How do we know that places like Narnia do not exist?

[PixyMisa]

Yer wha . .???

You cannot measure qualia.

Demon!

The world as described by science is entirely absent of any colours, any sounds, any smells, indeed it is entirely absent of anthing we ever perceptually experience.

Wrong.

Materialists hold that all colours are constructed entirely inside the brain.

Wrong. You are conflating conscious experience of colours and material colours.

Well, at least they do if they know what they're talking about.

Wrong.

Nor indeed is ther any pink, blue, red, orange, or any smell, or any sound, or anything else we have ever experienced to be measured either.

There is such a thing as context, Ian. There is no green existant in the real world to be measured in this example.

Pink is not part of reality. Not according to non-idealists anyway.

Wrong.

What's it an illusion of?

Try to keep up, Ian. It's an illusion of a green dot.

 

[PixyMisa]

But you're supposed to hold that there are only certain wavelengths of light in the world.

"Supposed to hold"?

There is nothing corresponding to colours in reality itself .. they are a creation of the brain.

Those are experiences of colours.

Some colours are created by the brain as a result of a wavelength of light entering the brain, some are entirely a fabrication of the brain. But they are both creations of the brain.

Experiences of colours.

You have to acknowledge this before we can proceed with the argument.

Well, that will slow the fish down.

 

[PixyMisa]

You mean they would look pink.

Nothing "looks" anything to a spectrophotometer. They would materially be pink.

So is the pink. You have to not look directly at the centre.

No, Ian. The pink is materially present. The green is constructed by the brain.

Not in the objects themselves?? But everything we ever perceptually perceive is moulded by the brain. If we really saw colours as in the objects themselves, then the colours of objects would change throughout the day.

As zaayrdragon pointed out, the apparent colour of objects does change according to the available light.

Yet your car appears to everyone to be equally red all day.

No.

 

[PixyMisa]

You said it yourself.

A machine can sense the wavelength of light corresponding to the pink but not the green.

Now when we declare that something is a certain colour, do we go by what a machine says, or do we go by what everybody actually experiences??

By what the machine says, of course. Because we know that what we experience is often false.

You can take apart the illusion step by step, and prove conclusively that no green is materially present. Therefore our conscious experience does not represent reality. It's a construct of the brain's curious way of processing visual information.

 

[PixyMisa]

I do not understand your view of things.

Is white a colour in the real world? Is pink? Neither is a pure spectral colour. Is every experience of seeing white or pink illusory, then?

You could call it illusory, but I'd just say it's subject to the way we process colour information. Since we know how it does this, we can construct photoreceptors that do the same, but are not subject to our visual system's other foibles, such as after-images.

If my computer screen lights up some tiny red and green dots, I see yellow. Is that experience illusory? Who says? Maybe it's real, and my identical experience when I look at monochromatic spectral yellow is the illusory one.

If you want to be that way, then the yellow in the first case is indeed illusory and the yellow in the second case is real. In the first case, the yellow is generated by a simple averaging function, but it's still an illusion.

Bees can see ultraviolet light. Is ultraviolet a colour in the real world?

Sure. So are gamma rays.

Two flowers that look the same to me might look different to a bee. Does my experience when looking at each flower directly represent its real-world colour?

To the limit of your perceptions, yes. It's only a representation, as you said.

It makes much more sense to me to say that there are no colours in the real world; there are only photons of light with various frequencies. When light enters my eye, I see a colour that depends on the frequency spectrum of the light. I can't always distinguish between different spectra; some spectra look the same as others. Sometimes, the colour I see depends on other factors as well, e.g., not only what I'm looking at right now, but also what I've been looking at recently, as in the case of afterimages.

Why does it make more sense that way? We know how colour works, materially, so it makes perfect sense to speak of material things having colours. We know that the eye and the brain have a certain way of viewing colour; that changes nothing in the material world.

 

[PixyMisa]

People don't notice because the colour of objects appear to be constant throughout the day.

No it doesn't.

 

[Belz...]

Gets what right? There are no colours out there that our experiences of colour correspond to.

Why yes, yes it does. You just choose to name it differently. Do you admit that light wavelengths exist ? THEY are the colours. Plain and simple.

Excuse me?? Who the hell gives a toss about the "objective scientific approach"?? The scientific is merely objective and as such abstracts from reality. Only the subjective is real, only the subjective matters.

Sorry, Ian. But now you've demonstrated how utterly, irrevocably detached from reality you truly are.

FU-SION! HA! And we have "Interesting Iacchus".

A wavelength of light is a wavelength of light. It is not colour.

Ridiculous. You're just trying to make your subjective reality special and more important than actual reality. Solipist.

 

[PixyMisa]

Gets what right? There are no colours out there that our experiences of colour correspond to. If for every last human being something appears to be a certain colour, then it would be ridiculous to declare that it isn't really that colour but some other colour.

Unless, of course, it really is some other colour. That last illusion demonstrates that the human visual system just plain gets things wrong sometimes.

It would make everyday conversation impossible since the colours of objects would then constantly change as the day progresses.

The apparent colours do change.

Say someone asks me the colour of my car. I would have to ask them at what time of the day, and whether they mean the car is parked in a shadow or not etc. Utterly ludicrous.

Not if you were normal. You would say "red", for example, and the person would know what colour a red car parked in shadow would appear. We make those sorts of adjustments every second of every day, mostly unconsciously. That's why that illusion produces the results it does.

Excuse me?? Who the hell gives a toss about the "objective scientific approach"??

Anyone who wants to get anything useful done.

The scientific is merely objective and as such abstracts from reality.

Eh?

Only the subjective is real, only the subjective matters.

You keep saying that. But you cannot usefully deal with the world that way. You'll get yourself killed.

Colour is what we experience.

That's one way of using the term.

I am aware that scientists have hijacked the term for their own purposes

People have always spoken of colour that way, Ian. They just assumed that their experience of colour related directly to the material colour.

but I'm using the word in the same sense as the vast majority of the human race.

No you're not.

A wavelength of light is a wavelength of light. It is not colour.

Yes it is. It's not an experience; it's a colour.

 

[PixyMisa]

A couple more points:

The (human) retina is actually sensitive to ultraviolet light, but it is blocked by the cornea before it reaches the retina. In patients who have been given certain types of artificial corneas, ultraviolet light is visible as a colour.

A (human, again) retina contains between zero and four different types of colour-sensors. The fourth type only appears in women. In effect, all men are colour-blind.

How was that again about subjective experience being the only real thing, Ian? When some people can see colours that you cannot, how does that work?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

The (human) retina is actually sensitive to ultraviolet light, but it is blocked by the cornea before it reaches the retina. In patients who have been given certain types of artificial corneas, ultraviolet light is visible as a colour.

Really? Cool! How do they describe the color?

~~ Paul

 

[Tricky]

A (human, again) retina contains between zero and four different types of colour-sensors. The fourth type only appears in women. In effect, all men are colour-blind.

You know, this may explain why Mom would always know when you were lying or guilty, but you could fool Dad easily. It's that damn fourth color sensor.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Tricky, when you lied, you turned a subtle bluish-green. Only your mom could see it.

~~ Paul

 

[Anders W. Bonde]

Ian,

If our level of understanding of the physical world and human perception was equivalent to yours it wouldn't be possible to make computer renderings and animations. Have you never seen a computer animation?

 

[PixyMisa]

Really? Cool! How do they describe the color?

I'll see if I can dig up some information. I think they said it looked very, very blue, but it's a while since I read about it.

Edit: Whoops. It's an unsaturated blue colour. See links in the next post.

 

[PixyMisa]

Ah, here's a first person account of someone who can see UV light in one eye after cataract surgery. He's published several papers in medical journals on the subject.

Here's a newspaper article about him and UV vision. And here are paintings of water lilies by Monet - before and after his cataract surgery.

 

[PixyMisa]

This reminds me of something that happened over Christmas.

My brother's family was visiting, and at one point my brother asked his four-year-old son to bring him "the orange bottle". My nephew looked around but didn't do anything. My brother got a bit annoyed and insisted that his son bring him the orange bottle. My nephew said "What bottle?" "That bottle! The orange bottle!" "It's not orange, it's red!" "It's orange!"

The bottle was vermilion.

One day Ian is going to get into a terrible accident when he runs an "orange" light.

 

[Jeff Corey]

I had replacement lens (not cornea) surgery last year and have noted some anomalous flashes which I figured were produced by pressure on the retina.

 

[PixyMisa]

Or it could be UV! Depends on the material they're using for lens replacements these days.

The cornea and the lens each filter out a percentage of UV light; my original post on this subject was wrong, and it is in fact lens-replacement surgery (for cataracts) that is associated with people seeing UV.

 

[Z]

Only the subjective is real, only the subjective matters.

And this is why it is useless, Dear Reader, to bother with Ian.

Ian is not here to discuss. He is not here to reach an objective consensus, or an objective understanding of the truth. He is here only to preach his subjective enlightenment, in the vague and distant hope that someone confirms his subjective intellect and soothes his tortured self-esteem. This is why the website is so appealing to him; the website cannot argue against his subjective knowledge. The website can't keep battering him with objective truths that he cannot, will not face.

The objective is all that matters; the objective is all that counts. By discovering objective truth, we can understand our own, faulty, subjective awareness, and overcome those limitations enforced upon us by our subjective process.

But Ian doesn't want that future to come to pass; he prefers to revel in the subjective and deny the objective, and in spite of all he tries, the world continues around him unabated.

By his own choice, he is being left behind in the wake of progress, of science, and of truth... and he hates it deeply.

So, Gentle Reader, consider this before replying to Ian: unless you're here to stroke his subjective ego, you might as well address the sky, for all the good it's going to do you.

 

[PixyMisa]

Yep.

Objective reality is a jealous reality. It will kill you if you believe in a different reality; the only way to placate it is by acting at all times as if you believe in it. Jealous, but dumb.