Why is the Universe Comprehensible?

[Jim__]

91. Once again, either you don't understand or you're pretending not to understand.

Last edited Fri Feb 7, 2014, 08:08 AM - Edit history (2)

I've given you the name of the red-colorblind professor that is perfectly capable of discovering and understanding how a swallow-tail butterfly can see red, that it DOES see red, and colors NO human can see as well, and PROVE That he understands it by devising empirical tests by which we can VERIFY that the butterfly can indeed see what he surmised.

You gave me the name Arikawa in post #90, the same post where you just claimed: I've given you the name of the red-colorblind professor that is perfectly capable of discovering and understanding how a swallow-tail butterfly can see red, that it DOES see red, and colors NO human can see as well, and PROVE That he understands it by devising empirical tests by which we can VERIFY that the butterfly can indeed see what he surmised.

In what post prior to #90. I don't see you giving that name in any previous post in this subthread.

Please tell me how the professor can demonstrate that the butterfly can perceive the color red, the color, not that its receptor is stimulated by, say 630nm electromagnetic radiation, but that the butterfly perceives color. Test like:

This paper demonstrates that foraging summer-form females of the Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly Papilio xuthus have colour vision. The butterflies were trained to feed on sucrose solution placed on a disk of a particular colour in a cage set in the laboratory. After a few such training runs, a butterfly was presented with the training colour randomly positioned within an array of disks of other colours, but with no sucrose solution. The results indicate that the butterflies learn rapidly to select the training colour reliably among different colours. The training colour was also correctly selected when it was covered with neutral density filters to reduce its brightness, or even when the colour was presented together with disks of a variety of shades of grey. These results demonstrate convincingly, for the first time, that a butterfly has true colour vision.

demonstrate a differential response to electromagnetic (EM) radiation. This is a form of a stimulus response experiment where the subject responds to the EM. I know the butterfly's receptors react differentially to different wavelengths of EM. Human cones respond differentially to different wavelengths of EM, but we have an experience of color, we live in a world of color. Where in our perceptual process, where in our neural networks, does the response to EM become color? Is there such a place in the butterfly's visual system? Are the butterfly's neural networks involved in this response purely computational, or is there a part of the network that accesses qualitative colors? Do butterfly's experience the same red that humans do? How do you know? If you don't know that, then there is part of the butterfly's visual system that you don't understand - I used that rather than comprehend since you seem so concerned about it.

He didn't just say 'perceive' he also said 'let alone understand'. He also threw out the colorblind example. [/div ]

Yes indeed he did. One reason could be that while humans can perceive color (not just differentiate EM but see color) and no one understands how that happens.

We were discussing a device that allowed people to perceive colors they could not formerly perceive. This device does nothing of the kind. Please don't try arguing that the ability to distinguish between white, grey, and black socks is color perception.

Are you fucking kidding me. THE POINT is that we are developing the tech to hook directly into the nervous system and deliver signals that the eye in question COULD NOT PREVIOUSLY perceive. The difference between light and no light is more fundamental, and a much starker contrast, than the color frequency difference between red and green. Yet, we have a device that can overcome that. Right now FDA approved. More are on the way. I cited that one because it's FDA approved, and available. There are more that DO distinguish between colors/color perception, and a implant for rats that can see near-infrared, if you could be bothered to fucking LOOK at the field at all, maybe just maybe you could be bothered to do a simple search like 'color retina implant'.

No, I'm not fucking kidding you. You claimed such a device existed. I said it's in the future, not now. You claimed I was wrong. According to the article you just cited, I wasn't:

From your post #82: Look, we are on the verge of a VAST array of different optical implant technologies taking hold. There is no reason to think the human brain is incapable of interpreting this data. All colorblindness conditions I am aware of take place in the sensory unit of the eye. We're going to bypass that.

And from my post #84: As I stated in post #67, discovering light frequencies and perceiving color are different things. And, as you just stated, we are on the verge of discoveries. However, on the verge implies in the future, not at present. Seidensticker's point about perception remains valid.

Then your post #86: Not discoveries. Widespread FDA approval/installation in humans. The discoveries are already made. One device is already approved, actually. Off the shelf.

And, from the article on color detection that you cited:

Although these technologies induce color perception in patients, this perception is difficult to predict and control, Loudin said. These electrically stimulated percepts enable patients to see a variety of colors, including yellow, blue, red and white.

“A device with precise, predictable spatial control of the color of these percepts across many patients is many years off. ”

So, by the article you cited, these devices are years off. Also note that they don't mention green which is part of the precise type of color blindness that Seidensticker mentioned: There could be enormous reservoirs of scientific fact that we’re inherently unable to perceive, let alone understand, because of our limited brains—like a red-green color distinction to a color blind person or a joke to a lizard. So, Seidensticker may have had good reason for what he said.

... Because you are quite obviously not getting it, and clearly not interested in putting a three word fucking query into the nearest search engine. I spoon feed you specifics, and you bitch about minutiae. I give you simpler, broader generalizations and you bitch about that too. I can see exactly what you are up to.

I didn't start bitching about miniutiae. You're the one that took issue with me saying this is in the future. You claimed it's here, now. But, the article you cited explicitly state that it's years in the future.

What these devices do, of course, is mimic sensory receptors and then tap into the existing visual networks. An awesome accomplishment. But, it doesn't begin to approach the complexity of the existing visual networks. As I said back in post #81: The reaction of sensory receptors is only the first step in perception. Yes, it's awesome that we can tap into that first step. But, again, we get to the lizard. It has an existing perceptual mechanism to hear sound; but it does not have any mechanism for understanding words or grammar. We have nothing to tap into there. We don't yet have any way to approach that problem .

I AGREE it may be possible that something out there might be utterly incomprehensible to us. We haven't found any such thing yet, and I see no reason to ASSUME that is true, just that it might be a possibility. The examples he gave were horseshit.

That we haven't found any such thing yet is an assumption. While we know how cones in the retina respond to EM, we don't know how our perceptual system converts that to an experience of color. So, for right now, we may or may not have encountered something that we can't understand. Yes, we should keep trying to understand; but to unqualifiedly declare that we haven't encountered anything we can't understand is an assumption.

Seidensticker was talking about parts of the universe that we may not be able to understand, a simpe point. A valid point. His examples were of aspects of our experience, things were can immediately relate to. The fact that you may not understand the article doesn't mean that it's drivel. It just means that you don't understand