the physics we have does not even contain the everyday phenomenon of color.
Color is determined by the wavelength of light. If you meant the experience of seeing color, it’s still very much a neuroscience problem—we are nowhere near reducing the brain to the pure physics level.
Well, yes, based on his previous writings, that’s what he meant. While it’s not completely solved, it’s not as mysterious as Mitchell_Porter makes it out to be:
We know why light departs from objects with the EM wave frequency that it does. We know what EM waves are well enough to generate them in other contexts consistent with our observations of light on objects. We know that detection of EM radiation at certain frequencies creates a physical response in the retina. Information about that response is passed to the brain through the optic nerve.
Based on this previous comment, Mitchell_Porter would consider even these last steps mysterious:
We can quantify certain things about subjective color; and we can describe certain physical realities which are somehow correlated with color. Thus 450-nm wavelength light “is” a type of blue light. But I submit that it makes no sense to say that when you see a particular shade of blue, you are “seeing a length”; or that blue itself “is a length”. That might do as a poetic description of the physics behind the perception, but as an ontological statement, it simply substitutes the correlated geometric property for the sensory property we are trying to explain.
Which makes his level of dissatisfaction with current physics unjustified.
Furthermore, Gary Drescher made some headway in Good and Real about the phenomenological issues. Once you can explain the correspondence between different EM frequencies and different retina states (and thus the nerve signal), you’re just left with the qualia issue of “is my red the same as your red?” and “Does this brain state mean a different red for me than if it appeared in your brain?” But, Drescher says, this is no different from the gensym “problem” in programming, where the names used in referencing data are different between program instances. If that doesn’t confuse you, neither should color qualia.
Which property? Under the usual assumptions, the particles composing the retina and the brain are exactly the same sort of particles composing the rest of the world. At what point in the piling up of colorless particles and forces does an actual shade of blue magically spring into existence?
At what point in the piling up of colorless particles and forces does an actual shade of blue magically spring into existence?
I have no idea. I don’t pretend to deserve a Nobel prize. But I am reasonably sure that the colorless particles and forces we need to look at to figure that out reside in the brain, not in EM radiation of a specific wavelength.
I’m also pretty sure that however the experience of seeing blue springs into existence, no magic is involved.
Color is determined by the wavelength of light. If you meant the experience of seeing color, it’s still very much a neuroscience problem—we are nowhere near reducing the brain to the pure physics level.
Well, yes, based on his previous writings, that’s what he meant. While it’s not completely solved, it’s not as mysterious as Mitchell_Porter makes it out to be:
We know why light departs from objects with the EM wave frequency that it does. We know what EM waves are well enough to generate them in other contexts consistent with our observations of light on objects. We know that detection of EM radiation at certain frequencies creates a physical response in the retina. Information about that response is passed to the brain through the optic nerve.
Based on this previous comment, Mitchell_Porter would consider even these last steps mysterious:
Which makes his level of dissatisfaction with current physics unjustified.
Furthermore, Gary Drescher made some headway in Good and Real about the phenomenological issues. Once you can explain the correspondence between different EM frequencies and different retina states (and thus the nerve signal), you’re just left with the qualia issue of “is my red the same as your red?” and “Does this brain state mean a different red for me than if it appeared in your brain?” But, Drescher says, this is no different from the gensym “problem” in programming, where the names used in referencing data are different between program instances. If that doesn’t confuse you, neither should color qualia.
Exactly. Blue-ness is a property of the retina and brain, not of the light. The light just has a wavelength.
Which property? Under the usual assumptions, the particles composing the retina and the brain are exactly the same sort of particles composing the rest of the world. At what point in the piling up of colorless particles and forces does an actual shade of blue magically spring into existence?
Directly related: Angry Atoms.
Thanks for the pointer. Another underrated pre-LW post.
I have no idea. I don’t pretend to deserve a Nobel prize. But I am reasonably sure that the colorless particles and forces we need to look at to figure that out reside in the brain, not in EM radiation of a specific wavelength.
I’m also pretty sure that however the experience of seeing blue springs into existence, no magic is involved.
That’s it? That’s all it took to make you start hiding behind the Sorites paradox? That was easy.