Idk, man. Once you start getting into the physics of a thing, it becomes difficult to argue "Some people just perceive the light frequencies of blue and red as opposite". These aren't strict interchangeable experiences. If you actually did experience a different spectrum of light, we could absolutely recognize as much.
We've got the doppler effect to consider, wherein traveling at different speeds can change the perception of light, but in a recognizable and repeatable direction. I can red-shift by slowing down and blue-shift by speeding up. But I can't do the reverse. Neither are we finding people who can just start perceiving ultra-violate or infra-red thanks to genetic drift.
None of this is a refutation of the idea that someone could experience the color spectrum in an inverted fashion. Red- and blue-shifting would just have their warming/cooling reversed along with everything else.
Red- and blue-shifting would just have their warming/cooling reversed
No. Because these are magnitudes. A red-shift would not cause you to perceive things in reverse any more than someone with a handful of beans would be perceived as adding beans by taking them away.
You are smarter than this, come on. This whole time I think everyone has been clear that we're talking about the sensation itself and not the stimulus itself. We are not talking about heat in terms of the vibration of molecules but in terms of someone's internal experience of something being hot. We aren't talking about pressure in terms of psi or atms but the tactile sense, such that someone with no sense of touch would be irrelevant to that conversation even though we recognize that the physical phenomenon of pressure applies just as much to them as anyone else and they'd have been squished if they were in the Titan sub just as quickly as those sorry jackasses were.
Just to make it easier to put in words, let's phrase it in terms of sound (afaik this is the original observation of the doppler effect anyway). If someone's perception of pitch was reversed, such that flies buzzing made a low-pitched noise and earthquakes were mainly high-pitched noise, the terms "high" and "low" pitch are not said in correspondence to the greatness in Hz of the soundwave, but the subjective experience of the sound (which incidentally in this thought experiment has an inverse relation to the Hz). Therefore, if someone with this condition has a fly fly towards them, the doppler effect dictates that the Hz of the sound waves would be higher than a fly flying in a vertical circle where the midpoint of the listener's ears are the center. Because the Hz is higher, and we know that this person experiences higher Hz as lower pitch, the fly would have a lower-pitch buzz while it was flying towards them. Likewise, flying away would produce soundwaves of a lower Hz and therefore a higher pitch to that listener.
So in the original case with color, we know that red-shifting would produce a cooler color because the stimulus is just the stimulus and the specific mechanism by which it was formed has no bearing on how it was perceived. In normal humans, there is no difference between a shade of yellow and a shade of green that gets red-shifted to yellow, the end result is the same, so if we inverted someone's perception, this would carry over.
I completely forgot, a crude approximation of this can be seen with a negative filter on a camera! Red-shifting doesn't just magically make things redder on a negative filter because it has "red" in the name, because the negative filter interprets the warmer light waves as being cooler.
It's really funny that you use the doppler effect for this example, as it seems the absolute worst version of this possible in my mind. When things are low pitched enough, we can literally hear the movements and connect them to the object we see moving, which gives an external anchor to the problem of sebjectivity. We KNOW that low pitched things sound that way ebcause it would otherwise result in things not align visibly with the vibration/back and forth movement.
If that was historically used, then it's funny because it's the weakest form of this argument.
When I mentioned history, I meant that the sonic doppler effect was discovered before the visual doppler effect: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743612/
I think just because it was more convenient to measure, since the idea came from a simple mathematical observation about the properties of waves. I guess it also could have come from watching buoyant objects move in water, since a boat's wake is partly a manifestation of the doppler effect as well.
If you want an actual historical text regarding the arbitrariness of sensation, the first of Charles Berkley's Three Dialogues covers it well.
Anyway, I don't see your point -- or rather, you keep missing mine -- we can say there is connection between low sounds and slow oscillation, but ultimately the correspondence in timing has only an arbitrary relation to the sensation of pitch itself, just as a blinking light being aligned in time with our experience of it does not cement the "objectivity" of the color we perceive it as. Whatever the timing is, it can be "colored in" with whatever sensation we stipulate.
Like, just think for mere seconds about the fact that synesthesia exists. Sounds can be experienced as smells, and it's an incident of evolution that we don't experience them that way.
Sorry I think you got the wrong comrade, this was my first reply. I agree with you, I just think that the high and low pitch is the worst possible choice for the argument. Like hot and cold have no external comparison, but the qualia of high and low pitch is very literally connected to another sense (in this case the sight of a low pitched subwoofer or such). Even when moving and causing the Doppler effect to you as observer, that anchor still exists just with a shift that is also externally explainable.
Sight, hot/cold, all kinds of smells, all have a sense of disconnection between sense and qualia. How you hear complex sounds (filters or such) introduces qualia
But remember, we actually agree, I just think your example wasn't good to convince anybody else
I think it's more fundamental than physics. There is no physical theory of human consciousness, experience, and perception. Only theories of how our physical bodies work, in mechanical terms. Of course most socialists are materialists and accept that matter forms the basis of reality, but that doesn't make subjective experiences explicable in objective, abstract terms.
There is no physical theory of human consciousness, experience, and perception.
No, but the human brain is still a physical/chemical machine and it still needs to process a set of homogeneous information. At some point you have to identify the part of the body that's doing the conversion from photon to information and say "Look! See! Brain X is doing this but Brain Y is doing that."
In some of the experiments above, we absolutely can do that. In others, say - by recreating the structure of the eye and realizing the image we get is upside down - we can simply infer that the brain has to do some amount of work to correct for things universally.
But if you just assert, carte blanche, that where you see a "2" I see a "3", and wave off any argument as a qualia... no. That's just not how things work.
that doesn't make subjective experiences explicable in objective, abstract terms.
We can engage in objective measurement of subjective participants and hunt for inconsistencies in experience. We can put a filter over each person's eye, knowing that they'll only experience X+1 and X-1, but not X, in order to factor down what each person does or doesn't perceive.
But these artifacts of consciousness come from somewhere and are processed/stored by something. And these biological machines do all operate on the same physical principles.
So, baring some real evidence to the contrary, it doesn't follow that one guy just sees a 400nm wave as a 700nm wave.
In some of the experiments above, we absolutely can do that.
Until and unless we can image thoughts down to the detail, no, we can't do much more than "this region of the brain lights up when it sees something".
we can simply infer that the brain has to do some amount of work to correct for things universally
We can infer that people are able to navigate and make sense of the world regardless of the inverting effect of the eye. We cannot infer the experience of seeing nor explain it in physical terms.
if you just assert, carte blanche, that where you see a "2" I see a "3", and wave off any argument as a qualia
That is not the argument at all.
it doesn't follow that one guy just sees a 400nm wave as a 700nm wave.
That is not the argument either. It is a question of the experience of perceiving the color blue. Note that in the OP, the observer can consistently identify a 400nm wave regardless of how they perceive it, as long as that perception is consistent. It only needs to be consistent for that observer, not between observers.
Until and unless we can image thoughts down to the detail
You don't need to image thoughts of color to recognize common ability to distinguish them any more than you would with shapes or quantities. These are quantifiable metrics, after all.
We can infer that people are able to navigate and make sense of the world regardless of the inverting effect of the eye. We cannot infer the experience of seeing nor explain it in physical terms.
We can, once we understand the mechanics of light passing through a camera obscura. These questions aren't trivial to answer, but they are answerable. What's more, we have already answered them.
We cannot infer the experience of seeing nor explain it in physical terms.
We can and we routinely do. That gets us into the language of colors and the way description shapes perception. We can consistently reproduce the phenomena of perceived color by language demographic.
It is a question of the experience of perceiving the color blue.
The experience is still a consequence of a mechanical effect. Namely, the brain processes certain frequencies of light in a particular manner. The only way to conclude that I'm seeing a 300nm shift in the color spectrum relative to you is to explain the mechanical gap in our cognition. And if I'm that far off the mark, I should be able to measure the difference relative to the midpoints very easily. This is all quantifiable. It shows up in medical diagnosis as various forms of color blindness or hyper-sensitivity.
OP asserts a dramatic shift in perception that absolutely should be something a physician looking for it can spot. The trick OP plays is that they're only working from a single data point (a very particular shade of red) rather than a full spectrum of colors. As soon as you lay out a rainbow for the child, you'll recognize the difference between their perception and the human standard.
The trick OP plays is that they're only working from a single data point (a very particular shade of red) rather than a full spectrum of colors. As soon as you lay out a rainbow for the child, you'll recognize the difference between their perception and the human standard.
Not to be rude but I don't think you understand the post if that is your stance. Adding more colors would not change the scenario at all. If your conscious, internal experience of all the colors is like mine except rotated by one (so that my ROYGBIV is your OYGBIVR) we would still be in 100% agreement about the color of any test object. The experience of color does not affect the test result, as long as it is consistent for each of us: whatever you experience in your mind is always the same in response to 400 nm light, and the same for myself, although my experience is not necessarily identical to your experience.
The above example is not equivalent to "I see 500 nm light and you see 400 nm light". We would both agree on the physical property of the light. The experience is what could, in principle, differ.
How can RGB compose properly edge colour like yellow? Intensity curve would be reversed. Why only the visible spectrum inverted centered on median human visible colour? This is a very human-centric way to think. "Inversion" is not a universal concept.
If your pet dog would like to join the conversation, they can speak up, but until then it is reasonable to focus on the experiences of those who can communicate them to us for the purpose of discussing fundamental blindspots in communication.
The lower wavelength and higher do not mix evenly. Hues will look more like the higher energy short wavelength at swapped values. Vision is also stronger at middle of range to high wavelength end, can see green-yellow better. Computer monitors would mix colours differently for different people and would not reproduce natural colours for some.
If there are differences in cognitive perception of colour they are not so simple as "inversion" and are unknowable with current understanding and do not have much meaning I think. Idea that perception of them is tangible enough to be invertible binary does not make much sense to me. Only Allah SWT can know.
If your conscious, internal experience of all the colors is like mine except rotated by one (so that my ROYGBIV is your OYGBIVR) we would still be in 100% agreement about the color of any test object
I think color theory demonstrates that this isn't true and it would need to be an inverted rainbow or one of "new" colors in order to stay consistent.
If two people agree that R + G = Y, in no way does that constrain or tell us anything about the conscious experience of each person in relation to those colors, except that it is consistent for each person, but not necessarily between them.
Sure, but are the categories of "warm" and "cool" purely a learned thing or are they an inherent connection in how we perceive things? Someone perceiving V as R and I as V would still get a smooth gradient of colors in terms of addition and subtraction, but that isn't the only thing to consider.
Idk, man. Once you start getting into the physics of a thing, it becomes difficult to argue "Some people just perceive the light frequencies of blue and red as opposite". These aren't strict interchangeable experiences. If you actually did experience a different spectrum of light, we could absolutely recognize as much.
We've got the doppler effect to consider, wherein traveling at different speeds can change the perception of light, but in a recognizable and repeatable direction. I can red-shift by slowing down and blue-shift by speeding up. But I can't do the reverse. Neither are we finding people who can just start perceiving ultra-violate or infra-red thanks to genetic drift.
We also have plenty of evidence that language informs ranges of color. As evidenced by a study done in Namibia whereas a tribe that does not discern between blues and green with different words, rather the English word for blue is often considered a variant of green through the tribe’s language, was given a color wheel of green squares and one blue square. Those in the study had a difficult time distinguishing which square was blue, however, were quick to differentiate another color wheel with all squares containing the same shade of green, except one shade that was slightly different. The English speakers in the video had a much more difficult time distinguishing the different variant of green.
So this sort of thing is falsifiable on several fronts. It just doesn't hold up at the degree the artist is describing.
No more than someone saying "I experience traveling 15 mph as though I was traveling 5 mph". Like, that's just not how things work.
None of this is a refutation of the idea that someone could experience the color spectrum in an inverted fashion. Red- and blue-shifting would just have their warming/cooling reversed along with everything else.
No. Because these are magnitudes. A red-shift would not cause you to perceive things in reverse any more than someone with a handful of beans would be perceived as adding beans by taking them away.
You are smarter than this, come on. This whole time I think everyone has been clear that we're talking about the sensation itself and not the stimulus itself. We are not talking about heat in terms of the vibration of molecules but in terms of someone's internal experience of something being hot. We aren't talking about pressure in terms of psi or atms but the tactile sense, such that someone with no sense of touch would be irrelevant to that conversation even though we recognize that the physical phenomenon of pressure applies just as much to them as anyone else and they'd have been squished if they were in the Titan sub just as quickly as those sorry jackasses were.
Just to make it easier to put in words, let's phrase it in terms of sound (afaik this is the original observation of the doppler effect anyway). If someone's perception of pitch was reversed, such that flies buzzing made a low-pitched noise and earthquakes were mainly high-pitched noise, the terms "high" and "low" pitch are not said in correspondence to the greatness in Hz of the soundwave, but the subjective experience of the sound (which incidentally in this thought experiment has an inverse relation to the Hz). Therefore, if someone with this condition has a fly fly towards them, the doppler effect dictates that the Hz of the sound waves would be higher than a fly flying in a vertical circle where the midpoint of the listener's ears are the center. Because the Hz is higher, and we know that this person experiences higher Hz as lower pitch, the fly would have a lower-pitch buzz while it was flying towards them. Likewise, flying away would produce soundwaves of a lower Hz and therefore a higher pitch to that listener.
So in the original case with color, we know that red-shifting would produce a cooler color because the stimulus is just the stimulus and the specific mechanism by which it was formed has no bearing on how it was perceived. In normal humans, there is no difference between a shade of yellow and a shade of green that gets red-shifted to yellow, the end result is the same, so if we inverted someone's perception, this would carry over.
I completely forgot, a crude approximation of this can be seen with a negative filter on a camera! Red-shifting doesn't just magically make things redder on a negative filter because it has "red" in the name, because the negative filter interprets the warmer light waves as being cooler.
It's really funny that you use the doppler effect for this example, as it seems the absolute worst version of this possible in my mind. When things are low pitched enough, we can literally hear the movements and connect them to the object we see moving, which gives an external anchor to the problem of sebjectivity. We KNOW that low pitched things sound that way ebcause it would otherwise result in things not align visibly with the vibration/back and forth movement.
If that was historically used, then it's funny because it's the weakest form of this argument.
When I mentioned history, I meant that the sonic doppler effect was discovered before the visual doppler effect: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743612/
I think just because it was more convenient to measure, since the idea came from a simple mathematical observation about the properties of waves. I guess it also could have come from watching buoyant objects move in water, since a boat's wake is partly a manifestation of the doppler effect as well.
If you want an actual historical text regarding the arbitrariness of sensation, the first of Charles Berkley's Three Dialogues covers it well.
Anyway, I don't see your point -- or rather, you keep missing mine -- we can say there is connection between low sounds and slow oscillation, but ultimately the correspondence in timing has only an arbitrary relation to the sensation of pitch itself, just as a blinking light being aligned in time with our experience of it does not cement the "objectivity" of the color we perceive it as. Whatever the timing is, it can be "colored in" with whatever sensation we stipulate.
Like, just think for mere seconds about the fact that synesthesia exists. Sounds can be experienced as smells, and it's an incident of evolution that we don't experience them that way.
Sorry I think you got the wrong comrade, this was my first reply. I agree with you, I just think that the high and low pitch is the worst possible choice for the argument. Like hot and cold have no external comparison, but the qualia of high and low pitch is very literally connected to another sense (in this case the sight of a low pitched subwoofer or such). Even when moving and causing the Doppler effect to you as observer, that anchor still exists just with a shift that is also externally explainable.
Sight, hot/cold, all kinds of smells, all have a sense of disconnection between sense and qualia. How you hear complex sounds (filters or such) introduces qualia
But remember, we actually agree, I just think your example wasn't good to convince anybody else
I think it's more fundamental than physics. There is no physical theory of human consciousness, experience, and perception. Only theories of how our physical bodies work, in mechanical terms. Of course most socialists are materialists and accept that matter forms the basis of reality, but that doesn't make subjective experiences explicable in objective, abstract terms.
No, but the human brain is still a physical/chemical machine and it still needs to process a set of homogeneous information. At some point you have to identify the part of the body that's doing the conversion from photon to information and say "Look! See! Brain X is doing this but Brain Y is doing that."
In some of the experiments above, we absolutely can do that. In others, say - by recreating the structure of the eye and realizing the image we get is upside down - we can simply infer that the brain has to do some amount of work to correct for things universally.
But if you just assert, carte blanche, that where you see a "2" I see a "3", and wave off any argument as a qualia... no. That's just not how things work.
We can engage in objective measurement of subjective participants and hunt for inconsistencies in experience. We can put a filter over each person's eye, knowing that they'll only experience X+1 and X-1, but not X, in order to factor down what each person does or doesn't perceive.
But these artifacts of consciousness come from somewhere and are processed/stored by something. And these biological machines do all operate on the same physical principles.
So, baring some real evidence to the contrary, it doesn't follow that one guy just sees a 400nm wave as a 700nm wave.
Until and unless we can image thoughts down to the detail, no, we can't do much more than "this region of the brain lights up when it sees something".
We can infer that people are able to navigate and make sense of the world regardless of the inverting effect of the eye. We cannot infer the experience of seeing nor explain it in physical terms.
That is not the argument at all.
That is not the argument either. It is a question of the experience of perceiving the color blue. Note that in the OP, the observer can consistently identify a 400nm wave regardless of how they perceive it, as long as that perception is consistent. It only needs to be consistent for that observer, not between observers.
You don't need to image thoughts of color to recognize common ability to distinguish them any more than you would with shapes or quantities. These are quantifiable metrics, after all.
We can, once we understand the mechanics of light passing through a camera obscura. These questions aren't trivial to answer, but they are answerable. What's more, we have already answered them.
We can and we routinely do. That gets us into the language of colors and the way description shapes perception. We can consistently reproduce the phenomena of perceived color by language demographic.
The experience is still a consequence of a mechanical effect. Namely, the brain processes certain frequencies of light in a particular manner. The only way to conclude that I'm seeing a 300nm shift in the color spectrum relative to you is to explain the mechanical gap in our cognition. And if I'm that far off the mark, I should be able to measure the difference relative to the midpoints very easily. This is all quantifiable. It shows up in medical diagnosis as various forms of color blindness or hyper-sensitivity.
OP asserts a dramatic shift in perception that absolutely should be something a physician looking for it can spot. The trick OP plays is that they're only working from a single data point (a very particular shade of red) rather than a full spectrum of colors. As soon as you lay out a rainbow for the child, you'll recognize the difference between their perception and the human standard.
Not to be rude but I don't think you understand the post if that is your stance. Adding more colors would not change the scenario at all. If your conscious, internal experience of all the colors is like mine except rotated by one (so that my ROYGBIV is your OYGBIVR) we would still be in 100% agreement about the color of any test object. The experience of color does not affect the test result, as long as it is consistent for each of us: whatever you experience in your mind is always the same in response to 400 nm light, and the same for myself, although my experience is not necessarily identical to your experience.
The above example is not equivalent to "I see 500 nm light and you see 400 nm light". We would both agree on the physical property of the light. The experience is what could, in principle, differ.
How can RGB compose properly edge colour like yellow? Intensity curve would be reversed. Why only the visible spectrum inverted centered on median human visible colour? This is a very human-centric way to think. "Inversion" is not a universal concept.
If your pet dog would like to join the conversation, they can speak up, but until then it is reasonable to focus on the experiences of those who can communicate them to us for the purpose of discussing fundamental blindspots in communication.
The only way, I'd argue
I'm not sure what you mean
The lower wavelength and higher do not mix evenly. Hues will look more like the higher energy short wavelength at swapped values. Vision is also stronger at middle of range to high wavelength end, can see green-yellow better. Computer monitors would mix colours differently for different people and would not reproduce natural colours for some.
If there are differences in cognitive perception of colour they are not so simple as "inversion" and are unknowable with current understanding and do not have much meaning I think. Idea that perception of them is tangible enough to be invertible binary does not make much sense to me. Only Allah SWT can know.
I think color theory demonstrates that this isn't true and it would need to be an inverted rainbow or one of "new" colors in order to stay consistent.
If two people agree that R + G = Y, in no way does that constrain or tell us anything about the conscious experience of each person in relation to those colors, except that it is consistent for each person, but not necessarily between them.
Sure, but are the categories of "warm" and "cool" purely a learned thing or are they an inherent connection in how we perceive things? Someone perceiving V as R and I as V would still get a smooth gradient of colors in terms of addition and subtraction, but that isn't the only thing to consider.
Yes, warm and cool colors are abstract concepts, they are not physical things beyond wavelength.
Abstract or not, they may still be part of a human's psychology