(July 9, 2015 at 5:39 pm)Nestor Wrote:(July 9, 2015 at 4:25 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: Nestor, what, exactly, do you mean by "color?"By color I mean simply ... red, blue, yellow, etc. These are how we experience objects, from the reflections of different light wavelengths, which appear in our vision, and as Jorm said, are processed by the brain... but we wouldn't say that the objects or energy itself contains "redness" or "blueness" as an intrinsic property... I presume anyway.
Surely, you are not asking if there were different frequencies of light before there was anyone to perceive it, are you?
I don't see any reason to suppose that our perceptions must be as things are. Physicists tell us that solid objects are really mostly empty space with tiny particles moving about (or at least, that is what they said a few years back). That is not how I experience my dining room table.
As for the color words, they are ambiguous, in that sometimes "red" means particular frequencies of light.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
