Seeing red

[emjay]

I'd guess the palette is just what evolution settled on.

Bees seem to have a completely different palette.  White is Blue-Green, Red is black, Purple is blue.

Seems like once the brain gets the data, it can do whatever it wants with it.

That's very interesting indeed, thank you   I'll look that up about the bees cos that could be very helpful.

I realise my post may have been gobbledegook to people because that's what happens when you combine introspection with your own private logic, but it made sense to me   But with my own private logic, what you've said leads to a couple of observations. a) that it might be worth, just as an exercise, trying to figure out what sort of system requirements would lead to those 'choices' of colours for the bee - i.e. what different states bees need to differentiate in the environment and why those colours are best suited to representing it and b) that what you've stated are still colours that we know... so leading to questions of whether colour is the only way to represent the raw data and that the range of 'seeable' colours is limited. It certainly appears to me to be the case that colours are produced in the brain on-the-fly as it were - that we have not necessarily seen every colour it is possible for us to see and if each one was neurally encoded individually the brain would be a lot bigger than it actually is because there would be so many possibilities. So given basically a red-green-blue neural input much like for TV, the resulting colour appears to have to be produced on the fly, and that's why I think it may be the case that colour is the only way to differentiate the required different states. I mean that's one constraint but there are others - other features of the visual scene that need to be differentiated - and I think maybe the combined effect of these constraints leaves the colours that we see as the only possible way to fit them in the system. In the more data that is integrated, the more constrained the output is.

[Neo-Scholastic]

In professional circles the OP is called the inverted spectrum problem. And for what it is worth, everyone does experience yellow differently in part due to differing distributions of green and red cones, not to mention effects such as simultaneous contrast that are well known to artists.

You might also look for Nagel's essay, "What is it like to be a bat".

[emjay]

In professional circles the OP  is called the inverted spectrum problem. And for what it is worth, everyone does experience yellow differently in part due to differing distributions of green and red cones, not to mention  effects such as simultaneous contrast that are well known to artists.

You might also look for Nagel's essay, "What is it like to be a bat".

Thank you so much for that Chad   This is so exciting and it just goes to show that a problem shared is a problem halved 

If you don't mind me asking, what profession are you in, if you were talking from personal experience?

[The Grand Nudger]

 I wonder if it is the case that the colour qualia we 'see' is the only way to represent the data in a way that meets all the constraints of the system... that the palette we see emerges because it is the only way to differentiate, in the right ways, between the different states that are represented in the underlying neural hardware. That somehow an inverted colour world fails somewhere to meet the constraints of the actual brain-in-state and therefore does not, and cannot appear. That therefore all perception, whatever type it is, 'presents' the data in the only way it can to fulfil it's objectives.

Any thoughts are welcome on any aspect of this

Could I get some clarification.  Are you asking whether or not we percieve things the way we do because thi is the only way that we, as a system, -can- percieve them..or because this is the only manner in which they -could be- percieved.  That any system would have to arrive at this solution in order -to- perceive?  The former is likely, to a degree...the latter would be difficult to substantiate.

It certainly appears to me to be the case that colours are produced in the brain on-the-fly as it were - that we have not necessarily seen every colour it is possible for us to see and if each one was neurally encoded individually the brain would be a lot bigger than it actually is because there would be so many possibilities.

There is a point at which you need to make the architecture bigger to handle more variables...but...consider how many individual colors you can designate in each bitplace of a relatively simple computational device. I don't know that the brain would have to be immensely large to hold a designating variable for many more colors than we can currently see. After all, we have names for colors that we can't see. We have already defined them -as variables-. We're not entirely sure that we retain every specific instance or memory of color, btw.....we have reason to suspect precisely the opposite. If the data is largely dumped after any relevant computation is performed..then no amount of new colors, however large, would overload the capacity of the system. Basically just discussing a theoretical problem that can be solved by a "biological register"....yeah?

[emjay]

 I wonder if it is the case that the colour qualia we 'see' is the only way to represent the data in a way that meets all the constraints of the system... that the palette we see emerges because it is the only way to differentiate, in the right ways, between the different states that are represented in the underlying neural hardware. That somehow an inverted colour world fails somewhere to meet the constraints of the actual brain-in-state and therefore does not, and cannot appear. That therefore all perception, whatever type it is, 'presents' the data in the only way it can to fulfil it's objectives.

Any thoughts are welcome on any aspect of this

Could I get some clarification.  Are you asking whether or not we percieve things the way we do because thi is the only way that we, as a system, -can- percieve them..or because this is the only manner in which they -could be- percieved.  That any system would have to arrive at this solution in order -to- perceive?  The former is likely, to a degree...the latter would be difficult to substantiate.

Hi Rhythm The former, I think - if I understand you correctly. I'm not suggesting that colours are the only thing 'out there' and that it falls to a system to tap into them in order to perceive. Indeed, what I meant by talking about different animals with different senses and different perceptions was that it looks like the possibilities for perception 'design' are endless. That not even our imagination is a limit because we can't imagine perceptions we don't share - for instance I can't imagine what it would be like to have no sight... not a black visual field but rather no visual field at all... can't imagine it. But instead endless in terms of design space, or evolution's imagination if you were to put it that way. Rather, what I meant was to that a system with a given set of constraints - in this case the human brain - could only satisfy those constraints by using colour as we know it. It's not just colour that contributes to the visual scene, but lines, shapes, the actual topography etc and I think it's possible that all those constraints constrict the possible expressions of the information. That the richness of our multi-modal perception is so rich and 'distinguished' precisely because it has to be because so much information is vying for expression and constraining the output at the same time. But it's just a thought. But if it's not something like that then you have to ask how the system specifies the form of the perception, and that looks a much harder question.

It certainly appears to me to be the case that colours are produced in the brain on-the-fly as it were - that we have not necessarily seen every colour it is possible for us to see and if each one was neurally encoded individually the brain would be a lot bigger than it actually is because there would be so many possibilities.

There is a point at which you need to make the architecture bigger to handle more variables...but...consider how many individual colors you can designate in each bitplace of a relatively simple computational device.  I don't know that the brain would have to be immensely large to hold a designating variable for many more colors than we can currently see.  After all, we have names for colors that we can't see.  We have already defined them -as variables-.  We're not entirely sure that we retain every specific instance or memory of color, btw.....we have reason to suspect precisely the opposite.  If the data is largely dumped after any relevant computation is performed..then no amount of new colors, however large, would overload the capacity of the system.  Basically just discussing a theoretical problem that can be solved by a "biological register"....yeah?

Yeah, I'm sorry about that, I think that was a mistake on my part, so forget I said that bit. I didn't think it through enough. I'm not a neuroscientist and have no training whatsoever in it but I am interested in it so I may have misunderstood or oversimplified. But as I understand it, cones in the retina are used for distinguishing colour and they are tuned to detect red, green, or blue light. That information is transferred into the brain, via the optic nerve, on an almost one-to-one basis (albeit with some extra information added at the retina end from other cells) such that the topographical structure of the retinal map is largely preserved inside the brain. Also, cones are able to respond more rapidly to changes than other cells. So what appears to me to be the case is that there is a map of neurons in the brain that is updated in real time with 'pixel' information from the retina - each cone is represented individually (or near enough) on this map. But that information has come in in the form of RGB. So the question for me became, what to do with it next - how can it be further transformed/abstracted by a neural network? But thanks to wallym's post and looking up colour perception in bees I came across a site which said that in comparison to bees, human can distinguish about 60 different colours based on RGB values so that kind of answers it for me; if it works that way, each 'pixel' as represented by R, G, and B values need only trigger one of 60 different detectors and the variety of the colours we see would come from adjusting their brightness, which would come in from another source. So if that sort of thing's the case then there would be no exponential increase in the number of neurons required and the brain could stay small ;-) In other words the topographical map where the colour of pixels was concerned could consist (somehow) of 60 colour neurons (where one neuron is just a simplification) and their rate of firing could indicate brightness. So I don't see any problem any more because that is conceivable. Not to say that it would be that simple, because where visual processing is concerned (and everywhere else) the brain is very modular with neural detectors to detect a great many aspects of the visual scene... detectors for lines in one orientation or another, for contrast, for depth, for movement etc and then they get transformed into greater and greater levels of abstraction like shapes etc. And then all these networks are interconnected with each other in multiple ways with feedforward, feedback, and lateral connections so how and where colour discrimination fits into the such a complicated system is anybody's guess but at least now I can conceive of how it could fit in, roughly :-) And no, I don't believe either that every instance of colour is retained in memory... imo the real-time topographical map of the cones is transient and just reflects the current, ever changing state... that to store it longer term than would require an exponential increase in the number of neurons and thus not be feasible, which was part of my worry in the first place.

[The Grand Nudger]

The system -doesn't- specify the form of perception....which might explain, in part,  why so many forms of perception exist.  If it did specify, there might be fewer forms.



I have to say, I'm less certain now of what it is you're trying to express than I was before. Any other way to communicate it?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Chaos borrows from God, but is making a mess of his face.

*hands God a tissue*

Boru

[emjay]

The system -doesn't- specify the form of perception....which might explain, in part,  why so many forms of perception exist.  If it did specify, there might be fewer forms.  



I have to say, I'm less certain now of what it is you're trying to express than I was before.  Any other way to communicate it?

No, I don't think it does either, that was my point... or at least it was supposed to be 

Clearly I'm not very good at this - perhaps it's never a good idea to start a thread with a TL;DR 

Any other way to communicate it? Hmm. Drunk perhaps?   I don't know really. Okay I'll try this. Why is the visual field 2D? You would not be able to detect the right patterns in the pixel information if it was organised in a 1D array... would not be able to detect pixels that were next to each other or diagonal to each other. So it has to be a 2D array and that's how it's physically organised in the brain with this topographical map received from the retina. And from the brain's perspective it presumably needs to be structured like that so that it can be interconnected correctly retaining that topographical information. So the system is forced to represent the array in a 2D manner because of the constraints of how it will be accessed further down the line... eg for detecting lines etc in needs to know where one pixel sits in relation to another. So all these constraints force it into a specific configuration functionally and structurally. I just wonder if roughly the same thing happens phenomenally, and that therefore colour is the only way to represent/label the 'pixels' in a perception that already looks like it has been forced into being a 2D visual field (well 3D but 2D in terms of how it is in your head), given all the other constraints.

[The Grand Nudger]

 Why is the visual field 2D? 

Because your eyes are incapable of penetrating many objects, you can only see what is presented to your field of vision.  Ie, there are positions in which you cannot see both the front and back of something.

You would not be able to detect the right patterns in the pixel information if it was organised in a 1D array... 

We don't need any particular number of "d", because however many "d's" your eyes are capable of perceiving, that isn't fed directly as is to you brain, nor is your brain capable of seeing like an eye as far as we can tell.  

[/i]

would not be able to detect pixels that were next to each other or diagonal to each other. So it has to be a 2D array and that's how it's physically organised in the brain with this topographical map received from the retina. 

We perceive in 3d, not 2...we can only draw in 2.  I can only see the front of a subaru, but I perceive the rear of the same despite my inability to commit that 3d concept to a 2d page.  I can percieve it, i can even simulate it, I cannot replicate it.  That's a limitation of the surface upon which we impose the image.  

And from the brain's perspective it presumably needs to be structured like that so that it can be interconnected correctly retaining that topographical information. So the system is forced to represent the array in a 2D manner because of the constraints of how it will be accessed further down the line... eg for detecting lines etc in needs to know where one pixel sits in relation to another. So all these constraints force it into a specific configuration functionally and structurally. I just wonder if roughly the same thing happens phenomenally, and that therefore colour is the only way to represent/label the 'pixels' in a perception that already looks like it has been forced into being a 2D visual field (well 3D but 2D in terms of how it is in your head), given all the other constraints.

We are forced, as a system, to represent a 3d perception in a 2d manner because the surfaces we use to represent them are limited to 2d.   We, clearly, are not.  The "specific configuration", both structurally and functionally, necessary to differentiate between variables is awfully general. We label that same phenomena by it's placement in a spectrum described mathematically. That's just -one- other way to perceive "color", as a number.

[emjay]

 Why is the visual field 2D? 

Because your eyes are incapable of penetrating many objects, you can only see what is presented to your field of vision.  Ie, there are positions in which you cannot see both the front and back of something.

Okay.

You would not be able to detect the right patterns in the pixel information if it was organised in a 1D array... 

We don't need any particular number of "d", because however many "d's" your eyes are capable of perceiving, that isn't fed directly as is to you brain, nor is your brain capable of seeing like an eye as far as we can tell.  

I'm not sure I agree here. I've already said that the final visual perception is the result of many different transformations... lines, shapes, colours etc. In other words the eyes bring in the raw data but it's processed in many different ways, detecting different features of the input, before being 'output' as a perception. So yes, I know it's not a replica of what the eyes detect... it's more like a construction or model created out of the different features of the input that it detects and abstracts. All I meant was that topographically inside the brain it has to retain that map because it needs to use the what I'm calling 'pixel' information relative to other pixels on a 2d map. If it didn't have that map and scattered the output from those cones willy-nilly around the brain it would take some very clever wiring to bring it all together again. So that part has to be essentially 2d, just to allow the next layer of neurons to synapse easily with what represents pixels and their locations relative to each other. But how that applies to visual qualia is just conjecture.

would not be able to detect pixels that were next to each other or diagonal to each other. So it has to be a 2D array and that's how it's physically organised in the brain with this topographical map received from the retina. 

We perceive in 3d, not 2...we can only draw in 2.  I can only see the front of a subaru, but I perceive the rear of the same despite my inability to commit that 3d concept to a 2d page.  I can percieve it, i can even simulate it, I cannot replicate it.  That's a limitation of the surface upon which we impose the image.

My apologies. I was just thinking of it and simplifying it in terms of a flat visual field... because for my thinking I'm only really concerning myself with colour and the fact that that is portrayed like pixels on a screen. But yes I know perception goes a lot deeper than that in so many ways. Just as an aside though, in my own case I believe it is 2D because of my eyesight - I have a lazy eye so everything looks like a cardboard cutout to me and I couldn't catch a ball to save my life. So I don't really know what it's like to perceive in 3D, except for the clues that come from shading, lighting, perspective etc.

And from the brain's perspective it presumably needs to be structured like that so that it can be interconnected correctly retaining that topographical information. So the system is forced to represent the array in a 2D manner because of the constraints of how it will be accessed further down the line... eg for detecting lines etc in needs to know where one pixel sits in relation to another. So all these constraints force it into a specific configuration functionally and structurally. I just wonder if roughly the same thing happens phenomenally, and that therefore colour is the only way to represent/label the 'pixels' in a perception that already looks like it has been forced into being a 2D visual field (well 3D but 2D in terms of how it is in your head), given all the other constraints.

We are forced, as a system, to represent a 3d perception in a 2d manner because the surfaces we use to represent them are limited to 2d.   We, clearly, are not.  The "specific configuration", both structurally and functionally, necessary to differentiate between variables is awfully general.  We label that same phenomena by it's placement in a spectrum described mathematically.  That's just -one- other way to perceive "color", as a number.

Okay I get that. Inside, we create a 3D perception out of a 2D input device (our retinas), but vice versa in the outside world where in art or TV etc we can only represent 3D in 2D because we are limited to 2D surfaces. But you've kind of lost me on the next sentence - what do you mean by 'awfully general'? I know we can describe colour as a number, and that's indeed essentially what it would be in the brain, well a variable at least. But our visual perception doesn't show numbers - we're not like terminators or living in the Matrix looking at 0's and 1's all day. The patterns would be lost in that. Colour allows the right patterns to be detected. But before you jump down my throat about the terminator reference I just want to try and clarify that I don't think anything is happening in perception... that I think all the work is done in the neural networks and that perception just emerges from it as a kind of metaphysical mirror of what's going on neurally. But my theory was that the form it takes is the only one it could be given the different states it has to capture. But it was just a theory There'll be others