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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Oct 29, 2015 - 03:19pm PT
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Dingus makes more sense.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 29, 2015 - 03:21pm PT
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Blue is just another name for the wavelength of light. -dtm
No it's not, Smartypants. Unless you're being loose and obtuse with the facts or the language. Which of course you often are.
It's not just another name - at least until it is clear you're distinguishing the reality of the wave and/or wavelength from the perception of the wavelength at the backside of the perception system.
And it's not at all clear from your post that YOU ARE distinguishing these two... the wave at the front of the eye from the perception at the back of the brain. So sorry no cigar.
Could Largo have written up his alien paragraph with more clarity and precision as he so often does in his other works? yes. But to those in the know who can see through the written lines he is right on this one and you are... at least... unclear.
Loose and obtuse.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 29, 2015 - 03:33pm PT
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If I cut into Cintune's optic nerves with my state of the art micromanipulator and cut the axons coming from his blue photoreceptors and red photoreceptors and simply interchanged them one for one, then sewed him back up and woke him, then he'd see our blue sky input (475nm) as red and report such and he'd see our red roses input (700nm) as blue and report as such.
My senior class project in undergraduate school was on electrical stimulation of the brain (pioneered by delgado). I got an A.
The subject's tricky, the language is tricky, it requires careful handling and thinking and dtm seldoms posts so. So who knows what he really knows.
Of course the really exciting and mind-blowing outcome would result (as I reported in this college paper) if in our experiment / subject we cut the optic nerves and auditory nerves and interchanged those one for one. Then our subject could open his eyes look around and see/hear sounds and play Taylor Swift on Youtube and hear/see colors different ones depending on song (Bad blood, Shake It Off). Trippy.
Back to Cintune: He'd see (our) blue sky as (his) red.
So is dmt's "blue" wavelength (475nm) still Cintune's blue? Not.
Blue is just another name for the wavelength of light. -dtm
Yes or no. Depends on context.
450nm light is called blue because that's the perception it gives us after the brain operates on it. If suddenly we knew what it was "like to be a bat" (a famous paper), I mean a Vulcan, by some trick of parallel processing and by perceiving the world also through a Vulcan brain as well as a human brain, we might be excited to discover that the 450nm light which the Vulcan perceives as blue (and calls blue) is the human mind-brain's green. Trippy.
No brains, no perception systems. No perception systems, no perceptions. No perceptions, no colors. Basic science.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 29, 2015 - 04:19pm PT
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So if we're being loose and obtuse with our words like this...
Blue is just another name for the wavelength of light. -dtm
I'll play too.
1. Blue is just another name for photoreceptor cone output that responds maximally and differentially to 450 - 494 nm.
2. Blue is just another name for cone output elect signal that connects to brain circuitry that in turn outputs blue perception.
.....
Actually the more dmt posts on this subject, like this...
"No forget all the alien bs for a moment. You have three people; each look up at the sky; one says its red, two say its blue. They all see the same frequency of light but one reports back some different word. One of them is color blind. He's wrong, his mind is wrong and he may be delusional and unable to tell. But the sky... is still blue. Blue is just another name for the wavelength of light. No matter what an alien, or you, may think."
...the more I'm led to believe he does not get it.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 29, 2015 - 04:47pm PT
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In it's simplest form, the whole "blue" thing is an attempt to literally take the map for the territory. We use all kinds of maps as symbolic representations of measurable or perceptible reality - words, numbers, signs, etc. None are the thing itself, any more than a topo of Snake Dike is Snake Dike.
Dingus says - three people look up and two see blue and are "right," and the third is color blind and sees red, and he is "wrong." In this case, "right" and "blue" are normed off normal human perception, NOT objective reality. Blue is not an objective reality, but a subjective symbol (word) for an objective set of light waves as experienced by a human observer.
Thing is, our perception is so tied up in what we see and think and feel and so forth, and contributes so much to our "reality" in terms of ordering and organizing the raw data into things and objects, that we mistakenly believe what we see exists just as we see it "out there," as though external "reality" is a diorama full of immutable props that remain selfsame no matter what creature or observer looks inside.
'Fraid not. No stoogie.
Ed commented earlier how quantum mechanics is in one sense a system that allows us to make predictions, and is not an exact mirroring or representation of whatever the hell is "out there."
My sense of it is there is some thing out there only relative to human consciousness and human physicality. Our objects would be encountered differently by other observing creatures possessing different brains and bodies and sense organs which would process the raw data of their experience in different ways.
Bottom line - the idea that there is a fixed or immutable set of objects "out there" is part of human experience, not necessarily part of some stand- alone objective reality removed from human perception and physicality.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 29, 2015 - 05:01pm PT
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To be clear...
So, Largo, it seems you and I are in agreement on the following: without perception systems in the universe it is a colorless universe.
Now are you also saying as a further step that without perception systems in the universe it is also an objectless universe? No El Cap, no moon, etc.?
Claim #1: No perception system, no color. Agree or disagree?
Claim #2: No perception system, no moon. Agree or disagree?
I can answer these straightforwardly.
Claim #1: Agree. Claim #2: Disagree. I hold (I believe) there is an outside objective reality (of objects) independent of evolved perception systems. Once upon a time, for eg, there was a primordial earth of no living things, no brains, no minds, no perception systems. A primordial moon, too.
(Based on current science) I can answer these simply and straightforwardly. Can you?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Oct 29, 2015 - 05:12pm PT
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Time for a walk down Grosvenor Square then, I guess.
So when will we be able to dice and splice photoreceptors to actually prove this argument? The wavelength we perceive as blue exists as a discrete manifestation of light, independent of our perception of it or the chest-thumping rhetorical gymnastics that this thread has devolved into.
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 29, 2015 - 05:36pm PT
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Just see the hypocrite wannabee scientist HFCS.
Always claims everyone else stuff is fairy tales and myths and only his stuff is "science"
and everyone should watch all his lame stupid anti-religion YouTube videos by the same guy and read all his anti religion books.
And then starts off with "Once upon a time ....."
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 29, 2015 - 06:58pm PT
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WB, you're so depressing. But c'est la vie.
.....
Speaking of video cips, here's a personal favorite from Eagleman's The Brain that aired last night. Again, so apropos to this particular thread as it concerns control and free will ala esp predictability.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
http://youtube/bAiu0v2Y8ck
Is BASE around? This clip could clear up his personal difficulty with determinism and deterministic systems - as Eagleman cleverly shows the plain (and readily understandable?) difference between (a) deterministic in a causal mechanistic sense and (b) (in)deterministic in a (non)predictable sense - they are categorically different - using ping pong balls and mousetraps.
Once upon a time, I saw the same set up at the Science Center in St Louis.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 29, 2015 - 08:16pm PT
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IOWs, the light waves don't determine the color. The observer does, according to their organism.
Amen. It is hard to imagine making an observation without an observer. In this case we can roughly identify the nervous system of the organism as the observer.
Our objects would be encountered differently by other observing creatures possessing different brains and bodies and sense organs which would process the raw data of their experience in different ways.
A clear move toward the materialist camp. A look into comparative physiology gives an idea of how other observing creatures possessing different brains and bodies and sense organs process the raw data of their experience.
When studied closely, our nervous system appears to have sufficient complexity and subtlety to account for all that we experience. It is quite marvelous.
More on blue:
Mr. Saffron's glittering glasses tilt up; then straight and slowly he rises, like the Lady of the Lake. When he stands, his glasses lose some highlights, and I can see his eyes. They are blue and shiny - not polished but wet; turned Miss Brandt they are so round they go pale; turned to me they are slits gone all dark, with a little eave of pink flesh all the way across over both of them.
I wait, and I wait; and there coming in is a chinchilla coat which will be flung over a chair somewhere just under a light, and yonder a fat face laughs too loudly; the trombone, part of a chord, still gives me two notes exactly right for a girl's inexpressible loneliness and my feelings about it, and the man with the shiny cart moves the heel of a silver spoon deftly through the bubbling blood of the jubilee...and as if by accident the fine Dean's head bows over the girl's table and he speaks to her.
And so she may turn her head away from sorrow, and when she does, the breath catches in my throat; in the nocturnal texture of her hair lies a single streak of silver, a hue of just the deadness, just the distance of a winter moon. No other colour could treat with such precision of an inherent sorrow, and no other creature has been so correctly branded as this girl.
To Here and the Easel
Theodore Sturgeon
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Oct 30, 2015 - 12:56am PT
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HFCS, the concept of "objective reality" is not obvious.
The problem with the whole 'no perception, no objective reality' tract is how is it is we had a planet to evolve on at all if no one was around to perceive it? Did it just pop into existence with us? Good argument for god I suppose; she must have been keeping an eye on it until we could do it ourselves.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 30, 2015 - 07:20am PT
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(1) "The problem with the whole 'no perception, no objective reality' tract is how is it is we had a planet to evolve on at all if no one was around to perceive it?" -Healyje
Of course.
(2) No stogie for dmt.
It's now pretty clear he's missing a thing or two. If only his ego could get out of the way?
(3) The point, Moose, is that 4 billion years ago, say, before there were evolved living things and their perception systems there was nonetheless the earth and moon objects and 450 nm light waves but no blue perception. Anyways, that is the claim, that is the holding, that is the belief.
Now Largo, with his Zen and/or Deepak Chopra leanings, might believe differently. I don't know. That's what the above post tried to clear up. So far no response however.
It is hard to believe you of all people wouldn't accept that. But maybe you do, or maybe you don't. Your post on the specific point is unclear.
If you've seen Cosmos by Carl Sagan, he introduced us to his "Cosmic Calendar" which illustrates the point or points I think fairly well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar
Four billion years ago in our solar system, objects like the earth and moon existed. And light existed. (450nm light waves existed.) But life with mindbrains (incl their perception systems) did not, obviously not having evolved yet; and (2) four billion years ago color perception (like blue perception) did not exist either as there were no perception systems (of mindbrains and eyes) around to create it. Hence the colorless environment.
But in the Andromeda Galaxy 4 billion years ago? who knows.
It's blue, damnit!
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 30, 2015 - 08:46am PT
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HFCS -- "But life with mindbrains (incl their perception systems) did not exist"
More bullsh!t from the wannabee scientist.
You were there not there so you have no clue and just make up sh!t as you go along as usual and masquerade it as science.
Mind and intelligence always existed,
and life always comes from life .....
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 30, 2015 - 09:03am PT
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"Werner is by several yardsticks the most solid person posting here"
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 30, 2015 - 09:05am PT
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If one cannot perceive it then the thing doesn't exist.
Still no cigar.
What is being said is that perception colors what exists in your experience.
Dingus is rooting for a fixed objective world out there that exists separate from an observer. We are not saying an observer creates the raw data "out there," like light waves and so forth. We are saying that we humans organize this raw data into subjective qualities like "blue" are not inherently IN the light waves, but are a perceptual reaction to the raw stuff out there in the external world. For example, there is no "sound" unless you have a tympanic membrane and a nervous system. Our nervous system does not create the sound waves, but the human experience of sound is different then sound waves. But wait, there's more. Without awareness, the world is still silent.
What exists "out there" might be totally undifferentiated. There certainly is an external reality, but without a human organism to shape it into recognizable objects and phenomenon, what do you have? No matter if you have a trillion people yelling that the sky is blue, it is blue only from our perspective. Blue is not objective reality, a subtle level of understanding.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Oct 30, 2015 - 10:06am PT
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Thanks Moosedrool. That was a really clear summation.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 30, 2015 - 10:25am PT
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"Thanks Moosedrool. That was a really clear summation." -Jan
So what say you, Jan? What's your lead or favorite model on this?
Specifically,
(1) Did the earth-moon system exist 4 billion years ago before there were living things (eg humans) to perceive it?
(2) Did 450 nm em radiation from the Sun exist 4 billion years ago before there were evolved living things and their perception systems?
(3) Did blue color exist 4 billion years ago before there were evolved living things and their perception systems?
.....
Moose, it IS pretty basic understanding in psych and neuro. The catch is that, though it's the 21st c, a shocking majority in GP are NOT grounded in it.
.....
"What exists "out there" might be totally undifferentiated. There certainly is an external reality, but without a human organism to shape it into recognizable objects and phenomenon, what do you have?" -Largo
Largo, that the Sun existed 4 billion years ago radiating its surroundings incl earth with EM as a result of fusion while Pluto in contrast was cold and inactive by comparison should be ample proof to you that objects don't need mind-brain perception systems to be differentiated (set off) from each other.
But somehow it isn't ample.
So now do our mind-brain systems often or typically add layers to the differentiations or boundaries of outside real world objects? yes... and often do they err in the process? yes.
Of course a further component that adds to all the complexity and trickery of the subject and its issues is that no two perception systems are exactly the same thanks (1) to our genetic endowment and (2) our stages of development (eg, young or old) - just as Eagleman pointed out as well in his series.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 30, 2015 - 10:39am PT
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Largo imo did not "muddle" the discussion with his introduction of blue perception vs 450nm em radiation. Instead, it highlighted one or two here that don't quite get the neuro/psych basics it seems.
As far as the neuro/psych component of his posts, he is correct.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 30, 2015 - 01:20pm PT
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Blue is not an objective reality
Actually, it is an objective reality. It is a specific wavelength of radiation. Very specific. You can measure it fairly simply, without using eyeballs, which are subjective. Each animal has differing perceptions. But blue light itself is a relatively simple matter.
If you can tell what people write here without looking at the words, then that would be something impressive.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 30, 2015 - 01:33pm PT
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What exists "out there" might be totally undifferentiated (JL)
I was with you until you veered off into metaphysics with this line. Evolution has given us the ability to differentiate real objects that were "separate" before our perception of them. Yes, this is a belief. At least you used the word "might."
Now, back to the nature of probability waves . . . do they have a physical or objective existence? If so, where might they be found?
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