Time and again you sweep aside the “bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions” Dennett refers to in his reply to Otto, in your appeal to the primacy of “redness” or “pinkness”.
This has some intuitive appeal, because “red” and “pink” are short words and refer to something we experience as simple. Your position would be much harder to defend if you were looking for “the private, ineffable feeling of reading Lesswrong.com″ as one commenter suggested: people would have an easier time denying the existence of that.
Yet—even though I’m not entirely sure that’s what this commenter had in mind—I would say there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between “the feeling of redness” and “the feeling of reading Lesswrong”. The feeling of seeing the color red really is a complex of dispositions, something cobbled together from many parts over our long evolutionary history. The more we learn about color, the more complex it turns out to be. It only feels simple because it’s a human universal.
The “feeling of reading LessWrong” can be analysed in great detail. There’s a classic work of phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art, which goes into the multiple “strata” of meaning which turn the examination of small black shapes on white paper into the imagination of a possible world. Participating in a discussion like this involves a stream of complex intentional experiences against a steady background of embodied sensation.
Color experience is certainly not beyond further analysis, even at the phenomenological level. The three-dimensional model of hue, saturation, and intensity is a statement about the nature of subjective color. The idea that experiences are ineffable is just wrong. We’re all describing them every day.
No amount of intricate new knowledge about the way that color perception varies or the functions that it performs can actually abolish the phenomenon. And most materialists don’t try to abolish it, they try to identify it with something material. I think Dennett is trying to abolish phenomena as realities, in favor of a cognitive behaviorism, but that is really a topic for Dennett interpreters.
Instead, I want to know about your phenomenology of color. I assume that in fact you have it. But I’m curious to know, first, whether you’ll admit to having it, or whether you prefer to talk about your experience in some other way; and second, how you describe it. Do you look at color and think “I’m seeing a bundle of dispositions”? Do you tell yourself “I’m not actually seeing it, I’m just associating the perceptual object with a certain abstract class”?
I’m not sure I ever “look at color” in isolation. There are colors and arrangements of color that I like and that I’ll go out of my way to experience; I’m looking forward to an exhibition of Soulages’ work in Paris, for instance.
When I look at a Soulages painting my inner narrative is probably something like “Wow, this is black… a luminous black which emphasizes straight, purposive brushstrokes in a way that’s quite different from any other painter’s use of color I’ve seen; how puzzling and delightful.” It’s different from the reflective black of my coffee cup nearby, the matte black of my phone handset or the black I see when I close my eyes. When I see my coffee cup I’m mostly seeing the reflections, when I see the handset it’s the texture that stands out, when I close my eyes the black is a background to a dance of random splotches and blobs.
When I think about my perception of black in all the above instances I am certainly thinking in terms of dispositions and of abstract tags. There isn’t a unitary “feeling of black” that persists after these various experiences of things I now call black.
Husserl couldn’t know what Dennett knows about the biology, psychology and evolutionary history of color perception.
Time and again you sweep aside the “bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions” Dennett refers to in his reply to Otto, in your appeal to the primacy of “redness” or “pinkness”.
This has some intuitive appeal, because “red” and “pink” are short words and refer to something we experience as simple. Your position would be much harder to defend if you were looking for “the private, ineffable feeling of reading Lesswrong.com″ as one commenter suggested: people would have an easier time denying the existence of that.
Yet—even though I’m not entirely sure that’s what this commenter had in mind—I would say there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between “the feeling of redness” and “the feeling of reading Lesswrong”. The feeling of seeing the color red really is a complex of dispositions, something cobbled together from many parts over our long evolutionary history. The more we learn about color, the more complex it turns out to be. It only feels simple because it’s a human universal.
The “feeling of reading LessWrong” can be analysed in great detail. There’s a classic work of phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art, which goes into the multiple “strata” of meaning which turn the examination of small black shapes on white paper into the imagination of a possible world. Participating in a discussion like this involves a stream of complex intentional experiences against a steady background of embodied sensation.
Color experience is certainly not beyond further analysis, even at the phenomenological level. The three-dimensional model of hue, saturation, and intensity is a statement about the nature of subjective color. The idea that experiences are ineffable is just wrong. We’re all describing them every day.
No amount of intricate new knowledge about the way that color perception varies or the functions that it performs can actually abolish the phenomenon. And most materialists don’t try to abolish it, they try to identify it with something material. I think Dennett is trying to abolish phenomena as realities, in favor of a cognitive behaviorism, but that is really a topic for Dennett interpreters.
Instead, I want to know about your phenomenology of color. I assume that in fact you have it. But I’m curious to know, first, whether you’ll admit to having it, or whether you prefer to talk about your experience in some other way; and second, how you describe it. Do you look at color and think “I’m seeing a bundle of dispositions”? Do you tell yourself “I’m not actually seeing it, I’m just associating the perceptual object with a certain abstract class”?
I’m not sure I ever “look at color” in isolation. There are colors and arrangements of color that I like and that I’ll go out of my way to experience; I’m looking forward to an exhibition of Soulages’ work in Paris, for instance.
When I look at a Soulages painting my inner narrative is probably something like “Wow, this is black… a luminous black which emphasizes straight, purposive brushstrokes in a way that’s quite different from any other painter’s use of color I’ve seen; how puzzling and delightful.” It’s different from the reflective black of my coffee cup nearby, the matte black of my phone handset or the black I see when I close my eyes. When I see my coffee cup I’m mostly seeing the reflections, when I see the handset it’s the texture that stands out, when I close my eyes the black is a background to a dance of random splotches and blobs.
When I think about my perception of black in all the above instances I am certainly thinking in terms of dispositions and of abstract tags. There isn’t a unitary “feeling of black” that persists after these various experiences of things I now call black.