Then the colours of blueshift and redshift are also quirks, but there’s no ‘red photon’ or ‘blue photon’ emitted by the distant galaxy, those frequencies are specified only by our motion.
In the TV-example, you treat the yellow as special but take the red and green for granted. But the pixels are not intrinsically red and green, they’re specified only in the relationship with observers and distance of view. Increasing the distance changes the spatial resolution until you no longer see red and green but yellow.
There is no need for a yellow pixel (nor a subjectivist/eye-brain-centric explanation).
Your question is based on a category error. It smuggles in a substance-ontology (properties must be held by objects) into a relational-ontology (properties are specified by relations).
Not at all. The whole point of the TV exercise is to show first that yellow cannot be “out there” (usually trivially accepted), and then on to the inference that even in the case of the “right” frequency of, say, “red” being displayed, the color exists only in the mind of the viewer. That there cannot be red “out there” either.
IOW, my position is that color is like pain is like taste: it’s a thing happening in a brain, in response to particular stimuli, but not a thing that exists in the external environment.
Well there is, because you have taken the position that colors are out there (direct realism). So let’s hear your explanation of where the yellow is and how it gets “released” by human red-green color opposition. It’s got to be out there, according to your view.
Nope – I leave it completely open to you. Whether black is a property of an object, or relationship between objects, or something else entirely, is all up to you.
So: I look into a completely dark part of Bootes void. What object or relationships have the property of black?
Right, but your claim is (or was) that the ratio of glutamate determines the colour seen. That’s plainly false.
For an eliminitavist, it can’t mean anything. But very few people are eliminativists.
It does. Different people see the same thing under different conditions of observation.
Galaxies beyond the observable universe still emit photons, their frequencies are still (or can be) specified by the Doppler-effect. The relation in which the colour experiences can be satisfied exists as an invariant potential.
It’s not false; it’s just not a complete picture, and nor was it intended to be — exactly like the keyboard example.
It doesn’t then follow that the thing they see isn’t a mental phenomenon.
I use the example of the dress to present something of a Common Kind Claim: I see white and gold and John sees black and blue. It’s not the case that we are each seeing two of the four colours that are “out there”. You must accept at least that either the colours I am seeing (white and gold) are a mental phenomenon or that the colours John is seeing (black and blue) are a mental phenomenon. But if the colours that one of us are seeing are a mental phenomenon then there’s no good reason to deny that the colours that the other is seeing are a mental phenomenon. The exact same kind of biological processes that give rise to “mental colours” for one of us (neurological activity in the visual cortex) are happening for both of us (albeit different neurons are involved, hence why we see different colours).
This is consistent with what physicists know about light and material objects and what biologists and neuroscientists know about colour vision.
If everyone who sees the dress to be black and blue were to die then everyone left alive would agree that the dress is white and gold. Where does that leave you?
Yes, but none of this is colour.
So does the relation in which a painful burning experience can be satisfied (its stars are really hot). It doesn’t then follow that the painful burning or the colours aren’t mental phenomena.
So the conclusion is assumed in the premises? To assume that the experience of yellow requires a yellow photon is also a compositional fallacy.
I think the yellow emerges exactly where the frequencies coalesce, a few decimeters in front of the TV-screen. But it’s a relational property, and to say that it’s in front of the TV doesn’t exclude any of its parts.
What happens in the eye (and brain) is the seeing, and the yellow that you see is the relational property out there in front of the screen.
Yes it’s a demonstrative exercise; the example refutes color realism rhetorically, by asking where the yellow is.
And secondly you’re ignoring all the questions I am putting to you.
You should be relishing the opportunity to explain your position and show why we (and indeed most neuroscientists and philosophers) are wrong. Instead we’re witnessing a masterclass in cognitive dissonance.
If you’re confident in your view, what’s the problem with asking questions about it?
That distance is going to depend on the visual acuity of the viewer. So yellow is objectively out there but moves around for each viewer?
(As well as all the issues with this view that have already been mentioned – that red and green photons don’t interact in any way. That human red-green opposition is the reason we see yellow and not greenish-red. That a yellow-photon detection machine will return zero at any distance etc etc).
No, you’re dismissing any reply or premise that doesn’t conform to your conclusion.
My explanation of colour realism is open to read, and it’s probably compatible with most if not all scientific facts of neuroscience, and psychology (at least in the realist tradition of JJ Gibson).
In philosophy, my position draws from the colour realism of Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman’s philosophy of symbol systems, the direct realism of John McDowell, Charles Travis, John Campbell, and John Searle.
I’m not here to defend their philosophies, but I’m happy to defend (or revise) the truth of the words that I write here on these pages.
What goes on in the brain during visual perception is the seeing, but the things that you see are located where you find them: e.g. on the surfaces of objects, or in states of affairs such as sunsets, blueshift, TV-screens.
Distance depends on spacetime geometry, not the viewer.
The visual activity, however, depends on the distance: near the screen you’ll see red and green pixels, further away the red and green coalesce as yellow (partly because of the wavelike behavior of light).
A photon-detection-machine is the wrong instrument. It doesn’t measure the pattern that emerges in views of the two pixels from a distance. A camera with pattern-detection-software could work, but the pattern alone doesn’t look yellow for the same reason the frequencies alone don’t look red nor green. All colours are relational properties, some frequency-based, others pattern-based.
No, you’re ignoring them.
For example, I asked, since your position is colour realism, whether black is out there, and if so, where, on 3 occasions now. I think this will be the 4th asking.
At one point you tried to bat it away by saying I was making assumptions, and I clarified that no assumptions are being made on my part – it’s 100% up to you if you want to claim it’s a property of an object, or a relationship, or is a mental phenomenon.
It’s been crickets since then.
What’s the answer?
No. The distance a viewer would need to be from the screen to see yellow will depend on the viewer’s photoreceptor count. So, for example, an older person would typically see yellow closer to the TV than a young person (cite).
So, I’ll repeat the question: where is yellow and how can it move around for different viewers?
But the “relation” is a quirk of the human eye, as I’ve said. Spectral yellow is at 570-590nm. A TV doesn’t need to produce any of those photons though, because the human eye also perceives yellow when green and red are close enough because they get mapped to yellow, instead of resolving to something like greenish-red, because of red-green opposition in the visual system.
Claiming that yellow is out there is as absurd as claiming that optical illusions must be out there, because that’s essentially what this is.
See, you keep assuming the conclusion in the premise that yellow just is spectral, a photon whose frequency is specified by itself, as if it had yellowness as its substance.
Yet frequencies are relational properties, as in the Doppler-effect etc.
Your excerise shows that a frequency can be substituted with a particular pattern that emerges in front of the screen from a point of view. That pattern is open to view and can be measured, e.g. like the degree of courseness of a plastered wall that appears smooth from a distance but course from a short range. These effects are real and can be captured by a camera. No need for glutamate or cells etc. As I write, it’s not sufficient for satisfying the experience but neither are frequencies. In the right context, however, the pattern functions as a part in the relation in which the colour experience is satisfied.
If optical illusions were behind the eyes or somehow inside the brain, then they are not visible.
Hallucinations, however, exist only inside the brain, as mental states, just like the mental states which are constituitive for seeing illusions, colours, and other objects and states of affairs.
The following is fairly easy to understand:
The experience of a colour is a mental state that is directed at some public part of the relation in which that experience is satisfied.
That public part is the colour. That’s why we find colours on the surfaces of objects, or in states of affairs such as sunsets.
The private part is the colour. That’s how we can see colours when we dream, hallucinate, or have synaesthesia, and how different people can see different colours when looking at the same thing (e.g. the dress). It’s not the case that these private colours only exist some of the time we see colours, with the rest of the time being some supposed public colours.
Yes, but that relation isn’t colour. Colour is the end product, which is how we can see colours when we dream, hallucinate, or have synaesthesia, and how different people can see different colours when looking at the same thing (e.g. the dress).
The illusion/hallucination is that you think the end product is “found” on some object’s surface. It isn’t.
In the sense they have a different modality, sure, but it’s the same in that both are mental phenomena (as are smells and tastes and pleasure).
The public part is there, e.g. a pigment. That’s why the colour is found there and not wherever you might be hallucinating.
In the case of the yellow colour in front of the TV, the public part is not a pigment nor other thing that specifies frequencies of 580 nm. Instead of frequencies, there’s a pattern emerging from the relation between a point of view and a pair of red+green pixels viewed from distance.
In that context, the pattern elicits the mental state of seeing the colour (like in optic illusions in which you see colours despite the lack of corresponding frequencies).
You just won’t distinguish the seeing from the object seen. But if any object of experience is illusory / hallucinatory, then you’re arguing for solipsism.
Which is what? Not a colour, but a molecular structure that reflects a certain wavelength of light.
No, there’s the cone cells in the eyes being simultaneously stimulated by both ~685nm photons and ~530nm photons, and they respond to this in mostly the same way that they would respond to ~570nm photons.
Unless you object to scientific realism, this just isn’t a matter for philosophers to discuss any more, and those who do are either clutching at straws (as I think you are when you talk about “patterns emerging from a relation”) or equivocating (as I think you are when you talk about “pigments”). It’s a historical question that has long since been answered. From here:
One of the major problems with color has to do with fitting what we seem to know about colors into what science (not only physics but the science of color vision) tells us about physical bodies and their qualities. It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess. Oceans and skies are not blue in the way that we naively think, nor are apples red (nor green). Colors of that kind, it is believed, have no place in the physical account of the world that has developed from the sixteenth century to this century.
Not only does the scientific mainstream tradition conflict with the common-sense understanding of color in this way, but as well, the scientific tradition contains a very counter-intuitive conception of color. There is, to illustrate, the celebrated remark by David Hume:
Sounds, colors, heat and cold, according to modern philosophy are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind. (Hume 1738: Bk III, part I, Sect. 1 [1911: 177]; Bk I, IV, IV [1911: 216])
Physicists who have subscribed to this doctrine include the luminaries: Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, Newton, Thomas Young, Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz. Maxwell, for example, wrote:
It seems almost a truism to say that color is a sensation; and yet Young, by honestly recognizing this elementary truth, established the first consistent theory of color. (Maxwell 1871: 13 [1970: 75])
This combination of eliminativism—the view that physical objects do not have colors, at least in a crucial sense—and subjectivism—the view that color is a subjective quality—is not merely of historical interest. It is held by many contemporary experts and authorities on color, e.g., Zeki 1983, Land 1983, and Kuehni 1997. Palmer, a leading psychologist and cognitive scientist, writes:
People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive. (Palmer 1999: 95)
Why you continue to deflect, and won’t just give your account. Your response so far was to diagnose my “error” but we are still waiting (this is the 5th time of asking) for your account of whether “blackness” is out there is the same way that “yellowness”, in your view, is.
No; a camera photographing a TV screen will detect green and red (and blue). This is why you often get odd results when photographing a screen, including green and red artefacts. It is just that if the sensor cells and TV pixels are aligned in a particular way, the result will be an image file with red and green subpixels that a human would, depending on how far away they are from the pixels, perceive as yellow because of how reddish-green gets mapped in the human brain.
So you’re saying optical illusions are out there? In the case of say this illusion, where there is apparent rotation if you put the object in your peripheral vision, you’re saying there’s a rotation happening “out there”?
Which is a public visible part of the relation in which that experience is satisfied.
I don’t object to scientific realism, only to a version that pretends to be scientific or realism but is neither.
Yeah, they’re both based on what Searle labels “The Bad Argument”. It refers to an invalid conclusion about the nature of perception which has plagued western epistemology (and science) since the 1600s.
The Bad Argument is basically this:
Take the valid observation that illusions and hallucinations exist, and make an invalid leap to the conclusion that we never directly perceive reality, only internal “representations” or “sense-data.”
Or, what and where are they, ever, and do we still see them, with less or no language?
Broadly, in this debate, what they are is mental items, and in the head, or (in the other model which may or may not be compatible) they are illumination events, or rather, types and relations of such events.
In the first case they are conceivably unaffected by limitations on language, which I guess is your point.
In the second view, where we get to analyse them rather than take them as basic, we can perhaps count a colour for each colour word that is an adjective or mass noun (not a complete solution of course and vulnerable to the “beetle” conundrum) and we can also consider the possible psychology of relation words like “deeper than” and “matches”.
Does this mean they are particulars rather than types or relations? Are they repeatable particulars, elements that are each common to several perceptions? How is that different to being types? (I’m asking your view on it, I don’t want SEP.)
On the external view, a tree falling in a forest with no sighted nor hearing creatures present is nonetheless one big sound and illumination event. And of course myriad smaller ones. All the events are instances of colour and pitch types and relations, as determined (imperfectly of course) by human visual and auditory perception. They are, equally, instances of optical and sonic patterns as described by physics.
Either way (phenomenal or physical) we are able in principle to identify the patterns (types and relations of sound events and illumination events) in the forest, indirectly, by playing back from an automatic recording device.
I get that you said universe not forest. But the playback is in principle.
Quite. They are completely different maps of the same world.
