[extropy-chat] effing

[gts]

On Sat, 03 Dec 2005 15:04:47 -0500, Acy Stapp <acy.stapp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's where I disagree. The snow does not look white, nor does the
> power to look white come from snow. The power to look white comes from
> "me looking at the snow", an *act*. The qualia is a property of the
> act, of a scenario involving me and some particular snow. Without me
> *and* the snow, there is no "looking white".

I don't disagree, nor does Locke, that secondary qualities exist only in  
observation. This is why he calls them powers. Secondary qualities are the  
powers of an object to produce qualia in the experience of the observer.

But I will disagree with you here that observing is an "act". We act when  
we think and reflect and behave in response to experience but perception  
itself seems passive. Here the objects of awareness are the actors. They  
act on our senses, producing qualia.

> Locke is, perhaps justifiably, assuming that all of his readers are  
> humansand thus generalizes to all of them, but in my mind the failure to  
> makethe distinction leads to a faliure of understanding. To a blind man 
> snow has no property of whiteness at any level.

I'm not certain he's making that mistake.  A blind man would not see the  
whiteness of snow, but this does not mean snow is not white.

Seems to me that objects can have many secondary qualities that you and I  
cannot experience.  However an object may "look" to a blind bat via sonar,  
that quale would be another secondary quality of the object.

>> The secondary quality of "looking white", the *power* to look white, is  
>> in some sense real because it "result[s] from the different  
>> modifications of those [real] primary qualities."
>>
>
> I have no idea what this means.

Locke means that snow's secondary quality of whiteness is derived from the  
real primary qualities of water and ice and light. Clean snow in normal  
light *must* appear white for real physical reasons. In that sense  
whiteness is a real quality or power of snow.

Primary qualities are "size, shape, number, position, and motion or rest  
of [an object's] solid parts" These exist intrinsically in the object,  
without reference to an observer.

The secondary and tertiary qualities of an object are powers that "result  
 from the different modifications of those primary qualities."

-gts