how can you logically understand the color red?

[Holygrail]

You can say that the color red can be reduced to the mechanisms of the brain and eyeball producing the color but the configuration of atoms are not the same thing as the actual experience of seeing red. The atoms dont even have color to them but the experience of seeing a color cannot be reduced because it's smaller parts are literally NOT the actual experience.... im trying to understand this argument of how the parts are not equivalent to the whole. it almost makes sense to me but im still missing something..

 

[AdamR95]

you cant

the experience of color is what the actual color is

its not complicated, you dont need a logic behind it

Edited September 21, 2021 by AdamR95

[LastThursday]

You're talking about the hard problem of consciousness, which is basically that materialism is totally useless for explaining consciousness. It's exactly the other way round, consciousness explains materialism. Consciousness itself is about difference. If consciousness is awareness, then awareness works by comparing differences. Red is not green, because they're different. If something is undifferentiated, there is no awareness of it (it doesn't exist).

What's important is the type of difference not the quale attached to it. For example you could swap all reds with greens in your vision, and it really wouldn't make a difference at all. Some people can learn to "see" with sound, like bats. 

So red is red, because it has become attached to a certain pattern of difference in awareness. It's utterly random. But qualia are similar to each other, red and green share the quality of being colours. There's a whole continuum of qualia, and qualia that you have never experienced.

If the brain is a pattern recognition/making machine, then the qualia you experience become "attached" to those patterns.

How's that for logic?

For some ideas about how the attachment process might work, look up Morphic Resonance and Rupert Sheldrake.

 

Edited September 21, 2021 by LastThursday

[Holygrail]

23 minutes ago, AdamR95 said:

you cant

the experience of color is what the actual color is

its not complicated, you dont need a logic behind it

yeah you cant reduce red because red is itself and couldnt be anything but itself... the notion of reducing the whole into parts and saying they're the same doesn't seem to make much sense to me. 

[Holygrail]

17 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

You're talking about the hard problem of consciousness, which is basically that materialism is totally useless for explaining consciousness. It's exactly the other way round, consciousness explains materialism. Consciousness itself is about difference. If consciousness is awareness, then awareness works by comparing differences. Red is not green, because they're different. If something is undifferentiated, there is no awareness of it (it doesn't exist).

What's important is the type of difference not the quale attached to it. For example you could swap all reds with greens in your vision, and it really wouldn't make a difference at all. Some people can learn to "see" with sound, like bats. 

So red is red, because it has become attached to a certain pattern of difference in awareness. It's utterly random. But qualia are similar to each other, red and green share the quality of being colours. There's a whole continuum of qualia, and qualia that you have never experienced.

If the brain is a pattern recognition/making machine, then the qualia you experience become "attached" to those patterns.

How's that for logic?

 

So basically the experience of red and the atoms are just differences, but doesnt mean one particular difference (atoms) necessarily equates to another difference like the experience of red. but what do you mean red becomes attached to a certain pattern of difference in awareness?

[LastThursday]

@Holygrail the subtlety is the following.

If we become aware of something, then there must be something to be aware of. It must have a quale attached to it, qualia are awareness. But the qualia are completely relative to each other. Imagine swapping all the high notes on a piano for the low notes, or everything that's dark becomes light and vice versa. Swapping qualia doesn't affect awareness. It's only the juxtaposition (pattern) of qualia that matters. Imagine a baby who is born who sees everything as a negative image to your vision. It would make no difference to their experience. They could still describe exactly the same things as you, they would still wince looking at the "dark" sun.

So, if qualia are only important in relation to each other, then the fact that you always experience blood as red and the sky as blue, must mean that "red" and "blue" qualia have become attached to blood and sky at some point. There's no inherent importance to the fact that blood is "red" and sky is "blue". See?

[TripleFly]

LastThursday's answer is really well done.

I also wanted to express the other side of this question which is not from the objective far back view, but rather to attempt to explain it from the inside. Which I say that to capture the color green and red is not coincidental and its value is not objective, these colors use for appreciating the mind. The realm of RED or the realm of GREEN. it hits you very different if you dare to take a step and valuate it subjectively.

Edited September 21, 2021 by TripleFly

[mandyjw]

Colors are colors on the most basic level because they reject a part of themselves. The potential of color is in colorless white light. The color red absorbs all wavelengths and frequencies of light and repels or emits the red wavelength of color we see. So red is actually everything BUT red. However, red only appears because of white, already whole light. No light, and red is not red anymore. 

Likewise the true light is not the light of the sun or other stars but the light of Awareness, and our consciousness is borrowed light from Awareness.

[justfortoday]

It's simple. 

Colors and sounds, all consciousness, which imagines scenes or dreams, and then inserts itself into the dream as the main character.

We're in a VR-like reality/experience that was designed by consciousness to keep itself entertained for eternity through lifetimes.

The color red isn't happening in your brain. It's happening on the screen that wraps around you and your field of vision. 

Your face is a void and you're projecting the color red (and your entire reality, for that matter) unto nothingness. That's why you can't see your face, because you see the world instead.

There is nothing behind the red apple. It's just an appearance in this VR / dreamworld.

Three-dimensionality does not exist. It's an illusion of materialism. 

 

Edited September 21, 2021 by justfortoday

[Leo Gura]

It's extremely radical.

You are imagining the brain, eyeballs, perception, and atoms.

None of that is absolutely true! That's all part of the dream.

Red is RED. That's what it is. It is not anything else. Stop trying to invent explanations for any thing. All things are themselves, not other things.

RED is not logical. RED is not thought. RED is not anything but RED.

Get that RED is RED.

Believe it or not, you don't get this yet. You think you get it, but you don't.

[justfortoday]

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

It's extremely radical.

You are imagining the brain, eyeballs, perception, and atoms.

None of that is absolutely true! That's all part of the dream.

Red is RED. That's what it is. It is not anything else. Stop trying to invent explanations for any thing. All things are themselves, not other things.

RED is not logical. RED is not thought. RED is not anything but RED.

Get that RED is RED.

Believe it or not, you don't get this yet. You think you get it, but you don't.

RED is seeing itself, being aware of itself as the color red. It's a hallucination emanating out of you.

Edited September 21, 2021 by justfortoday

[Nahm]

@Holygrail

Seemingly contrary to popular belief perhaps, it is not possible to think perception. There is simply no such thing as red. There is the thought “red”, as a label, which was learned & can be relinquished (no longer believed / attached to) anytime. 

“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth … There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

[Inliytened1]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

It's extremely radical.

You are imagining the brain, eyeballs, perception, and atoms.

None of that is absolutely true! That's all part of the dream.

Red is RED. That's what it is. It is not anything else. Stop trying to invent explanations for any thing. All things are themselves, not other things.

RED is not logical. RED is not thought. RED is not anything but RED.

Get that RED is RED.

Believe it or not, you don't get this yet. You think you get it, but you don't.

@Holygrail this is extremely profound.  To get this is awakening.

So..to grasp this existentially I recommend Leo's "what is perception" video

If one watches this video enough times and "they" actually "get it" one will actually have enlightenment right there.  "They" as the perceiver will dissolve and there will be just pure Being or Absolute Truth.  Isness.  RED IS itself.

That's all there ever was and is right now, your just not conscious of it because your busy imagining your a human.

[ZzzleepingBear]

5 hours ago, Holygrail said:

but the configuration of atoms are not the same thing as the actual experience of seeing red.

What makes you so sure of this?

It could very well be that the specific arangement of atoms is exactly what makes your eye/brain able to recognize/interpreting that arangement as a distinctive colour. To be clear with what I say, what you call the colour red, is the human translation when light are bouncing of different molecular objects in how that light then will be percieved by you. Red could maybe be percieved as what we would call yellow for another animal.

Notice this when you now read the word red. You stil know what colour you would expect and could point it out on a colour map. But there is no red in the word red, you simply distinguish the red from this post by translating the colour experience into intellectual translation.

As a ending thought on this, the colour you percieve may also be dependant on your distance to it, if you saw something that appear to be maybe blue/black from a far distance. As you get closer to the object, it now appears to be red as you get close enough to it. And if you take out a microscope to take a even closer look at this object, it maybe appear to have blue or green nuances to it as you zoom deep into it.

So what  you experience in terms of colour is a in relative relation depending of how or where you look at it. RED is literally just red in the end of the day..;)

[Holygrail]

15 hours ago, LastThursday said:

@Holygrail the subtlety is the following.

If we become aware of something, then there must be something to be aware of. It must have a quale attached to it, qualia are awareness. But the qualia are completely relative to each other. Imagine swapping all the high notes on a piano for the low notes, or everything that's dark becomes light and vice versa. Swapping qualia doesn't affect awareness. It's only the juxtaposition (pattern) of qualia that matters. Imagine a baby who is born who sees everything as a negative image to your vision. It would make no difference to their experience. They could still describe exactly the same things as you, they would still wince looking at the "dark" sun.

So, if qualia are only important in relation to each other, then the fact that you always experience blood as red and the sky as blue, must mean that "red" and "blue" qualia have become attached to blood and sky at some point. There's no inherent importance to the fact that blood is "red" and sky is "blue". See?

ohhh thats an interesting perspective, i see your point..

[Holygrail]

12 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's extremely radical.

You are imagining the brain, eyeballs, perception, and atoms.

None of that is absolutely true! That's all part of the dream.

Red is RED. That's what it is. It is not anything else. Stop trying to invent explanations for any thing. All things are themselves, not other things.

RED is not logical. RED is not thought. RED is not anything but RED.

Get that RED is RED.

Believe it or not, you don't get this yet. You think you get it, but you don't.

of course im openminded to enlightenment and seeing reality as just appearance with nothing going on behind the scenes. I was just using the brain, eyeballs and atoms as examples to why the parts cannot literally be the same thing as the actual experience of thing. You wont see red in the configuration of atoms that are supposedly equivalent to the actual experience of seeing red. Basically that red is irreducible because you dont get red in atoms! and thats such a mindblowing insight that I just recently had.

[Holygrail]

11 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

@Holygrail this is extremely profound.  To get this is awakening.

So..to grasp this existentially I recommend Leo's "what is perception" video

If one watches this video enough times and "they" actually "get it" one will actually have enlightenment right there.  "They" as the perceiver will dissolve and there will be just pure Being or Absolute Truth.  Isness.  RED IS itself.

That's all there ever was and is right now, your just not conscious of it because your busy imagining your a human.

right now, the only way that i realize that red is irreducible is because the configuration of atoms supposedly equivalent to the experience of red cannot be reduced to those atoms because there's no red in those atoms! red is red, and it feels like magic!

[Holygrail]

11 hours ago, Nahm said:

@Holygrail

Seemingly contrary to popular belief perhaps, it is not possible to think perception. There is simply no such thing as red. There is the thought “red”, as a label, which was learned & can be relinquished (no longer believed / attached to) anytime. 

“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth … There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

yeah because the symbol is not actually the thing that its pointing to, so you cannot think of perception. and this realization is started to sink into me, perception is like magic to me now.

[Nahm]

@Holygrail

Awesome. Symbols being freed up plays a role down the road. 

[Holygrail]

7 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@Holygrail

Awesome. Symbols being freed up plays a role down the road. 

cant wait to see what that entails