If You Place a Red Crayon Under a Bowl, What Color Is It?

<p>I don't think anyone confuses "the experience of redness" with "facts about redness". The discussion given in the link (sorry, of course I clicked it. How could telling me not to have any other outcome?!) strikes me as quite muddled, but of course it's a summary. Maybe the full text properly sorts out what a "fact" is, for instance.</p>

<p>Distinguishing between "the experience of a thing" and "the thing itself" is certainly a good thing to do. They are certainly quite different. The experience of a thing is itself a thing -- but it is not the thing. The gestalt of thought and emotion triggered in my mind by the color red is certainly not the same thing as the color itself. Also, the word "red" is another thing, which isn't the color itself. Sorting all these things our carefully and thoroughly is surprisingly difficult.</p>

 

<p>I like the red herring comment of Julie to show how I was being duped by the question and not that color is what is in question. As an aside, I have never seen a "red" herring, but then I am not into heavily cured herrings. I guess I can imagine them, as one who saw the red object before it was hidden under a bowl can imagine its presence even if unseen. I have the physical experience of red. If the bowl observers hadn't seen the red crayon before, nothing should allow them to see it when hidden from view.</p>

<p>"The trouble with Mary" is I guess a story about how even when armed with an infinity of scientific facts about what constitutes or describes the physical existence of something, if we haven't experienced the specific physical phenomenon itself we cannot fully perceive it. Mary was certainly more able to imagine the object (red color, as perceived by the human eye-brain) than others in her monochromatic dungeon, owing to her training, but she had no physical reference to what red actually appeared like (absolutely, or even relatively, when compared to some other physical reference of electromagnetic radiation). As you cannot physically separate out sugar from your mixed morning coffee (forgetting the crystallisation process), her experience of black and white would not have helped her). It would thus be a complete surprise to her, but I am not sure if there would be enough of that to shock her heart-brain into an arrest. Her great knowledge would probably have allowed her to comprehend at least an unusual experience.</p>

<p>Yes! and Yes! to Andrew and Arthur.</p>

<p>Now. <strong>Consider that 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of what you, personally (or "a" person) take to be your experience of the world, your "life story" is "under the bowl."</strong> You did not, cannot, and never will have line-of-sight or direct instrumental verification of what you, without thinking about it, take to be "true" or "there" or to "have happened." In the absence of metaphoric constructions ("this is (experientially) like that"), without generalizations ("this is usually like that; though I only see this front surface, I can surmise the back volume," etc.), without temporal assumptions (the sun came up yesterday, it will come up tomorrow) -- all of this stuff is fill-in-the-blank by the mind because we necessarily have line-of-sense access to only a minuscule transient thread of existence (assuming we are paying close attention).</p>

<p>Which, bringing all of this full circle, is why the idea-before? or idea-after? question is so interesting to a photographer, IMO.</p>

<p>To those who have been duped into believing in the fairy tales of qualia and dualism by the Mary story, ask yourselves whether Mary actually did know all there is to know about color, as claimed in the fairy tale. Then ask what Mary's reaction might be if she were handed a blue banana. Would she take it and simply eat it or would she know she was being . . . ahem . . . duped.</p>

<p>Reducing the debate about physicalism to a one-sided airing of the Mary thought experiment is about as intellectually honest as it would be to reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to interviewing one headstrong Israeli or one equally headstrong Palestinian.</p>

<p>Not being a trained philosopher and without any prior history of the Mary story, I choose to consider the event as being simply one that suggests the incompleteness of any access to truth by those possessing only the physical experience of red but no knowledge of what makes something red and those (admittedly rarer) poor souls who have all the knowledge of what red means in scientific terms but have never experienced its physical presence (as perceived by a human).</p>

<p>I allow that the discussion may have some relevance to art and photography, but would appreciate if someone (Julie, Steve, Andrew, Fred, other?) would join those dots in a clear manner, or do that with regard to the original OP, which I take, in one sense, as involving perceived versus imagined realities. As this is a philosophy of "photography" forum that would contribute some value to our discussion, like that of inhabiting the land (of ideas) between the strong Israeli and strong Palestinian viewpoints perhaps not too remotely related and referred to by Fred.</p>

<p>Arthur, good suggestion.</p>

<p>One way I can think of connecting it photography is in terms of the difference between the subject or content of a photo and the photo of that subject or content.</p>

<p>To riff on the original question, if I see a picture of a redhead, do I know the man or woman in the photo is a redhead? What ramifications does that have for my skepticism in viewing photos as representative of what they're photos of? In what situations do I care whether "the world" matches up with what I see in a photo? How, if at all, is my experience of the red of an apple I eat different from my experience of the red of a picture of an apple?</p>

<p>Now, I'm not saying all of these questions are terribly interesting, but maybe they could relate on some level to the supposedly disappearing redness of the crayon when it's out of view. It would be interesting to know if the OP had something photographic in mind.</p>

<p>The Mary story, by the way, is often taken to be about whether there is a kind of phenomenal knowledge in addition to physical knowledge. The story is meant to show that physicalism is not a complete source of knowledge and, of course, this theory of <em>qualia</em> has many detractors, as it should.</p>

<p>so, I believe it would be safe to assume that in the event the crayon under the bowl were replaced by a herring, it [the herring] would be red?</p>

<p>Well, hmmm. Can a herring that <em>is</em> red be a "red herring" and further, when you say "red herring" is the light on inside your head?</p>

<p>How about it? A solar-powered brain. Must check it out.</p>

<p>no light in my head, I'm just bored. no light=no visible crayon (red, blue or whatever). the moment you manage to determine which crayon (out of, say, 20) is red with your eyes closed - you have a solution. whether you'd care about it - is another question:)</p>

<p>Arthur, 99.97% of the earth's energy comes from the sun. Start with photosynthesis and work your way, trickle, trickle, zap!, bzzzz, munch-munch, (and/or a few billion years for petro-chemicals), one way or another, you got rays in your head.</p>

<p>Martynas, hmmm ... I might not care about the red crayon herring. I would care very much if we're talking M&Ms. Or an M&M shaped like a crayon. Or a crayon shaped like an M&M. How do I KNOW it's not a crayon-shaped red M&M under the bowl? (If you <em>ate</em> a red red herring, you could die, especially if you ate 20 with your eyes closed.)</p>

<p>I would say that it's superficially like the difference between Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity. For practical everyday purposes it probably suffices to say that the crayon is red when it's hidden, as it provides useful information to someone else who might like to retrieve it and photograph it or use it to draw something. However, Einstein's equations are extremely beautiful and complicated (I heard from a theoretical physicist friend of mine) and I wouldn't mind having a go at understanding them sometime.</p>

<p>Calico, the same color as Schrodinger's cat</p>

<p>I haven't read all the responses so apologies if someone has already mentioned this but wasn't this conundrum expressed by A J Ayer as: If lightning strikes a tree in the dessert and there is nobody there to witness it, does it make a sound?</p>

<p>Or, does a human really have to witness a physical event for it to occur.....</p>

<p>Humans can be rather arrogant about their place in the world.</p>

<p>I haven't read all of the messages so this may have been covered.</p>

<p>It depends on your definition of color</p>

<p>Let's say you are asking the question what is the spectrum of light emitted from the object under its current conditions. Not the intrinsic visible reflectance spectrum as perceived by human vision (red). Also, assume your answer is not constrained by light only in the visible spectrum. Some insects and animals can see "colors" outside of visible spectrum of human vision)</p>

<p>The spectrum of light that you would measure if you put a broad band IR-VIS spectrometer in the box with your object would depend on the temperature of the room. Since all black bodies emit optical radiation above zero deg Kelvin. the emission spectrum (determined by the black body radiation spectrum at the ambient temperature problem around 10,000nm or more at 37C</p>

<p>If you put a detector that can only see light from 400-700nm, then the object would appear black, with the exception of a few visible photons emitted from interactions with cosmic rays</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Actually, I looked the emission spectrum of a black body at 20C, there is a extremely small tail ( a factor of 10^-34) relative to the emission peak in the IR, that goes into the human visible spectrum (400-700nm), if your visible light detector was sensitive enough and your exposure was long enough, then any object would have a faint reddish glow to it from black body radiation emission, even with no incident illumination.</p>

<p>Don, yes, it was already covered . . . in depth.</p>

<p>Connecting the dots of truth about color.<br /><br />What's really going on with color and similar modality-mixed meta-wonderings?<br /><br />At the phenomenal level, the level of human experience, we experience color as inhering in the colored things we see. Thus, most of our language about color has to do with this phenomenal, real world, as experienced. This is the natural world of green grass, red crayons, and blue skys. We can and do say true things about color relative to this phenomenal understanding, relative to this experienced reality. <br /><br />For instance it is true to say that a boat you see in the harbor that's been painted blue, is blue. This means the boat was coated with a subtance known as paint or stain which is some shade of blue. If the grass is green, there is greeness in the grass.<br /><br />But a scientific understanding of color is another matter, and has to do with understanding what goes on at the neural level, a level we don't actually experience consciously.<br /><br />As Lakoff and Johnson put it (Philosophy in the Flesh), "At the neural level, green is a multiplace interactional property, while at the phenomenal level, green is a one-place predicate chracterizing a property that inheres in an object." So, they go on to argue, "a scientific truth claim based on knowledge about the neural level is contradicting a truth claim at the phenomenological level." That is, color understood as an interactional property of light, local color, color cones, neurons, is contradicting the phenomenal truth of colored objects.<br /><br />They go onto show how this stems from the philosophical theory of truth as correspondence which does not distinguish such levels. It assumes that all truth can be stated at once from a neutral perspective.<br /><br />But there are distinct truths at different levels, and there is no perspective that is neutral between them. Grass is green, as we all know, and the crayon is red (and if it's not red when the bowl is removed, then someone has actively tried to mislead us).<br /><br />The dilema present in this and similar (tiresomely shallow frollicings) is one between two genuinely disinct levels of understanding, or, levels of truth. <br />But we now know that truth is modal, and this is reflected in our language. Truth is thus, always relative to one's understanding which is relative to what one is doing.<br /><br />Some see this as a priority problem -- which version of truth is more true, but that's the wrong approach, neither is more true. In fact (and, for instance) it's mostly irrelevant to speak of our experience of color in scientific terms, because we simply do not experience that. To do so would be artificially ... untrue.<br /><br />So, the question, what color is the red crayon when placed under the bowl, is a phenomenal level question. Its answer is red. The answer we all know.<br /><br />As soon as you begin speaking of color in non-phenomenal terms, you've switched modes, and any subsequent question should reflect that modal shift. Unless you wish to chase your tail all day.<br>

And if you can't express your question in the mode you wish an answer, then shut up already. :-)</p>

 

<p>I'll figure this out right after I know the state of Schroedinger's cat.</p>

 

<p>Don</p>

<p>Your line is pretty much along Hawkins' who suggests even black holes do emit energy (grey holes, rather).</p>

If you can't see through the bowl how do you know no light can get to it or that it doesn't emit one color of light when

covered by an opaque bowl and another when it is inside an opaque cube?

 

In other words,how do you know nothing?

<p>Red.</p>