fresco wrote:The answer lies in the meaning of "same".
My argument is that the only meaning of "same" is "functionally equivalent". If you consider ANY two states of being they are simultaneously both "the same" (they are both the object of a comparison) and "different" (there are two). These two polarities are always mutually existent and our attention merely focusses on one or the other pole.
Hence it is philosophically meaningless to ask whether he sees "red" when I see "red" if outcome of such states such as the utterance "red" occurs in both cases. The only situation that matters is when our subsequent behaviours functionally differ, e.g. when he runs what I consider a "red" light.
(NB The modern view of child language aquisition has shifted significantly because of the recognition of the point that a child never actually "repeats" accurately what a parent utters but produces a functionally equivalent utterance.)
This view of course has major implications for a discussion of "truth" and "facts" which I would argue are essentially a function of social consensus.
leave it to fresco to cut to the chase....a fellow grandson of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub (inside joke).
I agree entirely. The requirements for color are object, incident light and observer.
The first two items are constants. The last is not, and it is a measure of how important language is to humans that the idea caused by the impressions of visible light on the human eye are uniformly understood as colors.
Regardless of what has been mentioned about similar physiological responses to colors that humans share, the resultant reflected light is sorbed on a molecular level by receptor cells and sorption of light by these receptors in the human eye varies with each person's genetic make-up..
Where one person sees violet, another might see gray, and not from the latter being color blind.
And this is what happened to me when in grad school synthesizing dyes. (my degrees are in the areas of dyes and color science.) I studied reaction rates of the coloration process (diazotization) so long that I could detect the onset of reactions of disazo dyes by the faintest change from red to blue.... first passing thru shades of violet and purple. When I showed the reactions to my advisor he could not see the violet until much later than I when observing the experiment and he had outstanding color vision and exhibited none of the traditional "red eye" color perception change most men acquire with age..
This, I considered a learned sensitivity to contrasting colors, or as is sometimes referred to as a "learned perceptual skill," although the fundamental sensitivity might have been innate, it was not exercised up to then and as Fresco points out the use of the word "red" is one which people generally agree upon by experience, and it is this sameness of agreed upon idea of what "red' means, not equality of sorption on the molecular level or even two people having the same physiological response that allows us to say we (as in more than a single person) saw red.
This is an interesting question because it pits the traditional view of self-consciousness versus the contemporary one. Where the former would indicate that "red" is derived from one's own sensations, (and regardless of this term being a socially determined one, how could that ever be in error), and the latter, which would argue against the infallibility of that introspective judgment of the mind seeing red.
interesting thread, thanks all, for the learning experience from you guys.
