And you've been told why you're wrong.
No. When we see something and interpret it as yellow it is because there really is something emitting photons with a wavelength of 575-585 nm. Those photos are really there. The interpretation is as the colour yellow. That interpretation is not an hallucination, at least not as usually understood of the term.
If we see a banana it is usually because it is emitting photons that we interpret, correctly, as a banana. This would not be an hallucination.
An hallucination is when our brain thinks there are photons, or sound waves, or other sensory causes, that aren't actually there. Hearing a song when there aren't any actual sound waves would be an hallucination. Seeing blue dots when there are no light waves with that wavelength would be an hallucination. However, the brain simply perceiving correctly (for a human) what is actually there, is not an hallucination.
For the experience not to be caused by what is actually there.
Correct. This would be a false perception. This would be an hallucination.
No. If the perception of colour is due to photons hitting the eye then it is not an hallucination, because the brain is perceiving what is there (the photons).
It's not as if photons are actually carrying the quality of color somehow and merely transmitting it to the passive brain. The photons are not themselves colored no more than the objects in the physical world are colored. Prior to the sensation of color generated by the brain that distinctive experience, of the unique and vivid yellowness of the banana, does not exist. This is why we can never know if YOUR yellow is really the same as MY yellow. Because even though we may scientifically define yellow as a physical wavelength of light, it is still being totally generated inside the brain somehow. There is iow no necessary causal connection between the information contained in the photons and the qualitative experience of color. A consistently generated hallucination is still a hallucination.
This can be especially seen with people who have cortical color blindness. (see below link). Their eyes are receiving all the right photons, their retina is generating all the right electrical signals, but they still don't experience the sensation of yellow. They "see" all the same properties of light, its luminosity, its invariance, its tone, and its contrast. But not the hue of yellow. Somehow their brains do not generate the experience of yellow for them but instead some other hue like grey. It's a consistent, light stimulated, but totally different hallucination from ours.
Furthermore, in the case of synaesthesia, color is being consistently generated by entirely different external stimuli, like sound or taste or smell. How is this even possible if it is an objective physical property existing only in light? Because all that sensory data is converted into synaptic firings at some point, which generate qualitative properties that are not causally traceable to that data.
One more example. Stare at a patch of color for a few moments. Then look at a white surface. The complimentary color of the original color will be seen. Red will produce green. Blue will produce yellow. We are still seeing a color based on all the right incoming physical light information, only having a totally different qualitative experience. How can color go from being a physically existing mind-independent property of light on the one hand, to a totally synaptically -generated first person-experienced hallucination on the other hand? Gotta be one or the other, right?
In the end perhaps it is all a matter of semantics. Is color a subjective sensation hallucinated in the brain, or the eye's perception of a certain physical wavelength of light? I say the former no matter what the stimuli is. You say the latter and only when the stimuli is light of a certain wavelength striking the retina. We will have to agree to disagree.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21223886/#:~:text=Cortical colour blindness is caused,destroyed at the cortical level.
You are confusing the experience itself for the cause, with regard what defines an hallucination. It is not the interpretation of something as yellow but what is causing that perception in the first place.
The interpretation metaphor is inadequate since it implies the preexistence of a true and objective perception of the situation. But where? In the eyes? The eyes are not perceiving anything. Down to their molecular and atomic level they are all dark inside. Hence that color is somehow preexisting its generation in the brain on the banana, in the light photons, or in the eye itself in a physical third person sense and yet is also being subjectively experienced later on in the brain as something slightly different is not the case. That's not what is happening.
The actual situation is far more radical. That color doesn't preexist the brain's generation of it at all and so is only projected by the brain as existing out there physically. The hallucination couldn't be more complete. Not only is color NOT existing in any of the information of the synaptic signals, it is also NOT preexisting those as a real physical property of light outside the brain.
Post 42 and half have been about your misuse of the word "hallucinate", the reason which will now have seen at least 2 (if not 3) of the 4 participants to the thread thus far dropping out.
A thread is a fluid and organic activity. Sometimes there's one poster.. Other times there's 3 posters. And for days there might even be no posters. I'm content to let it continue as it has and to vary over time unhindered in all of its spontaneous ways.
