Re: Thomas Covenant series

Constantinople wrote:


Chris Dollin wrote:
And that's where you miss it. You keep trying to take "the" physical
cause - the wavelength mix - as "the" colour. When different mixes
generate the /same/ colour response, it's clear that the cause and
the colour are not the same thing.

Actually, the colors we see depend on the surrounding colors.

Yes, but I felt that complication (which I alluded to, opaquely), if
permitted, only strengthened my argument ...

Notice this, though: it is features of *the apple itself* that are in
fact invariant in different conditions. It's the same apple, it's the
same species and has the same (say) bruises whether it's outside or
inside. And that's the important part of reality that our visual system
is trying to get a fix on, and that's why our sense of color is
dependent on surrounding colors.

Yes.

The visual system is looking for invariants in the object, not in the
light.

You say "it's quite clear that cause and color are not the same thing."
But our visual system is trying to make cause and color be the same
thing - that is, it is trying to make the *relevant* cause (the apple)
and the color be the same thing, (and trying to ignore the irrelevant
causes - e.g. the lighting).

Well - here by "cause" I specifically meant the /light/, since that's
where I think Sea Wasp was trying to pin the notion of colour.

But notice finally that color is not something simple from a
physicist's point of view.

It's not clear to me that the /physicist/ has a point of view on /colour/,
but yes, if they do, it's not simple, because it's tied into the
sensory apparatus of a biological system.

When you see the
color, don't you also sometimes sense the flavor of the fruit *in* the
color, so to speak? That is, the color of the fruit is not merely a mix
of red, green, and blue, but is actually *fruity*, there is a
fruitiness to the color, which maybe makes your mouth water.

Sorry; no, that doesn't happen to me. (Unless you mean "monkey see
banana, monkey imagine banana, monkey imagine /eating/ banana, yum",
where the fruitiness arises - as I loaded into my sentence - from
memories-of-eating.)

That's
part of your experience of it, that's how you experience the color. But
this isn't really an illusion, because what you're really seeing when
you see a colorful fruit, is the fruit itself, and the fruit really is
fruity.

So much philosophy, so little time.

And when you see a rotting apple, you don't merely see a
pattern of colors, you actually see the rot. Before you know it's brown
or whatever color it is, you know it's rot. It's the important things
that hit consciousness hardest; the clinical details (e.g., the exact
shade of color of the rot) are often ignored entirely. We actually have
a poor grasp of the merely photographic aspects of things - that is why
untrained people make such bad drawings. They see the important stuff
first, and only with great difficulty can be taught to see merely the
superficialities of things, the exact shapes and colors. They can
recognize when someone they know has had an injury to his face, so they
can sense small changes to a person's face, but give them a paper and
pencil and ask them to draw their friend's face and most people will
draw you something uglier than the elephant man, because they don't
actually see the shapes. We don't see the shapes, we don't see the
colors. We see the things that matter. And after many years of training
in an art school we can start to see the shapes and the colors.

Now /this/ is the sort of material I like to come out of these discussions;
it feels like something that's not just interesting (not totally new to
me, but presented to mesh with the other concerns) but something that can
feed back into writing. There's a way to use this, I'm sure.

--
Monkey See Nice Banana, Monkey Eat Banana, Hedgehog
Notmuchhere: http://www.electric-hedgehog.net/
Otherface: Jena RDF/Owl toolkit http://jena.sourceforge.net/
.

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