This meme has been making the rounds on the Interwebz of late:
It immediately brings to mind this passage:
Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.
…
Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.
– G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox
The meme appears to be part of a larger mood of pop philosophy skepticism which, once given its head, must soon arrive at the conclusion, not just that colors do not exist, but that nothing exists, since all our perceptions, not just our color perceptions rely, in the final analysis, on the reportage of our senses. Of course, when that day comes, a thoroughly consistent mad man must then declare that the Sciences, which are nothing more or other than the most accurate arrangement of our sense perceptions we possess (and the basis for the deconstruction of reality offered by memes like this) are likewise debunked as mere illusion, leaving the mad man with nothing left to say.
Or we can abandon this Ouroboros philosophy and find some other approach that is not mad. Start with the realization that a huge blunder is made by equating “Perception” with “Illusion”. Saying “Colors don’t exist” is manifestly and obviously wrong since it is manifestly obvious that colors do exist and that nearly everybody can see them. Sure, there are things we can’t see. Sure we do not completely understand all that we can see (or how we see it). Sure there are people who cannot see colors. But the fact remains that just because we cannot know everything about reality, this does not force the conclusion that everything we know is an “illusion”.
The meme, in doing bad philosophy pretending to be science, makes us dumber while perniciously making us feel smarter if we buy it. I’m not a philosopher of mind or anything. But even I can figure out that “perception” and “illusion” are not synonymous. That’s why science can work: because our brains are, in fact, capable of accurately reporting on the world beyond us–including what color stuff is and why it is that color. (See addendum below).
Indeed, the ability of science to sort perception from illusion is the reason we can know there is something wrong with the color receptors of some eyes. A color-blind person cannot see something that really exists and is perceived by most people. That’s how science works: by building up a picture of real, existing things through the Authority of the Senses, which is from God, even when it those realities may, for various reasons, not be perceptible to all.
Perception =/= Illusion. Bad philosophy is not good Science.
Addendum: By the way, I’m also not a scientist, But real scientists find this meme maddening too:
Alright, this is the dumbest thing on the internet today, and several of my “friends” (AKA casual internet acquaintances) have shared it. It is precisely the reason why people don’t “believe in science”. This is meme was made by someone who wanted to sound clever but ended up with a statement that is patently dumb AND absurd. We (=in the sciences) call this kind of thing “not even wrong”. It manages to concentrate bad science AND bad philosophy in ways that make Richard Dawkins sound open-minded.
Colors are very real. They are the main tool of astronomy. We (=the astronomers) do very very little by breaking things up into wavelengths (maybe 10% of astronomy is done by wavelength)? The other 90% is is done by color, AKA by filtering out objects into “red”, “yellow”, “green”, “blue”, etc. Does anyone want to see the largest color filter ever built for astronomy? Because it’s in my lab. It has “blue”, “red”, “yellow”, “green”, the whole rainbow. A child would recognize it for what it is. A philosopher wouldn’t, but there are literal preschoolers who come to my lab and understand this.
Red is very real: “red” is light with a wavelength between approximately 620 and 750 nm. Red is so real that even a blind person, with the appropriate instrumentation, can detect it and distinguish it from “green”. Now, color perception is one of the most fascinating problems of human (and animal) neuroscience. There is no way of knowing that the perception of “red” is the same experience across different individuals. But that doesn’t mean that “Colours don’t exist”: it just means that the human brain is spectacularly and fascinatingly complex.
– Maria Elena Monzani, Lead Scientist, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. at Stanford University
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8 Responses
The meme isn’t even smart enough to qualify as bad philosophy. It’s just bad semantics, mis-using (on purpose, I expect) to obfuscate.
To paraphrase the great medieval philosopher Inigo Montoya: “You keep using these words. But I do not think you know what they mean.”
Even the color blind can see spectral lines indicating the color of light entering a spectrometer. Even the blind can see color if one created a haptic interface for a spectrometer…
The fact that the concept of color transcends the method of perception emphasizes the reality of color.
I would caution against equating color with EM frequency. The term can certainly be used as a shorthand for a frequency or range of frequencies, but the actual color may not be caused by that frequency. Most of us can’t tell the difference between yellow resulting from 510-530 THz radiation (“yellow” light, if Wikipedia is to be believed) and yellow resulting from a mix of 530-600 and 400-480 THz radiation (“green” and “red” light, respectively). So yellow is the perception, not the thing that causes it. (And then there’s magenta, which doesn’t correspond to any actual frequency.)
Indeed. Colour is a cultural construct. And for about 8 males in 100, 40 females in 1000, colour is experienced somewhat differently. I myself have the commonest form of what is sometimes called “red-green colour-blindness.”
This scientist also approves of your commentary on this ridiculous meme. Many of my most frequently used biochemical assays have relied on spectroscopic detection of colors, and those measurements were not illusions.
Mantis shrimp! Porque?1?!
Perhaps all of this blather goes back to gender ideology. I’m reminded of Jenna, a close college friend of my son’s. She saw herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body who was attracted to a man trapped in a man’s body who wanted to be a woman. She dressed as a man, and he dressed as a woman. They were able to get married in the state of Texas before the law changed.
Jenna became a transbully crusader on the internet, reigning supreme over the proper use of the new language of gay gradations.
My fifth kid was briefly friends with a couple of kids that actually insisted that they didn’t identify as human. Tiresome.
The cringiest thing right now is listening to our Catholic principal struggle with the “they” and “them” when she’s presenting a little girl or little boy an award in front of the student body.
People who want to create their own reality. Ugh. I’m polite, but it’s like having extra work to do.
And, sorry, that should be 4women in 1000. Colour-vision is on the X chromosome and is sex-linked.
(1) Chestertonian quotes, like Biblical proof-texts on the Protestant side, hunt in pairs and no doubt if you flip a few pages over you will find GKC smack down some Fabian bourgeois or jobbing Anglican parson or sinister cosmopolitan Jew a century ago who foolishly thought “man in a robe reciting words in Latin over a wafer of bread” was all that was going at The Mass, just because that was The Evidence Of The Senses.
(2) As for colour being a cultural construct, let’s ask a devout, Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic whether “gray” and “brown” are different things; or a Russian-speaking Orthodox – his faith protected by bishops standing in the Apostolic Succession against the intellectual corruptions of modernism, liberalism, Freemasonry and religious indifferentism – if “navy blue” and “sky blue” could be considered “the same colour.”