To those who ask where colour arises from in a colourless world; Wrong Question and Mind Projection bonus!
Imagine an alien civilisation that has, say, fourteen colours. Calling two adjacent ones by the same name would be as ridiculous to them as someone here calling green and yellow the same thing. Still want to claim that ‘red’ is part of the territory? There are wavelengths, and there is the human faculty to tell them apart at sufficient intervals. Anything else is map only. There is no red.
Say you taste an apple. You know that the sensation you are experiencing is due to chemicals interacting with your taste buds. Do you then say ‘I understand why this happens, but clearly this distinctive appley taste is a thing in its own right, which can’t be explained by chemical interactions alone. Whither the appleyness?’?
I hope not. I hope you’d recognise that just because evolution has favoured creatures that can recognise certain combinations of chemicals (by remembering them as discrete experiences like ‘appley taste’), or certain wavelengths of light, doesn’t mean those subjective ‘experiences’ are part of the territory.
Concession: vision is harder to think about than most sensations, because it seems so tightly bound to reality. Easy to think that what’s on the back of your retina is the world.
Concession: vision is harder to think about than most sensations, because it seems so tightly bound to reality. Easy to think that what’s on the back of your retina is the world.
On this point I like to think about gorgeous photographs of nebulae, which have been taken with infra-red telescopes.
How can I see them if they are infra-red? The photographers simply adjust the wavelengths into the range that I can perceive, so I get to see the beauty of the nebula as though I could see into the infrared spectrum.
The fact that you can slide red into yellow into blue just by adjusting the wavelength of light should make it immediately apparent that there is no substantive difference between red, yellow, or blue—only very slight differences in wavelength. We have evolved three types of cones that each respond to a specific slice of the electromagnetic spectrum (it is quite narrow for each), and these are represented as entirely different things in our mind for the purpose of distinguishing between them.
So long as your cones and my cones are working equally well, and our visual cortex is functioning equally well, it’s almost a certainty that blue, yellow, and red look exactly the same in my mind as they do in yours. This is because the electrical and chemical signals will be identical, and they will be processed in the same manner for each of us. It would be a great surprise to discover they “seemed” different.
Many birds, it’s worth noting, have a fourth type of cone that captures a slice of EM radiation in the ultraviolet, because most flowers reflect into the UV spectrum, while most other things do not. This makes distinguishing flowers from non-flowers significantly easier for the birds who feed on them (and the flowers who rely on the birds for pollination).
To those who ask where colour arises from in a colourless world; Wrong Question and Mind Projection bonus!
Imagine an alien civilisation that has, say, fourteen colours. Calling two adjacent ones by the same name would be as ridiculous to them as someone here calling green and yellow the same thing. Still want to claim that ‘red’ is part of the territory? There are wavelengths, and there is the human faculty to tell them apart at sufficient intervals. Anything else is map only. There is no red.
Say you taste an apple. You know that the sensation you are experiencing is due to chemicals interacting with your taste buds. Do you then say ‘I understand why this happens, but clearly this distinctive appley taste is a thing in its own right, which can’t be explained by chemical interactions alone. Whither the appleyness?’?
I hope not. I hope you’d recognise that just because evolution has favoured creatures that can recognise certain combinations of chemicals (by remembering them as discrete experiences like ‘appley taste’), or certain wavelengths of light, doesn’t mean those subjective ‘experiences’ are part of the territory.
Concession: vision is harder to think about than most sensations, because it seems so tightly bound to reality. Easy to think that what’s on the back of your retina is the world.
On this point I like to think about gorgeous photographs of nebulae, which have been taken with infra-red telescopes.
How can I see them if they are infra-red? The photographers simply adjust the wavelengths into the range that I can perceive, so I get to see the beauty of the nebula as though I could see into the infrared spectrum.
The fact that you can slide red into yellow into blue just by adjusting the wavelength of light should make it immediately apparent that there is no substantive difference between red, yellow, or blue—only very slight differences in wavelength. We have evolved three types of cones that each respond to a specific slice of the electromagnetic spectrum (it is quite narrow for each), and these are represented as entirely different things in our mind for the purpose of distinguishing between them.
So long as your cones and my cones are working equally well, and our visual cortex is functioning equally well, it’s almost a certainty that blue, yellow, and red look exactly the same in my mind as they do in yours. This is because the electrical and chemical signals will be identical, and they will be processed in the same manner for each of us. It would be a great surprise to discover they “seemed” different.
Many birds, it’s worth noting, have a fourth type of cone that captures a slice of EM radiation in the ultraviolet, because most flowers reflect into the UV spectrum, while most other things do not. This makes distinguishing flowers from non-flowers significantly easier for the birds who feed on them (and the flowers who rely on the birds for pollination).