If you see a red flash, and explain that red flash by a red photon hitting your eye, then you are either being imprecise to the point of philosophical carelessness, or you are confused about physiology, physics, or both.
Whatever the case may be, it does not do to forget that materialism is not at all the same thing as assuming that the world is simple. The real story about what color is, and how color perception works, is vastly more complex than your offhand comment implies. I am no dualist, but I would suggest to you that giving a materialistic account of color is, in fact, quite a challenging task. The question of whether we have yet accomplished it, is not one which I would so quickly declare to be closed.
Fine I glossed over more than was good for the point I was making. To my needs if you look at a red chair, you have a vision of a red chair and it makes you think of a furniture object existing out in the world and that object is electromagnetically interacting with the object that you associate with your “identity” (ie your body). The story about objects existing is prone to theorethical uncertainty and error and it not evident from the perception itself. The link between particular kinds of flashes and particular kinds of electromagnetic waves is not central and I guess at the world side of things it would be more proper to talk about certain nanometer length waves instead (unheard tree makes a pressure wave). However you expect any kind of story of electromagnetic waves interacting with eyes in the relevant way to have a corresponding experience going. That is if you point a laser at your eye you are not surprised why you see a flash even if you have not ever damaged your eyes with a laser before.
But for example if your photo resistors are pushed without them triggering you do not experience that in any way. And if you photoreceptor are rubbed in a way that makes them go off some experience might trigger and an unused perciever might associate that experience with receiving light but what you actually experience is physical touch which is mainly felt throught skin ordinarily. A problem is that you come to believe how your senses work throught what is in them.
Say that you are watchiing television that has a documentary running how TV programs are made. Say that you are sceptical that TVs can be trusted. There is a problem in that the documentary is likely not seem compelling if you need to trust in the reliability of the TV in the first place to take it seriously. You might think that the documentary is a forgery to promote more tv ad adherence. If a person main method of finding out how TV programs are made is wathing tv they might be stuck in this catch-22 (for example my knowledge of “the room” is largely represented by “the disaster artist”). With TV you can instead go open a door and watch things with your eyes. But with our senses they are unescapingly the method that we interface with the world. There is no “extrasensory” release valve and even if there was that would just be another (standard) sense. So if we learn how eyes work by looking at slides in a biology class that is similar to wathcing a TV-making documentary on TV. Inductive reliance gives some hope. But it leaves the door open that one day the illusion of an outside world no longer (perfectly) holds. If I only dreamed the biology lesson the rules it teaches are not that fundamental. If blair witch project tries to sell itself as a found footage programming but I notice inconsistencies which are better exlained by actual production process my expectation on what I might see get changed a lot. If something is supposedly live action but looks very CGI another big shift. In the same way it’s plausible that stories about electromagnetic fields might be more akin to theather sets, yes their appearance is in congruence with the plot but they are only apparent but not fundamental.
None of that is at all relevant to what I was alluding to, which concerned human color perception. (A sample of relevant questions: “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see magenta”; “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange”; “what color are afterimages”; “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color”; “what does it mean to be wrong about an object’s color”; “is there such a thing as an object that has a color no human can see”. There are many more; this is only a small sample.)
The question is relevant only to the extenet that physical world event and perceptions are intermingled. I used simplist language, I infact know a lot of interesting things about color perception which you could not have deduced from my simplistic language.
For example for the question “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color” there is the illusion about a cylinder casting a shadow on a chessboard. Then there is what on what in chess terms would be different colored squares one outof shadow and one in shadowm marked A and B. The image is made so that if you compare the fill color of A and B on a monitor they have the exact same color values. But when humans are presented with the picture and claimed that A and B are the same color they can’t believe it. The human brain is such that when it recognises that something is in shadow it presupposes that the material would in more ordinary lighting be a more bright color and part of what makes the illusion work is that when people refer to “color” they have a closer association to the lightning-invariant color than to the kind of absolute color that computer monitor pixels have to assume. Quesitons of the form “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange” have presuppositions that get overruled by this lighting context. Under orange lighting the criteria on what wavelengths are counted as orange get tighter.
Going over what I wrote I notice a possible ambquity. “materialist theory” can refer to any theory whose primary ontology is fairly described as “materia” or it can be read as the top honed result of what “materialist starting point theory” has provided. A toy model belonging to the wide category doesn’t do justice for exemplifying explanatory power. But the point was to clarify that there is the evidence, the suppositions that are used to make sense of the evidence and the abstract hypotheses that are either bought or disbelief based on understanding. In the visual processing system taking into account shadows it assumes the existence of shadows as appropriate transformations on raw data to get useful data. The brain assumes out of habit or without justification that shadows happen and on the abstract layer it becomes diffult to doubt them. A and B seem like different colors and as the abstract reasoner you have little clue that the assumption of shadows was used to derive those colors. “they just appear to be different color” as a matter of fact. But if you had to do the job that your visual cortex does automatically by hand you could see how the raw data doesn’t necceciate that result. Looking pixel by pixel you can see that the color values match.
There is also color perception that does not enforce a materialist-handy set of assumptions. There is a form of synesthesia where letters are seen as colored. It’s not that super mysterious as letter-contex is not that different from shadow-context. But somebody having these kinds of experiences is much less likely to think of these as objective qualities world objects have. You don’t get confused as black object turns to red as you recognise it to be a t-letter. But sometimes your emotional state can color your perception of others feelings. If you are feeling paranoid you can think of everyone else as paranoid even without realising. This kind of experience can feel a lot like “just directly accessing that persons objective paranoidness” I guess you could have a sort of synesthesia where you color people based on what you think their mood is. If you did have emotional processing this automatic it could be hard to entertain that your emotional logic could be wrong “offcourse he is sad, just look how blue he is!”
I appear to have rambled but the point is that “simple color perception” is just open to be abstractly wrong as coloring sad people as blue. It’s hard to rule out that you are literally seeing red because you are synesthesing your anger into your experience. But the standard interpretion “I am seeing red because the environment is uncaringly having electromagnetic state in my location” suffers from same sorts of difficulties.
I do not understand how the linked discussion highlight anything that I have not covered. There are two conceptions of color according to one that A and B are same and another which they are not. Just as long as you don’t mix concepts you are fine. It might be misleading that language has only one color word but it should be pretty clear that the concept definitions are separate. Notice how there is no good word to call the color the squares do not have in common. Or if we use words “white”, “grey” and “black” they are both grey but one of them is black and the other is white. If you would think color was a single category one might be confused how something can be both white and grey. But the “grey” color is a different type of color (“apparent illumination”) than the others (“shaded hue”). For example we readily recognise that there would be a category error for thinking that shiny and white would mean the same thing (note that shininess would be confrimed in image wby the presence of whiter than usual pixels). When the both categories are called “white” it becomes harder to recognise that they are actually homonyms of two distinct concepts.
What lesson do you think I am drawing? What thing the linked discussion is drawing? And how is the linked discussion more appropriate learning? What color conception is appropriate for tyhe situation depends on the application. Sure human brains have a great need for “shaded hue” color. But computer monitor makers have a great practical relevance for “apparent illumination” color. that’s like arguing that “right” is the correct concept and “starboard” is an irrelevant and incorrect concept. And that road leads to arguing whether landlife is more valid than sealife.
If you see a red flash, and explain that red flash by a red photon hitting your eye, then you are either being imprecise to the point of philosophical carelessness, or you are confused about physiology, physics, or both.
Whatever the case may be, it does not do to forget that materialism is not at all the same thing as assuming that the world is simple. The real story about what color is, and how color perception works, is vastly more complex than your offhand comment implies. I am no dualist, but I would suggest to you that giving a materialistic account of color is, in fact, quite a challenging task. The question of whether we have yet accomplished it, is not one which I would so quickly declare to be closed.
Fine I glossed over more than was good for the point I was making. To my needs if you look at a red chair, you have a vision of a red chair and it makes you think of a furniture object existing out in the world and that object is electromagnetically interacting with the object that you associate with your “identity” (ie your body). The story about objects existing is prone to theorethical uncertainty and error and it not evident from the perception itself. The link between particular kinds of flashes and particular kinds of electromagnetic waves is not central and I guess at the world side of things it would be more proper to talk about certain nanometer length waves instead (unheard tree makes a pressure wave). However you expect any kind of story of electromagnetic waves interacting with eyes in the relevant way to have a corresponding experience going. That is if you point a laser at your eye you are not surprised why you see a flash even if you have not ever damaged your eyes with a laser before.
But for example if your photo resistors are pushed without them triggering you do not experience that in any way. And if you photoreceptor are rubbed in a way that makes them go off some experience might trigger and an unused perciever might associate that experience with receiving light but what you actually experience is physical touch which is mainly felt throught skin ordinarily. A problem is that you come to believe how your senses work throught what is in them.
Say that you are watchiing television that has a documentary running how TV programs are made. Say that you are sceptical that TVs can be trusted. There is a problem in that the documentary is likely not seem compelling if you need to trust in the reliability of the TV in the first place to take it seriously. You might think that the documentary is a forgery to promote more tv ad adherence. If a person main method of finding out how TV programs are made is wathing tv they might be stuck in this catch-22 (for example my knowledge of “the room” is largely represented by “the disaster artist”). With TV you can instead go open a door and watch things with your eyes. But with our senses they are unescapingly the method that we interface with the world. There is no “extrasensory” release valve and even if there was that would just be another (standard) sense. So if we learn how eyes work by looking at slides in a biology class that is similar to wathcing a TV-making documentary on TV. Inductive reliance gives some hope. But it leaves the door open that one day the illusion of an outside world no longer (perfectly) holds. If I only dreamed the biology lesson the rules it teaches are not that fundamental. If blair witch project tries to sell itself as a found footage programming but I notice inconsistencies which are better exlained by actual production process my expectation on what I might see get changed a lot. If something is supposedly live action but looks very CGI another big shift. In the same way it’s plausible that stories about electromagnetic fields might be more akin to theather sets, yes their appearance is in congruence with the plot but they are only apparent but not fundamental.
None of that is at all relevant to what I was alluding to, which concerned human color perception. (A sample of relevant questions: “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see magenta”; “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange”; “what color are afterimages”; “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color”; “what does it mean to be wrong about an object’s color”; “is there such a thing as an object that has a color no human can see”. There are many more; this is only a small sample.)
The question is relevant only to the extenet that physical world event and perceptions are intermingled. I used simplist language, I infact know a lot of interesting things about color perception which you could not have deduced from my simplistic language.
For example for the question “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color” there is the illusion about a cylinder casting a shadow on a chessboard. Then there is what on what in chess terms would be different colored squares one outof shadow and one in shadowm marked A and B. The image is made so that if you compare the fill color of A and B on a monitor they have the exact same color values. But when humans are presented with the picture and claimed that A and B are the same color they can’t believe it. The human brain is such that when it recognises that something is in shadow it presupposes that the material would in more ordinary lighting be a more bright color and part of what makes the illusion work is that when people refer to “color” they have a closer association to the lightning-invariant color than to the kind of absolute color that computer monitor pixels have to assume. Quesitons of the form “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange” have presuppositions that get overruled by this lighting context. Under orange lighting the criteria on what wavelengths are counted as orange get tighter.
Going over what I wrote I notice a possible ambquity. “materialist theory” can refer to any theory whose primary ontology is fairly described as “materia” or it can be read as the top honed result of what “materialist starting point theory” has provided. A toy model belonging to the wide category doesn’t do justice for exemplifying explanatory power. But the point was to clarify that there is the evidence, the suppositions that are used to make sense of the evidence and the abstract hypotheses that are either bought or disbelief based on understanding. In the visual processing system taking into account shadows it assumes the existence of shadows as appropriate transformations on raw data to get useful data. The brain assumes out of habit or without justification that shadows happen and on the abstract layer it becomes diffult to doubt them. A and B seem like different colors and as the abstract reasoner you have little clue that the assumption of shadows was used to derive those colors. “they just appear to be different color” as a matter of fact. But if you had to do the job that your visual cortex does automatically by hand you could see how the raw data doesn’t necceciate that result. Looking pixel by pixel you can see that the color values match.
There is also color perception that does not enforce a materialist-handy set of assumptions. There is a form of synesthesia where letters are seen as colored. It’s not that super mysterious as letter-contex is not that different from shadow-context. But somebody having these kinds of experiences is much less likely to think of these as objective qualities world objects have. You don’t get confused as black object turns to red as you recognise it to be a t-letter. But sometimes your emotional state can color your perception of others feelings. If you are feeling paranoid you can think of everyone else as paranoid even without realising. This kind of experience can feel a lot like “just directly accessing that persons objective paranoidness” I guess you could have a sort of synesthesia where you color people based on what you think their mood is. If you did have emotional processing this automatic it could be hard to entertain that your emotional logic could be wrong “offcourse he is sad, just look how blue he is!”
I appear to have rambled but the point is that “simple color perception” is just open to be abstractly wrong as coloring sad people as blue. It’s hard to rule out that you are literally seeing red because you are synesthesing your anger into your experience. But the standard interpretion “I am seeing red because the environment is uncaringly having electromagnetic state in my location” suffers from same sorts of difficulties.
It is interesting that you mention the cylinder/chessboard “illusion”. I do not think that the lesson to be drawn from it is what you think it is.
I do not understand how the linked discussion highlight anything that I have not covered. There are two conceptions of color according to one that A and B are same and another which they are not. Just as long as you don’t mix concepts you are fine. It might be misleading that language has only one color word but it should be pretty clear that the concept definitions are separate. Notice how there is no good word to call the color the squares do not have in common. Or if we use words “white”, “grey” and “black” they are both grey but one of them is black and the other is white. If you would think color was a single category one might be confused how something can be both white and grey. But the “grey” color is a different type of color (“apparent illumination”) than the others (“shaded hue”). For example we readily recognise that there would be a category error for thinking that shiny and white would mean the same thing (note that shininess would be confrimed in image wby the presence of whiter than usual pixels). When the both categories are called “white” it becomes harder to recognise that they are actually homonyms of two distinct concepts.
What lesson do you think I am drawing? What thing the linked discussion is drawing? And how is the linked discussion more appropriate learning? What color conception is appropriate for tyhe situation depends on the application. Sure human brains have a great need for “shaded hue” color. But computer monitor makers have a great practical relevance for “apparent illumination” color. that’s like arguing that “right” is the correct concept and “starboard” is an irrelevant and incorrect concept. And that road leads to arguing whether landlife is more valid than sealife.