On 6/19/2019 6:07 PM, Pierz wrote:
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 7:12:33 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote:
Red is red.
No I don't think it is. I do understand your point of view. Indeed
subjectively red does seem to be red, some kind of irreducible. Yet it
is far from unambiguously clear that this is really the case. Imagine
if you could only see in shades of red. How long would it take before
red became black-and-white? Imagine if all you could ever be conscious
of were redness. Without contrast, is such a state of consciousness
possible? Just pure intrinsic redness, existing in and of itself,
outside of any relationship with other colours, other qualia? If you
only have one colour receptor in your visual system, you have only one
differentiator of elements in your visual field - brightness. If you
have two colour receptors, like a dog, what colours do you see? Red
and yellow? Blue and yellow? The specific wavelengths of course do not
matter here - it's no guarantee that just because a dog has a receptor
for what we call "blue" light, that it perceives what we call blue
when it sees that colour. Indeed I doubt it, because blue is a
differentiator of a trichromatic system, and specifically our, human
trichromatic system. I believe that the colour red has its particular
qualities by virtue of evolutionary associations with red. What is red
in nature? Blood, fire. Red stimulates us to pay attention. Green
soothes us because of its deep evolutionary association with safe,
sheltered environments. I am not reducing qualia to "nothing but"
here, let alone "nothing at all", like Dennett, but I am saying that
they are part of a field of relationships and exist only by virtue of
those relationships. Take the relationships away and "red" dissolves -
and I believe you could prove that by wearing red-lensed glasses for a
week.
Exactly. And compare some other colors. My father was red/green color
blind (which is fairly common) so ripe strawberrys looked the same color
as the leaves to him. Is orange orange? English didn't even have a
word for orange until the fruit was imported from China. Chaucer writes
of a sunset color between red and yellow. And some people have four
different color receptors, instead of just three. But even though there
are many gradations and associations, does that mean there are /*only*/
relations? There is no red?
Brent
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