I suppose the next “technological revolution” would be bringing the viewer closer and closer to he images: stimulate the brain directly, giving the experience of entering into the picture. Surf to find your favorite fantasy, then zoom in.
When film first came about, an Artic explorer was showing a film of seals to a group of Eskimos. Then one in the audience rose and put a spear through the seal in the film. Seals have it rough. Sharks, polar bears, humans all attack them. Here even pictures of them are attacked. Since my “handle” is “Shy Seal” it makes me wonder. When I was a teacher at NMC someone or other defaced photographs of me. Such Voodoo vagabonds are like the Eskimo who could not tell the difference between a film-seal and the real seal.
A famous painting of a pipe has written under it, “This is not a pipe,” the point being that it was not a pipe but the picture of a pipe. Yet this mistaking of the image for the thing may not be so uncommon after all. Many intelligent people long ago and now held and hold that certain things like the colors we see, the sounds we hear, the odors we smell, the heat and cold we feel, are not properties of the external world at all, but are the way objects affect us with our particular sensory systems.
Let me try to explain, as we skim some deep waters. What is color? The redness of the red, the greenness of the green, etc. The world seems replete with myriads of hues. According to science, all this wonder of color corresponds to but a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the spectrum of visible light. Our visual systems, as the story goes, exhibit what is called “trichomany.” This is because there are three light sensitive pigments in our eyes, corresponding to the hues blue, green and yellow. (This same principle is used for color TV.) It is from a mixture of various intensities of these three hues that the seemingly infinite varieties of color are produced. Some animals do not exhibit trichomancy and accordingly do not see the colors we do. The story of color vision is a fascinating chapter in science and I recommend the April 2009 issue of “Scientific American” as a good introduction. Still, we may ask the question, What is the nature of color in itself? Is it a sensation produced by our visual systems, or is it something that exists in itself, independent of the human brain or mind?
Here the answer may surprise you. Many hold that the sensory quality of color, the redness of the red etc., are not objective properties of the colored object, but rather are sensations of the perceiving mind or brain. In other words, external reality, the physical world, has no “intrinsic” color in itself. Rather, an external object has the “dispositional” property, for example, the molecular structure, to produce the color by influencing the given perceiving visual system. In science, the various wavelengths of reflected light are correlated with visual colors but the wavelengths themselves have no color.
This is surprising, since we naturally think that the color of anything exists independently of the human mind or brain. The red apple will remain red even if no humans were around. We all can tell the difference between a photograph and the real thing, but the photograph is colored in the same way as the real thing. Where is the color?
Since the days of the ancients, a distinction was made between the “primary” and “secondary” qualities of objects. John Locke (1632-1704) noted the primary qualities as “solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number” to be in the objects themselves, independent of the human mind. But the “secondary qualities” he considered “in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but power to produce various sensation in us by the primary qualities, as colors, sounds, tastes.”
Thus the tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it will produce sound waves in the air but will produce no sound unless the appropriate auditory systems are effected. The sunset will produce magnetic waves but no color unless there are eyes to sense it. This position does not seem right. Yet how may we test it? You cannot step outside your own consciousness to see what things look like without looking. It seems there is an aspect to the world that depends on our mind or brains, and an aspect that exists independent of us. But to know just what is “internal” and what is “external;” that is the question.
Puzzle
What is the maximum number of grapevines that may be planted on one-sixteenth of a square acre (52 feet, two inches per side), and each vine at least 9 feet apart?
Answer to last week’s puzzle
1060290000 has exactly 1000 divisors.
