

Mazviita Chirimuuta: Color is a dance between your brain and the world - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/ingenious-mazviita-chirimuuta

======
personjerry
I really dislike this article. It stretches the "What if your blue is my red?"
concept too far, and makes it sound far more dramatic than it really is.

Let me clear something up first. Our senses are ways of acquiring information.
What we sense (i.e. colors, different pitches) are just the categories with
which we sort them. As long as we can agree on some common definition (i.e.
wavelength for a color), they have done their job.

The talk about the subjectivity of color is misleading. The only thing that is
subjective, is how our brain "parses" the information of these categories
(i.e. my red vs. your red). But, because we can't share the brain's
abstraction of color with one another, the discussion is meaningless.

Thus, while there is an aspect of colors that is subjective, it is impossible
to think about outside of your own, and thus the discussion of color in terms
of wavelength is the only plausible discussion.

\-----

My problem with the article lies in the entirely inadequate account from the
interviewee. Regarding her theory of color, she says: "... we need a way of
theorizing subjectivity in such a way that we’ll just acknowledge that there
are parts of our experience and our perceptual knowledge of things that are
generated by the particular ways that we interact with the world." Which
basically says "Our brains will parse the image differently, we need a way to
discuss the results," and is pretty much useless. Then she claims that color
is a combination of our interpretation of color and the properties of objects.

Two possibilities: this might be just wrong, as she is conflating the color in
the sense of wavelength and color in the sense of properties of objects that
reflect light. These are clearly distinct.

Alternatively, she is referring to the brain's interpretation of a scene given
the information from the eyes. That is, given the "bitmap data" the eyes take
in, the brain attempts to "parse" the scene, and adjusts colors for light
sources. Well great, mystery solved, but we knew this already. So what exactly
is her "theory" that she is contributing?

To my understanding, the entire article is an attempt to confuse different
meanings of the word color.

------
twiceaday
> When I asked Mazviita Chirimuuta why philosophers were so crazy about color,
> she smiled, as if she sensed my question had an implied criticism of
> philosophy’s penchant for chewing more than it bit off, to paraphrase what a
> wit once said of Henry James.

Too pretentious for my blood.

