When I think of the presentation of sound at the phenomenal level of experience, its phenomenological character makes sense. Sound is perceived when air vibrates the ear drum and is transduced to a neural signal and processed; and sound does indeed often have a qualitatively vibrational character, particularly when the frequency is very low. Similarly with spatio-temporal vision, the pattern of light hitting the retina is transduced into neural signal and processed leading to a spatio-temporal phenomenological world. Of course there is still some strangeness from the phyiscal to phenomenal level in these percepts; but at least there is some understandable qualatative aquaintance.
Colour is a truely bazare percept. The differences of colour are due to the differences in wavelength (vibrational energy in a sense) of light entering the visual system. Why then should colour not be phenomenally perceived as somthing like different fuzzing surfaces (like static television)? Perhaps its because of the incredible speed of the electromagnetic vibrations that means colour is just experienced as... well like it is! Or perhaps its because of colours functional role; some suggest it evolved so that we could detect fruit in the trees. Hence a vibrational sensation might be confused with movement (I'm not convinced this would matter if it was fuzzing that fast). Nonetheless it does seem a very odd sensation; blue is so different from yellow in such a strong way, yet its difference in physical stimulus is merely a few hundred nanometres of electromagnetic wavelength.
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4 comments:
Part of it is physiological.
In the ear, a single organ detects all different frequencies of sound, thus we hear sound as a continuum of different pitches.
Light, by contrast, is detected by 3 different kinds of cone-cells, leading to the 3 primary colors. That these three colors (red, green, and blue) should be perceived as completely different phenomena is therefore somewhat less surprising.
The in-between colors just show some of the weirdness in the way the brain re-combines multiple sources of data into a single coherent, multi-colored whole.
Is there actually any way that color could be perceived as a fuzzyness of surfaces? Static tv is inconsistent or missing information--but color isn't missing information. It's extra.
Also, I doubt there's much of a relation between the stimulus and the perceptual character of smelling.
Justin
yer i had thought of the strange phenomenology of taste and smell, which seem just as weird as colour. Touch on the other hand seems to make sense. For example a smooth surface feels smooth because less resistence occurs and so less touch sense cells are triggered (I forget what they are called). Pain obviously has the unpleasant phenomenological character to it and thus makes sense functionally. etc etc etc.
Fuzzyness was just an example of what else colour could be experienced as. I was proposing that different patterns of fuzzyness could correspond to different colours rather than the hues we experience. Say for example blue fuzzed faster because it has a higher wavelength than say red. Thus useful information could be extracted. Why is colour qualatitively like it is? Its probably an unanswerable question, but the thought is interesting.
Random stuff
your explaination of colour processing is a little oversimplified since it ignores the dual oppenancy channels and higher processing in cortical areas. Also the quirk I posted is of a philisophical nature rather than neurological/physiological one. It was really just a philisophical musing on the apparant qualatative relation of the physical stimulus to the phenomenal experience of sound but not the hue of colour, and in that sense colour still remain truly bizzare.
hmm I was just thinking that perhaps it is because the qualatatively vibrational phenomenological nature of sound, in other words vibration; can be phenomenally experienced and understood through different sense modalities; namely vibrations in the body, and vibrating objects through vision. The same would apply for smoothness of touch since we can experience smoothness visually. In other words our ability to experience the phenomena through another modality causes us (or gives me) to make cross-sensory metaphors. If this is the case then all qualatative phenomenology is equally bizzare. Who knows!
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