Truth is Relative

That's irrelevant. Even without human interference, Brazilin will find itself in an alkaline environment, or an acidic one, or a neutral one. Whatever the environment, the question remains what the intrinsic colour of Brazilin is. That is, if there is such a property as 'intrinsic colour'. It is my contention that there isn't. Again, I'm not saying that colour doesn't exist, all I'm saying is that colour is a perception, and as such doesn't exist outside the mind of those who perceive it. If redness was an objective property of things, should it not then be possible to tell a person who has never seen red what it's like to experience seeing red, without showing them? Sure, you can tell them that light of certain wavelengths hits their retina, and that neurons start to fire, and that the visual cortex is activated. But can you convey the redness of red? Can you make them see red just by telling them? You can't.Of course there is something out there that triggers perceptions in a perceiver, but since the same outside thing can trigger quite different perceptions in different animals, you cannot equate the outside thing with just one of those perceptions and ignore the rest. The only logical conclusion is that no one perception is equal to the outside thing. What you should have said, in my opinion, is that having a certain chemical composition seems to have a purpose in nature, because that chemical composition triggers certain responses that seem useful.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

You're right in that the concept of colour is a convenient shorthand to talk about wavelengths of light. Such a convenient shorthand it is that even if you don't know you're actually talking about wavelengths, you can still have a meaningful conversation about it.But to me that's a trivial aspect of colour. What really interests me is the essence of colour: that which first comes to mind when someone mentions the word 'red'.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

I think the interpretation of a spoken 'red' would be highly context dependent.When I think of 'red' outside of any conscious context, I associate it with heat.Of course, in the modern U.S., there's a strong association with Republicans.MooseEdited by Minnemooseus, : Change ID.

The first thing I get when I hear "red" is a vague version of the picture I posted upstream in this thread. That's what I'm talking about, that's what I mean by the "essence of colour".

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Yes yes but this does not help me distinguish the real object and some minimized finitness discussed by Russell . I take it by this post you are saying that there has been not change of attention of yours in this thread so far?

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It might be argued that, since we have admitted (NEXT QUOTE BELOW not part of text) that a simple object of perception may be of finite extent, we have admitted that it may be in many places at once, and therefore may be outside itself. This, however, would be a misunderstanding. In perceived space, the finite extent occupied by a simple object of perception is not divided into many places. It is a single place occupied by a single thing. There are two different ways in which this place may correspond to an infinite number of points in ”real’ space , and the single entity which is the object of perception will correspond to many physical entities in ”real’ space. Secondly, there is a more or less partial correspondence between perceived space at one time and perceived space at another. Suppose that we attend closely to our white patch, and meanwhile no other noticeable changees occur in the field of vision. Our white patch may, and often does change as the result of attention - we may perceive differences of shade or other differentitations, or, without differences of quality, we may merely observe parts in it which make it complex and introduce diversity and spatial relations within it. We consider, naturally, that we are still looking at the same thing as before, and that, what we see now was there all along. Thus we conclude that our apparently simple white patch was not really simple. But, in fact, the object of perception is not the same as it was before; what may be the same is the physical object supposed to correspond to the object of perception. This physical object is, of course, complex. And the perception which results from attention will be in one sense more correct than that which perceived a simple object, because, if attention reveals previously unnoticed differences, it may be assumed that there are corresponding differences in the ”real’ object which corresponds to the object of perception. Hence the perception resulting from attention gives more information about the ”real’ object than the other perception did: but the object of perception itself is no more and no less real in the one case than in the other - that is to say, in both cases it is an object which exists when perceived, but which there is no reason to believe existent except when it is peceived.”

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page 199 of Marsh listed in my first quote in this thread by Bertrand Russell.If we talk about Wright’s shifting balance theory and what the surface was meant to present, I believe I can show better than colour how there has to be something finite and real AND SIMPLE correlated definitvely, and hence with color as seems agasint your view here, regardless of the purpose put to it. By reframing Darwin’s diagram interms of quaternions it seems (to me) that one can reorient the entire mature Fisher-Wright debate. The visualization I am writing seems isomorphi to the question if Brazilian is one or two colors, somewhat analogously. Now you may demure that the adaptive landscape is not a quality a k a a hue but seeing how seeing it homologously goes to a point about the whole of creation and evolution itself using the issue of color relative to truth then would become such a small issue comparatively that we would ask ourselves why we even discussed it all.What Russell was referring to “ of finite extent” was this;

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But as applied to perceived space, such a view is quite inadmissible. The immediate object of (say) visual perception is always of finite extent. If we suppose it to be, like matter corresponding to it in ”real’ space, composed of a collection of entitles, one for each point which is not empty, we shall have to suppose two things, both of which seem incredible, namely: (1) that every immediate object of visual (or tactile) perception is infinitely complex; (2) that every such object is always composed of parts which are by their very nature imperceptible. It seems quite impossible that the immediate object of perception should have these properties. Hence we must suppose that an indivisible object of visual perception may occupy a finite extent of visual space. In short, we must, in dividing any complex object of visual perception, reach, after a finite number of steps, a minimum sensible, which contains no plurality although it is of finite extent.

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same book page 114Edited by Brad McFall, : added darwin diagram