Colour Cube

Saw this on a BBC documentary last night but with a single explanatory line that gave much greater insight than I have heard before.
The question is to determine whether the blue squares in the left picture are the same colour of different from the yellow squares in the right picture.

Now it would seem an easy question to answer, after all the question has given away that they are different by referring to them as blue and yellow squares. But not everything is at it seems.

The thing to notice for the discerning aesthete is the setting, or the context, of the two pictures. The left picture is apparently under yellow light, while the right is under blue light.

As a result of this seeming triviality our brain is forced to make some rather deeper than usual decisions. Yellow light (a mixture of red and green) lacks any blue light and so nothing will look blue under yellow light: it will simply be a shade of grey. As a result there is ambiguity and the brain cannot tell whether in thi context there is a blue or a grey square. It could be either. Faced with this problem and presumably because of the other bright colours, and also because it is comparing with blue squares in the right picture, it it reasonable to decide it is a blue square.

The blue illusion is not so good because we know that there is red and green light present because we can see the red and the green squares, it is quite possible that yellow is present. However in blue light (lacking in red and green) it will be a much duller tone more similar to grey. It is easier to bust the illusion in this picture which is why we look at it second.

Now here is the point. With the context removed this is the actual colour of those squares. The Blue on the left are actually the same as the yellow on the right. With two piece of paper held close together to create a slit over the picture above this can be verified.

What was so good about the casual comment in this BBC documentary was the recognition that it was the context that fooled the brain into making the logical deduction.

In a sense the squares on the left (if they were real squares under yellow light) would indeed "be" blue. The grey squares on the right most likely would be yellow and not grey.

This goes to show however that what we "see" is not early in our visual processing but actually after a good deal of assumptions have been made by the brain.

Here I agree with the science. Where I rapidly fall out with the science is this. It has taken a good deal of study beyond the visual system for mankind to deduce this feature of his own visual processing system. That is to say that where the visual system does some study to work out what it is "really" seeing, mankind has now done a lot more processing to show up the visual system as not always consistent. Thus we can fill gaps (with considerable time and difficulty) where the primitive system fails. We now claim to know "reality" better than the visual system, and this I have a problem with.

It is correct that we have shown that what we are conscious of is not reality. An easier way is to wonder what a dream was "of". We were certainly conscious of something: we can tell people what happened and we can sometimes even describe colours, smells, touch, sound and tastes. I once dreamt of eating a banana and the unripe texture and taste was so bad I was put off eating them for years! But what was the "reality". We seem fine about dismissing this as make believe. Now in this illusion we are seeing/dreaming colours that are not there - that are created so it seems not by "reality" but by our personal "brain". Yet to prove the illusion we turn to another picture where we see "grey". Now are we dreaming that also? Why scientifically are we allowed to consider the "grey" in this experiment as reality and the dreamed colours before as illusions.

It is only because of logical inconsistency. Our thinking mind is referring to memory and within the framework of language, culture and history. As if to prove that point see this entry in the online etymological dictionary for blue [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blue]:

c.1300, bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan, light-colored; blond; discolored; blue, blue-gray," from Frankish *blao, from P.Gmc. *blæwaz (cf. O.E. blaw, O.S., O.H.G. blao, Dan. blaa, Swed. blå, O.Fris. blau, M.Du. bla, Du. blauw, Ger. blau "blue"), from PIE*bhle-was "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow."

Blue comes from the root word for pallid, light coloured, blond and even yellow. Our thinking mind claims this knowledge that the visual system is inconsistent as proof that colours are not reality, and that it is closer to reality. A scientist will pull out a spectrum analyser and measure the bend of electromagnetic radiation to find our exactly what wavelength it is. That is reality he will claim, "I can tell you more about this light that even your own eyes". And this is fine he can. But can he claim that he could do without his useless error strewn eyes then and just use his spectrum analyser? After all, the eyes, it has been proven, don't show us reality at all only colours that we have made up with our brains. This is the problem because in fact he can lose all his senses because they are all prone to errors but what else has he got? Maybe he can invent some new senses that are more accurate; Terminator or Robocop senses; but they will still be imperfect. And exactly what are we to make of the "consciousness" of these new dreams through new senses: are they just made up also? It is a mess.

The point is that consciousness is about sensing. But sensing is not some useless telescope that lies between our pure thinking minds and some pure reality. And our pure thinking minds can somehow exist free of this telescope and can even examine it quite objectively to discover that really the "blue" and the "yellow" in the telescope don't "really" exist... but somehow the "grey" does "really" exist... and then discard the telescope. It was with the telescope that they ever "saw" anything in the first place. All the thinking that surrounds colours, spaces, dimensions and the language of all this exists inside the telescope... you can't escape it. And what we are looking at is not outside the telescope either... if it was then how would we ever know what it "was" apart from just light. A man limited to looking at the stars with only a telescope will never be able to tell if they are just holes through the cosmos letting light in or whether they are actual material things. What was the illusion for our eyes above, of deciding between grey or blue, becomes the equally intractable illusion of deciding whether the stars are just pin holes or material things. Thus matter and reality itself becomes an illusion of our mind just as colour was an illusion of our eyes. There is no outside the telescope.

So when we discover that indeed we are tricked, we do indeed discover something about our visual systems... namely that they can be tricked and we can learn the ambiguous circumstances. Just as an illusionist will make us "think" that the ball is in one hand when really it is in the other. The mind is as trickable as the eye. But while scientists don't like to dismiss the "ideas" as dreams when they are caught out, they are happy to dismiss the colours as dreams when they are caught out. And worse the scientists will say that colours are created by the brain, and not realise that the "brain" (which is just an idea) must therefore be created by the brain also which is an absurdity (a la SRH).

The conclusion is that either everything is an illusion and a dream (which I used to believe) or nothing is. They amount to the same thing! because if everything is an illusion then what does the dreamer who dreams the colour experiment above think is happening when he makes up the colours blue and yellow?