• zksmk@slrpnk.net
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    2 years ago

    I’d just like to take this one step further and say that color has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation and its wavelengths. Not at its core.

    You could easily have a robo-eye that reacts to water waves or anything else that might carry similar information and converts it into a bio-chemical signal that goes into the optical nerve and into the brain and you’d see color. In fact, you can see color in your sleep/dreams with no input from outside the brain. Or less abstractly, you can see flashes of color with your eyes closed after going in a dark room after being in a bright space, because of the state of the ”irritated” chemicals in the back of your eyes. The subjective perception of color, the qualia as it is called, is something that correlates in the physical world, or has its physical correlate (noun) only to something in the brain. The EM waves are just carriers of information that supply us with information that gets experienced as color once it finds it’s appropriate home in the information structures of the brain, and the mind.

    Another example of this is how people with amputated limbs can feel “phantom pain” sometimes in the non existent body parts, because the stump nerve is being appropriately irritated to send a signal to the brain, that becomes pain in the brain, independently of the existence or non-existence of the body part.

    Same with irritating the ear bones, without any air waves, as with tinnitus. The air waves just carry the info usually, they’re not sound itself.

    You can indeed hear EM waves’ info too, not see it, just listen to a radio.

    Shape is something we experience because of the existence of space, the perception of the “category”, the concept of space in the mind.

    Which one is more fundamental depends, I guess, which one you believe is more fundamental, if any, quality or concepts, perception or reason.

    This would be of equal true value, whether you label things as a materialist or as an idealist, just label it then as, let’s say, matter arrangement, or laws of arrangement. Or maybe simply, matter and spacetime.

    I’d say they’re of equal footing, and don’t quite go, one without the other, in the human mind, or the physical world, as we know them.