Is The Sky Really Blue ?

We locked in our own little caves watching patterns of sunlight from the world outside coming through cracks.
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With that, you reveal you are not so much Packerbacker as you are Platobacker! :D Either way, thanks PB!


Pulling on this thread a bit more: Because our consciousness is only a result of processing signals, that means our consciousness is actually a Function (process) and not anything Physical. However, it is one of the most critical functions that permit the human system to perform its operational activities.

RMT
 
Visual detectors in regards to the transitions of matter or lack thereof?
Is the main topic speaking about the reflection of the ocean on the atmosphere?
Interesting stuff.
 
Because our consciousness is only a result of processing signals, that means our consciousness is actually a Function (process) and not anything Physical.
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From an evolutionary viewpoint, our consciousness really doesn't need to bear any direct one-to-one relationship with the external world. All it needs to do is be self-consistent and represent the same external phenomenon consistently with the same internal one. That is to say, some form of transformation matrix exists. So it really doesn't matter if a donut is REALLY shaped like a 17 dimensional polyhedral pink elephant with 29 spots.......as long as Homer Simpson can recognise 'donut' and see it as a tasty sugary round thing, then consciousness presents an internal reality that 'works'.
 
BLack is NOT an invention of the brain. If we did not have eyes to see, then our world would simply exist without color. A cave snake "Sees" with heat sensors on the sides of its head. It can see the heat of bat flying by. It may "see" that heat as red, or orange, or what we think of as the smell of dog poo. However the snake sees it also see the absence as something....that being black, ro the snakes version of it. Texas cave salamanders live in complete darkness too and have no eyes. However they have little sensors all over their skin that measure pressure. They can tell, since they live in a hydraulicly dense medium (water) where an object is that moves, how big it is, and what direction and speed it is going....From its perspective it is "Seeing" its environment. The lack of water pressures is the negative space, or black.

If our sight was fully tied to our consciousness, then we could not dream in color.
 
Nicely put /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
I've had a toad sitting outside the middle front of my door a couple times recently.
Why? The change in temperature even though it's cold blooded I'd imagine.
How it perceives the change as possibly negative and instinctively positions itself outside the area where most of the warmth is escaping and centers itself there is quite interesting.
Of course I gave him a free lift out of harm's way

As well, the perception of potential danger expressed in rapidity of breathing for the short ride to safety could be seen.
It's interesting what we sometimes miss when we take for granted what we are observing all around us without really realizing.
Fascinating 'stuff.
 
BLack is NOT an invention of the brain.
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Well of course it is. By definition, black is the absence of any photons. If there are no photons entering the eye......then clearly you are not 'seeing' anything. So how can black exist externally, when there is NOTHING transmitting that 'blackness' to you ??
 
They can tell, since they live in a hydraulicly dense medium (water) where an object is that moves, how big it is, and what direction and speed it is going....
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Basically this is sonar. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
" So how can black exist externally, when there is NOTHING transmitting that 'blackness' to you ??"

I can't believe I'm wasting my time discussing the color black, but, if black was not a color that exists, then our eyes would not be able to perceive it. Plasma TVs make black by absence of photons. LCDs make black by a combination of photons. They both make black outside our brains, and thus black is.

Just as interesting as black is white. White, when made of matter is such that it reflects all light spectrum. While white when made of light is such that it is made when all light colors are combined into one. Being that you can not "See" white light and you only see the reflected light off matter, does this mean white light does not exist either?

Hopefully we can move on to another topic now.
 
RMT:

First a question: Why is it I could not find this thread using the TTI search engine, but found it immediately, with a hot link, by simply typing Platobacker into Yahoo?

Secondly, You know Plato's cave analogy is a close fit for a description of a movie theater. The cave dwellers are sitting facing a wall of the cave (the screen), while behind them on a platform (the projection booth), actors are moving in front of a smoky fire (pictures of actors are passing in front of the projection lamp).

Thirdly, We actually are confined to a cave: our skulls. Plato may have been talking about a kind of consciousness achieved by some yogis, and which is often referred to as "Illumination," or"Recognition," and which they all insist defies explanation. (I'm a fan of Franklin Merrell-Wolff.) :D
 
First a question: Why is it I could not find this thread using the TTI search engine, but found it immediately, with a hot link, by simply typing Platobacker into Yahoo?
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Dunno. But I think it might be that the TTI search engine may not strip out HTML tags when searching? Because when I use TTI search with "Platobacker" the only post it finds is yours (note mine has a bold portion, thus in the HTML there is an embedded tag). However, if I go search on only "Plato" it finds my post, your follow-up, and Paladius' original citation of Plato's Cave.

The universe is just full of strange and wonderful things, eh? /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
RMT
 
It is something a lot of people have trouble conceptualising. 'What do you mean the sky isn't really blue ?'....they will say. One has to then explain that what people ACTUALLY 'see' is not 'out there' at all...but is a rather clever projection created by brain cells in the back of their head ! Our conscious expereince ( by definition...there exists a logical and mathematical proof ) does not exist 'out there'. Sure..there are waves and frequenceies of light...but 'blue' does not exist out there.....your brain makes it up.
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I'm a bit confused. I'm sensing an equivocation perhaps you can help me understand. There are waves and frequencies of light but 'blue' does not exist 'out there'? Does the light whose frequency is 440 to 490 nanometers (commonly referred to as 'blue light') exist 'out there' or doesn't it?

And in fact that goes for ALL our senses. None of what we 'experience' actually exists out there in the form in which we experience it. But the brain is so clever at 'projecting' our consciousness 'out there' that we somehow fall under the illusion that that experience is what is really there.
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While our experience is internal, would you say that the reason why we have experiences is that, at least part of the time, there is something external to experience? I agree that experiences are something internal. What I'm not crystal clear on is whether you think all experiences are sourced in something internal.

If I'm not mistaken, you're advocating some form of solipsism.

We really don't live in the external world at all. We live in a completely made up world of experience that is AFFECTED by the external world but which is not a direct experience of it at all. Our experience is not the real world.....it is a purely internal model that 'represents' the real world.
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So there is an external world that affects our experience. Do we or do we not live in an external world that affects our experience?

Once one starts to grasp this......it is not long before one starts to question whether time itself is another of those things that the brain has invented in order to represent a reality we can never directly experience. In exactly the same way as 'light' does exist out there in the form of waves of energy but 'blue' is our own creation............I suspect 'time' has a basis in something real, but our perception of it is entirely our own creation.
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Is my brain inventing the external world that affects my experience?

I couldn't agree more: 'time' has a basis in something real, but our perception of it is entirely our own creation.

Just as the blue of the sky does not actually exist 'out there'......it is to me quite likely that neither does our experience of time.
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You're comparing a measurable phenomena (blue light) to a measurable process, time. I don't see any inherent problem with this; I'm just pointing this out. While it is clear that our experience of time is internal, what is not as clear is whether or not you believe there is an external world that has had at least two states (or configurations) which would indicate transition, hence time.


( If anyone wants a logical proof that the sky is not really blue, I can provide it )
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Do you mean that the light coming from the sky is never in the 440-490 nm range, or do you mean that 'blue' as an experience is internal?
 
Everything we experience and know of ourselves and reality seems to come from our processing of an apparent internal/external dichotomy. We contrast ourselves to our experience of an external reality that we think we are not. The divisions are relative, are they not? If we did not think of ourselves as being separate from what we perceive in some sense, what would our own self-perception be like? Yet it is through external reality that we have such experience...

Is blue an inherent property of the sky? Is it a product of our experience of the light spectrum from within a finite range determined by biological hardware? Yet that biological hardware itself is a product of time and relative conditioning.

What is anything, "really"? What is intrinsically there, without that relative filtering and contextualizing?

Does the perceiver ultimately determine what is "real"? Is there really an external and internal to reality? Is that an artifact of perception? Does perception itself maintain the dividing line?
 
If we did not think of ourselves as being separate from what we perceive in some sense, what would our own self-perception be like?
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What I call 'myself', and my conscious experience, are one and the same thing. The brain plays a very neat trick of projecting our experience 'out there'....so that we think that 'we' are somehow observers. But in fact, the observer and the observed are one and the same thing.
 
The one thing I can be sure of is that I am here.
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Ah...good old solipsism ( the name for the belief that one is the only person who exists ). Itg is actually impossible to prove a solipsist wrong.

On the subject of an earlier comment about what all this has to do with time travel....the general gist is that just like the blue of the sky, time may be an illusion too.
 
Ah...good old solipsism ( the name for the belief that one is the only person who exists ). Itg is actually impossible to prove a solipsist wrong.
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I certainly allow for the possibility that there is something external to observe; I'm just not sure that there is something external to observe. Not as sure that I exist, whatever I might be, and whatever existence is, as long as "I" and "exist" are defined in their usual sense.

On the subject of an earlier comment about what all this has to do with time travel....the general gist is that just like the blue of the sky, time may be an illusion too.
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Gotchya. It remains to be seen whether or not the illusion of time will persistently fool us into believing time travel is impossible or will the illusion of time turn out to be more malleable in the sense of making time travel possible. What is equally hypothetical is the existence of parallel universes which also might be illusions but those illusions would automatically allow that something equivalent to time travel would be possible.
 
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