Re: [Fis] Consilience and Structure

A comment on Malcolm's posting: On "what we know" with regard to color, it
is interesting to note that, while we mammals have three kinds of retinal
cones, birds apparently have four! That is to say that different kinds of
organisms live in what Jacob vob Uexkull called different Umwelten. What
there is in the world is a mutual construct between external objects and a
system of interpretance that interacts with those objects. Red, yellow and
blue are our interpretants of relations between wavelengths, but birds make
different interpretants. Those looking for solid knowledge of the world
would likely want to stick to wavelengths, but, of course, these too are
constructs of human devised detection machines. Given something
fundamental about waves, it seemed natural to trace them to oscilltions of
something. This move makes a huge consilience, as everything we intimately
know of, from political success through heartbeats to diurnal fluctuations
of light and dark mark oscillatons.

STAN

>Dear FIS discussants,
>
>There has always been a puzzle about why the mathematics has an ever
>widening role in science. Mathematics introduces strange abstract entities
>into our representation of nature: numbers, manifolds, groups, variables,
>operators and so on. Yet few believe that such abstract entities literally
>exist in nature. A more plausible explanation is that mathematics provides
>a precise way of representing the STRUCTURE of the world. It helps us see
>how things relate to each, not what things are in and of themselves. Taking
>this line of argument to an extreme, one might claim that if the consilience
>of scientific inductions, tools, models, communities is about the
>relationship of different things to each other, then consilience is the
>basis of all our knowledge.
>
>Perception is a source of knowledge, so it provides a test of this thesis.
>On the surface, it seems to pass this test because our perceptual judgments
>of the world are based the consilience of a wealth of information coming
>from quite separate modalities--vision, hearing, touch, smell, and
>kinesthetic information.
>
>Even our detailed understanding of how visual perception works seems to
>provide a striking confirmation of this idea. An old controversy about
>color vision was about whether color is a primary (objective) property of
>things in the world or a secondary (subjective) property. The simple-minded
>theory of color perception says that it consists merely in the detection of
>the wavelength of light striking our retina. This might have supported the
>view of color as a primary quality if it were true. But it was Land's
>experiment in the middle of last century that blew this particular myth out
>of the water.
>
>Land produced three black-and-white photographic transparencies of a
>colorful scene with a camera--one with a filter that blocked all light
>except red light, one with a filter that blocked all light except yellow
>light, and one with a filter that blocked all light except blue light. It
>is no surprise that we see the scene in full color when we reverse the
>process by projecting red, yellow and blue light simultaneously through the
>transperencies onto a screen. This is because the retina contains three
>kinds of color sensitive receptors called cones, one most sensitive to red
>light, one most sensitive to yellow light, and one most sensitive to blue
>light. But what happens if we replace the red, yellow and blue light with
>narrow band of yellow light shifted slightly towards red end of the
>spectrum, a narrow band of yellow light in the middle, and a narrow band of
>yellow light shifted slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum? To
>everyone's surprise, Land demonstrated that we see the scene in full color
>(albeit slightly washed out) even though there is only yellow light striking
>our retina. Color pereception therefore involves the detection of
>DIFFERENCES in light frequencies, and not light frequencies per se. Color
>perception rests on the detection of relational facts.
>
>But should we therefore conclude that color is therefore a relational
>property of the objects in the world? One might object that this would be
>to confuse what we know with how we know. The 'how' involves the detection
>of relational facts, but the conclusion (the inductive proposition) drawn
>from these facts is about the intrinsic nature of things in the world. For
>example, we all know that we can only measure mass RATIOS, but nobody seems
>to conclude from this that mass is therefore a relational property of
>things.
>
>Whose right? If you have a solution, then please let me know.
>
>Malcolm
>
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Received on Mon Nov 8 22:08:40 2004