TED Conversations

jake kaufmann

This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »

Is it possible to create a new color? One that does not already exist?

For years I have thought it possible to generate a color that has yet to be defined, but perhaps such a thing is not possible within the limits restraining the human eye. More so, do animals see colors not perceptible to humans?

Topics: art and science
+2
Share:

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.

  • thumb

    Michael Wolok

    • +4
    Nov 9 2011: Colors are qualia. They are created in the brain. To see more colors we would have to be able to alter brains. The real world is colorless, orderless and tasteless. Color, smell, taste and sound are not an objective phenomeon. If there were not sentient creatures they would not exist. What we experience is a virtual reality. Your body is an organic detection device that transmits electrical signals to our brains. Our brains then create an image from these signals. The image it creates is at best nothing like the real world we live in, if infact we live in a real world. The truth is we have no way of know if we really have bodies or brains. We could be a computer on laboratory table being feed input from another machine. If we takes this one step further, we realize there may be no sun, no Earth, no stars, and no other humans. The bottom line is we really have no way to know if anything we observe is real or not. The ony thing we can be sure of is what we experience. We experience love, fear, pain, misery, pleasure, colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and tactile sensations. If you could the world more accurately, you might see your body as complex field that exists everywhere in the universe simultaneously, but finds itself most of itself here on Earth. Atoms from your body are spread over space-and time at this very moment interact with objects in distant parts of the universe. Of course, you don't see this, and it doesn't seem like it is very relevant to your existence. We only see frustums of world-branes in space-time. If we saw world-branes motion would cease to exist, and we would see the past-present-future all at once. That is if any universe actually exists. Personally, I think it is all just a bad dream.

    • Lawrence Trevanion

      • 0
      Nov 11 2011: Thanks for the bad dream Michael.
      Colors are NOT qualia. They are NOT created in the brain.

      The reason for this concerns the relationship between experience and the real. If you are interested in this I'd appreciate you browsing through some of my many comments on the subject before replying too quickly.

      The philosophical outline is roughly this: we begin with personal experience; we 'comprehend' experience and recognise a real world; we then wonder what the relationship of experience is to this real world.

      You have expressed the notion that experience is produced by the real world, that qualia are created by the brain. But neuroscientists have never found qualia - how could they; what could it be? If we could discover qualia we would find ourselves in a hopeless tangle - self referential or infinitely regressive, take your pick. Not surprisingly, by accepting that qualia exist you have trouble deducing that the real exists (Berkeley). This I would suggest is absurd.

      It should be obvious that if the real is a comprehension of our experience then it would be conceptually disordered to feature experience itself as an entity in that real (read: qualia does not feature as an entity in the real).

      If we introduce the concept of perception and say we perceive the real (AND generalise and say that ALL experience is the perception of something) then we can express the relationship between experience and the real as - people are objects that perceive. Experience is what it is like for objects to perceive. Experience is expressed in the form "I perceive X" (and not "I HAVE the experience X"), where 'I' is the object that perceives.

      Color is never abstract. We say, for example "I perceive a blue X" but not "I perceive blueness".

      Hence, we can theorise widely about color but can only EMPATHISE in terms of the colors that we ourselves perceive (which is determined by our design as a perceiver) eg. a color-vision person can IMAGINE black/white vision but not vice versa.
      • thumb

        Frans Kellner 100+

        • +1
        TED Translator
        Nov 11 2011: There is no objective world.
        Seeing, the seen and the seer is one action or process.
        What you see is what you are.
        "I" is no object, factual it is nothing; call it a concept or construct from the ratio.
        Michael gave a marvelous description of the unthinkable.
    • thumb

      Frans Kellner 100+

      • 0
      TED Translator
      Nov 11 2011: Michael Wolok,
      I don't know where you've got all this from but it's fantastic.
      Maybe a bit incomprehensible for most people for they first have to release their conditioning to “Mara” or identification with appearances. If they do they can remember how they were assembled into the person they are.

    • George Kong 30+

      • 0
      Nov 13 2011: Michael, solopsism is an intriuging but ultimately futile intellectual pursuit. If we are not to trust our senses to any degree, then there is very little work that we can do to affect change in this world.

      The soft rescue from it is simply - 'congruence'.

      That is, if what I'm seeing is congruent with what I'm touching, what I'm smelling, tasting, my memories and knowledge of the world, congruent with the scientific testing, etc, etc... then it is *good enough* for us to trust and move on from.

      That said, you're very much right in the sense that we intercept a portion of the world through our senses - our sense of reality is very much a relative thing. We percieve a macro scale world that operates at a certain speed, because those are how our sensory and processing tools function. Without special equipment, we can't at all percieve the microscopic scale world - bacteria, cells (I think?), let alone atoms and molecues are smaller than the smallest visible light wavelength - objects of such scale can't even be readily or reliably reflect light.

      But it is pure pseudoscience philsophobabble to think that we can percieve beyond our inbuilt senses through our minds as Frans seems to be suggesting. But I may be misunderstanding his and your positions - but the word choice and phrasing is sending off red flags, indicating that the line of thinking that you're both engaged in is another form of dualism.

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.