Hobbes' Choice wrote:
I think your thoughts on distant galaxies was top notch.
I assume that you also assert that colour is a phenomenon of the perception and not a property of the object?
TerraStat, has a problem with his own reality.
Yes, I think colour must be a property of perception.
For one thing, we know we do not all perceive it the same way, not humans and certainly not animals. So, even if we thought colour was the property of the object, we could not know what that property was. Even for the same individual, colour is not fixed; an object seen under coloured lights will be a different colour. So, if we are going to insist that colour is a property of objects, we would not only have to specify '
to which observer' but also
'under which conditions'.
Of course, for a blind person there is no colour. Or, if we insist that the colour is still there, even if the blind person is not equipped to see it, then we would have to extend the notion of colour to include radio waves, and gamma rays, since these are also part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Yes, we are not normally equipped to see them, but nor was the blind person equipped to see the visible spectrum, yet we insisted that colour still existed. So we have to add
'using which equipment' to the list of things for detecting colour.
As we add more conditions, our claim that a colour is the property of an object becomes more and more subjective; saying '
the tree is green' has become '
the tree looks green, at least to me, under certain conditions, using particular tools'. i.e. it is more about the observer than the observed.
(Alternatively, if we allow the whole electro-magnetic spectrum to count as 'colour', then our understanding of 'colour' is absorbed in our understanding of physics generally, but a scientific account of the universe is not subjective at all.)