Talk:Inverted spectrum

Anglocentric argument?

"Dark yellow is brown (qualitatively different from yellow), whereas dark blue is blue"

Is it true that "dark blue is blue" among speakers of languages other than English? Dark blue is Navy blue; light blue is azure. --Damian Yerrick (serious | business) 17:28, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

The existance of inverted spectrum

Does the existence of color blind people not convince us that "inverted spectrum" is possible? I think the article can be a little more explicit about how exactly the claim of its existence is contested.

Musically ut (talk) 06:39, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Not to mention tetяachromats. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 16:01, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

A counter-argument runs thus: Colour is not perceived in a one-dimensional spectrum, but in Munsell colour system. Moreover, it is known that this shape is not symmetric. We are able to make finer distinctions of shades of yellow, red and green than of blue. It is conceivable that this shape could be "rotated" to be an inversion, but it would necessarily be detectable, because a person with a "rotated" colour space would be abnormally good at differentiating hues of blue, whereas she would perceive colours that others call different shades of red as the same shade. Also, the boundaries between, say, blue and green, or yellow and brown, would then be in different places, because some colours have larger shares of the space than others. So she would not distinguish two totally different colours for white and yellow. This last bit is what was meant by the "dark yellow is brown" stuff. This experimental psychological assignment of colours to a 3D-space is supported by neurological findings, because the neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus receive stimuli from the cone cells, and react to them in a fashion which is exactly corresponding to the colour space. I won't go into it here (because I haven't got the book source here), but a plausible explanation of colour blindness and a range of other colour-associated visual sensory phenomena can be easily derived from this argument.

As an aside, the sense of "possible" required for the argument to work is a very weak one. Just because I can imagine that there i a place on the Earth where there is no gravity means (in this sense of possible) that it is possible. It does not mean that science has to seriously consider the possibility of such a place.

See Churchland, P. S. (2002) Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press;

Lehky, S. R. and Lejnowski, T. J. (1999) Seeing White: Qualia in the Context of Decoding Population Codes. Neuronal Computation 11, 1261-80; and

Palmer, S. E. (1999) Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hinakana (talk) 10:12, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

I would like to point out that physical consideration breaks that sort of argument. The properties mentioned are all related to the physical properties of the neurons that detect light and the overlaping of spectra detected. Unfortunately the argument is flawed be the fact that it mentions inversion of the spectrum. That means that colors would become their spectral opposite or in other words each cone would map to the combination of the remaining two cones; when broken down into color components it makes much more sense that each type of cone would have an independent qualia, making the translation take on a number of extraneous quirks. If, however, one considered that a switch took place between two or all three of the color-receptive channels such that reds resembled blues or otherwise the color-space would not change. A few things are notable in that case: the new color where green once was would be brighter because of the rod cells; the new blue would be just as difficult to distinguish because the S type cone (blue) will be no more perceptive to minute changes in light intensity; no color information would be lost or gained it would only have a different perception associated with it. This still does not prove that qualia exist nor don't exist. It could simply be that the experience of color is simply the addition of different amounts of mental aliases of color components, thus making the inversion of colors analogous to calling the number one by the name two. Two plus two would then be one but the numbers didn't change their properties so the difference is only lexical. Thatoneguy (talk) 06:32, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Inverted spectrum arguments aren't particularly meant to be 'taken seriously by science'. Many philosophers believe that possibility conceivability is enought to establish their case. 1Z (talk) 17:18, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Physically Nonsensical

It should be stated that the argument is a physical impossibility, due to the nature of electromagnetic frequency. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SpunkySkunk347 (talk • contribs) 07:27, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Another way to state the argument: Are the signals from cones sensitive to long, medium, and short wavelengths carried on the same "pins" of the optic nerve in everyone's brain? If I were to swap the red and blue "wires", how much would qualitative experiences differ? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 17:12, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

If it is conceivable, then it is possible

I smell an equivocation of the word "possible" in premise 4: "If it is conceivable, then it is possible." Premise 5 appears to use "possible" in the sense of "physically possible"; otherwise, the whole argument is a tautology. This would make premise 4 false because some things that are conceivable are physically impossible. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 17:20, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Inconceivable

Seeing as the average person has absolutely no idea what physical changes would cause an inverted spectrum, it is impossible to imagine. Human imagination is not prepared to imagine what we cannot piece together from experience. We can no more envision brain chemistry than we can imagine a penteract. 75.118.170.35 (talk) 22:12, 22 June 2009 (UTC)