The Subjective Nature Of Reality

[Anonymous]

Red = Green?

I read somewhere that the ancient perception of colours was very different from ours. If my memory serves me right, Homer describes the sea as being of a wine colour in Odyssey. I basically grew up where the Argonauts went to in search of the Golden Fleece and can testify that the local sea can be of a most fantastic colour palette - but wine?? Have we changed, or is it the water?...

Also, I must say that the range of colours in English (3 full columns in my small thesaurus plus new brand-name fabric colours) can make any non-native speakers scratch thier heads looking for the right equivalent. Not that it can be equalled to about 300 shades of green known to Amazonian Indians.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Red = Green?

I read somewhere that the ancient perception of colours was very different from ours. If my memory serves me right, Homer describes the sea as being of a wine colour in Odyssey. I basically grew up where the Argonauts went to in search of the Golden Fleece and can testify that the local sea can be of a most fantastic colour palette - but wine?? Have we changed, or is it the water?...

This seems to have been based on 19th/early 20th Century, Darwinist interpretations of ancient poetic texts by people with, apparently, no grasp of poetic metaphor, who thought the sea should always be blue, or gray, and wine red.

They also seem to have been under the impression that wine has always been drunk from glass drinking vessels, whereas the wine would probably have been contained in wineskins, or baked clay amphora and most probably drunk from opaque cups (if not straight from the wineskin).

Loads of modern stuff on the problems of interpreting ancient textual references to colour, at:

http://www.cooper.edu/classes/art/hta321/99spring/Rebecca.html

Greek color terms have long confounded historians, spawning as many interpretations as there are interpreters. The difficulty is most extreme in it's earliest appearance. Homer used color words dramatically to paint the events of his epics, but limited these to four, roughly translated as black, white, greenish yellow and purply red. He also distinguishes the shades of metals, as we know from the Ekphrasis on the Shield of Achilles, in which he describes how the different metals are used for visual effect, but goes on to describe the actual sky as bronze colored. The confusion to modern readers is in defining the words and describing their implications. While as centuries progressed terms standardized, it is hard to equate the early usages to later definitions. Homer's limited range of color has been fodder for developmental theories, as well as suggestions such as color blindness (with the implication that all ancient Greeks were color blind). The problem is not only that he refers only to four colors, but the wide variety of things he describes as being those colors. For example, the sea is the color of wine, as are sheep. The same color, usually interpreted as yellow-green, applies to honey, sap and blood. Even as later writers expanded their descriptive palate confusing word choices persist. Discussion of this issue over the years has been influenced by various color theories as they have arisen; in the wake of Darwin, the theory was advanced that the early Greeks' retinas had not evolved the ability to perceive colors. Irwin seems conclusive in both her summary of the theorists, and her support of her own argument that the terms of contention refer not to hue precisely but to surface qualities, for example, sheen or dampness. What she does not address (it is not necessarily her intent) is what these observations may reveal about the nature of color perception in general. To the extent that we have preserved intact the works of Homer we have a representation of an immediate response to visual stimulus relatively uninfluenced by constructed ideas of color. Irwin does not question modern notions of color as fact1, but provides some impetus for doing so.

More here:

http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/1/3/141

Molecular Interventions 1:141-144 (2001)
© 2001 American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics

Reflections: The Mutability of Blue
Ryan J. Huxtable

Department of Pharmacology College of Medicine University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85724-5050



As Homer's "wine dark sea" suggests, interpreting the precise shade being indicated in the literature of other times and cultures can be difficult. Indeed, numerous suggestions have been advanced to account for Homer's choice of adjective. The hypotheses range from an early twentieth-century theory that Greek eyes had not evolved sufficiently to perceive many color differences, to the supposition of episodes of Red Tide in the Mediterranean when Homer was writing, to the claim that Greek wine was black or blue-black rather than red, to hair-splitting along the lines that "wine-dark" is not the same as "wine-colored."

Color perception appears to be culturally determined. What would the ancient Greeks have made of an English aristocrat being described as "blue-blooded"? They would probably be as puzzled as we are by Aeschylus' reference to the purple blood gushing forth when Clytemnestra kills her husband, Agamemnon. Think of the way skin color in the modern world can be described as "black" or "white," and think how puzzled an intelligent spectrometer would be by such usage. A pink-skinned northern European or a deep brown beach-loving Californian could both be described as "white," whereas someone of a faint chocolate tinge could describe himself as "black." Obviously, such usages include associations other than spectroscopic color. Presumably, all cultures have or had equivalent kinds of associations, even if we are unaware of them.

In addition, color words can change meaning from one age to another. What one century means by "blue" is not necessarily the same as another century means. The word "blue" derives from the same root as the Latin "flavus", which is normally translated as yellow. "Blue," indeed, probably derives from the inferred Indo-European root, "bhel", from which a wide range of color terms have descended, including bright, brunette, burnt, blanche, blond, blush, and black (10). Language is an organic entity, and as such undergoes continual change. The meanings of words, like Wegener's tectonic plates, can drift. Color words seem especially prone to migration, reflecting perhaps that color perception is just that—a phenomenon of the brain modified by culture and experience. Different cultures apparently can differ in the number of colors recognized.

 

[wembley8]

"This isn't just about colour blindess. What I may see as pink, someone else may see as what I perceive to be yellow, but there'd never be any way of knowing unless you became that person for the day and saw the universe through their eyes."

While we can never know about what philosophers call 'qualia' - the subjective experience of what something is like - we can say something about the physiology of colour vision.

I talked to someone in this area a while back, who told me that there are genes for different versions of the red, green and blue colour receptors which have different responses to light (light different film stock, if you like). So some people are working with the same palette as you, and others a different palette.

Brain processing is another area entirely. Why can't men see when colours clash horribly?

 

[Anonymous]

<<<Blue," indeed, probably derives from the inferred Indo-European root, "bhel", from which a wide range of color terms have descended, including bright, brunette, burnt, blanche, blond, blush, and black (10). >>>

Interestingly, bel- (Rus) / bial- (Pol) / bil- (Ukr) is a common Slavic adjective root for 'white.'

 

[Anonymous]

Wow, there are some fairly deep philosophical threads on the board tonight! I almost wonder whether we ought to have a category devoted to "philosophical forteana".
I have briefly read through the replies to Mr Snowman's excellent opening post. When I did so, I was slightly exasperated, because you were all talking about colour and colour perception etc. Actually I don't think Mr Snowman was asking about that at all. In a polite and courteous way, I think what the opening post on this thread was about is the nature of reality itself, and to what extent it exists as a result of our own postulates, as opposed to existing independently of our own thoughts, ideas and observations.
A good little phrase which encapsulates the former is "What's real is what's real to you" or the similar "What's true is what's true for you". In other words, you don't have to believe anything if you don't want to, no matter if the newspapers, the TV news, the Prime Minister, even if they all say something is true, well, that doesn't make it true to you. In a sense, we each create an entire universe around ourselves, filled with our own postulated reality (that which we agree on with ourselves as being true). Of course, all of these universes are different, to a greater or lesser extent. This is the reason why no-one, in expressing an opinion about something (e.g. politics) can ever actually be wrong. Your opinion can never be wrong - only different.
So here we all are, each postulating an entire universe, containing our own version of reality. How do we rein this in and standardise it? To what extent can we agree on what is in our respective universes?
Luckily we can do this to a very large extent. First of all, we've all got the same five senses (almost all of us anyway). Secondly, we've all got the same names for things, if we speak the same language. Thirdly we have science and knowledge to tell us about things (planet earth is not a cube, for instance). So most of us agree on the basics simply as a result of observation.
So onto the question of whether anything is actually "real" in the final analysis. If I believe, genuinely, that a figure is a circle when everyone else says it's a triangle, am I "right" in the sense of it being "my reality"? This question is a bit of a "deepie" but I think generally the answer is yes - but with provisos however. First of all, genuinely believing something strange or unusual does not give me the right to break any agreed-upon rules or laws. Secondly it could cause communication problems. Thirdly it may not stand up to a test (believing that a lamp post is simply not there will not stop you injuring yourself if you run into it). Finally I think ideas which are too bizarre ccould be said to be caused by mental aberration or even psychosis, as opposed to genuine, sane opinions about things.
Is this the answer you wanted Mr Snowman? Or just a complete load of nonsense by me as usual?

Big Bill Robinson

 

[inkedmagiclady]

Wow, there are some fairly deep philosophical threads on the board tonight! I almost wonder whether we ought to have a category devoted to "philosophical forteana"......
..............Or just a complete load of nonsense by me as usual?

Big Bill Robinson

And the crowd goes WILD! :yeay:

Big Bill, wonderful post. You said exactly what I have been thinking/wanting to say but hadn't formulated yet.

To me, what you said is not nonsense at all. It is perfect sense.

 

[Bannik]

I agree Inked, (mind if I call you Inked) - a very good idea.

 

[PeniG]

It is excessive to say that we each create our own reality around ourselves. A more accurate phrasing, less conducive to confusing maps and territories, is to say that we *organize* our own realities.

The world is what it is - infinite. Our brains are what our brains are - finite. In order to cope, we must constantly organize the world into comprehensible units. Me/not-me. Some of the cues we organize by are physical - male, female, gender-ambigous, transgender - and some are cultural - masculine, feminine, androgynous.

Which cues are important depend on the situation. Using the wrong cues at the wrong time can be disastrous; manipulating the cues others use can be a source of great power. Fortunately for y'all, it's my bedtime, so you're spared the disquisition on race-perception, propaganda wars, and the creation of false dichotomies. There's not much of a bottom to this subject.

But let me leave you with an analogy. Last week, I realized I had enough buttons in my sewing box that I needed to start sorting them. I made three categories - white flat buttons, dark flat buttons, and round buttons with a loop on the back instead of a hole. The number of other meaningful sortings I could have done was huge, and many buttons are only arbitrarily "white" or "dark" by courtesy - they looked too light in the dark box and too dark in the white box, so I punted. You will readily see that these categories are not real in the sense that the button itself is real, but is a matter of labeling for convenience.

Now, back off a little bit farther, and you will see that the category "button" is also a convenient classification. A button is real and solid in the physical world; the concept of button is abstract and flexible, a purely mental construct, and it may or may not be important or appropriate to classify the physical object as a button in any given case. For one thing, the buttons had to build up to a certain critical mass before they emerged as a meaningful subcategory of "sewing supplies."

Most of the time, we treat labels as realities and it does no harm - it merely enables us to get on with life. But it is important to know that the label is not the thing, so that you can adjust your behavior when the occasion calls for it. I know far too many people who cannot distinguish between label and reality in that way, and they are buggers to deal with in novel situations - like, meeting me. They keep trying to slap on the labels, and I keep trying to get the glue off my forehead. But I expect a lot of people here have that problem.

 

[Anonymous]

subjective???

Ahem.... Qualia methinks suits this thread.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

 

[littleblackduck]

So many ideas, so many pretty colours!

The rest of my comments are pretty verbose so here are the key words in no particular order: CONSENSUAL REALITY, CULTURE, RELIGION, PLATO, INFINITY, PLURIVERSE, FREE WILL, GOD, CHOMSKY, MORAL RELATIVISM, MORAL ABSOLUTISM, PHILIP K. DICK, PARANOIA, ARNOLD SWARTZENEGGER, ANTROPIC PRINCIPLE, EC COMICS OF THE 1950'S, THE MATRIX, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

Stop reading here if that last paragraph has given you a headache!

I have read much of the stuff mentionned here. You can merge many of these ideas together. For example, the fact that Homer uses four colour words meshes well with linguistic research which indicates that languages with one, two, three, or more words for colours add the colours in a specific order, suggesting what Noam Chomsky calls a "universal" deep in the human brain.

The first four colours are red, black, white and yellow, if I recall correctly, which is very often the four colours human skin is sorted into (although it is really mostly brown), and also the colours of the four cardinal directions (the natives who have occupied the old mill on Victoria Island, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada have painted four windows in the four colours, which symbolize the races of man and a lot of other stuff).

On the other hand, I think that sheep, honey, the sea and wine do have something in common--the colour yellow, so I don't take the Bicameral Mind altogether seriously, although it is a ground-breaking piece of thinking and a good example of a scientist willing to go out on the kind of limb that wins you a Nobel prize or breaks and makes you look like a twit.

What everybody seems to be discussing in one way or another is the concept of "consensual reality", namely the reality which is created by collective belief. Before Christmas, I tried to find out where this term originated. It is used by psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists but I don't know who invented it.

I did find a cute story about consensual reality involving lab animals and experimenters with an EC Comic Horror/Sci Fi twist at the end, in which the consensual reality of the dominent species is challenged and taken over by another species.

Still no answer.

Of course another name for consensual reality is culture. The sociologists have run away with the idea that all culture, even supposedly objective "fact" and "science", are essentually consensual realities. This is called "relativism" by philosophers and religious absolutists. I suspect that many religious absolutists confuse "moral" relativism with contradiction of their own beliefs. Many of these are Conservative Roman Catholics. The Protestants who are educated enough to mis-use the term relativism and to refer to Plato (who has a moral relativist in one of his more famous dialogues), tend to be Liberals, not Conservatives and are not so bothered by moral relativism or any other kind--world's big enough for everybody to do their own thing, most of the time.

Blah, blah, blah.

There was also a lot of stuff about the Matrix when I looked for the term "consensual reality". Hey--our little World Wide Web is as consensual as realities come. If you pretend to be a 12-year-old hot vixen, then you are a 12-year-old hot vixen until the police come and take you away or a hacker deletes you from the Matrix.

Plato, the Matrix, and 1950's EC Comics, oh my! Our consensual realities tend to hold together fairly well, thanks to mass media but they can be mighty scary, although not as scary as when they fall apart.

Philip K. Dick is the author you might want to read if you want to see God giving consensual reality a sh*t-kicking. THE EYE IN THE SKY (novel) is a prime example: an accident in a nuclear lab throws several people into the other's private realities, at least one of which is paranoid to start with.

They made some movies out of his stories:

BLADERUNNER
TOTAL RECALL (I can never recall that one!)
MINORITY REPORT
and coming soon! PAYCHEQUE.

Among others.

Then there is Leibnitz with his Monads--each a separate world complete and entire in itself, held together only by the harmonizing mind of God, the greatest Monad of them all!

Pluriverses and the Anthropic Principle, too, for the scientists among you--just as the Ancient Greek Philosophers concluded that an Infinity of worlds could exist, and exhaust the possibilities, so modern scientists have addressed the problems of God, Free Will, Evil and such, by positing an infinity of space-time-lines or regions of the universe, which eliminates the need to worry about why the Universe we live in seems so perfectly, obscenely adapted to us. (We couldn't exist in a Universe adapted to anybody else--it is We who are adapted In, From, and To the Laws of the Universe, not the laws of physics to us--so we think.)

But if you have read this far, you might want to get back to colours. It's another late dinner (or supper) for me.

I don't so much transgress, as digress.

 

[Bannik]

I know far too many people who cannot distinguish between label and reality in that way, and they are buggers to deal with in novel situations - like, meeting me. They keep trying to slap on the labels, and I keep trying to get the glue off my forehead. But I expect a lot of people here have that problem.

That does get annoying, but on the bright side, it's fun to see the baffled look on their faces when you do or say something that completely contradicts the label they've chosen to place on you.

 

[Anonymous]

They keep trying to slap on the labels, and I keep trying to get the glue off my forehead.

Hey, Peni, can I steal that line?

Nonny

 

[PeniG]

The degree to which it is difficult to think outside of one's culture is demonstrated by the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between perception and reality. An infinite universe cannot fit into a finite brain. The phenomenology of this seems perfectly straightforward to me, and full of possibility. Yet people persist in behaving and speaking as if "I can never fully perceive the universe" = "I make the universe; objective reality depends on my subjectivity."

This is called post-modernism, and in the long term, it doesn't work. Maybe there isn't a real world out there - but in that case, acting as if there is one, and as if you can adjust your perception of it, is a more fruitful course of action.

This is not just an abstract problem, as failure to agree on how the world works leads directly to violence. Don't believe me? Study the Indian Wars in America. Time after time after time, treaties failed because neither party understood what the other party thought it was agreeing to. Indians who had lived peacefully alongside whites for years were massacred the day after the Comanches blew through town - because the whites thought they had a non-agression treaty with "the Indians." If the Karankawas had understood that they were being made liable for the good behavior of the Comanches, they might have behaved very differently! Reservation Comanches used to tear out of Oklahoma periodically to attack Texas, and be very indignant when U.S. soldiers punished them for it, maintaining that they had a treaty with the U.S., *not* with Texas - which was perfectly true. The Council House Fight in San Antonio in 1840 is an example of what can happen when two cultures with completely different cultural referents behave exactly and honestly as they had agreed to. It was a massacre.

How much charity is spoiled because those who honestly wish to give cannot see the point of view of those who have to take? How many reasonable discussions go down in flames and hard feeling because people respond to the arguments they are prepared for, instead of the arguments that are made? How much more would any of us learn if, instead of trying to make someone else see things our way, we strove instead to see them his way?

But if you don't apply the knowledge that your perception is limited, it's just one more way to avoid learning.

P.S. to Nonny: Sure, if you need it. I have a standing policy that anyone can quote me off the net that wants to, as long as I get a byline. But if a short phrase fits well into your daily vocabulary, so that a byline would be awkward, just lift it. I always wanted to originate a byword.

 

[Anonymous]

P.S. to Nonny: Sure, if you need it. I have a standing policy that anyone can quote me off the net that wants to, as long as I get a byline. But if a short phrase fits well into your daily vocabulary, so that a byline would be awkward, just lift it. I always wanted to originate a byword.

You should know that I'm a writer, and any phrase I steal may creep into a book.

Nonny

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Red = Green?

I read somewhere that the ancient perception of colours was very different from ours. If my memory serves me right, Homer describes the sea as being of a wine colour in Odyssey. I basically grew up where the Argonauts went to in search of the Golden Fleece and can testify that the local sea can be of a most fantastic colour palette - but wine?? Have we changed, or is it the water?...

More likely the wine.

 

[Anonymous]

I think there are lots of examples of the realities we hold dear being only subjective, as have been described here.

However I think this is coping mechanism of humans. For example, the analogy used when people take LSD is that it is as if the normal "filters" are bypassed and full perception takes place. The implication then is that for normal everyday getting by, we do not need 99% of the information available so the brain filters out what is not necessary. This means then that your own brain chooses what to filter and so whatever reality you think are in is at best a subset of the whole.

But raised somewhere else on the board possibly, is the idea of self/not-self. This has been looked at in terms of the idea of god.

Neurological trials have discovered that stimulating the parietal lobes with a magnetic field at certain frequencies/levels, produces patterns of brain activity that are shown by people in deep meditation, of any persuasion.

Both tend to describe a feeling of oneness with everything.

On the other side, people who have suffered damage to the same are of ten describe being subjected to this feeling constantly and suffering as a result because thy have no idea where they stop and the world starts. As a result movement and emotional perception is broken down. They tend to find that they think that everyone should know what they do because they see no internal/external divide.

The people who tend to experience the oneness also talk about a comforting presence, which is anything from Jesus to a dead relative. This has been theorised as being the ultimate breakdown of self/other as the subject perceives their internal idea of themselves as another person, greater than their current perceiving self.

I have always thought personally that there is a reality that is not subjective, some kind of universality and we exist within it. Science I suppose helps us to glimpse this reality, but philosophy is what we resort to explain the bits we don't have that would weave the glimpses of understanding into a tapestry of the reality.


The existance and experiences of synaesthetes I think also goes a long way to showing how our our senses are producing information that must be interpreted by our brains and as such, the way you inerpret is a result of the way your brain has been trained, developed within your genetic inheritance, cultural surrounds and personal experience. The big example being that people who see colours with words or numbers do so in an arbitrary fashion.

I don't think that there is true perception, or indeed a way of dispensing with the subjectiveness of our own perceptions. But I think that over the coming generations, there may develope some kind of mathematical hybrid with language which would mean that interpretation is reduced and so meaning is conveyed intact, irrespective of writer or reader. Only then could we possibley begin to communicate in non-subjective terms about a a non-subjective reality.

LD

 

[sherbetbizarre]

This is the only thread I could find that mentions tetrachromat -

‘I’m really just high on life and beauty’: the woman who can see 100 million colours

As a kid, Concetta Antico was always ‘a bit out of the box’, but it took decades for her to discover just how differently she was seeing the world

Antico is a tetrachromat, which means she has a fourth colour receptor in her retina compared with the standard three which most people have. While those of us with three of these receptors – called cone cells – have the ability to distinguish around one million different colours, tetrachromats see an estimated 100 million.

Until 10 years ago, Antico says, “I didn’t know I was not experiencing the world like other people were. For me, the world was just really very colourful."

“I always felt like I was living in a very magical world. I know children say that, but for me, it was like everything was hyper-wonderful, hyper-different. I was always exploring into nature, delving and trying to see the intricacies, because I’d see so much more detail in everything. Someone else might look at a leaf or a petal on a flower, but for me, it was like a compulsion to really understand it, really see it, and sometimes spend a lot of time on it. And I just wanted to paint and portray everything that I was seeing.”

https://amp.theguardian.com/society...uty-the-woman-who-can-see-100-million-colours

 

[Cloudbusting]

I'm quite jealous of her, I can't deny. I've always thought that would be a wonderful mutation to have!