https://twitter.com/MarioEmblem_2/status/1676009845235896320

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I don't see what's dunkworthy about this unless you think qualia as a concept is dunkworthy, which is fair.

    As for the comic, when we say the sky is blue, what we are actually saying is that the sky share a certain optical property with the sea and other objects that we deem as blue. In other words, it's more about the sky's relations to certain objects rather than an intrinsic property of the sky itself or a person's subjective experience of the sky. To hammer this point even further, orange the fruit entered the English language before orange the color, so when we say this crayon is orange, we are very explicitly saying the crayon has an optical property that's similar to a citrus fruit. Likewise, the previous Old English word for orange was geoluread or yellow-red, and it's easy to see why orange the color used to be called yellow-red. In this case, it's the relations of the color orange being between the color yellow and red.

    The actual qualia of blue is just a subjective experience with no real way of substantiating as objective truth. But it really isn't that important because subjectivity by definition can't become objective. You'll never truly experience what I experience as an individual subject with my own unique physical makeup, psychological makeup, and personal history, but this shouldn't be world-shattering because you're not me lol. There are objective facts that can be gleamed from what I'm experience. For example, you could hook me up to some machine that monitors my heartbeat and notice my heartbeat going up when I get nervous about something, but you can never experience exactly what I'm experiencing. You'll never be able to replicate my grief over a family member because my relationship between the family member and me which informs my grief isn't something that can be replicated.

    This is just the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity and how to navigate this contradiction. The comic slants towards subjectivity at the cost of objectivity in my opinion, which I guess is dunkworthy.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      This is my favorite post in the thread. I don't see how people could have vastly different perceptions of color unless those perceptions were shifted on a scale or something. Most people would say orange is a color between red and yellow, so those three colors are connected for most people.

      At best you could say maybe people have a different perception of where the rainbow starts? Like mine starts at what I think is red, but what you think is green. Maybe orange to me is violet to you, so it still seems like a between color, just with purple and blue instead of red and yellow.

      Also, camouflage works for most people, so clearly those colors are similar. Really wacky different perceptions probably don't exist. The image shows the child seeing brown as purple and blue as red, which would mean he'd fail certain colorblind tests, wouldn't it?

      • VILenin [he/him]M
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        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Wouldn’t camouflage still work? The color of the camouflage would still match the color of what it’s trying to blend in with if you switched the colors.

        Colorblind tests measure your failure to distinguish the relation of multiple subjectivities. It can be said that this relation is objective. Color blindness is a dysfunction of the cells in your eye, something much more easily examined than internal experience.