11
votes
Is it possible to imagine a color one has never seen before?
The answer is controversial. Hume, 18th century British philosopher, famously argued that such a possibility is conceivable, that if we are presented with a spectrum of color where some intermediate ...
- 42.5k
10
votes
Accepted
Is color a hallucination?
A halluncination is to have a perception in the awake state when there is no external stimulus.
Colour is not a halluncination. Instead, it is the result of our processing of visual stimuli in the ...
- 24.6k
6
votes
Accepted
How did George Berkeley justify his disbelief in matter?
Berkeley gives two arguments in the quoted passage, and the first one does resonate with Kant's later arguments. But Berkeley's came before Kant's.
First, he says that the notion of matter is "...
- 42.5k
5
votes
Accepted
What are convincing examples of "mistaken" qualia?
I think the sticking point here is, as you point out, the immediateness of qualia. But that's not actually taken for granted in the literature.
In the physicalism vs. anti-materialism debate in ...
- 7,321
5
votes
Difference between Locke's Primary and Secondary Qualities
See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding : Book II, Chapter VIII by John Locke.
Primary qualities of bodies.
Qualities thus considered in bodies are,
First, such as are utterly inseparable from ...
- 36.2k
4
votes
What is the ontological basis for sentience arising from complexity?
David Chalmers takes the reasoning you describe and flips on its head: Levels of complexity can never account for the purely ontological nature of consciousness (his famous "hard-problem of ...
- 27.1k
4
votes
How can we understand the "intentional fallacy" mentioned by Pylyshyn?
Pasnau calls this the "content fallacy", quoting Pylyshyn's alternative description of it as "the seemingly innocent scope slip that lakes image of object X with Property P to mean (image of object X) ...
- 42.5k
4
votes
What perceptual error is this?
Sounds like Sampling Bias to me.
Andy's mental sample of gay men is more likely to include flamboyant ones than non-flamboyant ones, leading to overrepresentation of flamboyant men in the sample.
- 141
4
votes
Accepted
Proof that red and blue are different
Your definitions of your terms will ultimately decide about the answer, and they are far from clear here.
But indeed, your sentiment can be understood as correct: The difference is trivially there (as ...
- 13.5k
4
votes
Can we ask an infinite amount of questions or is there a limit to how many questions we can ask?
If I am correct, you asked if, as humans, we can always find a new question for which we do not know the answer. This means that there will never be a human that knows the answer to any question he/...
- 159
4
votes
Could color be a fundamental thing about the universe?
We have scientific understanding of a lot that is relevant to color perception, not only wavelengths but also of photoreceptors, how they relate to color blindness, etc. But the subjective experience ...
- 2,490
4
votes
Accepted
Is there any good argument that time moves?
Answer
Literally, time cannot move, because time determines motion of matter by way of v=x/t. However, it helps to think metaphorically about time, that we are an object and time comes towards us. ...
- 23.1k
4
votes
Is there a level at which energy and matter are indistinguishable?; viz. can space exist without perception?
If you heat matter to a high enough temperature- as existed in the first moments of the big bang- then the distinction between matter and radiation fades away, and physicists deal mathematically with ...
- 7,810
4
votes
Is the speciousness of the specious present specious?
Continuing the SEP quote shows that we can "perceive a relation between two [successive] events" by using memory.
... a paradox in the notion of perceiving an event as
occurring after ...
- 5,293
3
votes
What is the physical world if everything is perception?
Here is a lecture by Noam Chomsky where he argues that there is no mind-body problem because we do not know what the physical is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0
- 4,531
3
votes
In what ways is Merleau-Ponty following (late/unpublished) Husserl?
Good question, except that the answer is worth at least one or two doctoral theses. The question is way above my own amateur level, so perhaps this should just be a comment.
However, as far as I ...
- 13.4k
3
votes
Accepted
How does Putnam's internal realism differ from indirect realism?
Indirect realism in perception is the view that we do not experience the world as how it is, but only through and via our interpretations of how the world is. Representation becomes a key feature of ...
- 326
3
votes
Why is Sartre averse to "images" in consciousness?
To understand this passage, we have to note that Sartre inherits Husserl's theory of intentionality. For Husserl, all intentional mental states have both a content and an object. I am directed at the ...
- 2,137
3
votes
Why do people perceive the randomness of events so poorly?
Causality is one pattern. You could say that the tiger example of @SwamiVishwananda in your comments states that humans more often are abductive (thinking of a rule intuitively out if a single event ...
- 13.5k
3
votes
Is it possible to imagine a color one has never seen before?
Yes, you can imagine new "colors", and there are physically meaningful complex colors that humans don't really see.
Short version
We see with our eyes, and those signals go back to our ...
- 1,939
3
votes
Is it possible to imagine a color one has never seen before?
It seems trivial to imagine something that is almost like blue, but different. Some can even imagine a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue. It does, however, bring up the challenge of ...
- 17.5k
3
votes
Is art the object I'm consuming or what is happening within my own mind as I consume it?
Perhaps not surprisingly, different philosophers disagree. Kant centers aesthetics around the judgement of the viewer. Beardsley focuses on the artistic experience. Danto considers aesthetic ...
- 27.2k
3
votes
Why that cave dweller is called a misogynist?
First, let me kill that idea. Anthropologists do not accept the idea that early humans were cave dwellers. While there have been a few groups of people who did, for the most part, caves are not very ...
- 872
3
votes
Can we see actual light (electromagnetic radiation)?
Basically, your question concerns the content of perception ("what we perceive"). As explained here, "content" can be understood in two senses, as in "the content of a bucket" or "the content of a ...
- 5,830
3
votes
Classifications of experience
One way to approach these kinds of questions is to break things down into contrary alternatives: is it X or not X? The nice feature of this approach is that it lets you be confident that you have ...
- 7,598
2
votes
Why do people perceive the randomness of events so poorly?
I think the problem is that randomness is a folk concept. Everyone believes that they understand what is meant by randomness and that their understanding applies to all cases of perceived randomness, ...
- 3,515
2
votes
Why do people perceive the randomness of events so poorly?
Why do people perceive the randomness of events so poorly? @LightCC.
because randomness is a pure concept/speculation/abstraction/fantasy and the rationalist has still no idea how to connect his ...
- 145
2
votes
Direct Access to the Non-Existent
He's used a conventional linguistic shortcut; "the surface of the tomato" actually refers to the perceived surface of the tomato.
- 5,256
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