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AdeleneDawner comments on Bizarre Illusions - Less Wrong
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I'm just not seeing what obvious reality it highlights, so either I'm particularly dense or it's not in fact obvious.
So, rephrasing: what reality is being highlighted by the "illusion" ?
Your prime number analogy suggests that it's in fact the "both colors are the same" assertion which is an illusion. The perceptual reality is that the pixels in these areas are discriminated as different colors. The illusion consists of looking at pixel with identical RGB values and thinking "Oh, these have the same position in colorspace, I expect my brain to perceive them as identical."
The reality suggested by the "illusion" is that this expectation doesn't hold in general, it's a stupid model. A smarter model would take more things into account before it predicted what our brain will perceive as identical colors.
But this is very much non-obvious...
In other words, this is the visual version of "if a tree falls in the forest...", except that we already defined 'color' as qualia rather than wavelengths, right?
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.
Um, "we already defined" - the referent(s) of that phrase are very ambiguous, I'm afraid. Who's "we" and where was that definition ?
I definitely agree that color discriminations in the brain (the processes that eventually end up with color words coming out of our mouths) are about way more than wavelengths. I'd prefer the term "discrimination" to "qualia", the latter carries philosophical baggage that I'd rather do without.
It's a royal 'we' in this case: Some subset of the group of commenters here at LW, and that subset doesn't include me. It was discussed at some length in the recent discussion of consciousness. I wasn't paying much direct attention to the conversation, though, so I can't be more specific than that. (I'm not even sure that the relevant bits are all in one post's comments.)