At the risk of stirring up a hornets nest, like the Logicians and the eye colour scenario.
Has any one heard of Mary’s room? Or Mary the Monochrome Psychologist?
ANyhoo.
Here’s a trimmed down version of the problem from Wiki.
I think most people would agree that Mary would indeed learn something new about RED, a thing she has heretofore only understood objectively. She is now able to experience RED for the first time. and soon and without any special instrumentation is able to make distinctions between that and other colours she has only yet know as differences in tone. This new knowledge is called QUALIA.
But there is no way we can know that her qualia are experienced the same way as ours. This is not a trivial question, it is one often asked by 10 year old kids beginning to understand that the world does not look the same to them as to other people. They rightly pose the possibility that every time I see RED I see what you see when you see BLUE, but we call it red because are seeing the same object, we have no cause to think that our internal experience is the same, or indeed different, for any particular instance.
Sometimes the differences in qualia are so great as to cause a rift, and an obvious difference that IS detectable. For people called, rather prejudicially, COLOUR_BLIND, its not that we see no colour , not that we see colour ‘wrongly’ but that the range of colour has a different register, where the division between colour have different values. Further than that there is an African culture that has such a different range of Green that they can make a distinction that Westerners cannot; there are also Asian word-shapes westerners cannot hear.
You’re basically arguing that if a wavelength of light refracts into two different optical nervous systems that they’ll experience different “colors”. An orange wavelength of light could appear more red to someone and more yellow to another. Heck, it could appear entirely different as in green, blue, or violet for all intents and purposes.
The correspondence in experience remains, however. If I experience “A=1” and you experience “A=α”, we will both experience the same thing repeatedly when “A” is experienced.
Are you asking if there’s a conscious effort regarding the actual experience itself?
I don’t think his argument is necessarily just about two different "tokens"of the same “type”. The qualitative experience of any colour doesn’t necessarily need to be of the same type - what one person could experience as “red” could be more like, I dunno, a taste for someone else that they’ve just been taught to associate with “redness” when they experience it and/or are involved in a communication about it.
See, the actual quality of any qualia is irrelevant, as long as it’s associated with a stimulus that is agreed to originate from the same source in the same way, such that meaningful communication can occur between two parties that are able to meaningfully agree or disagree about something, and react in a way that is useful or at least preferable to each party.
How could we even test this? We cannot. Even if, in some sci-fi-like scenario whereby one person’s thoughts are linked up to another’s, or one’s brain is reconstructed to perfectly match another’s, the exact same consciousness cannot be guaranteed.
I know that redness definitely exists to me. It’s only once we start talking about objective or universal existence that we run into problems. This is why I completely reject any notion of objective or universal truth. It’s just a useful, social misunderstanding.
That is not to say that the existence of redness to me is psychologically constructed. That implies some kind of artificial mental illusion. It’s only if you’re operating from the premise that objective or universal truth is a given, that we start wondering in this kind of way. This idea of objective or universal truth too commonly takes precedence over individual or subjective truth, such that any dissonance between the two is approached with a kind of caution and scepticism towards the individual and subjective - when it should be directed towards the objective or universal.
Red isn’t psychologically constructed, it’s just a name given to associate with a type of personal experience…
Objective truth refers to the thing in itself. Subjective truth refers to the thing as it appears. At least that’s how Kant put it.
Are you saying the raw refraction of light into one’s optical nervous system doesn’t universally take place (regardless of the particular nervous system it’s refracted into)?
Meaning can also be tested by seeing how someone figuratively matches qualities to other objects. Humor is a great test for this. One’s sense of humor depends on taking qualities out of context where they can symbolize purposiveness without purpose.
Kant called this genius in the illustration of beautiful aesthetics.
Effort implies an intention to examine the world. All I meant by that is you are still experiencing the world lying down in a sound proof room with the lights out. No effort but you can still feel the bed, and hear your heartbeat.
The phrase “psychological construction” means that RED not being out there in the “real world”, is a thing constructed by the body. First by that eyes that can detect variations in the wavelength of the light hitting the retina, then by the brain that translates that nervous signal as a colour. This is all effortless.
Doe that answer your question?
I’m not answering for Silhouette, but your questions make me think. What is interesting about the RED question is that not only can we never perfectly know the ‘thing in itself’, but our perception of what is real, not only denies us that but adds more than is actually present in the objective world.
What is true for colour has also to be true for all other perceptual phenomena. Thus we psychologically create colour from differentiated wavelengths of light, but we also create a range of sounds from differences in ‘sound waves’. Humans, thus create the spectrum but we also create music. This, also is a purely psychological phenomenon, music is Qualia.
If Mary were watching the world in the sound equivalent of a monochrome world able to see the sound as a collection of amplitudes and pitches, she would be utterly puzzled when she saw people watch an orchestra play Beethoven’s Ninth. Until she left the confines of her lab and actually heard it, she would never be able to predict what hearing was like.
Now, the whole point is that the entire world is constructed like that, internally. This is one reason why scientific explanations are so damn poor, and why music and art is so damn beautiful.
But as you know, not every one loves the same music, likes the same art or natural landscapes, nor can they call laugh at the same jokes. But as humans are born with the same sensory apparatus and similar brains we are able to share and understand each other, stuff that Mary , another alien species would never to able to appreciate.
The presence of psyche is unnecessary for that structure. You’re treating red experience as a natural phenomenon that’s synthesized between environment and anatomy. It’s still a real, not ideal, moment.
Kant emphasized that the key to beautiful aesthetics is remaining disinterested. It doesn’t really matter whether you like a piece of music or not. You can still judge it being purposive through universally harmonized understanding: plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#2.1
When I referred to humor before, the point was that people can appreciate objective truths by taking subjective symbols and formulating them out of context where they no longer function. For example, consider smoke in context of fire to represent heat. If someone flirts in calling another “smokin” it shows judgment in understanding when people feel hot. The same thing applies when people wear red clothing and makeup in order to appear attractive by making others feel hot and representing one’s own sense of warmth. You’re disinterested in smoke and red. It’s the essence of heat underneath that counts.
I agree that scientific explanations can be rather poor. They try to quantitatively synthesize the possible forms, rather than qualitatively analyze the necessary formulation, of how qualia exist.
No I’m not making a dualist point at all. By psychology I am not positing a soul neither was I implying it. I am however drawing a distinction between what we can tell by looking at the world “objectively” and what we are in fact actually doing, is experiencing it wholly subjectively and from that subjective experience, science ought to console itself with dissecting out an objective world - Sadly it is so populated by naive realists that they rarely do that, and give scant consideration to the difference between what is out there “the thing in itself” and the way we all tend to experience the world internally.
In this way Kant has much to offer the scientific world of naive “objectivists” who are nothing more than slaves to their own ideology. The “if you can kick it, it is real” brigade have much to learn from Kant, they have more to learn from Mary’s thought experiments.
It is due to this distinction between the actual objective world and the internal world we create within which is a sensational reflection of it, that has seen the growth of Phenomenalism and existentialism, as way to acknowledge this difference, and to learn more honestly through our experience of the world that pure science would ever allow.
You sound a little confused. I’m not sure why you’re bringing culture into this.
Fire’s cheapest and most common color is red, and when people are attracted, they feel physically hot. This cross-sensory illustration allows us to identify the object in itself through purposiveness without purpose. Even in context of blood, it circulates faster and gives people color when they’re feeling hot as well.
I understand what you’re saying about single-sensory experiences being potentially distant and diverse, but that doesn’t get us anywhere.
Psyche is not implied from psychology, no more that astrology implies astronomy. I did not introduce “psyche”.
I accept idealism, I thought that was clear, but one vested in a materialism. I don’t think the idea of an ineffable extra material essence helps the discussion it being a word that does no work.
Red is a well known color, a well known spectrum in the scale of colors, if it’s suddenly sucject to doubt it’s not because one should doubt it’s existance, but we should question the doubters, with their irrational qualia.
Besides this is excatly why philosophy these days are so selfdefeating, as philosophers loooove to endulge in totaly irrelevant topics.
If you really think that garbled nonsense was “self-explanatory” then you really need a reality check.
You are a prime example of a naive realist.
You really need to do some philosophy lest you disappear up your own dream world of your own construction.
The concept of “qualia” is a rationalisation. It is nonsense to call it “irrational”.
I’m a master in logistics, finding 100 waste hours per sales person in a big company, reducing several tasks taking a whole day down to ½h, being a snotty whelp that changed decades old termnials to new, several had tried but I was the only one wit the wit to say the right words, etc, etc.
You defend your nonsens with more nonsens, you can’t make a simple rational argument. Yes, I’m a realist, contrary most philosophers, who are day dreamers, who chases rainbows, who are mislead by demagogues and selfdelusion.