
Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages - Osiris30
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11369
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evincarofautumn
My working model for why colours admit description more readily than smells is
that we judge and decompose them in largely the same way, but it’s simply
easier to develop a _repertoire_ of colours. They’re everywhere, most people
have decent colour vision, and someone can point to them and tell you what
they are in relative isolation.

Whereas smells (and tastes) are much more diverse, and rarely pure, isolated
chemicals but more often complex profiles of many different compounds.

A common way that people develop a repertoire of smells is through cooking:
now that I have some experience with many different ingredients and styles, I
can now readily tell what went into a dish and how I might replicate it,
describe new tastes in terms of old ones, and imagine new flavour combinations
and how they would work together.

Chemistry offers another angle—if you know what I mean by “indolic” then you
can probably conjure a mental image of exactly the heavy musk I’m referring
to, but you probably have no clue if you haven’t experienced it _and been told
that that’s what you’re experiencing_. You can add specific chemicals to your
repertoire of smells.

A similar thing seems to hold for recreational drug experiences. If someone
has had many different drugs before, especially drugs with similar
pharmacodynamics that operate on the same receptors, it’s relatively easy to
give them the gist of what something is going to feel like by reference to
similar experiences. If they haven’t, there’s only so much you can do to
prepare them for what is going to be a novel experience.

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GuiA
Perhaps I'm simplifying/abstracting a bit too much here but - colors are
single dimensional (i.e. the wavelength of the light you're seeing) whereas
smells are multidimensional/maybe not even really mappable to any continuum.

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red75prime
> colors are single dimensional

Light is a mixture of different wavelengths, so, in a sense, it's infinitely
dimensional. People's perception of light is usually three dimensional.

> maybe not even really mappable to any continuum

I think it cannot be continuum, as sense of smell is caused by discrete
molecules. As for "not mappable", it can be that it's mappable, but our brain
is really bad at it.

~~~
amelius
But light is composed of photons, which carry a certain energy which is
responsible for the color you see.

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hprotagonist
_The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and
audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of
knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of
little value._

Uhh... citation needed?

Off the top of my head, certainly Proust would disagree.

~~~
realusername
Even the concept of Western thought is dubious itself, there's not much in
common culturally between "western" countries. There's no common language,
values or vision of society.

~~~
tokyodude
Maybe I don't know what the definition of "Western" countries is but if
there's one thing that seems common to me across them it's Christianity. Every
western country I've been to is full of churches.

There's clearly a lot of thought influenced by those churches. It wasn't until
I moved to the other side of the world did I have the experience of cultures
not nearly as influenced by Christian thought.

I don't have concrete examples of the top of my head but I've read academic
papers trying to put forth ideas about universal human behavior that clearly
have never lived outside a Christian influenced culture. Even if the author
was atheist they didn't seem to notice how those influences shaped their
conclusions.

~~~
xte
Try looking at how missionary shape south America and Africa... I bet they are
not "western" countries, also in Europe "church" power vary from country to
country, for instance in France it have both little presence and power, in
Spain or Italy have far more presence and power.

Christianity itself steal many aspect of ancient religions from Egyptian one
to Celtic and Romans one. Just as an example in ex-Celtic area of Europe
christmas symbol's are mostly ex-celtic like "decorated fir tree", santa claus
(a male dressed with heavy winter clothes red because of the blood of animals
he have killed being a hunter), a big wooden log to be burning in the night
etc. In ex Viking part of EU santa claus is a female with more "Viking" dress,
in the southern christmas nativity scene are far more common while still
remain winter/snowy scene certainly not possible in ancient Lebanon etc.

Substantially all Christianity events Christmas, all saints, Easter etc are
Celtic or Roman or Greek events. Think only about our time measure: ancient
Roman count days starting with "ora prima" (first hour) in the morning, Celts
use midnight as we use today (an ancient Roman phrase "the Celts are a strange
population that count days starting from the nights").

Religions are political means to subjugate populations so their history mostly
follow political/military history of the world.

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edna314
It's interesting that visual perception seems to code better than sound
perception, but our main way of communicating, even across cultures, is via
sound. Is it because talking is faster than miming?

~~~
FroshKiller
I imagine it has less to do with speed and more to do with not having to keep
a speaker in focus in your line of sight to understand speech. And we hear
just as well in the dark.

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anchovies
I'd go out on a limb and speculate that much of existence was peviously
described amid a fog of superstition, with only a handful of objective facts
for primitive humans to draw consensus on.

Vocalization among animals finds its roots in high energy emotions, typically
fear and rage. Barking, roaring, hissing. As you walk up the socialization
gradient, vocalization gets combined with body language (raised hackles,
charging), facial expressions (staring down with a domineering gaze, bearing
teeth). Then, with inversions like group hunting tactics, coordination of
remaining silent while stalking prey.

Highly social animals have a seemingly partial grasp of fair play. Performing
tricks for rewards, or a pet ruining an owner's bed as revenge for a slight.
Most " _pet_ " chimpanzee maulings are the consequence of a chimpanzee's
perception of a violation of status, noticing a peer enjoy briefly held
favouritism, or a favorite toy transgressed by a stranger.

When it comes to perception of experience, and descriptions thereof, and
objectively related concepts arrive _VARY_ late to the party, so a null
finding is unsurprising to me.

First you need counting and accounting, in order to quantify, and then to
objectify, you you also need codification and enumeration. So already, you
have prerequisites of intellect, before anything objective happens. This means
writing and consistent phonemes, to establish conrete rules. But speech is
operational and practical long before it becomes romanticized with experience.

People would be counting and naming discrete essentials as part of primitive
trade, long before ascribing color to the sky. Indeed, color probably wasn't
important until decoration and desirable possessions became noteworthy.
Interesting animal pelts, face paints, stone and shell beads and bird
feathers.

Probably by the time leather and textiles are normative, you really begin to
see vocabulary take off, but still, it's not about what we sense, but material
objects to be grasped.

Some of the object aspects of sensory description that took centuries to
isolate are pretty subtle. How many colors are there? Only six, or many
millions? Which parts of the world boast the highest variety of flavorful
foods? Quanitfying tone scales, harmonics and other auditory details like
timber and rhythm require not only complex materials to emit controlled sound,
but also time pieces to measure duration and period.

Finally, we have centuries of superstition plagueing the discovery of facts as
science. Is the earth round? What happens when we die? How did the world and
universe come to be? Did an intelligence conjure us into existence by intent?
When will the world end? Are we the most important thing? Is nothingness
actually something?

So objectivity is not an incidental thing, even if experience is.

~~~
corey_moncure
>Indeed, color probably wasn't important until decoration and desirable
possessions became noteworthy.

The prime mover for these things is probably sexual selection, and we can see
that they are foundational all throughout nature, let alone animals, in plants
and fungi which do not even have brains or move. I guess that they are more
central than you are giving them credit for.

~~~
anchovies

      in plants and fungi which do 
      not even have brains or move. 
    

You’ve adjusted context to change focus from qualities of established
vocalization patterns to fundamental motility. Color as a phenomenon of
outward appearance does not obey the same principles as observation,
cognition, willful behavior and verbalization.

The externalities involved in plants adapting colors to suit pollinating
insects, versus crustaceans adapting colors to avoid being scavenged by birds
when they wash up on shore, have nothing to do with the noises animals make to
sound alarms or warn of aggression.

The next layer beyond the more obvious emotive sounds, is subtle noises in
proximity like cats purring or infrasound at a distance among elephants. These
sorts of noises still don’t signal choices, which is why we wouldn’t find
obvious objective patterns for color.

Most telling though, is the history of the word for Orange. This alone
indicates that the factors for thinking about colors, no matter how attention
grabbing they might innately be, is extremely subjective. Most colors find
their root words in a famous noun as the parent object for the concept of the
color. Blue as the sky. Brown as the dirt. Green as the grass. (not literally
these words, but definitely words like azul or chartreuse)

We know that colors exist, but to converse about them with peers is something
few animals seem to do.

The next cognitive leap after dividing up the observable world with discrete
vocabulary, is mastering the underlying principles that underpin the jargon
used to describe objects. Realizing that light travels from source to target.
Understanding that wind is an expression of air pressure and that air is more
substantial than vacuum. Differentiating between fire and heat.

When can words to describe these principles arrive within a linguistic
subculture? Only after a rich vocabulary already exists, and rules for
arbitrary word construction emerge.

It doesn’t matter that evolutionary pathways are selecting for observable
traits that result in ready differentiation of species. Language requires
awarenes and the will to communicate.

The subject matter that gets prioritized for communication is going to be
based on immediate operational factors and urgency. Necessity being the mother
of invention. So it’s not about the senses. It’s about reacting to
surroundings, whatever they may be, to gain advantage and persist in the wild,
at the moment.

You won’t see apes describing orange as a quality of the fruit, nor would the
orange trees be considering this fact as the orange gains success in
convincing the apes to distribute the seeds widely. The orange trees require
two factors to convince the apes to use the fruit. It needs to be obvious and
it also needs to taste good and serve biological needs.

Did the tree invent language constructs according to a linguistic model, to
evolve the orange? Did the apes invent a complex dictionary to describe the
subtleties the orange color or the citrus flavor as they introduced their
young to the source of food? No, you just know an orange when you see it. The
signal for it’s ripest best taste is a singular color, you’ll figure it out
after you eat a few.

