Dear Forum,
You sure are a hard crowd...
After reading your comments,
I feel that I was too hasty in my expectations of comprehensive discussion.
Zeuzzz has a strong point, I am writing too succinct (had to lookup that word, thanks for the education.)
Perpetual Student thinks I am redundant and semantical. Both points taken.
Jeff Corey thinks I am confused (I think.) Did you mean neurology books; psychology deals with human behavior, neurology deals with neural mechanics. Was that a Rorschach test based on black and white words? The last time I took one of those, I kept the guy writing for six hours on the first blotch, he was in despair to show me another...
Because I think it is useful to understand the true nature of light and colors in understanding the sensations of consciousness; I am going to make another redundant succinct attempt to explain it. I can hear the groans, but it is helpful to understand the brain when trying to understand the sensation of consciousness that it produces, and vision (light and colors) is a vast part of it.
Yes, I am saying that we see things that are invisible, sounds like an oxymoron, but it is not. A television transmission is electromagnetic energy, the same kind as stars radiate. We cannot see TV electromagnetic wave propagating through the air, that is, we do not see light and color or images in their propagation. Would you say that they are invisible since you cannot see them? They are there, just not as visible light and colors. We do not see EM propagation until it has been process by either electronics or the brain. Until then, they are invisible.
The energy radiating from stars does not have light or colors; they are only radiating invisible electromagnetic energy just as a radio wave does. Propagating star energy does not light up the universe; their energy travels invisibly the same way as television waves do. In the absence of light and color, there is nothing left but blackness. If you were out in space and put up a disk to block out the sun, an artificial eclipse, you would not see any light from the sun in the surrounding space, only blackness. Stars do not light up the universe. The light we think they emit does not actually exist until our brain invents it. The point is that electromagnetic energy is invisible until it is processed in the brain into a mental image, which is composed by an imaginary sense of light and colors. My statement that the universe is really black, that is - completely black, is a true statement because light and colors only exist in our minds. (
The sense of translucence's and perspective is another fascinating subject, but I will save that for another time.)
I used the words illusion and hallucination to describe this process because that is what is happening. If electromagnetic radiation does not have light and colors in its propagation, where do you think the light and colors are coming from; obviously your imagination. An illusion is something that appears to visually exist when it does not; since light and colors do not actually exist outside our consciousness, but they appears to exist, fits the definition of an illusion. A hallucination is a false sense perception, or something imagined, and again, the neural sense of light and color fit the definition. All the objects we see are there, but they are black, and emit invisible energy within a blackness of existence. It is our minds that add light and color to the blackness at large.
The last twenty or so responses in this thread have suggested that it is ridiculous to consider that light and colors are only neural illusions; they believe that the light we see/perceive also exists outside our minds. I am trying to counteract that perception with explanations describing the mechanics of neural vision. Where do you think the light and colors in a dream are coming form, your eyes are closed, the only sensation of light and color is generated in your brain from memory.
An interesting subscript to this discussion is an interview I did with an old man who has never seen; born completely blind. Though it frazzled him to try to understand light and colors, he claimed to see something. After many hours of discussion, my sense was that he saw a sort of gray background, not light not dark. He liked that description. He also thought he saw perspective in the grayish background, and could place objects within that space. Once he learned and knew a room, he could see it in his mind. I asked what differentiated one object from another; he said they were just different; he could not define a description of how he saw the differences, only that they were different. I said, could that serve as a definition of colors, and he readily thought it could. His brain was genetically prewired to formulate a pictorial image of the world around him; even though he had never seen, he still had some visual definition of the world. (
Equally fascinating are the dreams that blind people have, but that too is another discussion.)
My discussion of light and colors and how it relates to consciousness was intended as a quick "WoW," the brain can do that, so it could help define how consciousness in-of-itself functions. I wrongfully thought that posters in this forum better understood electromagnetic radiation. I am discovering that it is not a quick discussion. However, I think it is critically important to understand light and colors before attempting to understand consciousness. If our perceived notion of vision is that far off, do you think it could impair our ability to decipher consciousness?
Questioning - is the root of science; assuming knowledge is a deep dark pit, once you fall in, it is a hard place to get out of; thinking can be a guiding light,
Sincerely, Mark Maloney
