I wouldn't say we can't ever know how someone elses' green looks to us, I think that's an empirical question that's tied up in structure and function of consciousness, where better theories or advances brain to machine (or, who knows, brain to brain) interfaces may produce inroads.
>but to say it "exists in objective reality" implies that it’s not subjective.
Props to you for your careful phrasing here, as you've phrased this in a way that accounts for things being both in objective reality but also nevertheless subjective. I think that's very important, but I think it has a slightly different upshot.
That it's subjective means it's not necessarily a property out there in the world since it's tied to our subjectivity, but the flip side is, subjectivity itself is built out of the same stuff that builds the objective world and the greenness of subjectivity, so it could be objectively in there, so to speak. (E.g. specific color experiences might consistently show up the same way in brains, or we can come up with robust definitions that tie color to something objective that's in the spirit of normal usage of color terms even while accounting for individual variation).
I would just say it's something contingent on better future understanding and we have to be careful about declarations that imply some kind of ultimate unknowability-in-principle.
If you mean wavelength, that's a different story. But colors are not wavelengths
That's news to me. Reference?
BTW, the word "green" just means something different when applied to eyes than when applied to everything else. And green is a continuum so there is some fuzz around the edges. But if the task is to pick out green from a palate of half a dozen canonical colors I can definitely build a machine to do it with >99% accuracy.
And I agree with you on the second part: everyone agrees the sky is blue and that grass is green. But the fuzzy edges are what kills it and I don't think you can define it rigorously except by drawing some arbitrary lines on the color wheel. Which will be just that: arbitrary
Why? Everything has fuzzy edges. If you think fuzzy edges are fatal you won't be able to communicate about anything in the real world.
Thanks for the reference, but it's not really what you claimed. It's not that they don't have a word for "green", it's that they don't have separate words for "green" and "blue", so they use the same word for both. That is not quite the same as not having a word for "green".
You can see the same phenomenon in English. We have separate words for "orange" and "brown" even though they are actually the same hue just with different luminosities. Brown is just a dark orange.
The consciousness conversation comes up pretty often here. I kinda disagree with the idea that there's no way to communicate experience directly. Yea, at present there is no way to know that we have the same experience of green. But imagine in the future we were able to analyze/probe the computation of the brain and had more advanced biological engineering. Would we still not be able to determine experimentally what constitutes the sensation of green (and, as a result, be able to manipulate it)? Why not? It seems more like a practical/current problem rather than a theoretical one.
There’s something in those cells and signals that is having the first-person perspective of being me, which is experiencing the sensation of green. I believe that the matter is all there is, so it must be in there somewhere. But for example if it is in the carbon, I wonder why we haven’t found it when we look very hard at pencil lead? I mean, that’s getting way ahead of ourselves, we don’t really know how to characterize it at all other than by this one very odd thing that it seems to do.
"Green" as in Plato's form, an external perfect entity surpassing out physical word, probably doesn't exist.
"Green" as in a specific frequency of electromagnetic spectrum we choose to label thusly, exists
all the way out to measurement i.e. measured data i.e. inputs.
How do you account for this then?
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-green-screen-vid...
> Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination
All words are made up, so in that sense "figments of imagination." Green is a shared concept. Like cold. Or love. Or justice.
And to address the author, just like those other non-concrete things, green is literally a noun.
"the truth" is conceptually an adjective. to treat it as a noun is to get into philosophically tight spaces.
E.g. the noun definition of green is
> a color intermediate in the spectrum between yellow and blue, an effect of light with a wavelength between 500 and 570 nanometers; found in nature as the color of most grasses and leaves while growing, of some fruits while ripening, and of the sea.
This is different than saying that quarks exist, and that protons are formed from two up quarks and one down quark. These are truths of nature, whereas your examples are of human nature. It’s hard to even say whether a statement about them is true or not, let alone that those things exist.
Well, it can be, if you say something like, "I ate some greens." But most of the time it's an adjective, as in, "The pine trees were tall and green."
Am I looking at a big when I look at a big thing?
Are you a native English speaker?
Do you not recognize that all of those sound weird and are not grammatically correct English?
Ah. OK, that makes sense. That usage of the word had not occurred to me. I guess I should choose a different word to be my canonical example.
Thanks.
I disagree. Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination. It has some shared properties (e.g. humans can perceive green better than red or blue) but to say it "exists in objective reality" implies that it’s not subjective. But it is; there’s no way to know whether how I see green is how green looks to you. All that we can say is that we can distinguish green from other colors at similar rates.
I don’t think this is a small quibble. It’s the fundamental problem of trying to pin down philosophy too precisely. https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
> "Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers," Rod Brooks wrote, "programs written for them usually did not work." [6] Something similar happened when people first started trying to talk about abstractions. Much to their surprise, they didn't arrive at answers they agreed upon. In fact, they rarely seemed to arrive at answers at all.
> They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at too low a resolution.
> The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward. Knowing we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.