There is a question so simple it hides its own depth which is can you imagine a colour you have never seen? Not a shade. Not a mixture. A genuinely new colour, as alien to red as red is to silence. Try it. The mind reaches outward and finds only what it already holds, It shuffles, blends, brightens, darkens.
The new colour is impossible, the eye receives wavelengths, the brain maps them, what we call blue or crimson is not a thing in the world but a transaction between world and nerve, and that transaction can only happen in currencies already exchanged. Ask someone to conceive of a sixth primary colour and they will hand you a purple, a teal, a more saturated version of something familiar. The mind reaches into its inventory and finds no gap, because a gap has no texture. You cannot experience the absence of an experience.
The newborn arrives with none of this furniture. Locke’s blank slate, “tabula rasa” no innate colours, no inherited image of God, no prior language for grief or wonder. Everything comes in through the senses, one impression at a time, and from these raw materials the entire cathedral of thought is slowly built. The cathedral is genuinely magnificent. But it was built from stone quarried in the world, not conjured from nothing.
This applies to every idea, not only the theological. The poet who writes a truly original metaphor still built it from words already spoken, orginality is not creation from nothing, it is unexpected combination, the rearrangement of given pieces into a form that surprises even the person doing the arranging. There are no original ideas. There are only original connections, and connections require endpoints that already exist.
Beautiful question in its radical simplicity. Great OP.
Elsewhere I happen to be discussing Kant. Shall we examine this “we” ? What if I claim to be able to do so ? I claim that I can “see it in my mind” but find it nowhere in nature.
How is it (why is it ? ) that we “automatically” project the fixed structure of our personal experience as the fixed structure of all human experience ? How do we get from mine to ours ?
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Another fun issue:
You and I might agree that a certain ripe tomato is “red” ? How far does this get us ? I can’t see the tomato through your eyes nor you through mine. (Am I doing the thing I critique above ? Maybe youcan see through my eyes.) Schrodinger (a tetrachrome) and the logical positivists thought that we were stuck with just this “structure.” The public-pragmatic concept of red lacks sufficient depth to touch the quality itself for the individual pair of eyes.
Apparently, some people see new colors under the influence of drugs.
This is just not true. It is well established that babies have a cognitive structure and inborn perceptive capacity from birth. There are studies that show they have a sense of number, language, and perhaps even morality. I don’t know how that applies to color perception exactly, but most of us are born with the same optical sensing and processing equipment. We are not blank slates.
I forgot to mention, there are also studies which show that direct stimulation of the cones in the eye with lasers can lead to the perception of colors which have not been seen before.
Well you misunderstood the concept, Im not saying you “Why cant see a new colour?”, Im saying “why cant you THINK of a new colour”, I established the fact we learn stuff from our senses as we are blank canvaces when we are born, but why cant we think of a new colour that we never saw, meaning we are just limited to our perception, we are just limited in a bubble of everything we see, hear, touch, smell and feel, yk those video games where the map is unlocked and its dark until you go to it
I think you misread the argument, the essay was never about whether new colours can be “seen”. It is about whether they can be “conceived” as I said previously. If psychedelics genuinely produce a new colour experience, that actually proves the point rather than defeating it, the person now has a new impression, and from that impression they can form a new idea. Hume’s framework survives completely. You need the sensory input first. That is exactly what the essay argue
The point was never that we are born with zero cognitive machinery. It is that we are born with no content. The structures you mentioned are exactly that, structures, empty frameworks waiting to be filled. A number sense is useless without thngs to count language sensitivity is not language. heres the beautifull thing, the canvas metaphor was about the absence of received content, not the absence of a canvas itself
But I highly doubt people under psychedelics can see BRAND new colours since they never percieved it and there is no colour in the known world we haven’t already perceived, so there is no impression available to draw an idea from, people who are born blind cant dream of aynthing at all, its nothing, they see nothing not even black or darkness because they never visualised them, if they were born with perception or if they were born with a pre existing knowledge of how a tree looks, like Plato suggests with his “Theory of Forms”, then they would dream of it
We, that is a valid accusation and frankly I wasn’t careful in my wording. The empiricist assertion is not that we all have the exact same internal experience but that none of us can have experiences of a world that our own sense data didn’t give them. The process of acquisition is species-wide, if not private. Your red and my red could feel totally different internally and we would never know it but neither of us can imagine a color that neither has seen no matter what red feels like to you or I internally. It’s a limitation of structure, not of feeling.
Actually, your qualia point actually fortifies the essay rather than it weakens it. If we cannot even perfectly share the colors we already have; if your red is confined to within your own eye and mine to within my own, how much more radical is the idea of being unable to even form an idea of an utterly new color? We are not limited by only what exists. We are limited by only what our specific apparatus interacted with.
The tetrachromat is a nice case but proves the point again. They have more equipment the additional cone type means they have more to draw on, they do not have a more creative mind. They did not formulate an idea of a new color they experienced one, and that is exactly the point Hume is making. The idea of the color has to come from the impression.
And Thank you man, this is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping the essay would attract. The qualia point especially is something I had in the back of my mind but did not push far enough in the essay itself. You articulated it better than I did and this question has been on my mind for years and its driving me crazy, makes it feel like the world is small and Im stuck in a bubble haha
Why might asks whether reality bleeds ? I tend to agree with your rejection of creation from nothing. Creation is primarily rearrangement, curation. But Shakespeare invented a feast of words, and it’s hard to exclude some continual injection of novelty into our reality.
Playing devil’s advocate, how would one prove this ? One might expect similar biological structure to result in similar experience, but understanding the relevant experience as private also means zero data from which to make a case.
And yet I have the usual vague sense that others see and smell as I would if I see and smell what they do.
I tend to agree with you. I actually don’t like thinking of mind as internal stuff. Consciousness is rather pure presence of the world from the perspective of the organism, but that’s offered in passing, from a fellow (perhaps absurdly extreme) empiricist.
I appreciate the kind words and I like the name you chose.
What you call the qualia issue I would call the quality issue. My take is that the very being and/or quality of objects is what we call “consciousness.” This is along the lines of Mill’s phenomenalism, which is not so far from Hume. This reframing does lose the strangeness of the issue.
I surmise the creativity ( and its limits ) are a primary theme here. Harold Bloom writes about “the anxiety of influence” that poets feel in the face of the poets who taught them what poetry was. Can they do something strange enough to be genuinely new without losing the power of the poems that made them hope to be poets in the first place ? We can apply this to philosophy and so on. A rich topic in itself. We might ask about the “ineffability” or “privacy” of the quality of “meaning” just as we have discussed the weirdness of color.
The answer to the OP of course is that we don’t know. We can say, as the OP alludes, that our imagination in general often just modifies and mixes things we’ve already seen.
Which makes evolutionary sense. Our imagination is largely a planning and retrospective tool, and in both cases we don’t need to imagine genuinely novel things.
And, in terms of survival, imagining a new color would be worse than useless. Our attention could be taken by thinking of things that we couldn’t even describe to other people, let alone have any utility.
Edit: On first draft I was skeptical about people on drugs or with lasers seeing genuinely new colors. But on googling, this is a widely reported phenomenon. And it’s nothing like the marginal, barely perceptible tricks I’ve seen with “impossibly dark blue” or whatever.
So happy to update my understanding on that
And it doesn’t detract from my overall point about the imagination because it is believed that the reason for this effect is interfering with the part of the visual cortex that “pre-processes” color data from the eye. So the latter stages of visual processing act as though the stimuli from the eye is outside of the normal range.
The Bloom reference is perfect and I think it extends further than just poets, eevery thinker is haunted by the thinkers who made them capable of thinking in the first place, you cannot escape your influences because your influences are literally the material your mind is made of. The anxiety of influence is just the blank canvas problem wearing a more elegant coat.
The phenomenalism point is interesting because it dissolves the problem from a different angle than I took, I was treating consciousness as something that receives the world. You are saying consciousness is not separate from the world at all, it is just the world’s presence from a particular vantage point. If that is right then the qualia issue does lose some of its strangeness, there is no inner screen the red is being projected onto, the red just is what it is where it is. Though I wonder if that fully closes the gap between your experience and mine or just relocates it.
And yes, ineffability of meaning is the same structure. I cannot hand you what a word means to me any more than I can hand you my red. We agree on usage and call it understanding. Maybe thhat is all understanding ever is
I think your own update actually proves the essay rather than complicating it. You note the effect works by interfering with the visual cortex’s preprocessing, meaning the brain is being fed signals it interprets as outside normal range. That is still a sensory impression producing an idea. The pathway is unusual but the direction is the same, world to mind, not mind conjuring from nothing. If anything it is the most literal possible demonstration of Hume’s point. You need the impression first, even if that impression is being generated by disrupting your own hardware.
though I wish we had a machine that can generate a new colour completely, for some reason I think people will collapse from it or get a massive headache
I enjoyed your response, and I feel well understood ( which usually takes longer on delicate issues like these.)
You might like Eliot’s related but differently focused take, if you don’t already know it.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
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Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
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What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
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What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
So the phenomenalist is, as you say, understanding consciousness to be the redness of the apple “for” the conscious organism. But this still doesn’t solve the issue, in my view. The logical positivist and Schrodinger were (basically) phenomenalists, and they still felt stuck at structure. Because there is something ( as far as most of us believe) stubbornly personal about quality in general, even if we agree that we agree on what we call things.
I think that’s a tempting behaviorist reduction, but for me ( and I hope and assume for others) these “signs” ( like the inscriptions you sent over my way ) “radiate” with a “quality” that we might call “significance” or “meaning.” And this is almost more convincing than color, given the history of a dialogue, given the complexity of a call and response that seems to zero-in, when we are lucky, on a strong sense of the words coming to “mean the same thing on both sides.”
To me this is dark deep water, one of my favorite issues. What are words or better what are signs in general ? Things in the world among other things that we categorize as doing a certain special something. In the “Time and Being” thread we are digging into how meaning is entangled with time, since signs take on different meanings even for the same person “over time.”
Sure, but we know that there are sufficient differences between humans such that one person can be colour blind and another not be.
Those differences may also entail that, even in isolation, the colour a tomato looks to the colour blind is different to the colour a tomato looks to the non-colour blind (even though they both name it ‘red’).
Even when we consider those who aren’t colour blind we know that people can look at the same thing and see different colours, e.g. with the dress. And to immediately cut off the Wittgensteinian rubbish that I usually hear in response, we can explain it with this picture (as best as I can use Microsoft Paint, using close-enough default colours):
When asked to point to which boxes best represent the colours they see the dress to be, some point to boxes (1) and (2) and others point to boxes (3) and (4). So either they see the dress to be different colours or they see the boxes to be different colours.
Yep. Arguably that fits the world-nerve frame though.
I’d object by saying that the mind can fill a gap in a colour spectrum pretty easily usually, I’d suggest we can think of “new” colours by adding sensation descriptors to existing ones. Ie you get a blue and imagine it to be “more icy”. “Deeper and tarry” or whatever. Not unusual at all I don’t think
If thinking of a color is based on remembering a color that one has experienced, then to think of a new color (or an original idea) would simply require one to see a new color, remember it, and thus think it. I see no reason why we can’t do this. I see no reason why we can’t think of a new color.
Along similar lines, it is not clear why we should accept your premise which says that nothing new can be created from parts that are not new. It seems to me that we transgress this premise quite often. Perhaps it is very easy to think of new colors, and even moreso with the help of physical or digital media.
