I've nicked these garish swirls from the "Phenomenal Qualities Project" website. Now here's the cool part. These are the same swirls with a black background:
Crap! The green and blue swirls are actually the same color? How could that be?
Contrast effects can be pretty powerful!
In any case, here's the question: how should the Tye-style representationalist handle these cases? Do they pose a problem for the representationalist? That is, do they suggest the existence of aspects of phenomenal character that can't be identified with representational content?
[More such examples to come.]
I think it's only a problem if the Tye-style representationalist needs to claim that the brain must represent aspects of the world exactly the same in different contexts, and I don't see a reason for Tye to claim that.
ReplyDeleteHad there not been anything written about the two images and the contrast effects, I would have thought that I was looking at two separate images. Which I am. The realization that the swirls of the first image are the same color in the bottom image does nothing to the fact that if I look at these two images separately, it feels different to see them. We take contrasting colors into account with everything we look at. Not just these images. What about lighting? How should the lighting of the room I am sitting in affect what I see? What about the fact that this is a digital image as apposed to a hard copy image or a painting or a photograph?
ReplyDeleteFrom what I gathered, this is similar to the phenomenology of hallucinations. When I look at the first picture, I represent it as being a certain way, even though what I represent is not entirely consistent with they way the world truly is. Just as with hallucinations, my representation of the first picture as having two different colored swirls has a phenomenology, because there is something that it is like to represent it as having two colors, just as there is something it is like to experience what you do when you are hallucinating. I also tried to compare this issue with the difference between intensionality and extensionality, but I'm not sure I'm right in doing so. My idea was that the first picture has intensionality, because my representation of it involves a kind of belief, as opposed to the second picture having extensionality, because it involves a more of fact. But I'm not sure my representation of the second is really different from that of the first, with regards to it being a matter of belief or fact. Perhaps I still only "believe" that the second picture has all the same green-colored swirls, no matter whether thats the way the world really is, or whether my eyes are being tricked again. Does anyone have any ideas on this, or points of clarification?
ReplyDeleteI'm not exactly sure how the representationalist should handle these sorts of illusions. Unless I'm missing something, these kinds of perceptual deceptions seem to present a problem for the transparency thesis, right?
ReplyDeleteI think what could really be problematic about the two swirls is that there is really no way of knowing what their true representation should be; this should be a problem for Tye.
And, if I may add to Brad's comment: Brad, the very sensation that you have that it "feels different to see them" separately supports the existence of phenomenal qualia (which is to say that there are qualia that have causal efficacy), which, if I understand his view correctly, Tye must reject.
It would seem that the reason that phenomenally the spiral looks to be chartreuse and light blue instead of the light teal that it really is would be based on faulty representation. It could be that there are just some things that cannot be accurately represented phenomenally, or it could be that just for us human beings, there is a physical problem with our own visual medium that cannot cope well with contrasting colors, which may speak more about a physical instance than for representation or phenomenology themselves.
ReplyDeleteThe phenomenal character of the color is accurately represented in both cases. One must account for the multitude of uses of the same objective phenomena appearing in different contrasts and contexts. The absolute objective nature of the color is always exactly its perception however the absolute objective nature of the color appears objectively different in different contrasts. The same way a 3d shape can appear differently from different angles. This in no way means its objective nature changes or is distorted by our perception it just appears differently from different points of view.
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