Comments | alex_antonin: The grey world and your grey matter.

alex_antonin

The grey world and your grey matter.

Sep 28, 2012 16:19

I was thinking today about the scientific model of the universe that physics has given us. Most people don't realize the full implications of the model or, really, even half the implications of the model. Those few who realize half the implications of the scientific model realize this much: that the "objective real world" seems to be this colorless ( Read more... )

thought of the day, philosophy

Comments 5

Alex: The grey world and your grey matter livejournal September 29 2012, 00:34:20 UTC

User fayanora referenced to your post from Alex: The grey world and your grey matter saying: [...] This is a pretty awesome post. The human brain is fucking amazing! [...]

kinkypriest September 29 2012, 04:42:48 UTC

That is a pretty damned awesome perspective. Bravo!

alex_antonin September 29 2012, 08:08:08 UTC

Thanks! I've been reading a lot of Robert Anton Wilson lately, which is where I've gotten most of it; Wilson wrote a lot about how the "real" world "is" grey and how the brain hallucinates most things, among many other things he writes about. Though what inspired this particular post was the realization that if colors don't exist in the "real" world, the fact we can see something that has no reality outside our brains is just mind boggling. I don't even know if my post quite did justice to the jaw-dropping power of that realization when it hit me. I was walking around the room planning out this post aloud for about an hour before I could calm down enough to actually write it out.

kelly_holden October 2 2012, 01:27:59 UTC

Colour does correspond to a physical property of matter: the wavelengths of visible light that reflect from an object's surface. Admittedly, this is not a very important property, and things can 'look' very different under other ranges of light, but it's not exactly imaginary.

alex_antonin October 5 2012, 00:02:00 UTC

You don't Get It. Yes, the brain can tell colors apart by their wavelength and stuff, I said as much in the post above. The point you're not Grokking is that even though the brain can tell colors apart, what colors look like has no inherent reality; the appearance of the color is the brain arbitrarily giving that color an appearance. We have no way of knowing if purple looks the same to everyone else; we can all identify it (unless we're colorblind), and describe it in relation to other colors, but how do we really know that purple looks the same to everyone? For all I know, your purple could be my green or my red ( ... )