Sunday, May 6, 2007
Cause and Effect
Ok, maybe I'm crazy but milk is white, right? Everyone who looks at it sees it as white. I understand that our eyes see what the light reflects but even if you don't see it in the dark doesn't mean its not white just because we don't see it. A blind person may not physically see the milk he is drinking, but that doesn't mean it's not what it is. Its like the whole "If a tree falls in the forest" thing. Just because a person is not physically present doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's physics. If a tree falls and we see it we know it makes a sound. How arrogant are we to believe that just because we aren't there it doesn't happen. Yes, I'm a geek but I'm trying to get more blogs in. :)
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3 comments:
I had a hard time with the milk is white thing also.
My theory is that everything is black, the absorbtion of all color, until there is light and then we see the color thats reflected off the object. But since that is the color we see, as far as I know we need light to see, then isn't that the objects color? Or is it just a reflection, so kind of an illusion, and what we're seeing when in true form is really black? What people would probably say has no color.
I read somewhere that a butterflies wings aren't really the color we see, its the light reflected off the wings is what we see. Not to say I totally understand that either.
I make my own mind spin sometimes!! :)
OK both of you are giving me a headache - worse than my psychology class!!! Are you guys studying to be critical thinking instructors??? According to psychology (Kalat, 2006) color is the result of different spectrums of ultraviolet light. Now what exactly that means I dont know - I see something and I take it for what I see. What I see is not what you see, I am color blind so I have less cones than you do. However, my higher rod count allows me to see better in the dark - and was a benefit to see through certain types of camouflage.
If everything is black when there's no light, is everything white under the "blinding" light of a nuclear blast?
If everything is the color it would be under light, how much light shows us its true color?
Since most of us clearly do not see UV light (although, I read recently, some women do) if everything is whatever color it is regardless of what light shines on it and what person looks at it, is that ever the color that we actually see it, given that most of us do not perceive the UV light.
Person X, a caucasian who spends little time outdoors, looks kind of pinkish-beige from a distance. If we look closer, however, we see brown freckles. Is it more correct to consider X as beige-and-brown? if we look still closer, we find that a single patch of skin shows many colors. The veins show through blue-green. The hairs are brown, except where the sunlight glistens on them. Parts of the skin are distinctly pink; others are pale. Can we say, rather, that X is mottled?
If we examine X more closely, with a microscope, can we see various colors that are too small to distinguish otherwise, including the greens and prismatic diamond colors of various molds and bacteria. If we discount these as being part of non-X as opposed to X, how do we discount their effect on our total appraisal of X's color?
I once spent a long evening trying to explain red to a colorblind artist. I didn't manage, but he sure taught me some things.
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