5 ms·

Agreed. It's simply philosophically sloppy to suggest that purple, brown, and really any other colour don't exist without qualifying what one means by existing

Agreed. It's simply philosophically sloppy to suggest that purple, brown, and really any other colour don't exist without qualifying what one means by existing in this context, and why that definition of the word is used. In this case, it seems the "what" is that for a colour to "exist", it has to be a distinct, isolated frequency of light, and (for some reason) it needs to appear in a logical place in the frequency space in relation to other colours. They don't answer the "why" question, and I think if they tried, they would find it difficult, because it's completely arbitrary and in conflict with reality. Just because some colours do in fact correspond to frequencies of light, that doesn't mean all colours have to. There's a reason we have the terms primary and secondary colour. Some colours are emergent from mixing other colours together. Does that mean they can't appear in the natural world, being discriminated by sensory systems? No. Does purple cause things to happen? I'm sure you could find myriad examples of this in the natural world. Ironically, the only thing here that only exists in our brains, is the notion that purple doesn't exist.

VectorLock 2y ago
>I'm sure you could find myriad examples of this in the natural world. Can you think of any?
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  yaky (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584334) gave a great example of hummingbirds liking purple.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
  Even better, I can tell you one I experienced literally today. I was at a barbeque, and the people hosting put out one bowl of diced red onion, which despite the name was purple, as it tends to be, and a bowl of crispy fried onion, which was brown. I reached for the fried onion, and avoided the red(purple) onion, because I always hated red onion. Now, if you want to be annoying, you could make all sorts of red(heh) herring arguments about the cause of me avoiding the red onions being their flavour and aroma in the past having caused me not to like onions, and that's all true. But effects can have multiple causes, and it's also true that the distribution of pigments in the onion leading to an emergent property we dub "purple" did in fact convey information to me that caused me to decide not to eat them. I didn't smell them or taste them. Information was transmitted from onion to mind, via the electromagnetic field. Clearly the emergent property of purple colour has a causal effect here. As for other examples in the natural world of non-human plants an animals, I don't know, but feel free to use a search engine. But since the colour purple is found in all sorts of life forms(including humans, and all sorts of life forms(including) are able to perceive and discriminate it from other colours, it's fair to assume that the colour purple is out there having all sorts of causal effects.
  - Jamesbeam 2y ago
    The purple you saw in those onions is literally a neurological glitch. Your brain inventing a color that doesn’t exist in the spectrum. When red (long) and blue (short) wavelengths hit without green (mid), your visual cortex makes up purple as a placeholder. Your avoidance wasn’t caused by the color itself (a mental construct), but by the brain using this imaginary hue as a proxy for past onion trauma. This mirrors how we treat UI error messages. A "404" doesn’t cause missing data, it’s just the system’s way of flagging underlying issues. The real causal chain was anthocyanins → wavelength reflection → neural pattern-matching → memory recall. Purple was the middleware, not the root process. Fun twist. Those fried onions’ brown does have causal ties to flavor. Maillard reaction products directly interact with taste receptors. The universe trolls us with color semantics, but chemistry always wins.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
      It might not exist in the spectrum, does that mean it doesn't exist? You're arguing and conflating two different things here. On the one hand, you're implicitly arguing that a colour can't exist unless it corresponds to a singular frequency of light, which I've already argued against. This is no more meaningful than arguing that tables and chairs are mental constructs because it's all quarks and electrons at the end of the day. Emergent properties exist and can have causal effects, most philosophers and scientists are in agreement about this. The other is that a qualia or the mental experience of seeing purple is the same thing as perceiving purple as distinct from other colours in a physical object. I'm not talking about the qualia. In fact, I hate the concept of qualia, because whenever it's introduced into philosophical discussions, the discussion devolves into epicycles of meaningsless discussion of definitions and nomenclature and ends up going nowhere. No, the purple was there. You say all that was there was some chemicals that only reflects certain wavelengths. I say this is what defines the emergent physical property we call the colour purple. You say electrons and quarks, I say tables and chairs. Both are accurate, and certainly not in conflict. You might say, so how is this distinct from qualia? Well, for the qualia of seeing purple, there is no way even in principle to decide whether my qualia is the same as your qualia. But I can still look at a red onion and tell you it's purple, and you likely would agree unless you're colour blind. So this property of purple is, unlike a qualia, objective, not subjective.

VectorLock 2y ago

>I'm sure you could find myriad examples of this in the natural world. Can you think of any?

bryanlarsen 2y ago
yaky (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584334) gave a great example of hummingbirds liking purple.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
Even better, I can tell you one I experienced literally today. I was at a barbeque, and the people hosting put out one bowl of diced red onion, which despite the name was purple, as it tends to be, and a bowl of crispy fried onion, which was brown. I reached for the fried onion, and avoided the red(purple) onion, because I always hated red onion. Now, if you want to be annoying, you could make all sorts of red(heh) herring arguments about the cause of me avoiding the red onions being their flavour and aroma in the past having caused me not to like onions, and that's all true. But effects can have multiple causes, and it's also true that the distribution of pigments in the onion leading to an emergent property we dub "purple" did in fact convey information to me that caused me to decide not to eat them. I didn't smell them or taste them. Information was transmitted from onion to mind, via the electromagnetic field. Clearly the emergent property of purple colour has a causal effect here. As for other examples in the natural world of non-human plants an animals, I don't know, but feel free to use a search engine. But since the colour purple is found in all sorts of life forms(including humans, and all sorts of life forms(including) are able to perceive and discriminate it from other colours, it's fair to assume that the colour purple is out there having all sorts of causal effects.
- Jamesbeam 2y ago
  The purple you saw in those onions is literally a neurological glitch. Your brain inventing a color that doesn’t exist in the spectrum. When red (long) and blue (short) wavelengths hit without green (mid), your visual cortex makes up purple as a placeholder. Your avoidance wasn’t caused by the color itself (a mental construct), but by the brain using this imaginary hue as a proxy for past onion trauma. This mirrors how we treat UI error messages. A "404" doesn’t cause missing data, it’s just the system’s way of flagging underlying issues. The real causal chain was anthocyanins → wavelength reflection → neural pattern-matching → memory recall. Purple was the middleware, not the root process. Fun twist. Those fried onions’ brown does have causal ties to flavor. Maillard reaction products directly interact with taste receptors. The universe trolls us with color semantics, but chemistry always wins.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
    It might not exist in the spectrum, does that mean it doesn't exist? You're arguing and conflating two different things here. On the one hand, you're implicitly arguing that a colour can't exist unless it corresponds to a singular frequency of light, which I've already argued against. This is no more meaningful than arguing that tables and chairs are mental constructs because it's all quarks and electrons at the end of the day. Emergent properties exist and can have causal effects, most philosophers and scientists are in agreement about this. The other is that a qualia or the mental experience of seeing purple is the same thing as perceiving purple as distinct from other colours in a physical object. I'm not talking about the qualia. In fact, I hate the concept of qualia, because whenever it's introduced into philosophical discussions, the discussion devolves into epicycles of meaningsless discussion of definitions and nomenclature and ends up going nowhere. No, the purple was there. You say all that was there was some chemicals that only reflects certain wavelengths. I say this is what defines the emergent physical property we call the colour purple. You say electrons and quarks, I say tables and chairs. Both are accurate, and certainly not in conflict. You might say, so how is this distinct from qualia? Well, for the qualia of seeing purple, there is no way even in principle to decide whether my qualia is the same as your qualia. But I can still look at a red onion and tell you it's purple, and you likely would agree unless you're colour blind. So this property of purple is, unlike a qualia, objective, not subjective.