Philosophy On The Mesa

If you are over 40, or exceptionally musically literate, you will probably find this video hilarious.

If you are under 40, you may not get it; but that will be your loss.

The red light ahead signals you to come to a stop; the light changes, and you notice that the shiny strip of red on the road ahead has turned green. The evening’s rain has left shallow pools of color here and there, turning stretches of the dark pavement into nearly perfect reflectors. What for a moment appeared to be a gleaming red strip of light shining up from the road now becomes a glowing green. Past experience has shown, however, that this whole show of colors is just an illusion—they will disappear when the water evaporates or the signal light stops working. Common sense enjoins reason; no part of the road, you tell yourself, is really red or green. The color of the road is the same as that of most paved surfaces: an indeterminate, composite shade of gray-to-black. Parts of it only look red or green because they are reflecting first the red, then the green light from the signal. But, we might go on to ask, what is it in the signal light that really is red? It is not the light generated by the lamp itself, for the same (broad-band) light is used in the green signal. The red signal lamp is made with a filter through which only long-wave light can pass, while middle- and short-wave light is trapped or absorbed, so the filter might be said to be the source of the redness present in the above situation.

            So the red color seen reflected on the wet road is neither a property of that which is  reflecting, nor of that which is generating, the light. But is it really a property of the filtering material? There are reasons to think not, because if we were to shine only short-wave light, or a mixture of short- and middle-wave light through it, if any light at all makes it through the filter, it would appear dark amber, not red. So the color of the filter seems to be relative to the composition of the light it transmits. Running out of objects or energy sources outside the perceiver to serve as logical candidates for bearers of color properties, at least in any determinate or absolute sense, we turn next to an examination of the perceiver. We are again to be disappointed, however, since if the perceiver is not equipped with a particular set visual mechanisms that contain certain sorts of photo-reactive pigments, the light may not appear to have any color at all; or, it may look some color other than red. So what or where is the redness that is so commonly taken to be a regular feature of the natural and artifactual worlds we inhabit? If it is not in the world of objects external to minds, and it is not internal to minds, where could it be?  Commonsense notwithstanding, considerations such as these have led both philosophers and scientists to say that colors are instantiated neither by reflective surfaces, refractive objects, nor by illuminant sources of electromagnetic energy; nor are they properties of retinas, ganglion cells, cortices of the brain, or some combination thereof. Many insist that colors are illusions; the way we human perceivers see the world is not the way the world really is. But can we leave things here? Is such a fundamental component of our experience a “false, imaginary glare”? Is there an account of color properties that gives them the ontological status deserving of the mainstay of human-environment relations and aesthetic sensibilities that colors are? For some possible answers, take a look at the slide show “The Reality of Color.”

The Color of Reality-Slide Show