Ben C said:
....
I think looking at the squares, it's no longer possible to imagine that
you could have blue and yellow without grey. But before you look at
them, for many people, it is fairly easy to imagine.
But red and yellow without orange are harder to imagine, even without
looking at a similar demonstration.
It is easy to imagine a world that has red and yellow but no orange but
there is a great difficulty in imagining a world that had these but
where it was not empirically possibly to have orange. What would one
imagine? A cruel ruler who executed people if they were about to mix
yellow and red paint together or scientists who played with light etc?
Or other odd things like the world blowing up if the merest hint of
orange threatened to appear in what we in this world would regard as
perfectly natural circumstances.
I think this is similar to: 1 + 1 = 3 is impossible to imagine for most
people, even for a second. But 34 * 2433185 = 82728280 is easy enough to
imagine,
Is it really so easy to imagine in fact? What is being imagined? A quiz
show scene perhaps where the contestant says "82728280" and there is a
silence and the compere looks uncomfortable and apologetic and says,
"I'm afraid not!" and the audience sighs with disappointment, the
contestant dejected? I reckon the truth or untruth of some things are
something beyond imagination, the meaning of "true" and "false" and "34"
and "+" etc are understood well enough, but that does not mean that
where they are all put together in a meaningful statement, there is
created something that can be penetrated by an act of imagination.
until it is demonstrated to you that it can't be so (it's
82728290), perhaps by showing on paper what the correct answer is.
You can think it true and be shown it false, yes.
Why is it similar? There are many things in the world that some people
call orange and others red, and the same goes for orange and yellow. The
concepts overlap. For this reason, red + yellow = orange is almost as
intuitive as 1 + 1 = 2. You cannot really understand the word orange at
all without understanding red and yellow.
Not quite sure of this? But perhaps you are saying that the idea of red
and yellow contain in them the idea of variation. Some reds are more
yellowish and some yellows are more reddish and it is hard to understand
either idea without this flexibility. And, perhaps you are saying, this
flexibility, delivers the idea of orange. It pops out of the concepts of
red and yellow!
I am getting a 'not found' and no, there is no stop at the end! <g>
....
The other interesting thing here is the relationship between colours.
It's easy to sit back and think redness could hardly be more different
from greenness-- they "feel" like absolute primary concepts, some of the
lowest-level building blocks of perception (and we do know you have red,
green and blue cones in your eye). But in another way all the colours
are related to each other, just like numbers.
In general, the world is a complicated place and we have got this far by
our brains evolving to be on top of the things that are needed for
survival, all else is a marvellous plus of course, but we cannot push
our luck with the simple mechanisms of imagination.
Quantum physics is one of the most successful theories (and predicting
machine) ever built by man and no one the least understands it on the
level of imaginative grasp! I have heard recently an interesting
argument that biology needs to go down the path of theory that is not
easy to understand in terms of imagination (my paraphrase, of course).
The idea is that we need to jump a level or two away from the mechanical
pictures we have of biological processes to *really understand* them so
we better get a handle on continuing problems of how biological systems
are so sustaining and self organised...
I hasten to add that none of this is criticising anything you have said.
I just take the opportunity to rant on a bit!
