This is Texinfo edition 1.1 of `red.texi' as of 7 October 1994. This document was initially created by Jörg Heitkötter on September 17, 1994.
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'Grey dear friend are all your theories, the golden tree of life is green.' -- Mephislopheles in Goethe's "Faust"
What else is the color red, but an interpretation of your brain triggered by the absence of green and blue; i.e. non-red?But seriously, now that you come up with the definiton of colors, well, there's a nice story to tell about what constitutes a color, that perfectly fits in here. Since it also shows the different views on the world held by (a) reductionist = Newtonians; and (b) holistic thinkers, e.g. Goethe.
I submit there cannot be an objective way to judge who's right or wrong; (and this discussion belongs into alt.philosophy.objectivism, anyways;) BUT, I think it's worthwhile to explore these two fundamental views.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote an (obscure) book on color theory, entitled "Zür Farbenlehre" [1,2] in which he reports some experiments with prisms. (Try this at home.)
In the Newtonian view of the world, a prism splits white light into it's basic components (colors), that are represented by diverse frequencies. (Actually, Newton imagined so-called "copuscles" (vibrating bodies), that produced colors by their speed of vibrations; this is still a valid model, when teaching optics in school.)
Now, do what Goethe did, and look through a prism on a uniform surface. You'll see no colors at all. How come? Look at a white surface, or a blue urface, you'll encounter the same effect: uniformity; no rainbow in sight. BUT--if a slight spot interrupts the white or blue surface, then you'll seea burst of color, "when light and shadow interchange their play."
Hence Goether argues that color is a matter of perception:
"With light poise and counterpoise, nature oscillates within her prescribed limits, yet thus arrives all the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are presented to us in space and time.""Color is a degree of darkness, allied to shadow." translated to modern language of "chaos research": color comes from boundary conditions and singularities.
These writings were later "rediscovered" by Mitchell Feigenbaum, then seaching for what is now called "boundary conditions." He proved Goethe being right, since color is not an objective quantity, since "Redness" is not a particular bandwidth of light, (as the Newtonians would have it), but a territory of a chaotic universe; the boundaries of this universe are still not that easy to describe. (Although any Physicist reading this would say that's not true: red is light radiating in waves between 620-800 billions of a meter. And that's it. That's what they've been told in school.)
So, Goethe makes a distinction of "hard physical reality and the variable subjective perception of it. The colors we perceive vary from time to time and from person to person--that much is easy to say."[3] (And is "well in line" with recent findings of phychologists, btw.)
"It was the perception of color, to Goethe, that was universal on objective. What scientific evidence was there for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our perception?" [3]
What fascinates me most in Alife is the attraction of so many distinct fields of research that clash into each other in this melting pot of sciences; at least, I'd like to see it becoming a melting pot of sciences, where the traditional boundaries fade...and we get back to a state that was; the unity of all sciences.
We cannot define Life without taking life's "boundary conditions" into account; i.e., we have to look at the environment life lives in. (If we have to come up with a definition at all, which I doubt.)
The students of Alife are thrown into something Douglas Adams once called:
Douglas Adams has never been reading scientific lectures, but he captures the feelings of the `helpless layman' (aka student) wrt to science and this is what makes his well-known `triology' esp useful for students. (During their trip across the mind paralysing distance from uninitiatedness to post-PhD wisdom.)
When students face the gargantuan hill of accumulated wisdom in a field of their interested, they are endangered to get into a state of mind of total confusion. (Adams has described something like this in [4], p59):
"For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic little dot, which says `You are here.' "
However, this is just a Newtonian view of the world; in a holistic view there're no "tiny little markers" at all; and no students that are not considered human beings, but highly specialized learning machines; that can be easily abused to create "research papers" not to let their mentors drown in the foolish publish or perish game played by the current crop of scientists on a global scale.
`Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.' -- Thomas S. Kuhn
Well, als Plato once said: "And when they met their threw their arms around each other in their longing to grow together again," sciences, sooner or later, will have to learn to grow together again; otherwise they'll be doomed to failure (or at least to miss some integral parts of reality). And this will inevitably happen.
I don't see what the current crop of Newtonians at the universities of the world do about it. They obvioulsy don't even care? (NB Don't fear the Aristotelians, fear the Newtonians, that still educated the stundents...! Since they only know what they've been told. ;-)
So, if anybody out there could provide me with an idea on how to assemble a holistic picture of our (scientific) world other than by "dabbling"; I'd like to hear more about it. But I fear, there is none?
`Evolution is Chaos with Feedback' -- Joseph Ford
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 94 10:49:20 -0700 From: Doug Mounce <mounce@u.washington.edu> Message-Id: <9409261749.AA111814@homer06.u.washington.edu> X-Sender: mounce@homer06.u.washington.edu To: Joerg.Heitkoetter@Germany.EU.net Subject: Re: On the color of "red" (was: Re: The Meaning of Life) Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife,comp.ai.philosophy Organization: University of Washington
On getting a holistic picture of our scientific(?) world, Dante offers the example of taking on a guide. His Virgil was able to guide him to the garden of earthly delights, whereupon Beatrice was waiting to initiate him into the joys of the blessed. When he arrives at the Garden, and Beatrice explains it as the place sought by those who in olden times sang of the Age of Gold, Dante turns around to his guides and sees by the smiles on their faces that they heard these words. The message is that the struggle is worthy of one's trust. Dante goes deeper, of course, to elaborate on how far reason (Virgil) can take us in a journey which is initially inspired by Beauty (Beatrice).
Plato says in his myth that mankind is allowed to scale the mountains (by reason) which allows him a view into the land of the gods, but he is never able to enter that land. My personal favorite is Kierkegaard's subjective thinker who is able to make that "leap" following the study it requires as a prerequisite. Aristotle says in Protrepticus that this thinking about thinking (which is the best thinking you can do) is a philosophy which is of the greatest good and fairly easy to acquire. I think Jesus was the one who said approach it like a child.
Cheers, doug
Article: 1027 of comp.ai.alife Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow) Subject: Re: On the color of "red" (was: Re: The Meaning of Life) Distribution: world References: <35d8uo$q5k@Germany.EU.net> Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs Reply-To: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.27 Lines: 52 Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 12:47:21 +0000 Message-ID: <779978841snz@chatham.demon.co.uk> Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk
Goethe's book was not entirely ignored, insofar as Seurat (etc) founded pointillism in order to explore this "true view" of perception. As you indicate, however, perceptual research has shown that the subjective experience of colour has little to do with wavelength and everything to do with the balance between wavelengths. Land (of Polaroid fame) showed that you could start with a collage of primary colours (which he termed a 'Mondrian' after the Dutch abstract impressionist) which one viewed under white light. One noted red, green, yellow. The lights could then be changed such that there was not a photon of "red" in the illumination and the viewer would continue to report the scene as before, unchanged. Red stays red in relation to its neighbours. We calibrate our percept in *relation* to other things.
Herein lies the message. Hard truths exist as relationships: as balances struck between things, as polarities which we identify, as dimensions that we derive from an evolving explanation of our experience.
No doubt someone has already done the following. Our percepts trigger detectors which have beeen created by learning processes (or which are hard- wired into the brain; or some combination thereof) such that certain primitives (red, round, rose-scented) trigger neurological events. This we know to be true, both in the sense that we can measure this and also manipulate it. Each detector represents a dimension which is more or less expressed in percept space; and the strength of its detecting red-ness, circularity or odour is a quantity measured on that dimension. The neurological instant is, therfore, represented by a vector which spans the space created by these various (nested, resonating, hierarchical) detectors. At one point in this space lies the concept that is evoked when the vector rests upon it: a rose. On another, a red ball. The symbolic chunks into which we dissect our percepts can be thought of as points in such a vector space, where the orthogonal vectors are the things which we have learned to recognise. Fuzzy logic people will recognise similarities.
Prescription: htch up a sea of neural networks to a series of spaces within which fuzzy logic rules operate. Generate "symbols" out of the nonlinearities which emerge and use symbol heuristics to link these together. Use error minimisation as the route to feed back by which the nets learn that ! this ! bundle of percepts matter (autocorrelate with ! those !) and you would be (well, might be) on the way to a genuine learning system that discovers for itself how to represent knowledge in useful ways.
I suspect that one would also need objective functions (analogous to pleasure, pain, fulfilment and frustration) in order to drive such a systsem: error minimisation might be insufficient. Add delta from gaol as a proxy and supply the initial goals from outside, therefore.
Oliver Sparrow ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
Article: 1055 of comp.ai.alife Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow) Subject: Re: On the color of "red" (was: Re: The Meaning of Life) Distribution: world References: <35d8uo$q5k@Germany.EU.net> Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs Reply-To: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.27 Lines: 82 Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 11:55:07 +0000 Message-ID: <780062107snz@chatham.demon.co.uk> Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk
I posted a response to this once before, but it vanished into intenet limbo. If it suddenly shows up, there will be two versions on display and I shall appear a prat. Yet I am large, I contain multitudes.
Goethe's study was not entirely obscure: it stimulated the school of pointillism most associated with Seurat. The point in respect of relativism is now known to be true, however: Land (of Polaroid fame) demonstrated this some decades ago. If, for example, an observer looks at a isolated panel made up of strips of colour (figures which Land called "Mondrians", after the Dutch abstract impressionist) and sees these illuminated with white light, all such observers will tend to point to the red bits and say "red" and the green ones and say "green", unless RG colour blind, when of course they do not. This aside, if the light balance is now gradually changed, the observer of this isolated scene sees no change: red remains red, when there is not a photon of light bouncing into his or her retina which would normally be associated with redness. Our perceptions are relative, based on the dynamic set up between what we perceive rather than primarily driven by the absolute values of those signals.
We know quite a lot about colour (and other) forms of perception. It seems the case that qualities (redness) are linked to a percept in a specific part of the visual cortex. In this, a dimension is evoked and linked to other "primitives", such as roundness, circularity and the like. One can see each of these primitives as being more or less expressed, such that in a space spanned by N such orthogonal or related dimensions, there are a set of distinct zones within this N dimensional space:
{so much red, so much roundness, smooth edges} evokes "ball"
{less red, same roundness, more fractal/ frilliness} evokes "rose"
In such a percept space, each generic ("ball", "rose") would have a more or less discrete space that would resonate - become excited, operational - when perceptions placed a vector within it. Other areas of perception (odour, weight, social context) would also be aroused both by their incoming data and by the parallel arousal of linked areas of percept space that had, experientially, been linked to them by past learning or which were hard coded by genes or design. If 90% of the areas of arousal which are involved in there being a ball about were buzzing, the remaining 10% would also be aroused, producing fill in, anticipation, generalised seamlessness: what we experience as our awareness. (This does not tell you what "I" is but that's another story)
This is, of course, a potentially as true a picture of what happens amongst conceptual as well as of sensory linkages. The progress of a thought could be seen as the resonance of linked areas of arousal which evokes associations and cross-references in set of parallel structures. One notes that "red" emerges from a data stream but is also a quality with which these higher order abstractions operate. We also know that our literal sensitivity to red is enhanced when we look for red things, or think about the colour. Systems are, therefore, self-referential: what allows X to be seen involves previously learned things about X.
People who work with fuzzy logic will see something that they recognise in this. I suspect that one can say something about AI if it is to emulate these aspects of NI:
It may be that all of this is emulable in commodity silicon. Then again, it may not.
Oliver Sparrow ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
[1] Rupprecht (ed), "Goethe's Color Theory", NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970.
[2] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The theory of colors", MA: MIT Press, 1970.
[3] James Gleick, "Chaos", Abacus Books, 1993. Chapter on "Universality." pp164-166. [this is a cheap student's edition; the hard cover was published by Heinemann, London, 1988.]
[4] Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", London: Pan Books, 1980.