Your eyes do detect the frequency of light, your nose does detect the chemical composition of smells, and your tongue does detect the chemical composition of food. That’s exactly what the senses of sight, smell, and taste do.
Our brains then interpret the data from our eyes, noses, and tongues as color, scent, and flavor. It’s possible to ‘decode’, e.g., color into a number (the frequency of light), and vice versa; you can find charts on the internet that match frequency/wavelength numbers to color. Decoding taste and scent data into the molecules that produce them is more difficult, but people find ways to do it—that’s how artificial flavorings are made.
There are lots of different ways to encode data, and some of them are more useful in some situations, but none of them are strictly privileged. A non-human brain could experience the ‘color’ of light as a number that just happens to correspond to its frequency in oscillations/second, but that wouldn’t prevent it from having qualia, any more than encoding numbers into hexadecimal prevents you from doing addition.
So it’s not the ‘redness’ of light that’s a quale; ‘red’ is just a code word for ‘wavelength 635-700 nanometers.’ The qualia of redness are the associations, connections, emotional responses that your brain attaches to the plain sensory experience.
The human experience of colour is not really about recognizing a specific wavelength of light. We’ve discussed this before here. Our rods and cones are sensitive to the wavelength of light but the qualia of colour are associated more with the invariant surface properties of objects than they are with invariant wavelengths of light.
The human experience of colour is not really about recognizing a specific wavelength of light.
True, but irrelevant to the subject at hand.
the qualia of colour are associated more with the invariant surface properties of objects than they are with invariant wavelengths of light.
No, the qualia of color have nothing to do with the observed object. This is the pons asinorum of qualia. The experience of color is a product of the invariant surface properties of objects; the qualia of color is a product of the relationship between that experience and other similar experiences.
A human looking at an optical illusion might say, “That looks red, but it’s really white,” acknowledging that spectral color is objective, but psychophysical color is more malleable. But compare that sentence to “that sounds good, but it’s really bad.” Statements about color aren’t entirely subjective—to some extent they’re about fact, not opinion.
Statements about qualia are about the subjective aspect of an experience: e.g., red is the color of rage; of love; the color that means ‘stop.’
Your eyes do detect the frequency of light, your nose does detect the chemical composition of smells, and your tongue does detect the chemical composition of food. That’s exactly what the senses of sight, smell, and taste do.
Our brains then interpret the data from our eyes, noses, and tongues as color, scent, and flavor. It’s possible to ‘decode’, e.g., color into a number (the frequency of light), and vice versa; you can find charts on the internet that match frequency/wavelength numbers to color. Decoding taste and scent data into the molecules that produce them is more difficult, but people find ways to do it—that’s how artificial flavorings are made.
There are lots of different ways to encode data, and some of them are more useful in some situations, but none of them are strictly privileged. A non-human brain could experience the ‘color’ of light as a number that just happens to correspond to its frequency in oscillations/second, but that wouldn’t prevent it from having qualia, any more than encoding numbers into hexadecimal prevents you from doing addition.
So it’s not the ‘redness’ of light that’s a quale; ‘red’ is just a code word for ‘wavelength 635-700 nanometers.’ The qualia of redness are the associations, connections, emotional responses that your brain attaches to the plain sensory experience.
The human experience of colour is not really about recognizing a specific wavelength of light. We’ve discussed this before here. Our rods and cones are sensitive to the wavelength of light but the qualia of colour are associated more with the invariant surface properties of objects than they are with invariant wavelengths of light.
True, but irrelevant to the subject at hand.
No, the qualia of color have nothing to do with the observed object. This is the pons asinorum of qualia. The experience of color is a product of the invariant surface properties of objects; the qualia of color is a product of the relationship between that experience and other similar experiences.
A human looking at an optical illusion might say, “That looks red, but it’s really white,” acknowledging that spectral color is objective, but psychophysical color is more malleable. But compare that sentence to “that sounds good, but it’s really bad.” Statements about color aren’t entirely subjective—to some extent they’re about fact, not opinion.
Statements about qualia are about the subjective aspect of an experience: e.g., red is the color of rage; of love; the color that means ‘stop.’