Color, abstactions, and accidents

I will definitely give that a read. My apologies for the less than understandable tongue. I’m sure that they more I study this and read into it that i’ll pick up on the language where I can actually make constructive conversation. I’m still at that stage where I’m in the fog of preconceived notions. I can hear the rustling of the branches in the trees outside of the fog of the gigantic philosophical monster that I know is out there (yeah, I watched Jurassic Park recently).

I guess my answer to, “is it just an abstraction?” would have to be…maybe? The scientific approach to color seems to be that it is a light wave…or particle? I can’t be both, but regardless, if it was a wave or particle then it would take up space, yes?

Particle wave duality is not really important to time, at least relativity anyway, one thing at a time.:wink:

Alot of people struggle or think they are dumb because relativity doesn’t instantly make sense, but once you start thinking about it to an extent and with good knowledge it becomes graspable not a bugbear. That said if you have any questions ask the experts on forums such as physicsforums.com, I’m no expert, I know how it works but relativity is an area that troubles many people.

It’s nice to see you are interested anyway, but don’t believe this is the most difficult subject in physics, it isn’t. Also don’t believe gurus with massive brains who live in ivory towers drive physics, they don’t, if you put the effort in, and are really interested any person can get an understanding, unless they are really stupid, and most people aren’t. :wink:

In depth no, maths will be necessary there, but a good deal of physics is also conceptual. The maths helps but sometimes you can forgo it, in fact for things like wave-particle duality it is not all that important as the conceptual issues, at least at a fairly basic level.

hi
Yes you can have pink by itself, perhaps that’s all colour is ~ itself, and we then designate it to colour frequencies. In other words; colour is purely perceptual, it doesn’t really ’exist’ in the physical world its just that our minds read the signals derived of light frequencies, then according to shape of the sine-wave attributes a colour to that.

So now we may again ask; what is colour!

Now we have removed it from the physical world, we could say it is like information or symbols, shapes etc, such things don’t exist physically. Equally I wouldn’t say those things are composed of ‘mind’ or consciousness ~ what would that even mean? it appears we have three sets of things in the world:

0 {Reality}

  1. Non-physical phenomenon-a; Information, colour, symbols, shapes.
  2. Non-physical phenomenon-b; mind, consciousness, knowing/knowledge, experience [e.g. the experience of all 3].
  3. Physical phenomenon; matter, motion, QM.

Somehow there are things like colour and consciousness that just kinda happen when information requires them to. I’d go so far as to sat the same for matter etc {3} too.

In fact the only thing that is real is reality itself, existence [1,2,3], consciousness, god and everything you can think of are comparative [or actual] illusions.

Are you still dreaming? :slight_smile:
_

There’s nothing really there that they’re “in”, but we have to come up with something conceptual (we call it “space” and “time”) in order to talk about and analyze the positions of objects relative to each other and the rates at which they change/move.

I’m not sure I understand the question. Objects can take any position in space independently of the time (that’s what makes them dimensions). It has little to do with observers.

Though not objects themselves, colors are, by definition, properties belonging to objects. Ergo, you cannot have color unless it is on an object (or at the very least, taking up some area of space). Either way, they “inheret” positions in space and time.

Actually, it can.

Yes, but not a precisely defined space. Just as waves in water, the waves of particles “taper off” the father you get from the particle. There’s no crisp boundaries to the space they take up. Such waves can be spread relatively widely, in which case it seems more wave-like, or it can be concentrated into a more narrow region, in which case it seems more particle-like.

Gib, does color exist without a receptor? If color exists without a receptor, does it take up space? IOW, does a ‘thing’ always radiate it’s color wave and particles, or do they exist only when they can be perceived? There are animals that can’t ‘see’ color. Is the color there anyway?

No. There is only color when it is perceived. It nevertheless remains a property of objects.

LSD gives you colour that doesn’t arrive from the visual sense ~ via the eyes. At most such colour derives from signals - and not light waves - in the visual cortex.

We can then ask; where is colour within the context of electrical signals, in much the same way as we can ask the same about light frequencies?

My conclusion is that if you get information ’asking’ for colour to exist, then it does exist. Much like mind, consciousness and other qualia, even info itself, many aspects of our world simply exist when required.

I expect they still need physical ~ chemical and EM stimulus in order to occur, but that doesn’t mean they can be reduced down to that or otherwise we’d be able to find them within the objects, which we cannot [are not properties of, but relate to ~ which means they are somehting other than].

By way of a simplifying maneuver, if asked directly to consider the issue all would readily agree that colours, sounds, and sensations are mental phenomena produced by the human body, and the human body alone - usually when stimulated in this way or that.

From this vantage point, the experimental (rather than experiential) theory-world of the physicist truly contains no sound, no colour, no scent and no sense.

In pure format physics, experience is replaced with commeasuration - the use of arbitrarily chosen yardsticks to describe both the qualities and the quantities of the world, seemingly bypassing perception and the human entirely. Whether or not this is at bottom self-delusion has always been an open question in the philosophy of Science.

-WL

absolutely!

…but when we say it is mental or of the body, what do we then mean. colour is still somehting other than those things irrespective of weather or not it needs them to exist.

I would disagree the only way a colour has any definitive existence other than any other wavelength in the EM spectrum is when it is perceived, then and only then can an observer define it as a colour, otherwise it’s just a wavelength of photons. In the same way sound does not exist without an observer or listener, sound relies on an “intelligence” to define it. There is no property that we called sound or colour outside of perception, both are intimately defined by perception. Yes both wavelengths exist without an observer, but by definition sound cannot be sound until perceived and likewise colour. Semantic but important.

Wiki.

I too am making a semantic point: what we mean by ‘color’ cannot be torn away from its being a properties of an object, or in the case of LSD which quetzalcoatl brought up, areas of space or the visual field. It’s like the argument for matter: its essential character is extension. Well, color too seems to have to bear an ‘extended’ character. That it is a properties of an object, or an area of space, is possible because objects and space themselves are part of our perceptual world.

Then if you think it fundamental clearly you have to change the definition of sound and colour. This is analogous to claiming maths is discovered not invented.

If it is part of our perceptual world, on LSD or not, colour and sound need an observer with some discretion to make the identities coherent. There is no colour without sight and no sound without hearing. Perception deals in qualia, and qualia do not exist outside of the mind, as subjective as that may and necessarily has to be.

Why? I’m drawing on how we already do define these terms (at least, how the layperson does).

How so?

Correct. Now what of it?

No even the lay person knows sound is something they percieve, colour likewise there’s no fundamental there.

Because you are assuming that “maths” is fundamentally in existence, something that must therefore be discovered not invented.

I think you’re just ignoring the definitions of what sound and colour are, to you they are something that is pre existing, fundamental, this is not the case. I’m not sure how much more clearly I can put it, but sound does not intrinsically exist any more than colour does, they are filtered by an intelligent mind. There is no colour without observation. There is no God without intelligences that can comprehend such a thing. Maybe we are at logger heads because you have not explained your position well enough, but if you keep on saying such a thing as sound and colour are fundamental, you just have to redefine both, not an easy thing to do.

True but these are not properties of an object until they have been filtered by perception. Hence they are not intrinsic properties of anything, all they are is things that we perceive after being filtered by our minds, entirely subjective in our case, there is no objective colour. It’s not an objective on an object because it relies on a perception, some aliens may well not agree that blue is blue, and some animals likewise, because their perceptions differ from ours. Some aliens may well see into the infra red and ultra violet and beyond, and hence colour to them is a far broader spectrum. Colour is not inherent to any object, it is only inherent in a range to some observers, and in that range perceptions may be wider or smaller than others notions of them. Are we talking about properties that are exact, or properties that are variable, if the latter then there is no such thing as absolute colour.

Hell it’s awfully semantic but colour is subjective, it does not exactly represent any wave of light for all observers.

Yes, they know it’s something they perceive. That it is fundamental in that respect is not something they know or assume, but that has nothing to do with the fact that we define color as a property of an object or sound as something eminating from an event.

It is both discovered and invented.

Fundamental, yes. Pre-existing, no. Would it help if I told you I was an idealist?

Oh, how we’re still caught in the grips of Cartesian skepticism.

Already?

No, explaining that they are fundamental is not the same as redefining what they are. Color is still a properties of an object whether or not it is fundamental or a product of neurochemical actions.

Descartes has us convinced that if it is perceptual it has no reality. As I said, my thinking is more on idealist lines, and so I go with the motto that if it is perceived, it is real (i.e. reality is something inherent in our perceptions and experiences, not outside). You can take that or leave it, but at least I hope that clarifies where I’m coming from.

The idealism thing makes sense and explains what you mean I think. Thanks for taking the time to explain it.

I think Descartes should of stuck to maths personally, so we can agree at least that his form of arm waving dualism is not really very informative about reality, in fact it tends to leave us in all sorts of dead ends.

Ok firstly we can agree that colour and sound etc are perceptual, but I’d say there is colour without sight or sound without hearing. This is because the perception of them derives imho from electrical signals rather than the original frequencies, this is why we can see something that is different to what light-waves determine. Examples can be found not only with what drugs do I.e. create false or otherwise imaginary inputs and present them to the perception, but also in optical illusions [inner and outer false correlation of perception to inputs].

It would be wrong to omit further rigour in our logic here; just as colour is not a property of light-waves, in the same way it cannot be said to be a property of neuronal electrical signals. In both cases we have an object forming a wavelength, then that gives [contains?] information from which the mind may perceive meaning about its environment. Electrical signals also may derive from other neuronal sources e.g. the memory and the imagination, which again presents information to the perceiver.

Crucially then, surely we must state that colour properly derives from information, as it is not a property of the signals as mentioned.

That both information and colour are not physical objects, they occur [in the least] as respective agents derived of them.

Additional; Weather or not that too is always the case is quite another question, when we consider fundamentals and origins it seems to me that we have to go beyond objects, then to background information and perhaps beyond that. So it would appear to be like this; I [1] {info} ≡ O {objects} ≡
I [2], where O changes the language of I [2].

Does all this mean that there is a fabric of reality - so to speak, whereby colour and info as consciousness or mind, are brought into being as requested? E.g. if the perceiver gets a signal where its information tells the perceiver that the colour ‘red’ is to be observed ~ either in the mind or as observed in the world, then the colour ‘red’ occurs?
Or rather than a fabric of reality, colour and info are mental/perceptual and we call that a quality of mind? Surely info is out there in the world and it seems equally strange to refer to a thing as mental qualia ~ there are only thing-ness’s, what does mental object or qualia even mean.

_

My older brother is red-green color blind. People with him, who aren’t so impaired can ‘see’ the colors, while he sees only various shades of gray. Does this mean that color is always present, but that its perception depends on the brain chemistry of the perceiver?

It means that your brother’s brain doesn’t analyze some of the rays that bounce off of red and green things in the same way as most humans. The object is the same, the characteristics are the results of interactions between perciever and object. If the object or the perciever change, the characteristics of the object change.

This “of the object” is what causes all the confusion. It doesn’t mean that the characteristic is intrinsic to the object, it just means that it can only happen in the presence of that object, or that it is associated with the object,

Pezer, may I ask if there was anything wrong with the logic in my last post? :slight_smile:

Liz, your brothers colour cones in the back of the eye arent giving the right info/signals I’d expect, either way the signals his brain is getting contains the wrong info. Get the info right and he’ll see colour.
I have seen experiments where hearing and even the tongue is used for sight, although such science is at a rudimentary level at the moment, I doubt it will be long before there’s a way to give the optical cortex the correct signals/info. :slight_smile: