5 ms·
"That other animals have more cone cells than humans, e.g. birds with four and shrimp with up to 16, and so probably see colors we can’t even conceive of which,
by bluishgreen 5y ago
"That other animals have more cone cells than humans, e.g. birds with four and shrimp with up to 16, and so probably see colors we can’t even conceive of which, yeah, that limitation of our minds is frustrating, but it also hints that there are huge unseen dark continents of qualia lurking out there which someday we might find a way to visit."
This is based on a misunderstanding regarding the rise of qualia. It is processing power and not sensor capacity or at least both together in some combination with processing power doing the heavy lift. Humans have less cones but several OOM more neurons to make sense of what we have. So no - the shrimp doesn't see in spectacular color.
Experimentally proved:
https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2015/12/mantis-shrimp-myth-about-vision-debunked https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2015/12/mantis-shrimp-...
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1245824 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1245824
- ravi-delia 5y agoIt's still true that if we had cones outside our current color range we'd have new qualia, even if animals don't.
- 323 5y agoIn 100 years it will probably be possible to genetically engineer humans with more or extended range pigments, which are sensitive to IR / UV. Or maybe we'll just have bionic hyper-spectral eyes which plug directly into the optical nerve.
- lovecg 5y ago…and sadly those humans still won’t be able to describe their experiences in any way we would understand. “It’s just its own color that’s separate from all the others. You know, the color the black lights are”.
- hardlianotion 5y agoWould we? It seems possible that some other sensation could be overloaded as well - ie seeing red where others see only blackness...
- ravi-delia 5y agoI mean, it seems clear we don't have any real consistent definition for qualia. I'd argue that every distinct color you can see is a different qualia, although an argument could be made for a single "color" qualia which takes on different forms.
- hardlianotion 5y agofair enough. But qualia is the feeling that you get. So presumably, if you were to see "extended red", it would not seem to you - unless you consulted your less fortunate fellow-beings, that there was anything special about this red ...