[ExI] i am software: wasRE: utah: RE: Frank Jackson's brilliant color scientist Mary

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at gmail.com
Tue Jan 7 19:57:12 UTC 2020


This 'part' of redness you are talking about is only yet more abstract
labels and language.  You are only talking about red, and not providing a
qualitative definition of physical redness.  All we know of light, is
abstract descriptions, there is no qualitative meaning in that.  Remember,
you can invert red with green, anywhere in the perception chain, including
in the optic nerve, disconnecting redness from anything in the eye and
anything you are talking about.  Talking about how some people experience
and use different words for red, again, tells you nothing about what it is,
that has a redness quality, which for all practical purposes, my redness
could be the same physics as your grenness.

Nobody, including you, can provide a qualitative definition of, or what it
is that has a redness quality.

Brent









On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 12:11 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 10:50 AM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Today physicists can’t tell us the qualitative color of anything.  Though
>> they can abstractly describe everything about physics (just as Frank
>> Jackson’s Mary can) they can’t tell us anything about the physical quality
>> any of these descriptions are describing.  For example, it could be that
>> our descriptions of how glutamate reacts in a synapse could be describing
>> what we directly experience as redness.
>>
>
> Well, I can tell you what part of "redness" is.  There are certain
> photoreceptors in the human eye that trigger upon receipt of red photons,
> and do not trigger upon receipt of photons of other colors.  It's the
> specific neurons that matter: the receptors for red, green, and blue all
> use glutamate in the same way.
>
> The brain recognizes these patterns, but associating them to the word
> "red" is very much a cultural, learned thing - see
> https://k-international.com/blog/colors-in-other-languages/ among many
> other sources.  Thus, "redness" gets into sociology and the humanities, so
> of course pure biophysics struggles to give a full picture of what
> "redness" boils down to.
>
> Put another way, to take a specific example that page notes: we have
> direct physical evidence that "blueness" differs between those whose first
> language is Russian and those whose first language is English.
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