Something in my inbox from a page I pay some attention to.
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/
Though we experience the world as being full of color, 17th-century English philosopher John Locke argues objects themselves cannot possibly be colorized independently, as color only exists in the interaction with a perceiving subject.
When you look at a ripe tomato, for instance, the redness you see is not a property of the tomato itself, but a result of light waves reflecting off the tomato into your eye.
To someone from a slightly different vantage point, the color would be slightly different. To a dog or bumblebee or someone who was color blind, the tomato would appear different again. Moreover, if you wore blue-lensed glasses, or the source of light changed to dark purple, the color you’d experience when looking at the ripe tomato would change once more.
Which of these can be said to be the ‘true’ color of the tomato? Why should we favor any of them?
It seems we are forced to conclude, Locke says, that while the tomato appears red (to us) under normal perceptual and light conditions, it is not itself red: it just looks that way to our eyes, brains, and nervous systems under normal circumstances.
And it turns out this is the case not just for colors, but for all our sensory perceptions: how things taste, smell, sound, and feel are qualities not of things themselves, but of our interaction with those things, and such interactions are based on myriad circumstantial factors, and remain utterly private.
We are thus left with the question: once we strip away our private sensory perceptions from the objects we encounter, what remains? What are things like away from the senses, by themselves?
What do you make of Locke's analysis?
