I found the following to be a rather simple problem to solve. If we can see color, then color must be an inherent property of objects and not imaginary whether or not that color takes on the form of electromagnetic waves until it meets our eyes or whatever other form it may take. Qualia The question hinges on whether color is a product of the mind or an inherent property of objects. While most philosophers will agree that color assignment corresponds to spectra of light frequencies, it is not at all clear whether the particular psychological phenomena of color are imposed on these visual signals by the mind, or whether such qualia are somehow naturally associated with their noumena. Another way to look at this question is to assume two people ("Fred" and "George" for the sake of convenience) see colors differently. That is, when Fred sees the sky, his mind interprets this light signal as blue. He calls the sky "blue." However, when George sees the sky, his mind assigns green to that light frequency. If Fred were able to step into George's mind, he would be amazed that George saw green skies. However, George has learned to associate the word "blue" with what his mind sees as green, and so he calls the sky "blue", because for him the color green has the name "blue." The question is whether blue must be blue for all people, or whether the perception of that particular color is assigned by the mind. This extends to all areas of the physical reality, where the outside world we perceive is merely a representation of what is impressed upon the senses. The objects we see are in truth wave-emitting (or reflecting) objects which the brain shows to the conscious self in various forms and colors. Whether the colors and forms experienced perfectly match between person to person, may never be known. That people can communicate accurately shows that the order and proportionality in which experience is interpreted is generally reliable. Thus one's reality is, at least, compatible to another person's in terms of structure and ratio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_philosophy
The qualitative definition of color being "out there" as part of objects in the scientific version of the world underlying commonsense realism... Would be something of a bugbear to many materialists who try to orbit around the the former. Even a floating patch of red is a member of that vast group of "shown things" that differentiate biological perception / consciousness from the nothingness of organisms lacking such (like when they're dead) and self-navigating machines. That "shown things" (either simple/random or complex/meaningful) are solely produced by brains or whatever can mimic them properly is a very dominant, gut / reflexive belief (in addition to its intellectual defenses) that rival beliefs must hurdle over. Erwin Schrodinger: "But it [the world] certainly does not become manifest by its mere [material] existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?" Materialism can't be said to be anti-phenomenal across the board (take Galen Strawson's contrary panpsychic version, for example). But in general (even in the post-Descartes monism era) it contains, or is either synonymous with the belief that manifestations of anything (not just abstracted properties like color) are only associated with the brain. Or whatever else that might either optionally evolve or be designed to generate the same. Possibly against this "neural-centrism" is the fact that brain tissue is not composed of unusual matter and depends upon forces and microphysical attributes that are ubiquitous throughout the cosmos. Attributing a special formal structure or unique functioning organization to being the primary or sole culprit for producing qualitative events (again, just any appearances / showings at all PERIOD) seems little more than a conjuring spell. IF there are no precursor properties posited in physics to be manipulated by such a framework in its engendering of the higher-level novelty, or for the latter to fall out of as a non-magical-like alternative. Nevertheless, under occasionally refined labels or a more hypernymic one, materialism remains the top metaphysical stance among today's philosophers and scientists (in the latter's personal lives at least). 'Tis deemed better to be incurious or just ignore or detour around the affairs swirling around the hard problem. To pursue a deeper or more satisfactorily explanation of experiences was associated with loon-ville during much of the 20th century ["let it be an eternal puzzle" or "let us pretend we do not have them"], and that stigma still triggers a partial phobia in contemporary thinkers, researchers, theorists, etc. One obvious remedy is that it requires cognition (memory-dependent and identification related processes) to KNOW that phenomenal events are present or occurring (ergo, they could be happening everywhere but minus the capacity to verify them). However, the very possibility that primitive / elemental flickerings of the latter could be universal (beyond skulls) but minus cognition of them, is still an ideological obscenity (reeks of "mind" even when there is no mind) to many traditional materialists. Who desire brains or their equivalents to remain special places harboring a brutely emergent novelty transpiring nowhere else. Thin overview of the historic roots of anti-panexperientialism [unfortunately under the broader concept of panpsychism that subsumes it]: William Seager: [David] Skrbina (2005) finds several panpsychist remarks in Plato, many fewer in Aristotle, and a general anti-panpsychist viewpoint coincident with the rise of “Aristotelian” Christianity that lasted until the renaissance. A number of important thinkers of the Italian renaissance embraced panpsychism, including G. Cardano (1501-76), G. Bruno (1548-1600) and T. Campanella (1568-1639). But it was the modern “mechanistic” picture of the world inaugurated by Galileo, Descartes and Newton which put the problem of the mind at center stage while paradoxically sweeping it under the rug. The whole problem-space was severely distorted by what was virtually a stipulated separation of matter from mind, so that what could have been merely a useful conceptual distinction was transformed into an ontological gulf. Thus, everything that could not be accounted for in terms of the interactions of simple material components was conveniently labelled a “secondary quality” inhabiting not the “real” world but merely the conscious mind. For instance, in a maneuver reminiscent of Democritus, colors were banished from the world of matter, replaced with the “causal powers” of physical things to produce “in the mind” the experience we call color. Thus the world was made safe for physics. But the problem of the relation of the physical world to conscious minds was unavoidable and became ever more pressing. As Newton himself drolly pointed out in a letter to Henry Oldenburg: “… to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie.” One option was simply to give up—remove the mind from the expanding scientific picture of the world, and such was the motivation for René Descartes's infamous dualism of mind and body. But this leaves us with an untidy, perhaps incoherent, and certainly disintegrated view of the world. Another approach was to question the underlying definitional move of the scientific revolution, which was to stipulate that science was to study a “purely physical” world, voided of mentality by fiat. For one can wonder whether there is such a world. This question exacts its own price, however, which is our familiar dilemma, to which many thinkers responded with an endorsement of panpsychism. [...] Perhaps the initially most obvious problem [currently] with panpsychism is simply the apparent lack of evidence that the fundamental entities of the physical world possess any mentalistic characteristics. Protons, electrons, photons (to say nothing of rocks, planets, bridges etc.) exhibit nothing justifying the ascription of psychological attributes and thus Occam's razor, if nothing else, encourages withholding any such ascriptions. Furthermore, it is argued, since we now have scientific explanations (or modes of explanation at least) which have no need to ascribe mental properties very widely (it is tempting to interject: not even to people!) panpsychism can be seen as merely a vestige of primitive pre-scientific beliefs. At one time, perhaps, panpsychism or animism may have been the conclusions of successful inferences to the best explanation, but that time has long passed. --Panpsychism; SEP
We don't 'see' color we experience color. You can experience color while reading a book or daydreaming. So, you aren't really answering your own question. I'm not sure if this adds anything, but David Hume suggested the difference between our internal experience/perception of an object (say looking at a red rose) is much more finely detailed / 'seems real' when compared to the internal experience of that same rose when we close our eyes and just imagine it, our 'impression' of the rose when we try to conjure it up in our 'mind'. That's a line of reasoning that objects exist in a real world. Through empirical observations of those objects we can determine things like wavelengths of light. And we can map the neuroanatomical pathways to the occipital lobe of the brain, but, we cannot explain the 'experience' itself. Maybe studying the claustrum will help as it seems to coordinate "consciousness"? Interestingly, some people who meditate suggest we can step back away from consciousness and observe it. I wonder if that's true?
Phenomenologically-reasonable hypothetical background: There exist different types of acceptably white light, which is to say there exist two illuminants (called in this example "the incandescent", A, and "the fluorescent", B.) such that a particular observer, C, agrees that they are perceptually indistinguishable to the point where no boundary can be seen between frosted glass squares illuminated by them even when adjacent even though spectroscopy can readily and easily distinguish between these sources just considering the spectrum related to typical human vision. Since non-fluorescent dyes differentially reflect incoming light at different wavelengths without changing the wavelength and without regard to human perception of color there is no a priori reason to believe that A and B having the same perception of color will lead to dyed material having the same perception of color when viewed under different illuminant. Question: If dyed material, D, exists such that it's perception of color is so radically different under the two illuminants as to merit different names, should D said to posses the quality of color, or just the reflected light from D under certain illumination conditions? And if just the reflected light, E, has the quality of color, then what about visual experiments which says the perception of color of a given spot of light varies depending on it's neighboring or surrounding spots of light?
rpenner, If I understand you correctly, you want to know the difference between actual color and reflected light under certain illuminated conditions? If so, I would say there is none due to the fact that light emits various colors depending on wavelength. Does that help at all?
Of course we experience color. Experience is reading itself. E.g. "I am experiencing reading Crime and Punishment" or "I am experiencing the sights and sounds of Niagra Falls." So there really is no distinction. Experience is anything that a living being does while alive (and maybe awake as well?). If you say otherwise I'd like to see an explanation for why.
A possible alternative is simply to identify each of the familiar external, commonsense colors with whatever “power within external objects” it is that tends to produce the relevant internal sensation. More specifically, we might try to identify each external color with a specific electromagnetic reflectance profile had by any object that displays that color. The objective reality of colors would then emerge as no more problematic than is the objective reality of the temperature of a gas (which is identical to the mean kinetic energy of its molecules), or of the pitch of a sound (which is identical to the dominant oscillatory frequency of an atmospheric compression wave), or of the sourness of a spoonful of lemon juice (which is identical with the relative concentration of hydrogen ions in that liquid). http://aris.ss.uci.edu/~kjameson/Churchland.pdf
CC: Reality itself is manifest and does not require the brain as it is independent. Or do you believe it does require the brain (which appears to be a flaw in the above line of reasoning you quoted from)?
Schrodinger's quote provided a direct-to-the point example of how the cosmos is "invisible", in mainstream materialism, until consciousness evolves / emerges. Its physical existence precedes its manifestation (as meaningful visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc phenomena). There's not even the disorganized, random qualitative events or the universal-wide "noise / static" suggested in more humble versions of panexperientialism. Nothing too unusual about this, since other metaphysical doctrines have sported their version of "real existence" being non-exhibited as well. The original idealism or platonic dichotomy of a sensible world/side (appearances) and an intellectual one (forms, noumena, etc) had the latter being unshown as well. Or lacking the phenomenal / spatiotemporal / becoming character of the former, which was deemed illusory and inferior.
