Qualia and the Mystery of Colors

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”.

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?

What was experienced in the past is real. That’s one of the categories associated with the word “real”. Since each one of us has an experience of colors, each one of us will categorize them as real. But then, is that what you mean by “real”?

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.

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.

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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So mind is not real? Qualities are not real?

Yes, we can say there are things that are not real.

Dreams are real.
Why? Because we have an experience of them.

Imaginary dreams are not real.
Why? Because we have no experience of them.

Imaginations of dreams are real.
Why? Because we have an experience of them.

Robot, cartoon and imaginary unicorns are real.
Biological unicorns are not real.
And you know the reasons: the former have been experienced whereas the latter have not.

Why do we say dreams are not real when they are in fact real?
Because dreams do not have all the properties wakeful experience has. That is what is meant by the statement. Not that they are literally unreal.

Color is real, and qualities in general, whether or not color is a property of light (in other words, whether or not our experience of color is correlated with the color of light corpuscles that hit our eyes.)

The word “universe” refers to a category that includes every idea that points to something we consider to exist and excludes every idea that points to something we consider to not exist.

The word “exist” on the other hand is a label that we attach to the pointer of ideas. We use specific set of rules to decide whether we should attach “exists” or “does not exist” to the pointer of any given idea.

Some will say that the word “universe” does not refer to a category. But then, when you ask them what it refers to, they won’t be able to give you an answer.

Some will agree that the word “universe” refers to a category but will deny that it includes ideas. They will say, it includes not the ideas but what the ideas point to. They will say, it includes things that can be sensed such as humans, animals, mountains, rivers, planets and galaxies. They will agree that it also includes ideas but will disagree that it only includes ideas. But then, when you ask them what does the category exclude, they won’t be able to give you an answer.

Some will agree that the word “universe” refers to a category that includes certain ideas and excludes others but will disagree that its content is based on our judgment. They will say, whether something exists or not is independent from our judgment. But then, when you ask them what does the category include and exclude, they won’t be able to give you an answer without using their own judgment.

They are morons.
Abstract beyond limits of sanity.

It is us who judge whether something exists or not. And we do so using a specific set of rules. The only question is what kind of set of rules do we use.

As I’ve said before, what has been experienced in the past is automatically judged as existent. What hasn’t been experienced in the past is passed to the second round of judgment. When no round of judgment picks it up as existent, we say it is non-existent.

Because we have an experience of quality that is color, we say it exists.

However, that does not mean that light is made out of corpuscles that are colored and the color of which determines the color we are seeing when they [corpuscles] hit our eyes.

These are two separate things.

I think that it does.

Wow
Seriously?


Something is physically real if, and only if, it affects physically real things. And if it does not affect any physically real thing at all, it is not physically real.

There is no example of a perfect circle in nature. The physical universe cannot contain a perfect circle. Thus a perfect circle cannot affect anything physical and therefore is not physically real. And although dreams physically exist, the concepts contained in a dream are not physically real.

I think they are, but physicists don’t. they think the mind is the brain and qualities are physical objects e.g. photons for colour.

Ok, can you give an example?

We experience the colours and sounds etc, and they are not necessarily a faculty of experience. The brain is composing those qualities just as it does the world, so they are akin to the brain working like a computer and making the graphics for the game.

Do you mean that an experience of colour [or any given quality] can be different to light colour? Hmm that’s a tricky one, an idea of colour is not the same as colour, but if we are seeing the idea as a colour in a dream or in the world, then surely it is of light. Do you think there is a quality of colour which when we see it in our minds or world is not photonic?

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Mind is not the brain. Mind is caused by the brain. I don’t think physicists, at least most of them, deny the former. They are simply stating the latter using crude terms.

I already did. Imaginary dreams (i.e. dreams that are imagined and not experienced) and biological unicorns.

Existence is a property of ideas of what might be real. When the idea of what might be real is a dream for which there is no evidence of its occurence, then we say it is not real.

This property is useful in separating ideas that are potentially a factor in decision making process (the real ones) from ones that are not (the unreal ones.)

They are experienced. If you have a memory of them, they have been experienced.

The state of the brain is separate from the state of the mind but that does not mean they are unrelated.

You are making a mistake of assuming that if A causes B that B is A. It is not.

Light switch causes the state of the light bulb. But they are not the same.

When you turn the light switch on, the light bulb emits light. But there is no light in the light switch.

There are no colors in the brain and there are probably no colors in light. Colors do not belong to these categories.

some interesting links…

rats seeing infa red light via implant…
sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/ … ared-light

Photon entanglement through brain tissue…

nature.com/articles/srep37714
greenmedinfo.com/blog/biopho … made-light

and light into matter even…
phys.org/news/2014-05-scientist … quest.html

Phototransduction and how the eye works…
backyardbrains.com/experiments/eye

It may be so that mind actually is the brain, if you consider that a simple rainbow has vast complexity such to be seen differently by all observers. Something happens when informations meet and exchange ideas [- in said rainbow for example], and you get qualities. It may be so that that happening in the brain is literally what thought is. To me this doesn’t demean mind, though I do think the way scientists and atheists describe that majestic nature of reality does. Really I think a fuller explanation tells us that the perceived physical reality is much more than what it appears to be ~ more than merely physical objects [which themselves don’t exist in absolute terms].

I already did. Imaginary dreams (i.e. dreams that are imagined and not experienced) and biological unicorns.
Ah ok sry. Biological unicorns don’t exist until you make them, but I take your point, they are just an idea about something which is not real. A real idea concerning a non-real. What kind of dream is imagined without being experienced? We are somewhat disconnected from the same memory we use in everyday life, so we can forget dreams, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t experience them.

Does a camcorder experience what it ‘sees’, no, so can we not say that the functional part of sight is making colours such that they can be observed? We don’t experience everything we see, look up blind-sight for example, this is where blind people [and everyone] see things in terms of the mechanics taking in information, but aren’t consciously seeing it. Equally there will be mechanistic aspects of the brains graphics software, composing the colours we expect to see e.g. in optical illusions where that is not the real colours in the world.

And so we return to the question; what is colour?
I do think it is, and only is, a property of light.

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Mind and brain are two different categories. If they were one and the same category, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the two, which is a contradiction, because we already do.

There is no question that mind is not the brain. Mind is simply not the brain. The question is what is the RELATION between them. And physicists will tell you – and I am no physicists myself – that mind is caused by the brain. I have no reason to doubt this. Sounds pretty sensible to me.

In other words, color (which is in the mind) is caused by neurochemical processes (which are in the brain) and these in turn are caused by the wavelength of the light that comes in contact with our eyes (which is in the physical world outside of the brain.)

You, on the other hand, appear to think that light has color and that this color causes the color in the mind. This is a matter of physics. Because I’m not a physicist, I can’t comment on it. But I can comment on your reasoning insofar you think that the fact that there is a difference between color and its physical correlates means that color must be physical too. It does not.

You ask “what is color?” I am not sure you know what you’re asking. We already know what color is. We know what kind of experience the word “color” refers to. You need to understand what you’re asking. Are you asking “what is the cause of color?” That would be a different question. But we have answers to that question too. What exactly are you asking?

Existence is a property that is given exclusively to the ideas of what might be real. It is not given to every object of experience. Observations of reality, such as seeing a horse running, do not have such a property. Observations are used to determine the value of this property but they do not have the property itself.

An idea that biological unicorns might be real is not real. But an idea that an idea that biological unicorns might be real might be real is real.

When you lie about what you dreamed last night, for example.

What is difficult to understand, or maybe simply to admit, is that it is us who judge whether something exists or not.

The word “exist” is nothing but a label that we attach to certain objects of experience, namely to ideas, using a certain method (defined by a certain set of rules) and with a certain purpose in mind.

The concept of existence makes no sense outside of judgment.

Many will say this is not true because “whether something exists or not is independent from human judgment”.

That statement is very popular and I have no doubt that it makes an important point. However, when taken literally it is wrong and those who take it literally make themselves stupid by doing so.

The statement does not communicate its point unambiguously.

People are addicted to this naive concept of objectivity which is entirely independent from every subjective factor including personal judgment. Such an objectivity is entirely imaginary, and therefore, not really an objectivity.

It’s also a symptom of paranoia.

Whatever is not judged as existent is quite simply not existent i.e. it is not judged as existent. Tautology is miraculous.

That’s quite simply what “not existent” means: it means you didn’t judge it as “existent”.

However, that does not mean that the judgement of something as being existent will persist infinitely through time. For example, depending on the method of judgment, it might change with the advent of new experience.

What ultimately matters is the method of judgment one is using. In other words, epistemology. Or how we know what we know.

When your method of judgment is basically “what I want to exist is judged as existent and what I don’t want to exist is judged as non-existent” then we say you are subjective.

When your method of judgment is highly dependent on evidence, i.e. prior observations, then we say you are objective.

Objectivity isn’t judgment-independence. Rather, it is evidence-dependence and preference-independence.

Most people misunderstand subjectivity to be mind- or brain-dependence so they think tastes are subjective. These folks are very annoying.

Subjectivity simply means that your judgment is dependent on your preference for its conclusion. It does not mean dependent on any kind of mental factor and/or preference.

When I say “God does not exist”, presupposing I have a clearly defined idea of God, I am simply saying that, using my method of judgment, whatever that method is, I judge the idea of God as being non-existent. I am not saying that my judgment will remain infinitely constant through time. Depending on the rules of my method of judgment, it might be possible to change my mind at some point in the future, say if new evidence appears. But my present judgment is that God is non-existent.

Agnosticism and “absence of belief” arguments represent an unwillingness to make a judgment call. Nothing more than that.

Most of these agnostics behave in a way that is very similar to the way that follows when you judge the idea of God as non-existent. They just don’t want to admit it. They are afraid of conflict.

Sorry about the physics stuff, but james was saying that light isn’t in the brain, or it sounded like he was anyway.

Its like software/hardware, the machine and what it produces are different yes, but colour qualia is composed by the brain and not some mysterious facet we consider to be ‘mind’. that’s why we can be tricked by optical illusions, you wouldn’t suggest that we are consciously doing that surely?

I am asking; ‘what is colour’ and by that I am not referring to holistic definitions. My answer is that colour is not an idea, pigment or material, it only occurs where light hits such a material and changes its frequency. Ergo for the brain to be creating colour it must be producing light, otherwise the ‘mind’ wouldn’t be able to see it. A blind person cannot see colour if they loose the physical ability, and a colour-blind person’s brain is composing colour relative to the incorrect information its getting ~ akin to optical illusions [which is light being changed by the brain.

I see your point, and its been a long battle in science and philosophy, but a physicist would say that information which is measurably out there exists. Information which doesn’t have physical form like meanings, stories dreams etc, are the products of the physics. One is the machine the other is what the machine makes.

That’s a whole topic in itself and I am inclined to agree, perhaps we could go so far as to say that only subjective things exist? If you consider what Einstein said which agrees with your position, a relative object is not objectively real or even exactly located.

I disagree however that existence itself is a matter of judgement, how we judge things only changes our subjective interpretation of a thing. You could judge that the mountain doesn’t exist, but it still does. Just because its particles cannot be located if you try to observe them, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They are a bit like a bee in a jar - so when there are collections of relative particles acting as information upon one another, the result is a substance and that isn’t relative. Otherwise we’d be saying that information does not inform, yet it measurably does, even our minds use info.

Epistemology is more a language [/meaning] problem, mathematics and physical information isn’t necessarily the same. No matter how we describe something, that doesn’t change what the thing is, it just changes our description of the mountain.

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When you say “something exists whether or not we judge it to exist” you are saying “something exists even if we judge it not to exist”. But how can we say something exists without judging that it exists? We cannot. So what you are saying is “we judge something to exist even if we judge it not to exist”. This is strictly speaking a contradiction because you cannot judge something both ways at the same time: that it exists and that it does not exist. However, you can say that “we can judge that something exists even if in the past we judged that it does not exist”. Basically, it is saying that our judgment can change with time. This is the true meaning of the phrase.

In other words, existence is a matter of judgment and if you have problem with this you have problem with facts.

Tell me, how can you say that the mountain does not exist and then say that it does exist even though you say it does not exist? Isn’t this a hypocrisy? Maintaining two contradictory beliefs, one deemed subjective (mountain does not exist) and another objective (mountain does exist or rather might exist.) The latter is better described as paranoid.

That would take it too far, I’m afraid. I don’t even know what “only subjective things exist” means. What is a subjective thing? How is it defined? Care to give some examples and counter-examples?

Mind isn’t mysterious. It’s simply a category, or a class, that includes certain events and excludes others. Feelings, for example, are in the mind. They are not in the brain. Their correlates – neurochemicals – are in the brain. There is a form of correlation that we call causation between physical events and mental events (e.g. neurochemicals causing feelings) but there is also, no doubt, such a correlation between mental events themselves (e.g. feelings causing other feelings.)

You have to understand that causation, and correlation in general, is established after-the-fact. It is not what is simply “out there”. It is a product of our judgment based on our need to fore-see, which is to say, to see before seeing.

Facts/particulars are fundamental/independent.

Interpretations/universals are not – they are built on top of, and are thus dependent on, the former.

That’s the age old question of whether classes and other abstract concepts are real (the position of realism) or not (the position of nominalism.)

What does “out there” mean?

More generally, what do words “inside” and “outside” mean?

Would you agree with the following:
“X is inside Y” simply means “element X is a member of set Y”.
“X is outside Y” simply means “element X is not a member of set Y”.

Basically, would you agree that these words indicate membership status of any given element in relation to any given set?

If so, you will agree that “out there” means nothing other than “not a member of some presumed set”. Possibly “within some set that is not the one that is presumed”.

It doesn’t say much, in other words. Not explicitly, at least. We need to know, to identify, what set we are speaking of.

Perhaps this set is three-dimensional space?
Is that what “out there” refers to?
Being a member of three-dimensional space?

I hope you will agree that three-dimensional space is a set. And nothing more than that. Other than perhaps an advanced type of set – perhaps we can say a structured set – because it has fixed slots, unlike plain sets that only have elements, into which elements can be inserted and because it can be addressed using three parameters (x, y, z.) Whatever slots are unused we call “void”, whatever slots are used we call “matter”.

Three-dimensional space is a mathematical structure – an abstraction – used to organize some preexisting information using certain set of rules. In other words, it’s not fundamental. It’s a high-level construct.

The set of raw (read: unorganized) information is what is fundamental. It is so because it precedes our sense of three-dimensional space. It is what is independent whereas our sense of three-dimensional space is what is dependent.

This set of raw (or unorganized) information is the set of all events we have experienced in the past and have memorized. Basically, it’s our memory.

The set that is 3D space is defined by some rules and these rules impose certain restrictions that determine what bits of raw information will be included within it and what bits will not. It generally does not include everything – it is not all-encompassing. This means that some raw information will be excluded. Some of it is simply outside of the scope of 3D space.

Most people have a strong attachment to the concept of three-dimensional space and most of them think that 3D space is what is fundamental. Thus, whenever some information falls outside of the scope of 3D space they deem it to be not real.

Qualities such as feelings cannot be included within the set that is 3D space without leading to Cartesian dualism and “ghost in the machine” situation that often leads to bizarre conclusions such as “everything is conscious”.

Do colours solely rely on light to exist?

Are colours a dormant entity… waiting for light to make them become what they are?

Does the universe work with us, or are we solely evolving to take advantage of what the universe has to offer?

Has anyone ever stayed long enough in a dark room/space to trigger their night vision, or when you close your eyes see colours/neon lights?

Amorphos,

But the mind is a mysterious thing, all facets of it, Amorphos.

Aside from that, the sensation (qualia) which we experience by viewing colors or particular colors, is ALSO brought on by the individual mind, in conjunction with the individual brain, I believe.
Any two people might experience color differently. I see qualia also as part of an emotional experience, so in this way we may even see and sense it differently, as a result of one’s mind’s perception in relation to how they view the world internally and have lived it externally.

If that were not the case, could we have favorite colors? Wouldn’t yours also be indigo like mine? Or wouldn’t mine also be yellow like Van Gogh’s?