencing RED and GREEN, and not some computer programs just trying to make conversation

tvywel : I have a strong conviction about something : that in the end we will somehow 'understand' RED. But not necessarily by the end of this thread...

Scissors : Exactly - we can only understand each other because of, like fresco has pointed out, sociolingusitic acquisition and consensus of needs. We can agree that roses are red. We can also determine that blood is red. But is it RED?

farmerman,SCoates : Your pragmatical view is respected. However, the hardest part of science is to obtain questions. Right now, my question is philisophical at best, by i feel there is a scientific question in there, just can't get it out. And one philosophy's role could be just that : digging out the potentially scientifical questions out of the sea of metaphysics.
I am intrigued by Qualia because I cannot put that in software. Pragmatism is my every day work, and qualia is what I dream about.

Craven (and Cav) : What was it LIKE?

BoGoWo : a functionalist view is always appreciated - we all depend on functioning in the end, which fulfills our material needs. But a computer does that - functions - do we not do more? I am seeking to understand how does the feeling of RED come about when my program searches for the best pattern-fit of a pixel array received from digital camera, or does it at all?

Dlowan :
I find that extremely interesting to think about. It shows that feeling of RED is an extremely high-level psychological process, one much higher than say pattern recognition which is practically built into the low-level eye/brain functions. There are features of the picture (geometry, shadows etc.) being processed by our pattern-recognition extremely effectively and subconsciously, and yet the feeling of RED or PROXIMITY comes on top of that! Color should be a very basic property of the picture, judging from a functionalist perspective, much higher than shadows and geometrical perspective - yet it isn't.

What about memory? Anybody stumbled across the following:
I could swear I remembered the house was painted BLUE. I could remember it as clear as a day, perfect sunlit image forming before my inner eyes. Yet when I set my eyes on it, after 10 years, It was exactly as I remembered it, except it was GREEN! I could not believe my eyes! I researched if a paint job has been done on it, or if the color has changed - but no! Everybody confirmed it has ALWAYS been GREEN!

And what about multi-perceptions - the people that can see music, and have visual feelings triggered by notes? That 'something' that is triggered by a certain piece of music looks the same as a blue wave on a lake, and it is BLUE. This BLUE exists independently of the wave, or the sounds that triggered it.

if I am just delusional, and am imagining things that aren't there - maybe RED does not exist, as functionalists say - then what is it - the thing i'm imagining? What is IMAGINATION? I think therefore I am - I imagine it, so it can't be nothing.

Relative

the 'brain' is your 'server', and the senses, your internet 'connection';
and to extend the analogy, don't trust everything you 'experience', it might be absolutely "true", or, if you are lucky, it might be a figment of your 'imagination' - as good as it gets!

I can't speak for Craven, Relative, but when a kid stabs out your eyes without a King Lear, Oedipal or Equus excuse, it hurts like hell, and there is a lot of red involved.

Interesting BoGoWo

RelativeThe word synesthesia, meaning "joined sensation", shares a root with anesthesia, meaning "no sensation." It denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blendings whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like "shards of glass," a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or, seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of red as well. The experience is frequently projected outside the individual, rather than being an image in the mind's eye. I currently estimate that 1/25,000 individuals is born to a world where one sensation involuntarily conjures up others, sometimes all five clashing together (Cytowic, 1989, 1993). I suspect this figure is far too low.

1.3 It is aphorismic that nature reveals herself by her exceptions. Since our intellectual baggage includes deeply-ingrained historical ideas about normative concepts of mind, synesthesia not only flaunts conventional laws of neuroanatomy and psychology, but even seems to grate against common sense. Yet it should also be aphorismic (though never contemporaneously evident) that concepts which some souls now think of as clear, coherent, and final are unlikely to appear to posterity as having any of those attributes.

Continued in link….

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html


I do now have the feeling of tasting red,

BoGoWo : I think you have it backwards .. The reality is the internet(server), senses are your connection, and the brain is your client.
But who is the person reading the web content ? Could it be just a figment of client's software? I say no..

twyvel : Thanks for links and excerpts on synesthesia. I have forgotten the word and couldn't even quickly google it .. I have much more pronounced processing than memory.
I have a long way to go before I can understand the style of .. Sutra. It is using negation, using negation of existence like a template for oneness. I cannot see now how negation of multidimensional delusions, if they are illusions, is going to provide me with understanding. I can see that making things as simple as possible is the only way to go, but not any simpler than possible. ( A. Einstein)

Relative

Man, it's a fun reality, or illusion. or whatever it is.

I just can't think of any believable explanation of how different people COULD (or why different people would) see different colors. Does anyone have an explanation to support the possibility?

Subjectivism and Objectivism---Philosophical skepticism
---The mind-body problem

'Only if you except that there is truth, but then claim we have no way of actually obtaining it, do you arrive at skepticism' -Thomas Nagel

Nolanguage, do you agree with Nagel? What would you call a person who argues that there is no such thing as Truth itself, a nihilist, a mad man? This person may be arguing that human nature is able to develop the notion of Truth, but not to understand Reality on its own terms. Nagel's Skeptic only holds that we have technical limitations, that the skeptic's problem is methodological, not epistemological.