Comment on Bizarre Illusions

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:55:01 GMT

Since you mention it, that's something I should have brought up in one of the Mitchell_Porter consciousness threads: the colors you see are not actually matched up one-to-one with the wavelengths hitting your retina. Rather, the visual system does something like subtracting away the average color.

Meaning, the color that you experience seeing depends on all the colors in the scene, not just the wavelength of the light coming off each specific object.

Some people were talking as if you were getting direct knowledge of (something equivalently expressible as) wavelengths, which is unfortunate, since part of the path to demystifying qualia is understanding this kind of processing.

Discuss