Marsha HOW does science deal with experiencing the color red? Does science produce certainty or meaning about experiencing the color red?
[Krimel] By the 1870's a lot of people were asking similar questions in a variety of ways. Descartes, the British Empiricists, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche had all had their say. The gross anatomy of the brain had been established and the major pathways of sensation (input) and motor function (output) were known. The effects of various kinds of damage to almost all of the nervous system had been demonstrated in humans and in animals. Camilio Golgi had developed staining methods that were giving researchers their first glimpses of the details of intercellular structure. These two different approaches; the phenomenological analysis of experience and the study of physiology; both aimed at understanding what makes us tick. While there was no doubt some overlap and synthesis these approaches were heading in different directions. In 1874 Wilhelm Wundt wrote the first text book on psychology, "Principles of Physiological Psychology." In the first paragraph he says this: "The title of the present work is in itself a sufficiently clear indication of the contents. In it, the attempt is made to show the connexion between two sciences whose subject−matters are closely interrelated, but which have, for the most part, followed wholly divergent paths. Physiology and psychology cover, between them, the field of vital phenomena; they deal with the facts of life at large, and in particular with the facts of human life. Physiology is concerned with all those phenomena of life that present themselves to us in sense perception as bodily processes, and accordingly form part of that total environment which we name the external world. Psychology, on the other hand, seeks to give account of the interconnexion of processes which are evinced by our own consciousness, or which we infer from such manifestations of the bodily life in other creatures as indicate the presence of a consciousness similar to our own." He claimed the neither path was alone sufficient. It only made sense to focus on the areas of overlap. Did physiology produce phenomenology? Or was physiology only a artifact of some kind of higher order relationships? How could you tell the difference? In 1890 William James published his massive 1400 page, "The Principles of Psychology." In the introduction he says this: "But the slightest reflection shows that phenomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our remembering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow undergone it, we shall never know of its having been. The experiences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned." In 1879 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the scientific study of psychology. He began following the path of Gustav Fechtner who had begun the study of what he called psychophysics. The concern was to establish what could be known about things like: "what IS the experience of red?" They looked at things like how much light must be present for you to see it? How much brighter does it have to get for you to notice? Which wavelengths of light can we see? What names do we ascribe to which bands of color? How blue does red have to be before you call it purple? The questions and hypotheses multiply like bunny's. Pirsig's Law holds that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." People began asking all kinds of red related questions. Do people act differently in a red room than a blue one? Do more people like red than green? Would people be more likely to buy chocolate wrapped in dark red or pink? We learned that as people age, changes in the lens of the eye shift our sensitivity to different shades of color. These shifts happen gradually and we can't even tell. People had noticed that the French painter Claude Monet's included more and more red as he grew older. At age 82 he had cataract surgery to save his failing vision. When his first eye recovered he noticed a huge change in the color. He painted the same scene with first one eye and then the other shut and there was a big difference in the shades he used. He looked back at all of the red in his work and wanted to repaint or discard some of it. Does any of that help produce certainty or meaning about experiencing the color red? I think it does but I guess it depends on how you would like the experience of the color of red to be dealt with. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
