A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green.
“light is clearly colored.” “No it’s not—imagine looking at it from the side!” ”By definition, looking at something means absorbing photons, so if we could look at a beam of light form the side it would look like the color it is.” And so on.
“If any thing has color, it is light.” My point was that if you want to make color a property of things in themselves, and not the reaction of your nervous system to them, green light strikes me as about as green as a green thing can get.
As for the supposed scary and interesting part of the problem, while the science of color perception is no doubt full of interesting facts and concepts, it’s hardly scary, and I don’t think the perception of color is scary or interesting in philosophical terms at all.
I would call some subset of the possible states of your nervous system as you perceiving green. I can’t enumerate those states, but I find nothing scary about the issue; it’s completely unproblematic.
See the rest of my sentence. I was explicitly talking about things in themselves, and not how they appear to an observer.
The original comment I responded to
A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green.
Anyone talking about light in the optical range as it traverses space is likely to talk about the color of that light, and assert “that’s green light”. More generally, outside the optical range, they’re likely to talk about the type of light in terms of frequency bands.
Why not? If anything has color, it’s light.
Careful of getting sucked into a Standard Dispute :P
“light is clearly colored.”
“No it’s not—imagine looking at it from the side!”
”By definition, looking at something means absorbing photons, so if we could look at a beam of light form the side it would look like the color it is.”
And so on.
“[S]aying anything whatsoever about [light], in answer to the question Mitchell is asking, is blatantly running away from the scary and hence interesting part of the problem, which will concern itself solely with matters in the interior part of the skull.”
Maybe I needed to add a space in my comment.
“If any thing has color, it is light.” My point was that if you want to make color a property of things in themselves, and not the reaction of your nervous system to them, green light strikes me as about as green as a green thing can get.
As for the supposed scary and interesting part of the problem, while the science of color perception is no doubt full of interesting facts and concepts, it’s hardly scary, and I don’t think the perception of color is scary or interesting in philosophical terms at all.
I would call some subset of the possible states of your nervous system as you perceiving green. I can’t enumerate those states, but I find nothing scary about the issue; it’s completely unproblematic.
What do you find scary about this?
How green a ray of light appears can depend of what’s around it.
See the rest of my sentence. I was explicitly talking about things in themselves, and not how they appear to an observer.
The original comment I responded to
Anyone talking about light in the optical range as it traverses space is likely to talk about the color of that light, and assert “that’s green light”. More generally, outside the optical range, they’re likely to talk about the type of light in terms of frequency bands.
I still don’t get that.