![]() ![]() There is two points of view so far: those who supports physicalism, that is, the idea that physics is enough to explain everything, and the ones who subscribe to epiphenomenalism, according to which mental states may be caused by physical and biochemical events but their existence is something different from physics, including subjective conscious experiences (qualia). It’s astonishing the outcome of this experiment is far from being resolved. What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room? Will she learn anything or not? She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue”. ![]() She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. Mary’s room is one of them, specially meaningful because of the question we’re asking, proposed for the first time by Frank Jackson in 1982: In order to shed some light on these questions, several thought experiments have been proposed to reveal the problem in its basics. Therefore, is there any part of that experience that cannot be explained physically, even knowing how our brain works? And if that is true, should we resign to fully knowing it? This idea seems quite plausible, but in order to accept it we must admit there are certain aspects of sensory experience that cannot be fully described even when we have complete physical information. ![]() Other people, more suspiciously, tend to think that knowing that process in detail and effectively hammering my finger are different things. ![]() For instance, if we know every physical detail about the processes triggered when I hit my finger with a hammer, then I should know (according with this line of thought) what sensations (pain in this case) I would feel without the need of having really hammered my finger. Some people assume that once we know everything physically posible about certain phenomena, then we know everything knowable about it. There’s a lot of issues debated around the concept of knowledge. And after learning it, one has the sensation (same word again) that we know everything there is to know about it. Its objective study led us to colorimetry, the science of measuring what is perhaps the only human sensation we can assign numbers to. The fact that color covers both physic and physiologic phenomena is what makes it exquisitely complex (at least in my opinion). So, before we attempt to do such a thing, let us agree in its basic definition: What is color?Ĭolor is a sensation produced when electromagnetic radiation in the range called visible (having wavelengths roughly between 400 and 700 nm) falls upon human eyes. It may seem an innocent question, but answering it implies to simultaneously address all aspects that give birth to color. ![]()
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