From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2005 - 16:06:35 MST
At 03:59 PM 1/22/2005 -0500, Patrick Crenshaw wrote:
>If we mix red paint with blue paint we get purple paint. Which we
>percieve as having a color very similar to violet. If we look at the
>spectrum of purple paint and the sensitivity of the human eye, we see
>why it looks like violet. This would be the empiricist point of view,
>but what would the subjectivist point of view be about purple?
The rules that underwrite the visual constancies seem much closer to the
subjective than to the objective, and yet... A famous illusion (which
Eliezer has url'd previously) shows a partially shadowed chessboard; we
*see* a certain square as white and another as black, yet objectively they
are precisely the same. Context and pre-conscious interpretation force us
to see the color fields as contrasting; it is actually impossible to
override this by thinking about it, making this subjective error or trick
an objective fact. Antinomy.
Damien Broderick
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