Except we are not talking about scientific facts. The only disagreement is the definition of the word “color.”
Well, it’s obvious that what we call “color” does not apply to light outside of the visible spectrum. Thus, not all light has “color”. Therefore “color” cannot be an intrinsic property of light.
Fine. But any definition that doesn’t include the term “perception” makes no sense to me. One can say the “color green”, but unless one has perceived this “color”, the term “green” is totally meaningless.
By the same logic, “length of penis” is not an inherent property of an individual human being because not all humans have penises.
It has nothing to do with scientific accuracy, and everything to do with the meanings of common words. The dictionary says that color is associated with frequency. You claim that it’s not. Dictionary wins.
No. I claim that color is not necessarily associated with a given frequency, but is determined by our brains. If the dictionary wants to claim that “color” = “wavelength”, then so be it.
Let me try this… (I’m with Q.E.D. BTW)
Color is how your brain tells you what range the frequency of the photons from a particular object happen to be. Color is what the brain has evolved to convey that information to your “self”. It might be possible that in an alternative evolutionary path, the brain might have mapped the energy of a photon to say, a sense of flavor. In which case, you would be associating light with flavor/taste. I don’t think there’s any way to prove that a given frequency of light inevitably leads to the evolution of the same qualia as it has right now. IOW, you can’t prove that theoretically any “brain” evolved in whatever fashion, would necessarily map the same color or even a “color” for that matter to a given frequency. If you could, then color would be an inherent property of light. But, as it stands right now, we don’t know and our best guess is that color and its assignment as we know it is just the mapping of the human brain.
This argument is a waste of time. There’s no way to demonstrate that any two individuals percieve color the same way, let alone any arbitrarily evolved creatures. There’s also no way to demonstrate that a 300 Hz tone sounds the same to me as it does to you. Likewise, there’s no way to show that “salty” things taste the same way to me as they do to you, or that a given knife feels as sharp, or that water of a given temperature feels as “hot”.
The argument gets you precisely nowhere in terms of determining whether pitch, saltiness, sharpness or temperature exist outside of human perception.
Right. So there’s no basis for claiming that color is an inherent property of light.
That’s not a logical conclusion. There’s no basis for singling out color in this fashion. Either everything we percieve exists independently of our perception, or nothing does.
That is correct. “length of penis” is not an inherent property of humans. Only of a certain subset of humans. Namely, “humans with penises”.
More importantly, all light is basically the same, with the only differences being numerical variations of things like frequency and energy. All photons have the same “structure”, if you will. Therefore, it is impossible for any supposed property, which only applies to a certain subset of photons, to be a inherent property of light, since all photons have the same properties.
Color is a function of wavelength, not the wavelength itself. Wavelength is mapped onto the domain of colors, and not all wavelengths are mapped.
This is complete nonsense. You seem to regard “color” as a process of attaching labels like “red” and “green”, whilst ignoring the fundamental property that distinguishes “red” from “green”.
You hit the nail right on the head. Color is the reaction our brain has to certain wavelengths of light interacting with the cones in our retina. It’s an interpretation of a physical stimulus, not a property of the stimulating agent. We are able to use that reaction to determine a fundamental property of the stimulating agent, to some extent, but that’s all.
I’m not ignoring the fundamental property at all. I’m just saying that the fundamental property (wavelength) is not the same thing as color. If you can’t tell someone what color X-rays are, then color isn’t a fundamental property of X-rays. Since all photons have the same “structure”, and since not all photons can be assigned a color, then color cannot be part of a photon’s “structure”, and thus is not a fundamental property.
The problem with this whole color vs. wavelength thing is that we perceive color. We think in terms of color. To us, color would seem to be fundamental, because it’s what we can directly measure with our senses. In reality, color (as we perceive it) is nebulous and inaccurate. It’s an approximation of a more fundamental property based on various photo-chemical interactions in our retina.
You are still talking nonsense, and insisting that color is a naming process, whilst ultimately ignoring what those names denote.
It doesn’t get you anywhere to argue about the non-existence of names for colors of x-rays. Red light is red colored. Green light is green colored. If you insist on having a name for it, then x-ray light is x-ray colored.
The human eye measures light intensity, and by discriminating between different frequencies, also measures light color. We have names for some of the different colors, intensities and mixtures of frequencies. “Green” is a particular range of frequencies. “Red” is another particular range. “White” is a mixture of several frequencies and so cannot be a property of an individual photon. It is, nevertheless, a frequency distribution specification, often given in terms of the temperature of a theoretical black body radiator.
Even though our eyes measure intensity, we don’t have names for particular levels of photon flux, just vague things like “bright” and “dark”. But we can come up with a pretty precise specification in terms of HLS or RGB parameters for any particular light that we see. To do this you have to accept that term “light” means an arbitrary photon flux. You probably can’t find photons that will match an arbitrary HLS specification, but you can find a mixture of photons that will.
And for a sanity check Joe Random, the human skin measures temperature, pressure and other things within certain ranges. Our names for the things that we feel with our skin are very vague. Just “hot”, “cold”, “warm”, “hard”, “soft”, “sticky”, etc.
You would probably recognize the idiocy of claiming that temperature, pressure, surface adhesion, etc. are only valid concepts within the range of human perception of them.
AFAICT, you don’t seem to appreciate the concept of qualia. I didn’t single out color. I just happen to be talking about color since err… that’s we are talking about.
Hypothetically, if no human had cone cells, we wouldn’t be talking about “missing” color in our vision. The form and mechanism of frequency discrimination (as you put it) of light is a method instrinsic to the brain. It physically exists in the sense that the mapping is uniform and consistent. But there is no “physical” reason why the color spectrum must be ordered the way it is and why it should start and end where it does. That’s a mapping that the brain has evolved.
There are laws covering the perception of colour, for example two identical colours X and Y may be made from different mixtures of other colours (i.e. different mixtures of photons of certain wavelengths), if we then add another colour Z to the two we can state that:
X + Z = Y + Z
Also a colour, X made out of the three primary colours, A, B and C, with, a, b, c denoting the amount of each colour, can be stated as:
X = aA + bB + cC
A another colour Y made from the three primary colours can be stated as:
Y = a’A + b’B + c’C
We find that
X + Y = (a + a’)A + (b + b’)B + (c + c’)C
MC
The implication from those laws is that what matters is the gestalt from the interplay of the various components and not the process from which they’re arrived at.
Could you clarify how this affects the current argument?
AFAICT, you don’t seem to appreciate the concept of non sequitur.
That colours can be defined mathematically.
Could you point out the logical gap(s) in my previous post?