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[slstr]

If someone is born blind, and you tell that person about a color, say, red, what does he think of????

The rest of the videos on his channel are really interesting too.

 

[zapatiste]

that's pretty interesting to hear, color is illusory in any case -- just what the brain processes as it's exposed to photons of different wavelengths.

however "false" color may be, i thought this should fit in nicely given how beautiful it is. sorry for re-post but it may be deserving to revisit this colorful imagery!

stunning cinematography, the landscape shots are breathtaking and the dizzying heights leave you with a sense of anxiety. a powerful feudal lord divides his empire among his heirs, madness ensues...

Akira Kurosawa's Ran [1985]

 

[pickpackpockpuck]



that's pretty interesting to hear, color is illusory in any case -- just what the brain processes as it's exposed to photons of different wavelengths.

Three Laws of Qualia
by V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein

http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/espiritualismo/Biological functions of consciousness,Qualia.pdf

"...We also suggest that the apparent epistemic barrier to knowing what qualia another person is
experiencing can be overcome simply by using a ‘bridge’ of neurons..."

 

[zapatiste]

i was meaning to read this but forgot about it , thanks for the reminder !

but what i just skimmed over doesn't get to the root of the question i brought up above, the superscientist in the thought experiment still uses neural processing of photons of particular frequencies, he just uses someone else's V4 area of the brain. it still remains just some wavelength that is interpreted by an intermediary !

 

[pickpackpockpuck]



i was meaning to read this but forgot about it , thanks for the reminder !

but what i just skimmed over doesn't get to the root of the question i brought up above, the superscientist in the thought experiment still uses neural processing of photons of particular frequencies, he just uses someone else's V4 area of the brain. it still remains just some wavelength that is interpreted by an intermediary !

not sure what you mean. you want a method of experiencing something without neural processing? or maybe I'm not understanding what the intermediary is that you're talking about.

The paper starts from this premise: "In part, our argument is that the self is indeed something that arises from brain activity of a certain kind and in certain brain areas, and that this activity is also closely tied to functions related to qualia." If you're talking about the homunculus in the Cartesian Theatre idea, they do deal with that (Ramachandran is always very aware of this pitfall in everything I've read of his). That's basically the point of the quote: there's no separate "self" inside your head that has to interpret the photons as red. (Because then that "self" in your head would need it's own mini brain to do the interpreting, and so on in infinite regress until your head is a never-ending matryoshka doll.) The "self" basically emerges from a collection of neural processes, including the process that "experiences" red.

If what you're really after is just knowing what a blind person thinks of as "red," then that's easy. Just ask a blind person!

 

[zapatiste]

this is getting way too nerdy but anyway

no there were 2 issues :

1) imaging a photon, the same way one can image atoms, here using scanning electron microscopy. this uses a narrow beam of electrons with high energies (on order of 10 keV) that results in scattering blahblahblah

basically you can image using anything, electrons, light, toasters, just need to reconstruct an image based on how the beam of whatever you're firing is scattered which tells you about interactions with your sample.

i was trying to think of how you can image a photon. obviously when we see light we're absorbing it and creating an electric potential, CNS, etc etc that's not important.
how can you image a photon without destroying it ? i have no idea but the best i can do is imagine a dot:

. <-- a photon

2) the color of light, which is nothing more than a consequence of our evolutionary adaptation to being able to different between, say, lions and baboons vs trees and berries in the african savanah back in the day. (ok ok eyes, vision, light detection, came much before but it's a more functional analogy, and also one that can help explain why quantum physics isn't as intuitive as classical, because if we were treating the lion as being in a superposition of states one of which is digesting us, that wouldn't do too well for escaping and proliferating!). so we see electromagnetic radiation, or a small fraction of the spectrum, as certain colors because of a wiring in the brain to process it as such. and so the blind superscientist uses the brain of another person to experience colors despite never having done so on his own before. but this is still using a brain, never mind whose. so what is a color in the reality that exists outside our perception through the brain ? no clue. probably just bunch of vibrational energy .... ???

edit: Schrödinger posited, "The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so."

 

[pickpackpockpuck]



this is getting way too nerdy but anyway

no there were 2 issues :

1) imaging a photon

2) so what is a color in the reality that exists outside our perception through the brain ? no clue. probably just bunch of vibrational energy .... ???

edit: after rereading 1) still no idea because i don't know squat about the physics involved, 2) ramachandran's neuron bridge does solve the problem, but yes, you do need a brain. i don't think that's an issue since that's specifically what we're talking about: how the brain perceives a color. can't have a brain perceiving without a brain to perceive...

 

[Lionheart Biker]

hey shah, you know where I can download "ran" with subtitles? found it on youtube but with the youtube subs and they obviously weren´t downloaded with the movie..

 

[sipang]

There's a great film-essay by Chris Marker on the filming of Ran / Akira Kurosawa


[VIDEO][/VIDEO]

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

[VIDEO][/VIDEO]


[VIDEO][/VIDEO]


[VIDEO][/VIDEO]


[VIDEO][/VIDEO]


[VIDEO]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viLYkhRfpMg[/VIDEO]

 

[slstr]

Shah, a photon is a massless particle, so it would be nigh on impossible to keep it still enough to ever image it in the way you're thinking. I'm not an expert by any means, but as far as I know it's also a force-carrying particle (gauge boson), not a matter particle, meaning it has no size or physical presence whatsoever, it's only a force.

 

[hoodyear]

hey shah, you know where I can download "ran" with subtitles? found it on youtube but with the youtube subs and they obviously weren´t downloaded with the movie..

Torrent's your best (free) option. Otherwise it's on Amazon instant.


The use of color in Kagemusha is equally compelling I think:











Kurosawa's transition to color is fascinating to follow.

 

[zapatiste]



hey shah, you know where I can download "ran" with subtitles? found it on youtube but with the youtube subs and they obviously weren´t downloaded with the movie..

This is not an endorsement of piracy, but you may find better luck searching

Ran (1985, Akira Kurosawa) x264 AAC multisubs

Shah, a photon is a massless particle, so it would be nigh on impossible to keep it still enough to ever image it in the way you're thinking. I'm not an expert by any means, but as far as I know it's also a force-carrying particle (gauge boson), not a matter particle, meaning it has no size or physical presence whatsoever, it's only a force.

yeah i was considering this. assuming we can even know its position, this would tell us nothing about the direction it's moving. there was a group in Israel that recently put out a paper describing a technique to measure (weak measurement, the termed it) the wave function of a system without collapsing it. The abstract was insane and I didn't go through the experimental setup carefully enough to say anything more, but it gave me hope !

i think in one sense the photon does have a physical presence. if you pass light through a medium, say glass, the reason it appears to slow down is due to the lightwave causing the electrons in the medium to vibrate which in turn create a phase shift in the lightwave, and the wave has to recompose before exiting so there's an apparent delay but it's just due to phase shifting not a decrease in c. but the photons never hit the electrons (or atoms) , just pass close enough to cause this -- else they'd be absorbed and destroyed.

The use of color in Kagemusha is equally compelling I think

beautiful, will check it out it's already on my drive queued up and i didn't even realize , thanks for the reminder

 

[el Bert]

Have you ever taken a conceptual physics coarse because color was described much differently that what you said shah.

Think of it this way everything has the ability to absorb light and reflect light which we in return we consider color. It's what you said is perception which in some way is but it isn't because there are colors that are both real and not real that we make through pigments to fool out brain that they are there.

Here's an article that kinda describes colors through light and colors through pigments that describes how pink isn't a real color even though its found in nature....but it's a perceptual thing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...nk-doesnt-exist-just-pigment-imagination.html

 

[ibringdoom98]

These are related to visualizing photons in slow-mo:

 

[MS007]



how can you image a photon without destroying it ?

Thats what last years Nobel prize was for.