are they really unknowable though? obviously we don't have a deep enough understanding of neuroscience and consciousness to perfectly comprehend the full chain of physical phenomena all the way to subjective experience, but we understand a lot of it, and it mostly seems consistent from person to person afaik. like blue light interacts with a specific type of cone in the retina, producing specific neural responses, etc. etc.
Like you can argue maybe the inner mechanics of the mind mean we are experiencing the colors differently and just assign the same name to it like in the comic, but is there any evidence of that? or is it just mysticism trying to fill in the gaps of our limited understanding of how the mind works.
The concept is about the sort of abstract perception, like the actual final form that gets perceived by the mind, but the whole thing is just one of those pointless philosophical cognitohazards that are like the equivalent of XKCD's "nerd sniping" bit, just shit that's weird and pointless and unsolvable.
Like does the final processing step that is the mind's perception consistently ascribe the exact same perceptive values to a given color or sound that other people do? Maybe, maybe not, because we don't know what mechanically is happening to create that phenomenon, we don't know how consistent the processing in the visual neurons is across individuals, we don't even know what that perception is. So maybe for one person the color blue gets coded as a certain specific voltage or whatever when it transitions from the image processing bit to the consciousness bit (if that's even a distinction that can be made at all), and for another it's 1% different or a different frequency or whatever, but would that even change anything? It's still remaining consistent before that, and it goes along with all the cultural stuff attached to the color, and it clearly works consistently, so it's kind of just a nonsense question that's trying to sound deep.
Like we're talking about possible unknowable differences in systems that developed to sort of chaotically brute force their way into consistency and adaptability. So maybe "blue" gets stored and processed slightly differently between individuals, but we can also see that in every perceivable way it ends up with the same result. So the answer to the question is that it's the wrong question to ask in the first place: blue is always blue because it will always have the properties and associations of blue and those are consistent across people because they're the product of systems that plastically shape themselves to be consistent, and any differences are clearly not materially noticeable if they even exist at all.
I could just as easily ask "what if we all actually have the same favorite color internally, but due to differences in perception ascribe it to different frequencies of light?" and it would be just as valid a question, but even more nonsensical on its face.
blue is always blue because it will always have the properties and associations of blue and those are consistent across people because they're the product of systems that plastically shape themselves to be consistent, and any differences are clearly not materially noticeable if they even exist at all.
Good points, though people do not perceive blue the same in the sense of same properties and associations. Humans are no idealized platonic digitalized humans. Being human is concrete materiality and that means that we are each different and bring our own upbringing and past with us.
It is the difference between subjective reality and objective reality. Subjective, by definition, means it depends on perspective (a subject). Objective is the opposite, it does not depend on perspective, it is true for all perspectives.
In a certain capacity it is possible to know something subjective. If you are looking at something — say, a bird — that I can't see from where I'm standing, I can move to where you are standing, and be able to see the bird myself from where you were standing.
But location is only one level of abstraction from which we understand perspective. Time is also a factor. What if, in the time it took for me to move to your spot, the bird flies away, and I miss it? Then it becomes clear, I didn't have the same perspective that allowed me to spot the bird.
This path of further specifying the extreme detail which makes up a subjective experience ultimately leads to impossible requirements like being in the same mental state, having had enough sleep the night before — in the last resort, having lived all the same experiences until that present moment, and having an identical physical body throughout the whole process. There can be no true knowledge of a subjective experience without experiencing the exact same thing, in all of the specificity that entails. In a word, without being the same subject.
We can know objective facts which are independent of perspective, such as empirical measurements like temperature and pressure, all the way up to more complex facts like "we live in a society of commodity production and exchange." But those are objective because different observers can verify them empirically, like the color blue in the OP's post.
An additional thought... the history of science is essentially the history of finding objective facts, facts which are true regardless of perspective. Even physics, being perhaps the most basic and immediate field of research, has struggled to find an end to the manifold perspectives which can overthrow what we had thought were objective facts.
One can of course point to the discovery of the round earth, or of heliocentrism. But it goes further.
We thought we were pretty smart when we figured out classical mechanics and thermodynamics. Lord Kelvin famously said,
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
This obviously turned out to be false because, when you look really closely at stuff, quantum mechanics starts to change everything. What we thought were particles with definite positions and moments, at last revealed themselves to be indeterminate wave-ish things.
For that matter, general relativity a few decades prior had upended our most basic notions of time and space. We thought we were safe saying the Sun is at such-and-such position 150 million kilometers in blah direction, and it is 5 billion years old, etc etc. But because the speed of light is constant regardless of your motion, this forces us to accept that other observers might observe the Sun somewhere else and perhaps a different age than what we perceive. Thus the name relativity; there is in fact no objective frame of reference. In science we use the inertial frame as the default, but it is arbitrary and not intrinsically more correct than the frame on the event horizon of a black hole.
Even in my previous comment, where I listed temperature and pressure as objective, to claim those as objective it is necessary to specify (implicitly in my case) some location and time which give validity to calling them objective.
So it is always the case, for any objective fact, that it depends on a set of assumptions about what is sufficient to call a perspective "the same" enough that it can be said that two subjects share a perspective. This abstract sense of shared perspective is what gives rise to "objective" facts, which may in fact not be objective for the whole universe. But as a practical matter it is usually only necessary to assume things which are common to all, such as being on Earth, living in 2023, being a human, etc.
An additional thought... the history of science is essentially the history of finding objective facts, facts which are true regardless of perspective.
I agree with basically everything you've said throughout your post, but I do want to emphasize that even this got thrown out the window in the mid-20th century with the work of Kuhn and Quine. Scientific realism is currently trying to mount something of a comeback, but some rather compelling work in history and philosophy of science says that the notion of objective facts needs to go out the window.
Interesting, I'll have to look into those authors you mentioned. I agree, there does seem to be a shift away from a clean separation of objective and subjective, toward a more refined attitude of true given these assumptions, i.e. an emphasis on the scope of validity for a given fact, and never believing for a second that we've found the absolute end of science, scoped out all of the hidden assumptions or miscategorizations we didn't realize we held.
are they really unknowable though? obviously we don't have a deep enough understanding of neuroscience and consciousness to perfectly comprehend the full chain of physical phenomena all the way to subjective experience, but we understand a lot of it, and it mostly seems consistent from person to person afaik. like blue light interacts with a specific type of cone in the retina, producing specific neural responses, etc. etc.
Like you can argue maybe the inner mechanics of the mind mean we are experiencing the colors differently and just assign the same name to it like in the comic, but is there any evidence of that? or is it just mysticism trying to fill in the gaps of our limited understanding of how the mind works.
The concept is about the sort of abstract perception, like the actual final form that gets perceived by the mind, but the whole thing is just one of those pointless philosophical cognitohazards that are like the equivalent of XKCD's "nerd sniping" bit, just shit that's weird and pointless and unsolvable.
Like does the final processing step that is the mind's perception consistently ascribe the exact same perceptive values to a given color or sound that other people do? Maybe, maybe not, because we don't know what mechanically is happening to create that phenomenon, we don't know how consistent the processing in the visual neurons is across individuals, we don't even know what that perception is. So maybe for one person the color blue gets coded as a certain specific voltage or whatever when it transitions from the image processing bit to the consciousness bit (if that's even a distinction that can be made at all), and for another it's 1% different or a different frequency or whatever, but would that even change anything? It's still remaining consistent before that, and it goes along with all the cultural stuff attached to the color, and it clearly works consistently, so it's kind of just a nonsense question that's trying to sound deep.
Like we're talking about possible unknowable differences in systems that developed to sort of chaotically brute force their way into consistency and adaptability. So maybe "blue" gets stored and processed slightly differently between individuals, but we can also see that in every perceivable way it ends up with the same result. So the answer to the question is that it's the wrong question to ask in the first place: blue is always blue because it will always have the properties and associations of blue and those are consistent across people because they're the product of systems that plastically shape themselves to be consistent, and any differences are clearly not materially noticeable if they even exist at all.
I could just as easily ask "what if we all actually have the same favorite color internally, but due to differences in perception ascribe it to different frequencies of light?" and it would be just as valid a question, but even more nonsensical on its face.
Good points, though people do not perceive blue the same in the sense of same properties and associations. Humans are no idealized platonic digitalized humans. Being human is concrete materiality and that means that we are each different and bring our own upbringing and past with us.
Exactly how it all works can (almost certainly) be ascertained. If organisms who care enough to know survive long enough in the right conditions.
It certainly seems like everything can ultimately be quantified, though I am a determinist personally.
It is the difference between subjective reality and objective reality. Subjective, by definition, means it depends on perspective (a subject). Objective is the opposite, it does not depend on perspective, it is true for all perspectives.
In a certain capacity it is possible to know something subjective. If you are looking at something — say, a bird — that I can't see from where I'm standing, I can move to where you are standing, and be able to see the bird myself from where you were standing.
But location is only one level of abstraction from which we understand perspective. Time is also a factor. What if, in the time it took for me to move to your spot, the bird flies away, and I miss it? Then it becomes clear, I didn't have the same perspective that allowed me to spot the bird.
This path of further specifying the extreme detail which makes up a subjective experience ultimately leads to impossible requirements like being in the same mental state, having had enough sleep the night before — in the last resort, having lived all the same experiences until that present moment, and having an identical physical body throughout the whole process. There can be no true knowledge of a subjective experience without experiencing the exact same thing, in all of the specificity that entails. In a word, without being the same subject.
We can know objective facts which are independent of perspective, such as empirical measurements like temperature and pressure, all the way up to more complex facts like "we live in a society of commodity production and exchange." But those are objective because different observers can verify them empirically, like the color blue in the OP's post.
An additional thought... the history of science is essentially the history of finding objective facts, facts which are true regardless of perspective. Even physics, being perhaps the most basic and immediate field of research, has struggled to find an end to the manifold perspectives which can overthrow what we had thought were objective facts.
One can of course point to the discovery of the round earth, or of heliocentrism. But it goes further.
We thought we were pretty smart when we figured out classical mechanics and thermodynamics. Lord Kelvin famously said,
This obviously turned out to be false because, when you look really closely at stuff, quantum mechanics starts to change everything. What we thought were particles with definite positions and moments, at last revealed themselves to be indeterminate wave-ish things.
For that matter, general relativity a few decades prior had upended our most basic notions of time and space. We thought we were safe saying the Sun is at such-and-such position 150 million kilometers in blah direction, and it is 5 billion years old, etc etc. But because the speed of light is constant regardless of your motion, this forces us to accept that other observers might observe the Sun somewhere else and perhaps a different age than what we perceive. Thus the name relativity; there is in fact no objective frame of reference. In science we use the inertial frame as the default, but it is arbitrary and not intrinsically more correct than the frame on the event horizon of a black hole.
Even in my previous comment, where I listed temperature and pressure as objective, to claim those as objective it is necessary to specify (implicitly in my case) some location and time which give validity to calling them objective.
So it is always the case, for any objective fact, that it depends on a set of assumptions about what is sufficient to call a perspective "the same" enough that it can be said that two subjects share a perspective. This abstract sense of shared perspective is what gives rise to "objective" facts, which may in fact not be objective for the whole universe. But as a practical matter it is usually only necessary to assume things which are common to all, such as being on Earth, living in 2023, being a human, etc.
I agree with basically everything you've said throughout your post, but I do want to emphasize that even this got thrown out the window in the mid-20th century with the work of Kuhn and Quine. Scientific realism is currently trying to mount something of a comeback, but some rather compelling work in history and philosophy of science says that the notion of objective facts needs to go out the window.
Interesting, I'll have to look into those authors you mentioned. I agree, there does seem to be a shift away from a clean separation of objective and subjective, toward a more refined attitude of true given these assumptions, i.e. an emphasis on the scope of validity for a given fact, and never believing for a second that we've found the absolute end of science, scoped out all of the hidden assumptions or miscategorizations we didn't realize we held.
You're getting very close to Quine's confirmational holism there. Cool stuff all around.
In that we can't know it with our current tools, theories and methodologies.