[Avodah] leap of faith

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Mon, May 04, 2015 at 10:50:54PM +0300, Eli Turkel via Avodah wrote:
: A more practical problem based on personal experience is that of defining
: colors (to a human not in terms of wavelengths). There is no way for 2
: people to confirm they are seeing the same colors.

Even further: there is no wavelength corrsponding to pink or brown,
they only exist as our mind combines wavelengths. Pink is weirder,
because it resides on the color wheel where you would glue the two
extremes of the spectrum together to close the circle.

Colors other than the three in the middle of the sensitivity range of
each of the types of cone in your eye can be seen two ways. For example:
you could make orange by mixing two parts red with one part green,
or by looking at light of one color, that is at the right frequency to
trigger your red cones twice as much as they trigger the green.

The topic we're discussing is qualia, and color is a favorite sort of
quale to use for illustration (pun intended). A quale is the "what
it's like to see red".

In my example about orange, we have two different physics, but both
could end up producing the same experience, the same exact shade
and brightness of orange. So orange is not 1:1 any specific
wavelength.

Asude from the question RET raises, a popular thought experiment
among philosophers is Mary the Color Scientist (Frank Jackson 1982):

     Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced
     to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and
     white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of
     vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information
     there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes,
     or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. She
     discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from
     the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via
     the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords
     and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering
     of the sentence 'The sky is blue'.... What will happen when Mary is
     released from her black and white room or is given a color television
     monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that
     she will learn something about the world and our visual experience
     of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was
     incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there
     is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

And so Jackson concludes that the world can't be reduced to physics.

This is also what I was talking about when I referred to justifying a
belief based on comparing imagination to memory. Koach hadimyon does
mean "imagination", but what Ariso meant by Imagination, or the rishonim
by dimyon, includes qualia in general. The image of red while you're
seeing it, not just when you're dreaming it up.

And I would argue that even when we make rigorous logical proofs, those
proofs are conclusions drawn from a set of givens, and those givens end
up resting on koach hadimyon anyway. The formally proven theological
statement is therefore less conclusive than one based on an appeal
to dimyon directly, such as R' Aqiva's argument.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Today is the 30th day, which is
micha at aishdas.org        4 weeks and 2 days in/toward the omer.
http://www.aishdas.org   Gevurah sheb'Hod: When does capitulation
Fax: (270) 514-1507                  result in holding back from others?