Kevin's Watch

Put simply (not that you guys need it but I do ) is your red the same as mine, your rose scent the same as my rose scent, your umami my umami.

I think it is and here's why. We have the same apparatus, constructed by the same means and from the same blue-print in order to achieve the same 'goal' (providing reliable information about the world beyond our skin). Would it then not be illogical to think that the middle bit - the actual experience or qualia we perceive - is suddenly different for each of us. Surely this doesn't stack up?

All stimuli is filtered by our perspective and perception. Also, we know that biologically we may have different strengths or weaknesses based on our genetic heritage, and our psychology and environment.

It doesn't have to be the same.

Otherwise, why do we have preferences in taste? I can't eat particularly hot things, but the GF loves chillies. I don't much like the music she does. The stimuli are the same, but our reactions to them (and therefore our experience of them) differ.

--A

But she might like blue and you might not Av - but it doesn't mean you see a different color does it?

Isn't this like asking if your feeling of sadness is the same as my feeling of sadness? Experience isn't shared. So the question is academically fruitless. No?

What prompted it WF was a program I saw the other night about the brain in which a neurologist was suggesting that there was no evidence that our personal experience of these subjectively based inputs from the external world were the same for different people. I may be reading more into this than he indeed meant, but it didn't seem logical to me somehow that given the same equipment for perception and interpretation or sensory input, that our experience of it should be radically different (although I conceded that how we feel about such experience can be).

peter wrote:But she might like blue and you might not Av - but it doesn't mean you see a different color does it?

It doesn't mean the spectrum which the object reflects is different, but that is not the same as saying we do not see a different blue.

(Actually, the GF and I argue over what colour things are all the time. )

--A

There's no evidence that the experience of color is the same ... and there's no evidence that it's different ... because there's nothing here that can be measured or quantified either way.

Even if we get to the point of being able to copy or manufacture memories digitally, the color blue will not be indicated by a datum, but by an association with things that are blue. That's how memory is wired. So we still won't know.

In the end, blue is a feeling.

+JMJ+

Avatar wrote:

peter wrote:But she might like blue and you might not Av - but it doesn't mean you see a different color does it?

It doesn't mean the spectrum which the object reflects is different, but that is not the same as saying we do not see a different blue.

--A

How do we know that the Object doesn't release different spectra and that we perceive them all as the same blue?


Enlightenment Dualism, I love you. Without you, what would a Wosbald do?

Interesting description of the visual mechanism of the brain, where the guy explained how the activity level of the thalamus was way above that required to process the sensory impulses from the eyes prior to their onward passage to the cerebral cortex. Also he said that there was a greater flow back to the thalamus from the visual cortex than toward it. This was accounted for by the brain using its own pre-constructed template on which to tack on the fine detail of any visual field, thereby saving the time and energy required to build each visual picture from scratch. Clever brain!

peter wrote:This was accounted for by the brain using its own pre-constructed template on which to tack on the fine detail of any visual field, thereby saving the time and energy required to build each visual picture from scratch. Clever brain!

Yes. Most of what we see is only what we think we see. As I had been saying earlier in the topic about objective truth - we experience reality very indirectly.

Wosbald wrote:How do we know that the Object doesn't release different spectra and that we perceive them all as the same blue?

We don't.

Frank Herbert wrote:'What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?'

wayfriend wrote: Yes. Most of what we see is only what we think we see. As I had been saying earlier in the topic about objective truth - we experience reality very indirectly.

Exactly.

--A

I do however think the man's statement at the end to the effect that each of us have our own reality, and that there is no necessary correspondence between them is somewhat misleading in that it almost denies the existence of a reality beyond our self generated perception of it. Better I think to put it as you guys have in terms of our brain's creating a map of it for us to make use of - but never forgetting that the map is not the territory.

I think the idea is that "the reality beyond our self", while it may exist, has little or no bearing on how we behave ... we all live by what our generated perceptions create.

This is an example of aTOMic's sig: "If you can't tell the difference, what difference does it make?" A certain frequency of electromagnetic radiation hitting sensory organs of different beings of the same species, brought up in the same society, each individual interpreting the same frequency the same way every time, all individuals consistently understanding what other individuals are referring to. With no way to prove it one way or the other, all we have is the fact that the system works.

What would it take to go beyond this level of knowledge: would a direct transference of the visual content of a third parties wetware to ones own (say via upload to virtual format if such a thing is ever possible) do it - or would your own brain just interpret the perception into it's own usual form ( in which case only by actually becoming the third person could you perceive as they do and the whole exercise is moot).

We wouldn't be able to tell whether or not your own brain was just interpreting the perception into it's own usual form than we can currently tell whether or not my blue is your blue.

Saying we were able to convert the impuses within a third persons brain [ie the final processed visual information as it is percieved] into a form where it could be 'screened' [not as far fetched as it sounds; we are close to achieving a very simplified form of this already with dreams I believe] - would this show us what they 'see'?, or are we really talking 'impossible' here?

When red is not red and blue is not blue there are people who do not see
those colors. To them they are some shade of grey. Why Grey? Well ones
afflicted with what we call "Color-blindness" see the only colors they can
agree upon with a "supposed" normal person is grey.

I have met those people and some have it very
severe.
Brown, red, orange, yellow, blue and green have been perceived as shades of greys.
Although conversing with them they try to explain they see "colors" they
can not describe. Within a sunset, within photographs and in every day life.
It's like their eyes have been shifted in the electromagnetic spectrum. It
makes it hard to match clothes when they want to dress up appropriately..

Only sight within the normal human perception can we have a consensus
what the colors are designated. But even that may not be absolute. Until
we can be another person and see what they see, hear what they hear,
taste and feel, or in short be them, can we then compare the sameness of
our senses.

I don't think we have a technology that can determine that.. yet.

Speaking of colour blindness and clothes though, Pantone makes a colour scanner...you run it over anything and it tells you what colour it is.

Pretty neat.

--A

But it can never tell you how you will see it, or whether you will like it.

These optical illusions where you can be made to see two squares of colour as totally different when they are in fact exactly the same, simply by virtue of their surrounding colours and your expectations of what the colour is always fascinate me. They show how absolutely dependant colour perception is on the circumstances of its viewing.