The discussion revolves around the nature of color perception, exploring whether color exists solely as a physical phenomenon tied to electromagnetic radiation or if it has a separate, perhaps more subjective, existence. Participants engage with philosophical questions about the relationship between color and consciousness, the role of the brain in interpreting color signals, and the implications of color perception in different contexts, including cultural and emotional associations.
Participants express a range of views, with no consensus on whether color is purely a physical phenomenon or if it has subjective elements. The discussion remains unresolved, with multiple competing perspectives on the nature of color perception.
Some arguments rely on assumptions about the relationship between physical properties of light and subjective experiences of color, which may not be universally accepted. The discussion also touches on cultural and emotional dimensions of color perception, which complicate the analysis.
ThomasT said:How could 566 THz be perceived as 484 THz?
In the case of red and green as perceived by the human eye and mind the sensory apperatus has issues with distinguishing them when they are together. If you mix the two in significant quantities you do not get red-green or vice versa but rather you see brown. Brown is not a colour that exists on any spectrum of light it's something your brain produces in response to proxiomity or mixing of colours your eyes have trouble perceiving together at the same time. At the same time if you mixed a very small amount of green into a red you would only see red, you would not perceive the green, and vice versa. I believe the red/green/brown perception is the most striking but there are other examples where certain colours are perceived differently due to the presence of other colours.ThomasT said:How could 566 THz be perceived as 484 THz?
Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances
Ravi Mehta and Rui (Juliet) Zhu*
Existing research reports inconsistent findings with regard to the effect of color on cognitive task performances. Some research suggests that blue or green leads to better performances than red; other studies record the opposite. Current work reconciles this discrepancy. We demonstrate that red (versus blue) color induces primarily an avoidance (versus approach) motivation (study 1, n = 69) and that red enhances performance on a detail-oriented task, whereas blue enhances performance on a creative task (studies 2 and 3, n = 208 and 118). Further, we replicate these results in the domains of product design (study 4, n = 42) and persuasive message evaluation (study 5, n = 161) and show that these effects occur outside of individuals' consciousness (study 6, n = 68). We also provide process evidence suggesting that the activation of alternative motivations mediates the effect of color on cognitive task performances.
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, 2053 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada.
Evo said:If you have something you have labled as "blue" and ask millions of people to pick the "blue" square out of a sampling of others colors, they will all select it. I think we can fairly say that we all pretty much perceive color the same way. It's something that all people see similarly enough that no mater what you call it, people know it. You could just give people a blue square and thousands of other squares of other colors and ask them to find the square that matches. Unless they have a physical problem such as color blindness, they will recoginize the color.
Philosophy has nothing to do with colors.
lubuntu said:For some people there seems to be something which is color that exists outside of electromagnetic radiation. As the typical question goes "Is your red my green?" I don't understand the argument though. If we look at what we mean by color the only thing we can possibly say is: "Well when my optic nerve reacts to light of this frequency I my conscientiousness perceives a thing I call green". I don't understand how you can postulate that there is something that is green-ness without going through this definition.
If we call a certain frequency green and furthermore agree within reason what cultural and even emotional significance is attached to that thing then we don't have any conflict. The supposition that "your red is my green" implies some sort of supernaturalism that color is something besides the sum of the electromagnetic radiation that triggers a response to a set of neurons.
Furthermore, the question is non-scientific as there is nothing that is testable and even if it was truth there are absolutely no consequences.
I can see that this is an interesting subject to consider briefly, but when it was brought up in a philosophy class I am taking I was a bit confused, the rest of the class seemed to just take for granted that somehow color can be separated from the physical phenomenon.
To me this seems a question that is barely worth posing. Richard Dawkins puts it well in "The God Delusion" where he says that just because we can form something as a question in our language doesn't mean that it makes any sense or deserves any sort of answer.
madness said:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_color_illusion
The above illusion should make it clear that our perception of colour is governed by more than just physical wavelengths. Going back to the original question, I think most people can distinguish between their perception of something and the thing itself, ie our perception of colour is not the same as the physical thing that caused it. One is mental ("qualia"), the other physical. If only the physical wavelength mattered, we would all be "P-zombies" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_zombie).
madness said:It is perfectly conceivable that one person's red is another person's green, or that one person's red is a colour that another person can't even imagine.
madness said:Yes but the point is that when they each say it is "red", they only have their own understanding of red to compare it to, ie the same red that they have experienced since they were little. The fact that everyone agrees the laser is red only goes to show that people consistently perceive that wavelength in the same way (as individuals).
And what's the difference between experiencing something as green and mistaking it for green?
madness said:I maybe wasn't clear in the last post. What I mean is that if one person grew up seeing red things as green and vice versa (obviously this has to be with respect to some other person), then you would never know. He would still say "yes that laser is definitely red", but would be experiencing what you think of as green.
madness said:"That would be difficult to refute since we have no way of measuring experience yet, but is their any logical reason to believe that or was it pulled out of the air? For instance, why would it be another color of mine they experienced? Why not a completely different experience all together (of course, still a color experience)."
It was just an example, and I did say it could be a colour the other person couldn't even imagine in the earlier post. There is no logical reason to back it up, all I was saying is that it is conceivable and a valid question - the OP seemed to be arguing otherwise. I pretty much agree with the rest of your post.
octelcogopod said:Another example is touch and feeling on the skin/body.
When I pinch my arm the skin is folded and nerves/tissue is moved around, but nowhere in this physical composition is there contained the actual sensation/pain I feel.
This sensation is an experience my brain is giving me based on the information it receives, but you can't objectively measure or feel/see the pain in any lab tests.
Same as the experience of color. We can't even explain it to others.
The most fundamental issue is that there is no difference between a machine with no consciousness built exactly as a human, and a human as we know it.
wiki said:[physicalists] argue that while consciousness, subjective experiences, and so forth exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims they are; pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences.
Pythagorean said:This is a fallacious argument, though. If you were able to build a machine exactly like a human, then it would be a human.
Also, see Daniel Dennet's criticisms on the P-Zombie:
[physicalists] argue that while consciousness, subjective experiences, and so forth exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims they are; pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Criticism
octelcogopod said:But the reaction to pain can be programmed and then the person would react just as a person who actually feels pain. I don't see how that negates the zombie argument.
He is thinking on a very high level, you have to think on a very low level in that every molecule in the body is custom built for the sole purpose of creating a 100% identical zombie.
And yes, you would have a human, but you wouldn't know if it actually feels anything or is conscious, and this is true for our very reality as well. Prove to me that I am conscious.
octelcogopod said:There's no way to really define consciousness in a physical manner. We can define it subjectively by using normal language and words like 'thinking' 'abstraction' 'processing' 'feelings' but none of this can be proven to exist in the physical world.
The only reason we can map a brain event to an emotion, is because we know the emotion ourselves. When a subject laughs because of stimuli to the brain, we /assume/ that the subject has the same experience we do.
In fact, you're kind of the one implying dualism in the sense that you are telling me I have consciousness when there is no physical proof for it.
Conscious action implies first person experience, but in your post you are only deducing that first person experience must exist to exhibit that behavior, you haven't actually proven that it's there. And I don't know a way to do that.
Maybe science one day will solve all this, but who knows.
Pythagorean said:But we still have the problem of qualia, of course: How do we tell pain from pleasure? Even if we can measure the intensity of these things, what's the difference. Just like anything in science, this comes from definition. We can't "measure" the difference between distance and velocity, they're simply defined as two different types of things. In the case of pain and pleasure, the type of qualia would be defined by the neural events that take place in each case (i.e. we induce pain into the subject and we see what circuitry lights up in the brain, then we induce pleasure into the subject and map out the different circuitry).
My hypothesis is testable too. If we find that only a certain kind of "circuitry" produces a certain experience, then we should be able to eliminate that experience by physically eliminating that circuitry from the brain. We already know beyond a doubt, that certain regions of the brain are responsible for different functions. This wouldn't be but a step beyond that. We just have to wait for brain imaging to catch up (which it seems to be doing with things like fMRI).
With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at, except that I marvel at how the sky is yellow, the grass red, and so forth. Would this not confirm, empirically, that our qualia were different? But suppose the technician then pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees and reinserts it in the socket. Now I report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth. Which is the "right" orientation of the plug? Designing and building such a device would require that its "fidelity" be tuned or calibrated by the normalization of the two subjects' reports--so we would be right back at our evidential starting point. The moral of this intuition pump is that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology.
So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all.
Q_Goest said:What does this say about determining the experience we have by monitoring the behavior of the computational circuit? It says we have no way of telling what qualia was being experienced.
octelcogopod said:Or at least, the experience is a composition of many different physical elements but there is no single place to observe this experience from a third person perspective.
octelcogopod said:Because consciousness certainly feels like a single point. It feels like it is all accumulated into a coherent whole, where I am completely oblivious to the physical works underlying it.
I do not feel neurons, or nerves, or electromagnetic light frequencies, or chemicals, I feel happy, sad, excited, but where are all these things in the physical world?