Color is not in the brain. The brain contains electrochemical pulses that have been triggered by stimuli. When external light is the stimulus that triggered some of the electrochemical pulses, the brain deduces that there is light "out there" somewhere. Different light triggers different pulses and the brain distinguishes them with the idea of "color". The same kind of thing is true for all of the other senses.
We say that the apple "has redness" or "is red" when we mean that the light reflecting off of the apple triggers the particular electrochemical pulses that we associate with "red" light. We could have called it "mergoin colored light". We merely mean that the light coming from the apple is of a specific type out of many other possible types. We learn to call it "red" so as to communicate the sensation to others.
We give names to different affects upon our senses for sake of communication. The affect that water has upon our senses is what we call "wetness". Because all or at least most water triggers that same affect upon us, we categorize wetness as a "quality" of water in the same way that we categorize color as a quality of certain apples.
The quality of a thing tells us what affect to expect from that thing. The quality is not the thing itself, but rather an affect stemming from it. That is just the way the language works
This doesn’t tell us what colour qualia is though. Reasonably and after seeing a paper [that I posted a while ago] stating that there is a ton of light in the brain, and that cells release photons, I can only imagine that those electrical signals are being converted to light. How else do we see colour?
The problem is that as you know, photons are merely a point of energy and physicists say they are transparent. Red is simply a stream of photons moving in that particular wavelength, - this doesn’t tell us what the quality of redness is.
When we observe what stuff is made of we loose sight of the holistic entity, what colour is, what water is, and what we are.
The word "real" refers to a category (or more exactly, a set of related categories, since there is no single category it refers to and since these multiple categories it refers to cannot be reduced to a single category) and this category it refers to has certain rules that determine what is included in it and what is excluded from it. You need to tell me what these rules are before I can agree or disagree with your claim that qualities are real. In simple terms, define the word "real".
I divide it into what is existent [physical objects] and what is non existent [infinity, mind, qualities, etc]. if something is there in any way at all then it is in some way real, even a dream is a reality in that our minds are acting like computers and composing the images we see. Can we say that there is something which isn’t real? We can say something isn’t true or is an illusion, but an illusion is real graphics.
What exactly are you saying? Are you saying that the color we perceive is the color of . . . light? Light is made out of colored corpuscles that when hit the eye determine, based on their color and not on how they move, what kind of image we see?
Indeed, and I do know all of that btw; the light is turned into electrical impulses which at the back of the eye is more akin to a kaleidoscopic image, and it then gets calibrated even before it moves to the optical cortex where the image is processed. So what I was saying above is that once the image has been processed we then see it, ergo the brain is making colour happen, which reasonably can only be done with light. But like what I am saying to james [above], there is an issue even with colour as a property of light ^^.
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