[MD] The Science of Red

[MarshaV]

Krimel,

No, it doesn't explain the experience of 
red.  But this was the easier of the two 
questions.  The talk was of mystical 
experiences.  I was not asking about the 
concepts/context either religions or science use 
to describe the experience.  I was asking about the actual experience.

Dmb's post on Jill Bolte-Taylor does get to the 
issue.  Sorry I didn't make myself clear.


Marsha




At 03:03 PM 2/3/2009, you wrote:
>Marsha HOW does science deal with experiencing 
>the color red?  Does science produce certainty 
>or meaning about experiencing the color red? 
>[Krimel] By the 1870's a lot of people were 
>asking similar questions in a variety of ways. 
>Descartes, the British Empiricists, Kant, Hegel 
>and Nietzsche had all had their say. The gross 
>anatomy of the brain had been established and 
>the major pathways of sensation (input) and 
>motor function (output) were known. The effects 
>of various kinds of damage to almost all of the 
>nervous system had been demonstrated in humans 
>and in animals. Camilio Golgi had developed 
>staining methods that were giving researchers 
>their first glimpses of the details of 
>intercellular structure. These two different 
>approaches; the phenomenological analysis of 
>experience and the study of physiology; both 
>aimed at understanding what makes us tick. While 
>there was no doubt some overlap and synthesis 
>these approaches were heading in different 
>directions. In 1874 Wilhelm Wundt wrote the 
>first text book on psychology, "Principles of 
>Physiological Psychology." In the first 
>paragraph he says this: "The title of the 
>present work is in itself a sufficiently clear 
>indication of the contents. In it, the attempt 
>is made to show the connexion between two 
>sciences whose subject−matters are closely 
>interrelated, but which have, for the most part, 
>followed wholly divergent paths. Physiology and 
>psychology cover, between them, the field of 
>vital phenomena; they deal with the facts of 
>life at large, and in particular with the facts 
>of human life. Physiology is concerned with all 
>those phenomena of life that present themselves 
>to us in sense perception as bodily processes, 
>and accordingly form part of that total 
>environment which we name the external world. 
>Psychology, on the other hand, seeks to give 
>account of the interconnexion of processes which 
>are evinced by our own consciousness, or which 
>we infer from such manifestations of the bodily 
>life in other creatures as indicate the presence 
>of a consciousness similar to our own." He 
>claimed the neither path was alone sufficient. 
>It only made sense to focus on the areas of 
>overlap. Did physiology produce phenomenology? 
>Or was physiology only a artifact of some kind 
>of higher order relationships? How could you 
>tell the difference? In 1890 William James 
>published his massive 1400 page, "The Principles 
>of Psychology." In the introduction he says 
>this: "But the slightest reflection shows that 
>phenomena have absolutely no power to influence 
>our ideas until they have first impressed our 
>senses and our brain. The bare existence of a 
>past fact is no ground for our remembering it. 
>Unless we have seen it, or somehow undergone it, 
>we shall never know of its having been. The 
>experiences of the body are thus one of the 
>conditions of the faculty of memory being what 
>it is. And a very small amount of reflection on 
>facts shows that one part of the body, namely, 
>the brain, is the part whose experiences are 
>directly concerned." In 1879 Wundt opened the 
>first laboratory for the scientific study of 
>psychology. He began following the path of 
>Gustav Fechtner who had begun the study of what 
>he called psychophysics. The concern was to 
>establish what could be known about things like: 
>"what IS the experience of red?" They looked at 
>things like how much light must be present for 
>you to see it? How much brighter does it have to 
>get for you to notice? Which wavelengths of 
>light can we see? What names do we ascribe to 
>which bands of color? How blue does red have to 
>be before you call it purple? The questions and 
>hypotheses multiply like bunny's. Pirsig's Law 
>holds that "The number of rational hypotheses 
>that can explain any given phenomenon is 
>infinite." People began asking all kinds of red 
>related questions. Do people act differently in 
>a red room than a blue one? Do more people like 
>red than green? Would people be more likely to 
>buy chocolate wrapped in dark red or pink? We 
>learned that as people age, changes in the lens 
>of the eye shift our sensitivity to different 
>shades of color. These shifts happen gradually 
>and we can't even tell. People had noticed that 
>the French painter Claude Monet's included more 
>and more red as he grew older. At age 82 he had 
>cataract surgery to save his failing vision. 
>When his first eye recovered he noticed a huge 
>change in the color. He painted the same scene 
>with first one eye and then the other shut and 
>there was a big difference in the shades he 
>used. He looked back at all of the red in his 
>work and wanted to repaint or discard some of 
>it. Does any of that help produce certainty or 
>meaning about experiencing the color red? I 
>think it does but I guess it depends on how you 
>would like the experience of the color of red to 
>be dealt with. Moq_Discuss mailing list 
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