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> I can't show you "green" unless I show you a green thing. Adjectives have to be bound to nouns to be exhibited, but that doesn't mean that "green" does not e

> I can't show you "green" unless I show you a green thing. Adjectives have to be bound to nouns to be exhibited, but that doesn't mean that "green" does not exist in objective reality. It does, it's just not a thing. I disagree. Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination. It has some shared properties (e.g. humans can perceive green better than red or blue) but to say it "exists in objective reality" implies that it’s not subjective. But it is; there’s no way to know whether how I see green is how green looks to you. All that we can say is that we can distinguish green from other colors at similar rates. I don’t think this is a small quibble. It’s the fundamental problem of trying to pin down philosophy too precisely. https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html > "Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers," Rod Brooks wrote, "programs written for them usually did not work." [6] Something similar happened when people first started trying to talk about abstractions. Much to their surprise, they didn't arrive at answers they agreed upon. In fact, they rarely seemed to arrive at answers at all. > They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at too low a resolution. > The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward. Knowing we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.

drewcoo 2y ago
>> I can't show you "green" unless I show you a green thing. > Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination All words are made up, so in that sense "figments of imagination." Green is a shared concept. Like cold. Or love. Or justice. And to address the author, just like those other non-concrete things, green is literally a noun.
- sillysaurusx 2y ago
  The trouble with those concepts is that there’s no way to measure them precisely. This tends to be at odds with the scientific method, though people try to sidestep them. E.g. the noun definition of green is > a color intermediate in the spectrum between yellow and blue, an effect of light with a wavelength between 500 and 570 nanometers; found in nature as the color of most grasses and leaves while growing, of some fruits while ripening, and of the sea. This is different than saying that quarks exist, and that protons are formed from two up quarks and one down quark. These are truths of nature, whereas your examples are of human nature. It’s hard to even say whether a statement about them is true or not, let alone that those things exist.
- ysofunny 2y ago
  this is my way out of the "what is truth?" questioning "the truth" is conceptually an adjective. to treat it as a noun is to get into philosophically tight spaces.
- lisper 2y ago
  > green is literally a noun Well, it can be, if you say something like, "I ate some greens." But most of the time it's an adjective, as in, "The pine trees were tall and green."
  - cgriswald 2y ago
    “Green” is the noun that describes the property being referenced by the adjective.
    - lisper 2y ago
      Do you think "big" is a noun? Can you show me a big? Two bigs?
      - cgriswald 2y ago
        No, I know green is a noun and I can show you two greens.
        lisper 2y ago
        Would you please? Because I cannot imagine how you would do it. I can imagine how you could show me two green things, just as I can imagine how you could show me two big things, but I cannot imagine how you could show me two greens but not two bigs. Please enlighten me.
        cgriswald 2y ago
        Yes, I need a green thing to show you a green. But you are looking at a green when you view the green thing. I can show you “big” but cannot show you two bigs because big is a comparison of the size of two things. Size is a property of a thing (and yes, I can show you two sizes).
        lisper 2y ago
        > you are looking at a green when you view the green thing Am I looking at a big when I look at a big thing? Are you a native English speaker?
NikolaNovak 2y ago
It's semantics and definitions all the way down. "Green" as in Plato's form, an external perfect entity surpassing out physical word, probably doesn't exist. "Green" as in a specific frequency of electromagnetic spectrum we choose to label thusly, exists
- ysofunny 2y ago
  > It's semantics and definitions all the way down. all the way out to measurement i.e. measured data i.e. inputs.
glenstein 2y ago
And to your point, we can even say we do know for certain that some people have different color experience than us, given that there are colorblind individuals. I wouldn't say we can't ever know how someone elses' green looks to us, I think that's an empirical question that's tied up in structure and function of consciousness, where better theories or advances brain to machine (or, who knows, brain to brain) interfaces may produce inroads. >but to say it "exists in objective reality" implies that it’s not subjective. Props to you for your careful phrasing here, as you've phrased this in a way that accounts for things being both in objective reality but also nevertheless subjective. I think that's very important, but I think it has a slightly different upshot. That it's subjective means it's not necessarily a property out there in the world since it's tied to our subjectivity, but the flip side is, subjectivity itself is built out of the same stuff that builds the objective world and the greenness of subjectivity, so it could be objectively in there, so to speak. (E.g. specific color experiences might consistently show up the same way in brains, or we can come up with robust definitions that tie color to something objective that's in the spirit of normal usage of color terms even while accounting for individual variation). I would just say it's something contingent on better future understanding and we have to be careful about declarations that imply some kind of ultimate unknowability-in-principle.
- lisper 2y ago
  You and the GP have both missed the point. The reason green is part of objective reality has nothing to do with human's subjective experience (except insofar as it leads us to attach a label to this particular phenomenon). I can predict with very high accuracy what things other humans will identify as "green", and I can even build a machine that will do this as well. That fact is hard to account for if "Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination." It isn't. Green screens would still work and green detectors would still work even if there were no humans. The green-ness of green things isn't contingent on human perception any more than the roundness of round things is.
  - rolisz 2y ago
    I don't think you can build a machine to identify what is considered green. My wife and I disagree about whether our baby daughters eyes are green or not. There's the joke that men see 16 colors and women see 24 million. Some cultures don't even have the word for green so people there will say something green and something blue is the same color. If you mean wavelength, that's a different story. But colors are not wavelengths
zero-sharp 2y ago
>But it is; there’s no way to know whether how I see green is how green looks to you. The consciousness conversation comes up pretty often here. I kinda disagree with the idea that there's no way to communicate experience directly. Yea, at present there is no way to know that we have the same experience of green. But imagine in the future we were able to analyze/probe the computation of the brain and had more advanced biological engineering. Would we still not be able to determine experimentally what constitutes the sensation of green (and, as a result, be able to manipulate it)? Why not? It seems more like a practical/current problem rather than a theoretical one.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I think it is a claim, not an argument, really (one I do happen to agree with); essentially that if we had good enough neuroscience we could find the sensation of green in the cells, signals, or whatever. There’s something in those cells and signals that is having the first-person perspective of being me, which is experiencing the sensation of green. I believe that the matter is all there is, so it must be in there somewhere. But for example if it is in the carbon, I wonder why we haven’t found it when we look very hard at pencil lead? I mean, that’s getting way ahead of ourselves, we don’t really know how to characterize it at all other than by this one very odd thing that it seems to do.
lisper 2y ago
> Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination. How do you account for this then? https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-green-screen-video/ https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-green-screen-vid... How do you account for the fact that I can predict with overwhelming accuracy what things other people will identify as "green", and that I can even build a machine that will do the same thing?

drewcoo 2y ago

>> I can't show you "green" unless I show you a green thing. > Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination All words are made up, so in that sense "figments of imagination." Green is a shared concept. Like cold. Or love. Or justice. And to address the author, just like those other non-concrete things, green is literally a noun.

sillysaurusx 2y ago
The trouble with those concepts is that there’s no way to measure them precisely. This tends to be at odds with the scientific method, though people try to sidestep them. E.g. the noun definition of green is > a color intermediate in the spectrum between yellow and blue, an effect of light with a wavelength between 500 and 570 nanometers; found in nature as the color of most grasses and leaves while growing, of some fruits while ripening, and of the sea. This is different than saying that quarks exist, and that protons are formed from two up quarks and one down quark. These are truths of nature, whereas your examples are of human nature. It’s hard to even say whether a statement about them is true or not, let alone that those things exist.
ysofunny 2y ago
this is my way out of the "what is truth?" questioning "the truth" is conceptually an adjective. to treat it as a noun is to get into philosophically tight spaces.
lisper 2y ago
> green is literally a noun Well, it can be, if you say something like, "I ate some greens." But most of the time it's an adjective, as in, "The pine trees were tall and green."
- cgriswald 2y ago
  “Green” is the noun that describes the property being referenced by the adjective.
  - lisper 2y ago
    Do you think "big" is a noun? Can you show me a big? Two bigs?
    - cgriswald 2y ago
      No, I know green is a noun and I can show you two greens.
      - lisper 2y ago
        Would you please? Because I cannot imagine how you would do it. I can imagine how you could show me two green things, just as I can imagine how you could show me two big things, but I cannot imagine how you could show me two greens but not two bigs. Please enlighten me.
        cgriswald 2y ago
        Yes, I need a green thing to show you a green. But you are looking at a green when you view the green thing. I can show you “big” but cannot show you two bigs because big is a comparison of the size of two things. Size is a property of a thing (and yes, I can show you two sizes).
        lisper 2y ago
        > you are looking at a green when you view the green thing Am I looking at a big when I look at a big thing? Are you a native English speaker?

NikolaNovak 2y ago

It's semantics and definitions all the way down. "Green" as in Plato's form, an external perfect entity surpassing out physical word, probably doesn't exist. "Green" as in a specific frequency of electromagnetic spectrum we choose to label thusly, exists

ysofunny 2y ago
> It's semantics and definitions all the way down. all the way out to measurement i.e. measured data i.e. inputs.

glenstein 2y ago

And to your point, we can even say we do know for certain that some people have different color experience than us, given that there are colorblind individuals. I wouldn't say we can't ever know how someone elses' green looks to us, I think that's an empirical question that's tied up in structure and function of consciousness, where better theories or advances brain to machine (or, who knows, brain to brain) interfaces may produce inroads. >but to say it "exists in objective reality" implies that it’s not subjective. Props to you for your careful phrasing here, as you've phrased this in a way that accounts for things being both in objective reality but also nevertheless subjective. I think that's very important, but I think it has a slightly different upshot. That it's subjective means it's not necessarily a property out there in the world since it's tied to our subjectivity, but the flip side is, subjectivity itself is built out of the same stuff that builds the objective world and the greenness of subjectivity, so it could be objectively in there, so to speak. (E.g. specific color experiences might consistently show up the same way in brains, or we can come up with robust definitions that tie color to something objective that's in the spirit of normal usage of color terms even while accounting for individual variation). I would just say it's something contingent on better future understanding and we have to be careful about declarations that imply some kind of ultimate unknowability-in-principle.

lisper 2y ago
You and the GP have both missed the point. The reason green is part of objective reality has nothing to do with human's subjective experience (except insofar as it leads us to attach a label to this particular phenomenon). I can predict with very high accuracy what things other humans will identify as "green", and I can even build a machine that will do this as well. That fact is hard to account for if "Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination." It isn't. Green screens would still work and green detectors would still work even if there were no humans. The green-ness of green things isn't contingent on human perception any more than the roundness of round things is.
- rolisz 2y ago
  I don't think you can build a machine to identify what is considered green. My wife and I disagree about whether our baby daughters eyes are green or not. There's the joke that men see 16 colors and women see 24 million. Some cultures don't even have the word for green so people there will say something green and something blue is the same color. If you mean wavelength, that's a different story. But colors are not wavelengths

zero-sharp 2y ago

>But it is; there’s no way to know whether how I see green is how green looks to you. The consciousness conversation comes up pretty often here. I kinda disagree with the idea that there's no way to communicate experience directly. Yea, at present there is no way to know that we have the same experience of green. But imagine in the future we were able to analyze/probe the computation of the brain and had more advanced biological engineering. Would we still not be able to determine experimentally what constitutes the sensation of green (and, as a result, be able to manipulate it)? Why not? It seems more like a practical/current problem rather than a theoretical one.

bee_rider 2y ago
I think it is a claim, not an argument, really (one I do happen to agree with); essentially that if we had good enough neuroscience we could find the sensation of green in the cells, signals, or whatever. There’s something in those cells and signals that is having the first-person perspective of being me, which is experiencing the sensation of green. I believe that the matter is all there is, so it must be in there somewhere. But for example if it is in the carbon, I wonder why we haven’t found it when we look very hard at pencil lead? I mean, that’s getting way ahead of ourselves, we don’t really know how to characterize it at all other than by this one very odd thing that it seems to do.

lisper 2y ago

> Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination. How do you account for this then? https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-green-screen-video/ https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-green-screen-vid... How do you account for the fact that I can predict with overwhelming accuracy what things other people will identify as "green", and that I can even build a machine that will do the same thing?