I've been married 30 years. My wife is now 75. She's in good health, spry, but her body sags in all the places you'd expect. I remember, when we first got together, how beautiful she looked when I'd see her in the bathroom getting undressed. Now, I look at the little old lady doing the same, and to my delight, my response is the same -- she is still the most beautiful woman I know.
Elements of rasa theory here---The Indian theory of drama and performance: Rasa, meaning gist, is an alaukika (other worldly) experience resulting from witnessing an art (piece/performance). ‘Rasa’ is the term that Dewey lamented did not
exist in English, a word that combines both the ‘artistic’ and the ‘aesthetic’ (Thampi, 1965).
Primarily derived from a reference to cuisine and concept of taste, ‘Rasa’ can mean
essence, gist, or flavor. Rasa is used to mean an ‘extract’, (since it is) ‘worthy
of being tasted (Gupt, 2006 p. 261) Without Rasa no purpose of an art is fulfilled (Rangacharya, 1966).Rasa is something that can be relished, enjoyed, appreciated like taste in food, or melody in music, and body’s movement in a dance.
Both knowledge and context are important. So are all the other senses. Smell, sight, hearing....etc. For that reason....if you are sleepy or inebriated...neither can you enjoy a concert nor a meal. BEING AWAKE --(meaning all senses (depending on the context) are functioning well) --is important.
> Yes, of course there are better and worse exemplars of a style, but there is no objective, transparent context for fine-grained rating.
Similar issues come up with respect to determining the meaning of a word “out of context”. There is, of course, no such thing as “no context”, and the question of which aspects of meaning come from the word itself and which come from the ways in which it composes with the context is deeply challenging to answer. The connection to aesthetic preferences and taste makes that even clearer to me.
I'm reminded of an experiment from England that showed that most people can't judge the flavor of yogurt with an unexpected color (such as blueberry being bright yellow, etc.). I use this video in my IB Theory of Knowledge class: https://youtu.be/1w-DbQhuJtY?si=pDq-s5K8_f03qldZ
There is a lot of truth in this article. However, when your perception of reality begins to cause significant problems in your own life or the life of those you encounter (e.g. murdering random travelers) then society rightfully declares that to be a problem.
Thinking about this in terms of color perception may be useful.
The perception of color is a mental phenomenon which may or may not(*) be influenced by physical phenomena like photon energies, but isn't solely an effect of photon energies.
It can be useful to distinguish different kinds influences on the perception of taste. Specifically, the signals from the tongue and the nose are both influencing the perception in the same way that photon energies influence perception of color. But things like labels on bottles are creating the equivalent of "optical illusions" of color (take your pick of the many examples out there).
I'm not quite sure whether one should consider contextual matters like "sitting on a beach" for choice of beer (or "in a dance club" for choice of music) to be something essentially equivalent to bottle labels or something distinct.
It seems that what argument there is about this stems from equivocation about whether the thing (taste, color, beauty) is the perception or the phenomena.
(*) consider, for example, the perception of color in dreams
I'm doubtful that we can meaningfully distinguish between true color and optical illusions of color. I think it is all just "color". For example, metamers are two patches of color that look identical, but are made up of different combinations of light wavelengths. A pure light source of 520nm looks green. But we mix the right amount of 420nm, 480nm, and 620 nm light wavelengths it will look identical to 520nm. Is one of these an optical illusion? Or simultaneous color contrast, which is basically a context-setting for color perception. There's even colored shadows. All kinds of stuff. So my take is that all color is in the same metaphysical boat.
I think beauty and taste are in the same boat. They may be secondary qualities, so in that sense mind-dependent (and generated by the interaction of many inputs), but real nevertheless. Many things would not exist without minds, but are still perfectly real. Minds themselves, for example!
"I'm doubtful that we can meaningfully distinguish between true color and optical illusions of color"
It is a mistake to speak of this in terms of "true" color at all. The problem is that we use "color" to identify two different phenomena - one physical, one mental. (I think it is also a mistake to speak of certain perceptions of color as optical "illusions," as that incorrectly implies that the mental experience of color is false, when what it really means is that the correspondence between photon energy and perceived color is broken.)
In your example, the "looks green" is not an illusion - in either case the brain constructs an experience of green. But mixing 420, 480, and 620nm light doesn't give you a 520nm light source. (It may be better here to think of this in terms of photon energies instead of wavelengths to avoid the confusion of beat frequencies.)
Still, I don't think you and I disagree about what is going on - there is a confusion generated by considering the physical phenomena and the mental phenomena to be the same thing. (Or, for those of you who are about to insist that "mental" phenomena are, in fact, physical phenomena: the phenomena outside the body vs the phenomena inside the body. And if you are still concerned that the distinction isn't sufficiently precise (it's not!), you are off on a different argument.)
We get confused about color precisely for the reasons you suggest: because the close correspondence between the physical phenomena of photon energy and the mental phenomena of color perception leads us to think they are the same phenomena, and that if the correspondence is broken, something has gone wrong.
I've been married 30 years. My wife is now 75. She's in good health, spry, but her body sags in all the places you'd expect. I remember, when we first got together, how beautiful she looked when I'd see her in the bathroom getting undressed. Now, I look at the little old lady doing the same, and to my delight, my response is the same -- she is still the most beautiful woman I know.
Exactly. And you are correct in your judgment.
Elements of rasa theory here---The Indian theory of drama and performance: Rasa, meaning gist, is an alaukika (other worldly) experience resulting from witnessing an art (piece/performance). ‘Rasa’ is the term that Dewey lamented did not
exist in English, a word that combines both the ‘artistic’ and the ‘aesthetic’ (Thampi, 1965).
Primarily derived from a reference to cuisine and concept of taste, ‘Rasa’ can mean
essence, gist, or flavor. Rasa is used to mean an ‘extract’, (since it is) ‘worthy
of being tasted (Gupt, 2006 p. 261) Without Rasa no purpose of an art is fulfilled (Rangacharya, 1966).Rasa is something that can be relished, enjoyed, appreciated like taste in food, or melody in music, and body’s movement in a dance.
Both knowledge and context are important. So are all the other senses. Smell, sight, hearing....etc. For that reason....if you are sleepy or inebriated...neither can you enjoy a concert nor a meal. BEING AWAKE --(meaning all senses (depending on the context) are functioning well) --is important.
Great article—I strongly agree with this point:
> Yes, of course there are better and worse exemplars of a style, but there is no objective, transparent context for fine-grained rating.
Similar issues come up with respect to determining the meaning of a word “out of context”. There is, of course, no such thing as “no context”, and the question of which aspects of meaning come from the word itself and which come from the ways in which it composes with the context is deeply challenging to answer. The connection to aesthetic preferences and taste makes that even clearer to me.
Good one, thanks.
Great article!
Ah, Agua de Culo! Rated browner in taste by 9 out of 10 experts.
Great article!
I'm reminded of an experiment from England that showed that most people can't judge the flavor of yogurt with an unexpected color (such as blueberry being bright yellow, etc.). I use this video in my IB Theory of Knowledge class: https://youtu.be/1w-DbQhuJtY?si=pDq-s5K8_f03qldZ
Nice!
There is a lot of truth in this article. However, when your perception of reality begins to cause significant problems in your own life or the life of those you encounter (e.g. murdering random travelers) then society rightfully declares that to be a problem.
Thinking about this in terms of color perception may be useful.
The perception of color is a mental phenomenon which may or may not(*) be influenced by physical phenomena like photon energies, but isn't solely an effect of photon energies.
It can be useful to distinguish different kinds influences on the perception of taste. Specifically, the signals from the tongue and the nose are both influencing the perception in the same way that photon energies influence perception of color. But things like labels on bottles are creating the equivalent of "optical illusions" of color (take your pick of the many examples out there).
I'm not quite sure whether one should consider contextual matters like "sitting on a beach" for choice of beer (or "in a dance club" for choice of music) to be something essentially equivalent to bottle labels or something distinct.
It seems that what argument there is about this stems from equivocation about whether the thing (taste, color, beauty) is the perception or the phenomena.
(*) consider, for example, the perception of color in dreams
I'm doubtful that we can meaningfully distinguish between true color and optical illusions of color. I think it is all just "color". For example, metamers are two patches of color that look identical, but are made up of different combinations of light wavelengths. A pure light source of 520nm looks green. But we mix the right amount of 420nm, 480nm, and 620 nm light wavelengths it will look identical to 520nm. Is one of these an optical illusion? Or simultaneous color contrast, which is basically a context-setting for color perception. There's even colored shadows. All kinds of stuff. So my take is that all color is in the same metaphysical boat.
I think beauty and taste are in the same boat. They may be secondary qualities, so in that sense mind-dependent (and generated by the interaction of many inputs), but real nevertheless. Many things would not exist without minds, but are still perfectly real. Minds themselves, for example!
"I'm doubtful that we can meaningfully distinguish between true color and optical illusions of color"
It is a mistake to speak of this in terms of "true" color at all. The problem is that we use "color" to identify two different phenomena - one physical, one mental. (I think it is also a mistake to speak of certain perceptions of color as optical "illusions," as that incorrectly implies that the mental experience of color is false, when what it really means is that the correspondence between photon energy and perceived color is broken.)
In your example, the "looks green" is not an illusion - in either case the brain constructs an experience of green. But mixing 420, 480, and 620nm light doesn't give you a 520nm light source. (It may be better here to think of this in terms of photon energies instead of wavelengths to avoid the confusion of beat frequencies.)
Still, I don't think you and I disagree about what is going on - there is a confusion generated by considering the physical phenomena and the mental phenomena to be the same thing. (Or, for those of you who are about to insist that "mental" phenomena are, in fact, physical phenomena: the phenomena outside the body vs the phenomena inside the body. And if you are still concerned that the distinction isn't sufficiently precise (it's not!), you are off on a different argument.)
We get confused about color precisely for the reasons you suggest: because the close correspondence between the physical phenomena of photon energy and the mental phenomena of color perception leads us to think they are the same phenomena, and that if the correspondence is broken, something has gone wrong.
figure/ground
the process versus the product
etc