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

PixyMisa said:
Yes.

But you said that green was present. It isn't. There is the experience of green. If you said that, no-one would have argued with you.


I'm not sure I agree with Jeff. I think, with appropriate editing, this could form the basis of a coherent statement.
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Give it a shot. As long as it isn't, "Reality is like a whole lot of space with atoms really far apart." Because at any other level, it is nonsense.
 
PixyMisa said:
Good grief. Now we are expected not only to refute your nonsense, but to keep track of it for you?

You said:
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Ah, that optical "illusion". The green is there, or not there, as much as the pink is. This is also a subject which I have argued extensively about in the past in the context of that checker-shadow illusion. I have nothing further to add.
 
Ian said:
Ah, that optical "illusion". The green is there, or not there, as much as the pink is. This is also a subject which I have argued extensively about in the past in the context of that checker-shadow illusion. I have nothing further to add.
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We didn't understand what you said about the shadow illusion, and we don't understand this one, either. Clearly the green is not "there" in the same way as the pink.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
We didn't understand what you said about the shadow illusion, and we don't understand this one, either. Clearly the green is not "there" in the same way as the pink.
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Actually, I do understand Ian.

He thinks, essentially, that the chain of causality in conscious experience runs backwards. (Backwards relative to what we observe, that is.)
 
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Interesting Ian said:
I thought there was only light of certain wavelengths which the brain interprets as the various specific colours.
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Nope.

Consider white light for a moment. It's not made up of white photons, it's made up of a broad range of wavelengths. The brain interprets it as white.

Or consider after-images. Stare at any bright patch of colour for a minute, then look away, and you will see a ghostly patch of the reverse colour of that image. That's generated by the brain. The pink/green dots are an example of this.
 
PixyMisa said:
Nope.
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What do you mean no?? To reiterate: you're saying the pinkness is actually constitutive of reality where as the greenness isn't??

I think you should be very very careful here before making such a claim

Edited to add: I think you misunderstood my post where I said:

"I thought there was only light of certain wavelengths which the brain interprets as the various specific colours".

What I mean by this is that colours don't really constitute reality -- colours are something whcih the brain creates.
 
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Interesting Ian said:
What do you mean no?? To reiterate: you're saying the pinkness is actually constitutive of reality where as the greenness isn't??

I think you should be very very careful here before making such a claim
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The pink exists in the real world. It is directly measurable by lab equipment.

The experience of greenness is constructed entirely inside the brain. There is no green in the real world to be measured. There is an experience of green, but it's an illusion.

To reiterate: you're saying the pinkness is actually constitutive of reality where as the greenness isn't??
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Constitutive?

There really are pink dots in the example. There really isn't a green dot in the example. The illusion of the green dot is generated by the brain.
 
Interesting Ian said:
What I mean by this is that colours don't really constitute reality -- colours are something whcih the brain creates.
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That doesn't even approach the level of a meaningful statement on the subject.

There are colours in the real world.

There are experiences of colour in the brain.

Some of these experiences directly represent real-world colours.

Some of these experiences are illusory.
 
Interesting Ian said:
What do you mean no?? To reiterate: you're saying the pinkness is actually constitutive of reality where as the greenness isn't??

I think you should be very very careful here before making such a claim

Edited to add: I think you misunderstood my post where I said:

"I thought there was only light of certain wavelengths which the brain interprets as the various specific colours".

What I mean by this is that colours don't really constitute reality -- colours are something whcih the brain creates.
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Consider it this way, Ian. If you took the individual dots, apart from the rest of the illusion, and looked only at the dots or photographed them, or ran them through a photospectrometer, they would be pink. The green that you imagine is situational, depending on the presence of other things and on the fact that you must not look directly at them (or they become pink again).

However, they are both part of reality, its just that the "green" part of reality is only in your brain, not in the objects themselves. The fact that your brain states can be so easily manipulated does not negate materialism, on the contrary it shows just how the material aspects of your brain and sensory organs work.

In one sense, they are like dreams. The things you dream are often not real, but your brain states are real and your memories of your dreams are real. Even without looking at that illusion again, I can remember the way they pink changed to green and orbited the center. It doesn't matter that my memory is of something that didn't really happen.
 
Interesting Ian said:
I thought there was only light of certain wavelengths which the brain interprets as the various specific colours.
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PixyMisa said:
Nope.

Consider white light for a moment. It's not made up of white photons, it's made up of a broad range of wavelengths. The brain interprets it as white.

Or consider after-images. Stare at any bright patch of colour for a minute, then look away, and you will see a ghostly patch of the reverse colour of that image. That's generated by the brain. The pink/green dots are an example of this.
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You start by saying "nope." But how does the rest of your post (which I agree with) contradict what Ian said (which I also agree with)?
 
Tricky said:
Consider it this way, Ian. If you took the individual dots, apart from the rest of the illusion, and looked only at the dots or photographed them, or ran them through a photospectrometer, they would be pink. The green that you imagine is situational, depending on the presence of other things and on the fact that you must not look directly at them (or they become pink again).

However, they are both part of reality, its just that the "green" part of reality is only in your brain, not in the objects themselves. The fact that your brain states can be so easily manipulated does not negate materialism, on the contrary it shows just how the material aspects of your brain and sensory organs work.

In one sense, they are like dreams. The things you dream are often not real, but your brain states are real and your memories of your dreams are real. Even without looking at that illusion again, I can remember the way they pink changed to green and orbited the center. It doesn't matter that my memory is of something that didn't really happen.
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I was going to say something along those lines, but as usual Tricky does the Trick.
 
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