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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2015 - 10:20am PT
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The whole “blue” thing is a tricky one for literal thinkers to get hold of. The cognitive error is – as so often happens – conflating an object with the subjective.
Not how Dingus relates “blue” to light waves “out there,” when in fact “blue” only relates to human perception. Blue is a human perception happening entirely inside your subjective field of awareness.
Fruity said it clearly: The world is inherently colorless. Such observations are “childish” only if you are not interested in how our perceptual process colors and shapes the reality we swear is out there existing independent of an observer.
Moose said: “Largo seems to be arguing that because we can't imagine what the electromagnetic radiation is, it is a no-thing. So, he says "blue doesn't exist."
This is a wonderfully muddled and convoluted claim, having nothing to do with what I was saying.
For one, I’m not arguing. Rather I am presenting a simple set of facts that square with all prevailing modes of neuroscience and psychology, as Fruity said. None of this is my opinion or something I cooked up.
Second, I challenge you to tell us what electromagnetism “is,” as opposed to what it is doing. Who amongst us can say what anything actually is – we can only talk about forces, and the measurements and relationships derived from those forces, and the qualities that spring to mind when we human’s encounter said forces and phenomenon.
I suspect that Moose believes that radiation is a thing that contains forces and measurable phenomenon. In fact, there is no thing called radiation which has forces – radiation IS the forces that we measure. And apparently no more.
As mentioned, objects are almost certainly a human construct, a way for our perception to bundle a bunch of forces and qualities (like sound, shape, color, etc) into a manageable whole or thing/object we can label as “that.”
And blue does exist, but blue is in fact a human interpretation of lightwaves, and that interpretation is not the same at the light waves.
The existential implications of this are magnificent.
And Moose, meditation is not about states - but yes, the mind can play all kinds of tricks on us, and that's why the focus is not on the content or stuff in our mind, but on perception itself, which is not a thing.
JL
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Oct 28, 2015 - 10:38am PT
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Curious stuff about color. It's true that 5th century Greek has few words for color and as well the pre 19th century world was lacking in the kinds of saturated colors we accept as more or less natural today. Chemistry and television and all other screens produce color that is so much more intensely saturated and ubiquitous than what we might find in the early 19th or 18th centuries and certainly earlier than that. It's one of the reasons 17th century Dutch painting tends to look just dull to the modern eye. To some degree contemporary folks have lost a sensitivity to the subtlety of color at least in the appreciation of art. There is what might be described as a kind of color pollution in contemporary life much in the same way we have light pollution or sound pollution. We seem to readily accept a world of saturated color in the same way we accept a noisy environment or a world of twenty four hour light. But, of course, when you're alone in the mountains far from light and noise it can feel like heaven. All those subtle colors are really quite beautiful anybody who's fallen in love with the desert knows that.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2015 - 12:11pm PT
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We don't know the nature of the physical reality. But we can measure it and make accurate predictions. It is not for the science to say what the nature of things is; that belongs to philosophy (which is subjective).
This asserts that all philosophical truths are mutable, even those concerning human nature (“It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it”).
Said truths are not measurements, it is true, but they tell us what a human being IS. There are many other ways for the mind to objectify above and beyond using the micrometer or atom smasher.
JL
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 28, 2015 - 01:52pm PT
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any scientific theory is good until a better one is put up.
No it isn't.
It's only good for the clueless and the mental speculators ......
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 28, 2015 - 02:06pm PT
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moosedrool -- "I wouldn't trust any perception of reality acquired by the mind alone."
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 28, 2015 - 02:10pm PT
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Blue is entirely in your mind
Not[e] how Dingus relates “blue” to light waves “out there,” when in fact “blue” only relates to human perception. Blue is a human perception happening entirely inside your subjective field of awareness.
Interesting how the light waves get into this mind or this subjective field of awareness and how these strange statements about what is happening on the inside get back out of same and appear on this screen.
Consider the possibility that everything is "objective processing." Can you identify the boundary between objective and subjective? For the color blue, is it at the cornea? The retina? The lateral geniculate nucleus? The visual cortex?
Having faith in the special nature of the subjective does not remove it from the realm of the physical.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Oct 28, 2015 - 02:55pm PT
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When the whole mind of an individual is mapped and replicated in a human built machine (computer?), many things will be measured accurately. It would be fascinating (if scary) to compare the intensities of feelings. Do you love me as much as I love you?
That brave new world. Can't wait!
"Neuroscience is progressing rapidly, but the distance to go in understanding brain function is enormous. It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind.
I certainly have my own fears of annihilation. But I also know that I had no existence for the 13.8 billion years that the universe existed before my birth, and I expect the same will be true after my death. The universe is not about me or any other individual; we come and we go as part of a much larger process. More and more I am content with this awareness. We all find our own solutions to the problem death poses. For the foreseeable future, bringing your mind back to life will not be one of them."
Kenneth D. Miller is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia and a co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.
Don't hold your breath.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 28, 2015 - 03:48pm PT
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It is a great last paragraph.
Personally I like to imagine Carl Sagan stating it.
Sorry, Ken.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2015 - 04:47pm PT
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When the whole mind of an individual is mapped and replicated in a human built machine (computer?), many things will be measured accurately.
----
You'd have to have no idea what mind/subjectivity actually is to think for a second that the above statement will ever be possible. For starters, 'mind" involves a slew of feed-back loop related to functions far above and beyond your neo-cortex. When wannabe Frankenstein's talk about mind, they are mostly talking about discursive reasoning.
I'll post more on this fiction-of-the-mechanical mind later. It's total sci-fi rubbish once you understand what is involved from a practical point of view.
Also, MH2 asked about where the objective becomes the subjective. This assumes that the process is entirely mechanical - and our discursive minds ask: What else could it be? This question underscores the whole "threshold" problem - the threshold from nothing to something (big bang), the threshold from inorganic to organic, from organic to experiential, and of course from quantum to meta. The belief is that these are all reductive processes. But one wonders...
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 28, 2015 - 06:02pm PT
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This question underscores the whole "threshold" problem - the threshold from nothing to something (big bang), the threshold from inorganic to organic, from organic to experiential, and of course from quantum to meta.
I had no idea we were doing something comparable to the Big Bang or the origin of life whenever we perceive the color blue.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Oct 28, 2015 - 06:42pm PT
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Well it's a simple but unanswered question: what is the experience of blue? Or better yet what is the experience of beauty, sometimes associated with the experience of blue? Chemistry and evolution aside what is that moment of experience and what is the experiencer... mysterious?
I am not even sure if there is a limit to human invention.
Modernist positivism... the landscape of unintended consequences.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2015 - 07:23pm PT
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Hey Moose, I agree with you on the "impossible" rap. I used to hear that growing up as a wannbe rock star and we always went after the "impossible" stuff.
But in the case of "mind," what is involved is not at all obvious till you start looking at the whole mo fo in practical terms. I'll try and post something about that soon. It's pretty involved but interesting to some of us.
And MH2, your question was not about blue, but about the very point that light waves (objective) "became" the subjective experience of blue. Said "point' is one of those pesky threshold problems that no one has really solved by way of a mechanical explanation. Not to say they won't, but none is even close as yet.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 28, 2015 - 07:53pm PT
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And MH2, your question was not about blue
Oh.
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crankster
Trad climber
No. Tahoe
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Oct 28, 2015 - 08:30pm PT
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In 428,000 years the stoopid gross materialists crankloons will all be vanquished while the intelligent class remains.......
Not 429,000? Maybe use your spaceship's computers to re-run the numbers.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Oct 28, 2015 - 10:47pm PT
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I just saw Dean Potter!
On the PBS/SoCal series titled "The Brain". They interviewed Dean just a few months before his crash. They showed him soloing Heaven, and discussed with him about being in a sub-conscious "flow" compared to being in a conscious rational mind.
Hope you all take a peek. It's a weekly series that's really good.
RIP Dean
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 28, 2015 - 11:05pm PT
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Truth?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truth
1a archaic: fidelity, constancy
[]b: sincerity in action, character, and utterance
2a (1): the state of being the case : fact (2): the body of real things, events, and facts : actuality (3) often capitalized: a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality
b: a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true [truths of thermodynamics]
c: the body of true statements and propositions
3a: the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality
b chiefly British: true 2
c: fidelity to an original or to a standard
4 capitalized Christian Science: God
— in truth
: in accordance with fact:actually
in most cases, we are assigning the word truth to some immutable attribute of reality. We don't expect "truth" to apply at one time and not at another.
We also don't think of truth as equivocal, something is either true or not true (false).
Scientific "truths" are neither immutable nor unequivocal.
Galilean relativity is a "truth" in Classical Mechanics, but it is untrue when the velocity of inertial reference frames approach the speed-of-light...
Not only that, but we may not require the idea the a theory is "true" in the sense that it represents reality, we often only care that the theory is able to calculate the outcome of experiments/observations. In this sense, Quantum Mechanics does not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence to "reality"
Measurements are finite, limited by the instruments that make them...
We talk about the consistency of predictions with measurements, generally we are only "sure" about measurements that contradict (in a statistical sense) a prediction.
So with all the equivocal language, hanging the word "truth" on the word "science" seems problematic. There is a legitimate definition of "scientific truth" but when compared to other uses of word "truth" it seems more of a burden to keep the notion of "scientific truth" than to jettison it.
As for Ohm's law, it is an idea with limited (not universal) application to the properties of materials and electric currents. What do we consider "truth" regarding Ohm's law? We apply it in ways that Ohm never thought of, and design materials that do not "obey" it, and also understand the fundamental description of it in terms of physics unavailable to Ohm.
So while we call it "Ohm's Law," the phrase may have a very different meaning now, then when Ohm first devised it...
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Oct 29, 2015 - 04:51am PT
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The Truth
Therein lies
There lies the truth
The truth about one
Who lies in Duluth
Who lies in bed
Each night until two
Because that's no lie
And that's the truth
-b
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 29, 2015 - 10:32am PT
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Because blue is blue.
--
Say you have three creatures from three different solar systems, all gathered on earth. they look up. According to each of their sense organs, the light waves in a certain frequency (what us humans call "blue") is registered, respectively, in each of the three, as what we humans call "orange," "red," and "green." That is, each creature has a different experience and different interpretation of what we humans call blue. Clearly, "blue" is NOT blue to the Martian, nor the Venutian, nor yet the Plutonian. But to all of them, the light waves remain the same.
Where Dingus gets turned around - and it's a common cognitive glitch - is in investing absolute truth to a label ("blue") that is result of a human organism encountering light waves at a certain frequency. Blue is blue so long as you have our sense organs. If not, blue might be green or red or orange - from our perspective.
IOWs, the light waves don't determine the color. The observer does, according to their organism.
The territory does NOT change creature to creature - that is, the light waves remains the same. The map, the label we ascribe to these waves (blue, etc) is entirely our doing.
Take away an observer and the sky is not "blue." This is the trick of objective constancy that was discussed earlier.
JL
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Oct 29, 2015 - 11:50am PT
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JL makes sense.
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