From Philosophical Research
Main entries
- Colorblind people also have a different red / Colorblind people are indistinguishable practically from people with a different red / Colors are practically identified through similarities between paint-chip colors, not by what absolute color people see, so only a difference in which paint-chip colors are grouped together should count as experiencing red differently -> it's so typical for people to say "when I talk about people seeing a different red, I don't mean they're colorblind". why not? what are you asserting the difference to be? it could be that philosophers think that there are unique activations in the brain for red and blue, and they are saying that the eyes are the same but the brain is different. this is at least somewhat possible, in that some people with brain damage cannot recognize colors as particular names. [1] but. let's consider the world as a collection of material objects. every person learns to recognize colors by grouping physical things, like water on a sunny day and blue jays. if the person cannot see blue, and groups sand and water together, there is a difference in perception, because the person sees the details of the objects as belonging to a new signifier. if a person groups cardinals with pine trees, that is distinctly a colorblind perception, but if a person groups cardinals with sunsets and pine trees with jade, that is distinctly a typical perception. say that somehow there was such a thing as absolute color, and red and green were cosmic objects, but humans always named things in crayola colors: cardinals are rose, blue jays are robin, pine trees are forest, and sand is lemon. say that in that world, there are three people: Alex, Bob, and Carol. Bob says that cardinals are forest and pine trees are rose; he sees cardinals as yellow and pine trees as yellow. Alex says that cardinals are rose and pine trees are forest; they see cardinals as red and pine trees as green. Carol says that cardinals are rose and pine trees are forest; she sees cardinals as green and pine trees as red. there is no practical difference between Alex and Carol. every single thing they communicate with each other will be understandable, and every action they take in the world will be comparable. Carol can even create art that does not look colorblind and looks perfectly normal to Alex, because Carol has always observed the natural world and the relationships between things in the natural world the same way she draws them, while Alex also perceives the same set of relationships between all things in the natural world.
we need to step back and look at the social impact of that. Alex and Carol are much closer to seeing the world the exact same as each other than Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin and Trotsky see the same colors but the messages they attempt to communicate with each other and their ability to perceive those messages are drastically different. they technically both believe in Leninism. they should be the same. but they're not the same, because Trotsky perceives a particular arrangement of groups of people one way and Stalin perceives it another way. if significance to an ideology and recommended action were a color, Trotsky sees state businesses as robin, Stalin sees state businesses as rose. the difference between them is in what category or signifier they parse a particular object as being part of. but, in whatever way this may have happened, they have learned this categorization of objects into signifiers during their lives. and this active categorization and assignment is what makes perceptions different; if you didn't choose what category something is in and somebody else was assigned the exact same categorization system, they are mathematically equivalent perceptual systems. let's go back to Bob. even though he did not choose to be colorblind, it directly affects the process of his brain categorizing objects into signifiers, in his case in a nicely predictable way. when Bob categorizes cardinals as forest or pine trees as rose, it is subjective in the same sense as Trotsky categorizing state businesses as robin based on his knowledge, because both perceptions rely on The Subject taking objects and putting them in signifiers. subjective perceptions matter to daily life because differences between them result in the need to understand subjective experiences and experience intersubjectivity or empathy, or at the very least in the need to do meta-Marxist analysis of the development of countable cultures and ideologies. if Trotsky had some weird perceptual issue where he literally looked at state businesses and saw an undulating hydra, but all he said was that state businesses are rose and genuinely believed that signifier and all around was a mainstream Marxist-Leninist in both his actions and his beliefs, that inner experience wouldn't matter to anyone. it's when Trotsky looks at state businesses and sees them as robin and then says they're robin versus somebody else categorizing them differently that it actually matters to everybody. so, really, colorblind perception should be more significant than a stupid thought experiment where Alex and Carol both agree cardinals are rose and pine trees are forest. when Bob says that cardinals are forest, that is his red. everything that has ever been red to most people is yellow to Bob, but as Bob goes through life he always has to see everybody else call it red, so it is red to him inasmuch as it is rose to him. I guess what I'm saying is that there is no practical difference between red and rose or green and forest. I have a mathematical reason, in structuralist linguistics and perception. I have a historical reason, in Stalin and Trotsky going through subjective perception and forming warring "countries", which nobody should want. I have a humanities reason, in that it is pointless to talk about inner experience and lived experience and qualia if the point is not to better experience it and understand how to treat other people — well, inasmuch as those results are the whole reason people usually talk about lived experience in the first place and without the usual motivating rationale of talking about lived experience then what is the logical reason to even bring up lived experience. I feel like that's pretty sufficient, even if not exhaustive. this old thought experiment misses the point of talking about perception.
- A palette swap can see a different red / A CSS stylesheet can see a different red / Paint-chip colors are connected to absolute colors by signs, therefore a tool that edits all chip-to-perception signs at once has changed perception -> this dawned on me while testing a colorblind stylesheet and I haven't thought about the "different red" question the same way since. if a webpage says "box_red" and the CSS stylesheet turns it from rose to sea or from rose to fir, haven't you then finally figured out how to experience a different red? or if you take a Famicom-era game designed for a certain limited color palette and you swap the colors. only while you're looking at the color-swapped sprites you'd be seeing a different red, and I cannot justify why it wouldn't be in the exact same sense as the thought experiment. colors are always defined relative to each other. a sprite palette designed based on the real world is almost exactly the same thing as how colors are relative to each other in real life.
Concepts
- paint-chip color / Crayola-style color
- absolute color
Ideology codes
- ES / structuralist linguistics
- MX
