Color

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Robin:
What should we talk about today?
Agnes:
Today is going to be the day that we talk about color. The difficulty in talking about colors is not completely clear what question you're supposed to be asking about it. So I thought we'd start with a question I've been thinking about, and we'll see where that takes us. The question I've been thinking about comes from, well, this book, Remarks on Color, by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he wrote it as he was dying of cancer in the last year or so of his life. And it's a bunch of remarks, and one of them that pops up over and over again is, why isn't there transparent white? That is, we have, you know, you can have transparent blue glass or transparent green glass or transparent pink glass. You can have transparent glass. It seems in just about any color.
Robin:
So it isn't plain transparent, transparent white.
Agnes:
Lichtenstein considers that response, and he says, I mean, people who are listening to this can't see, but I'm holding something up that's clean and transparent. And he says, well, look at it. Does it look white to you? Yeah. It does? It doesn't look white to me. The parts of it that are shining, the parts that are not transparent, those parts look white to me. But the most transparent bits look the least white. A transparent.
Robin:
Right. It's just clear, it's not. Okay, but for a transparent blue one, the parts that look the most transparent also look the least blue, right?
Agnes:
No, that's not true. So when I look through the totally transparent part of the blue glass, it still looks, that part looks blue to me.
Robin:
But if it were varying in its transparency, then the bluer parts would be less transparent.
Agnes:
No, I don't even think that's right. Because there are parts of the glass that might have a shine or a gleam on them. Those would be white. Those would be less blue. And then there are other parts where there might be some imperfection. So I see the surface of the glass. That also might be less blue. So that doesn't seem true to me. It seems to me that I mean, so here's the thing. It's worth distinguishing transparent white from translucent white. So you can have a cloudy white, like a milky white glass. You can also have, I think, milky green glass. That does let some light through, but it's not transparent. Or you could imagine looking down from an airplane through the clouds and seeing the ground below with a kind of whitish tint. And I think a way to think about why that doesn't qualify as transparent white is like someone might get glasses that are tinted blue or green, but nobody would ever get milky translucent tinted glasses, right? Because you wouldn't be able to see very well. So translucency doesn't preserve the boundaries of things.
Robin:
It seems like translucent blue or red glasses are only very lightly That is, if it was very heavily blue or red, you can hardly see through them. So what if you had it very light except it was white instead of blue, wouldn't that work?
Agnes:
To the extent that you made it white, to that extent, the boundaries of the things seen through it would be a bit obscured. And that's not true of blue or red. That is, to the extent that it's white, it's just that opaque. And so this just seems to me, actually there's a real difference here between white and the other colors. And it's, It's in a way the thing that has come to puzzle me the most is how people resist this. And I told it to my ex-husband and he's like, that's ridiculous. Of course there's transparent white. And I was like, just show it to me. Show me some transparent white. And he's like, no problem. And he goes off and he comes back a few hours later and he's like, oh my God, you're right. There's no transparent white. So it's this fact that we have to come up against. It's like smashing and against a reality. We don't expect it. I don't think it's entirely unique. For instance, there's also no transparent black. There's transparent gray and black. We're somehow not as surprised by that.
Robin:
So as a physicist, I might think in terms of the distribution of spectrums that it lets through. So a completely transparent thing would just let all frequencies through at full strength.
Agnes:
Right, so you wanted to call that transparent white. From a physics point of view, it would be legitimate to call that transparent white. But physics just doesn't capture color experience very well in this case because we look at the thing and we're like, yeah, it's not white. So I'm not gonna call it white, even if the physicists tell me it follows the rule, right?
Robin:
Right, now, a translucent thing would have things inside it that reflected colors, and then we could talk about the color of that, and that could be white. But if we ask about what just goes through, then letting everything through is white or black. In some sense, it's only relative which frequencies get through more that's the sort of thing you could call about the color of the glass. But white or black doesn't have any differences between the different frequencies.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, black would be letting nothing through, right?
Robin:
Right. Well, and then white lets it all through. I mean, so as a physicist, I want to call that truth. I get that when you look at it, it doesn't scream transparent white, but it feels like as a physicist, that's the right name for it, if I'm going to give a name. And as a physicist, that seems satisfying to me. But yeah, that's what transparent white would be. It lets all the lights through. And if I look at something with all the lights going through, I guess I'm going to call that transparent white.
Agnes:
So, I mean, it seems to me that your grasp of colors has been colonized by physics in a weird way. Sure. Um, but for most of us, like, um, you know, if we look at this and I say it's orange, sorry to people who are only listening, the thing I'm pointing to is orange. It's my orange dress. Um, um, the way that you can tell that it's orange is not that you have some physics device that, um, um, checks what light is, um, reflected by it, and checks that the wavelengths are the correct ones, you just tell that it's orange by looking at it, and you know what orange is like, and you say, yeah, that looks orange. And we do the same thing with white. Okay. And so we can tell whether something looks white.
Robin:
I mean, so obviously my eyes- It doesn't. My eyes can't distinguish between all distributions over frequencies, even if I'm just looking at reflection, because we only have three colored rods, right? And so I'm actually projecting this vast space of colors into a three-dimensional space of the three different, or actually two-dimensional space, if we control for overall intensity, of, because I have the three color rods, but I know my eye isn't capturing lots of distinctions that are there for that reason. So why?
Agnes:
Light gray, you might call white, right? But clear just seems clearly different from white. I mean, in a way, right?
Robin:
You're pointing to a distinction that my mind and I together aren't telling me about, but I already know there are many distinctions that my eye and my mind aren't telling me about. So why is this one especially puzzling compared to all the other distinctions my mind and eyes aren't telling me about?
Agnes:
I mean, the thing I'm puzzled by here is that, and let's put up a Twitter poll later, I just think almost nobody would say that something that's clear, like a clear glass or something, that it looks white. They would say, it doesn't look white to me. And they would be able to tell very easily that that thing doesn't look at all white. It doesn't look white more than it looks blue. It just doesn't, it's not colored white. It's not a close case. It's like, because you look right through it and you see the colors that are through it. And you might see a white thing through it, but it itself is not white, I think. So there I'm just puzzled. What's puzzling to me is how could you not be able to tell the difference between something that looks clear and something that looks white?
Robin:
But there is no difference here. That is, the physics says there is no difference. That is, this is not an actual difference, right?
Agnes:
But your eyes tell you that there is a difference. That is, you look at a white thing and you look at a clear thing, they look really different.
Robin:
I mean, the physics could tell you that a green thing and a red thing were actually the same, but you look at them and... But a thing that lets all the frequencies through is going to look transparent, and if that's what white means, then
Agnes:
That's not what white means, though. That is, what happened is we had white light, and then we learned some things about it. For instance, Newton learned, okay, you could separate it out into all the different colors, and then you could keep separating those and see that those were, in some sense, the color atoms that you couldn't mess with any further. So that's something we know about white, but that's not, people use the word white before they knew that, right? And that's not, many people, children, young children, learn to use color words without knowing anything about wavelengths of light. So it seems like what the wavelength of light tells you is something like the causal story behind a certain experience, but there's also what it is like to have that experience. We can talk about that. And in fact, stuff about wavelength of light tells you pretty much nothing about what it's like to experience orange, that it's what orange looks like. Because somebody who was blind could know all the facts about the wavelength of light, but they wouldn't know anything about what orange looks like.
Robin:
So I guess here is where I lose my academic or intellectual credentials because I'm still, I'm tempted to say, but how does it matter? Like, what are the other things in the world that would depend on this such that this, I would care about this. You might say, you should just care about it because it's part of the world of things we could ask about. And I realized, yeah, that doesn't work so well for me. I need some more reason to care.
Agnes:
I mean, there's a direction this conversation could have gone in terms of why it's significant if you had had used the word white in the way most people do, which is to look at a clear thing and say, that's not white. So it has to go in a different direction now, which itself is interesting. And so I guess I think what's interesting about this to me is that your you're kind of violently overwriting your own experience and insisting that the scientific account is all there is to the experience, that's itself interesting. Maybe someone who comes from a science background is inclined to do that, inclined to sort of suck the life out of their experiences and replace them with a description that someone could understand even if they'd never had the experience. But to most people, color experiences are important because there's something that it is like to have that experience that is not captured by anything you might know about, you know, the light waves or the stuff in your rods and cones in your eye.
Robin:
Okay, but all we have at the moment is a categorization, a linguistic categorization of visual experiences. And then there's one element in that categorization that isn't realized in our experience. And now,
Agnes:
Which is the one that's not realist?
Robin:
Transparent white.
Agnes:
OK, are we there? I mean, if we're there, I can go from that.
Robin:
OK, but like, why do I care if there's one element of this? You know, there's this array of possibilities and one of them never happens.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Why do I care?
Agnes:
Okay, good. Now we can talk about that now that you admit that it doesn't happen. So I think the reason why this is interesting is that it reveals a certain expectation that we had that anything can be any color. So I'm wearing an orange and white polka dot dress today. You know, you could easily imagine a world in which my dress was blue with pink polka dots or red with green polka dots or whatever you want. It seems like, and Wittgenstein has this line about flags, like a flag that's blue and orange could be yellow and purple. And I think that our feeling like, of course there must be such a thing as transparent white. comes from this principle that we're using, that we appear to be using, which tells us anything can be any color. Say something like a commitment to the extreme superficiality of color and the total lack of interaction between what color something is and in some sense the causal role of the object that is that color.
Robin:
I mean, we definitely expect that there are many things that have a natural color and it would be very hard for them to be a different color. We do have those physical expectations about the world around us, like a candle flame, you know, that we have a range of colors from blue in the bottom and red at the top, and we would be very surprised to see red at the bottom and blue at the top of a candle flame.
Agnes:
Yeah, so actually, that's one of Wittgenstein's examples. So his examples of things where they've got to be a certain color are flames. He says a gray flame. That would be very weird. It turns out you can actually get that, usually, people, if you Google. But it's through weird lighting effects, so I'm not sure it counts. Gray flame, the shine or the glint on things, like if you have a glass and there's a glinty shine, that's never gonna be black. A shine can't be black. So absolutely, there are things where we say they've kinda gotta be a certain color, but they're just few and far between. And certainly, we'd be very surprised if the grass were pink or, you know.
Robin:
The ocean purple.
Agnes:
Yeah, the ocean. The Greeks said that the ocean, they described the ocean as purple, the wine dark sea. So they saw it as being kind of purple. But also, on the other hand, it is actually kind of easy for us to imagine the grass being pink. We're like, sure. Whereas transparent white, we just really, we can't do it. There's a wall there where there isn't with the grass being pink. So we have this kind of sense of the flexible relationship between colors and the colored things, the things that bear those colors. And I think that's an interesting feature of color that doesn't extend to our other senses.
Robin:
We certainly have some kinds of things that could be almost anything in a ride space, like a movie could be about almost any topic, or a box when you open it could have almost anything inside it. We have some kinds of things in our world that have a wide range of possibilities to them.
Agnes:
I agree. So it's more just that, you know, so if we look at the analog, the sonic analog of hue of the difference between say red and green and blue, That is what's called timbre in music. And that is the difference between say a human voice singing a certain note versus a violin playing that note or flute playing the same note. There are differences in how the note, the attack and the decay, how it comes in and how it goes out and overtones, et cetera. All of that is timbre. And if you notice the way that I had to describe it, maybe music professionals could do better, but the only ways I'm able to describe it is by talking about the thing that causes the sound. So I had to talk about the violin or the voice, whereas I can refer to red without talking about what causes the red experience. I don't need to talk about stop signs or strawberries. And the same is true of tastes, I think. If I want to talk about the taste of a strawberry, I kind of have to refer to the strawberry. or the smell of a rose. So most of our sense experiences are causally embedded in a way that color appears not to be. So it's different from our other senses. That's already interesting. It seems to be layered on top of reality more thinly from a metaphysical point of view than our other senses.
Robin:
So if we look through a telescope out past Earth, it seems to me that there's just less variety that we could come across in our visual views. Things are just more predictable there and more constrained. So maybe these features of color are features of our familiar experience in our cities and, you know, in our homes and things like that. In the world around us, people fill the world with a wide range of shapes and surfaces, and then they feel somewhat free to fill them with a wide range of colors. That's a fact about our cities and homes, or offices, or even jungles, but not really a feature of the universe if you look out there. That is, out there you will see a much more constrained range of options. and much more predictable relationships. So is this just maybe a psychological adaptation humans have to familiar human environments?
Agnes:
Yeah, I think that there's probably something to that. color makes us feel at home in the world. So one of my favorite questions is to ask people whether they would prefer to live the rest of their lives, um, not seeing any color, but just see the world in black and white or never hear music again. Um, I think, what did you pick? I can't remember now.
Robin:
I didn't. I did not pick. I did not want to pick.
Agnes:
Okay, well now you have to pick. Now your choice is being recorded for all posterity.
Robin:
I think, I thought I was going to pick the being able to hear sound, the music, I guess. But you made the distinction between sound and music, which is different than color and
Agnes:
Yeah, so the way that I've put it, I could say timbre versus color, and I have put it that way sometimes when I ask this question. But in my experience, people just translate the timbre into music, because basically you suck out timbre, you don't write anymore. I'm assuming you can still communicate just fine. So, you know, maybe the voices are all going to kind of sound a bit the same. And I even, I want to leave out the thing of, am I going to be able to hear emotional affect in the voice? Let's just say that's not an issue. I kind of want to contrast the aesthetic aspects of these two things.
Robin:
Right. So it's a hard choice for me. I think I feel like the peaks of emotion are more with music than colors, but I less often appreciate music than colors. I mean, colors sort of infuse my day life all the time, pretty much, whereas music is somewhat more rare. So that's what makes it hard for me to pick.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
Do I want to go for the peak experiences or the common experiences?
Agnes:
I think that color experiences are not that, to me, they're not that emotional. It's not just that they're spread out over time and that we have them all the time. I think I enjoy color and it's a really big part of my life and I care about it a lot, but I think I have actually very little of an emotional response to color and I have a strong emotional response to music.
Robin:
So there's a way in which light makes the world lively and there's a way in which a lively world feels important. And that's, I guess, the question of how much will I miss a lively world? There are many movies that play on this contrast between black and white and color and a key transition happens when characters see color finally, and then that's presented as a very meaningful thing, that is, their life had been empty to some important way before color, and with color their life is fuller, and that allows other kinds of fullnesses to happen in the characters' lives.
Agnes:
I, a difference, it seems, that I've been sort of toying with is that music makes me feel alive. Like it fills me with emotions. It makes me feel like there's life located in me, inside of me, on the inside of me. And that sort of emotion is, it's a feeling of being alive, I think. That's what passion feels like. Passion makes you feel like you're really alive. Both positive and negative passion. And I think that color is more about your environment. It makes you feel like you're in a living place, which is to say, you know, maybe your own habitat that is the habitat in which you were meant to live or something like that, or it's the life is external to you. And so I will tell you that most adults choose to keep music and dump color. Um, and I have asked fewer children, but all the children that I've asked prefer to keep color and lose music.
Robin:
Okay. That's interesting. Um, maybe it takes longer to appreciate music in a life or maybe, maybe peak emotional experiences of music happen later in life. I don't know.
Agnes:
Yeah, that's possible. I mean, you know, one of the children I know who said he would pick color because he's my child and I know him, he's very musical. He's very into music, plays music, et cetera, but he still would go for color. But maybe even though he likes and plays music and composes music, still, maybe it really is when you're a teenager that you start to have these really emotional responses, at least in my own life. It was when I was a teenager that I started to have emotional response to music and not before. So maybe that he doesn't appreciate music, especially if you're mostly listening to classical music, which is what he is doing, that emotional throwaway comes later.
Robin:
So I guess if I ask, why do people desperately need music? I more understand it because I more see the peak emotional experiences and that they're located in a person directly caused by the music. And then when I look at color, it's harder to see maybe what exactly about it is so important because each piece of color that you see isn't that important necessarily. And there's no one, you know, set of colors that really reaches a peak, but it still does feel like that it adds up to a lot. And so I guess it's somewhat interesting to ask, well, what is it about color that we need so much?
Agnes:
Right, one person who I asked this question to said, one of the adults who actually chose color said, when he imagines just waking up day after day and opening his eyes and everything is sort of shades of gray, he just feels like he would become very depressed. So, which I understand, I find it depressing even when I'm in a space that doesn't have much color.
Robin:
But it seems like this isn't just a matter of variety of experience. That is, our experience has enormous dimensions of variety, and we can imagine losing many of them without great concern, but this, so this one is different, or these two are different, and so it's worth pondering what is it about this particular variation in our experience that is so important? I mean, yes, of course, if you have fewer colors, there's fewer distinctions you will notice, maybe subtleties you won't see, but that doesn't seem to be the reason. For example, you could talk about somebody who doesn't have glasses, who would need glasses. They would see the world more fuzzily. There would be a lot of things they didn't see. I think you might ask them, would you rather see no color or see the world fuzzily without glasses? I'll bet people would choose to see the world fuzzily. And they could bring something closer and see it just as well, it would just be a little more work, but there's nothing they couldn't see, they would just have to work harder at it. But with color, there's just things they could never get to.
Agnes:
Yeah, so one interesting thing is that I was saying I have played with this question and framed it in a variety of ways. And even though the natural analog to color is timbre, I find the right way to frame it is color versus music. And that's how people are thinking about it. And they don't reframe it as paintings versus music or something like that. I think that in a black and white world, it's like I would miss my friends red and yellow and green. Red and yellow and green are seen as kind of a basic element of my experience that I would be upset to be deprived of by contrast with certain kinds of notes or whatever. No, I'm interested in those only in so far as they're brought together into works, into clubs, like musical clubs.
Robin:
Here's another way to think about it. Imagine you just lose one of. Instead of having three color cones, you just have two.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Now, it isn't all black and white, but you lost one of the color dimensions. I guess there must be colorblind people who are, in fact, this way. How do they feel about the possibility of this other color dimension? How eagerly are they to get a third rod if they could? And how eager are we to get a fourth? I mean, how desperately would we demand and seek out a fourth color rod so we could see more colors? I fear that we very much don't want to lose all of our color rods, but I'm not so sure we are desperate for the fourth one, or even that we would that much miss one color rod.
Agnes:
Right. There's a line somewhere I was looking for that sort of We somehow feel that the colors that we see are all the colors. Our concept of a color is the colors that I see. I mean, we know that there are kinds of light that we can't see, right? Right. Just as there are kinds of sound that we can't hear. But I have this idea of a dog hearing stuff that I can't hear, tones that are too high for me. But if the dog could see colors that I can't, I'm just like, no, that's not, like I somehow, I have a problem wrapping my head around it, right? So there's this, I'm not sure what the right way to put that is, but there's a sense in which I have a kind of, I don't know, I claim a kind of ownership over the colors such that something lying outside of the colors that I can see doesn't make sense to me as a color.
Robin:
So I feel like we map colors and music onto emotions. and that we have some precious emotions we feel we would lose if we lost some colors or lost some music. But maybe we feel like we have the full range of emotions within the range of colors and music we have. So we don't need more colors or even music in order for sound, say, to hear a fuller range of emotion in the music. And so if the key thing we wanted was the emotion that was in the colors of the music, and we thought those were fully contained in whatever range that we now have, then that might explain why we aren't that eager for more, but would be very averse to getting less. So here's a related thing that I pondered over in the past. It seems like Vocabulary is a limit to emotions. That is, in societies with fewer words, they in some sense can feel fewer emotions because they can't name their emotion to know that they're feeling it. And so, in fact, having a larger emotion, the vocabulary for emotional words lets you actually feel and know that you feel a wider range of emotions. And you know, how much do we lament or you imagine we counterfactually could join some society with a language with much fewer words for emotions, we would then be losing many emotions, would we be terrified by that similarly to losing color? If they had a third, say as many emotional words as we are used to using, we would then feel fewer emotions.
Agnes:
Right, so, I mean, I didn't really answer your question about, you know, colorblind. I've lined this up. I don't feel confident that the reason I care about seeing as many colors as I do is that I'm mapping colors onto emotions. I hear people talk about this, you know, synesthesia, where they connect colors and numbers and emotions. It's just, I don't do that. I take the colors at face value. I like orange because it looks like orange. That's good enough for me, and I would be sad to lose orange, not because there's some feeling that I'm tied to orange, except for the feeling of seeing orange, which I like, and I don't want to lose.
Robin:
Well, let's generalize this from emotion then. Let's just say it's a marker that you've integrated into your expectations and mappings of things. And if you lost that marker, you would just lose a lot of categorizations of things that you've had.
Agnes:
Yeah. So I think colors are a lot like words, actually. This is the sort of thesis that I've been working towards. They're more like words than they are like sounds or smells. And they have a little bit the arbitrariness of words in that we could cut the color spectrum up differently than we do. In fact, other cultures have cut it up differently just as people have different... The way that words cut up the concept space differs from language to language. but that where we rely very much on the carvings up that we have. And that, you know, just as the the word. Like, you're hearing what I say, you're hearing a bunch of words, and you're also getting my thoughts at one and the same time. It's a package deal. And similarly, you know, you see a bunch of colors and you see a bunch of things. It's a package deal. You get it all together. But we can peel off. the layer of color or the layer of the word, we can do that actually fairly easily. There's this layer on top, so it's superficial in some way, and examine that surface instead of the thing that it's pointing us to. And we have in both cases this sense that, at least I do, that it matters a lot to have the color as a mechanism, color's such a word as a mechanism of organizing. A way that I was thinking about it is, imagine not having a word for something and then suddenly having the word for that thing. Like, gaslighting. I was reading a book about gaslighting, and that word didn't always exist. There's a thing, and you can describe it, but when you have the word, your mind fastens onto it, and I was thinking it's almost like when something flashes up in a color, you, it, It kind of fills the thought with life and makes the thought thinkable when you've got a word for it. Even better when you have a description or an analysis, like when you can put something into words, that does something to the thing that you couldn't put into words before.
Robin:
I still want to push on this asymmetry, though. If we talk about words, you might feel your life lost if you lost many keywords that you're used to now and you couldn't, especially if you had gotten used to them and somehow they just, this happens to us old people sometimes. We just can't remember a word when we're thinking of something and it's really frustrating. There's an asymmetry with our aversion to losing words and our eagerness to get more. We're not that desperate for more words, even if we would be very averse to losing them.
Agnes:
I love getting more words and I'm constantly trying to get them.
Robin:
But with colors, we talked about how eager would you be for more colors?
Agnes:
Yeah, I think I would be more eager for more colors than more words. Though I think that that's because often it doesn't feel like the new word is really making something thinkable that you didn't think before. Like, that is not all new words are gonna do that. Sometimes it'll just be a little, it'll just be like A plus B and you had a word for A and B. But, you know, like when it really, when it's something like gaslighting, I'm pretty eager for the word. I'm pretty eager to have the word. And I think that maybe my greater eagerness for more colors is just my, it's like the water diamonds paradoxes. I'm sort of like, I know I can't get, it's really hard to get new colors. So that would be suspicious to me, because I almost never get them, whereas I do get new words. And so I'm less excited by them. So I would pay more for the new color than the new words, but I do think the new words mean a lot to me.
Robin:
Right, but I was focused on the asymmetry of how much you'd pay for a new one versus to avoid losing an old one.
Agnes:
Right, well, I mean, I know a lot more words than I have colors, even though I know a lot of colors.
Robin:
Okay, but still, how much more would you pay to prevent losing a word than to gain a new one, similarly for a color, right?
Agnes:
I mean, it's gonna depend on the word.
Robin:
We could give it a 50-50 thing. We say, 50-50 shot of status quo or you gain a new word and lose an old word together. Which of those will you take?
Agnes:
You might just be tracking general loss aversion there.
Robin:
I guess I was thinking that maybe one of the reasons I would be very averse to losing even one color is just I've had this lifetime of experience with the colors I've had, and those experiences have been indexed and organized and connected to the colors I've had. And that's what I would lose if I lost a color is that I would lose all that ability to connect what I've experienced so far with each other into new things. But a new color, which I haven't used all my life, I would have to just start to integrate it into all these concepts and experiences. And then that's see less of a value because, um, you know, I'm already doing okay with integrating stuff from the colors I have. And same for words. Like I have a whole lifetime of using a word. then losing that word would be a big deal because I, I've used it in many writings. I've thought it in many terms. I have connections between it and other words, but one whole new word that I've never used before would feel like, well, I could do without that because that isn't yet integrated into other things. And it'll take, it would take a while to, to integrate it into all my other words.
Agnes:
Okay, but let's say you were to lose a color in the following way. This way of losing the color would, it's probably not consistent with spending a lot of time with me, but it's just that you happen not to see it, right? So let's say, you know, Um, pink, okay? Now there happens to be pink on your shirt. But imagine you wear this shirt out, and you throw it away, and then you just never buy any more shirts that have pink on them, and there just happens to not be any pink in your office, and your colleagues happen to not wear any pink, and you just happen not to be in any circumstance in which there's any pink. And so, for the rest of your life, you never see any pink, but not because your ability to see pink is in any way damaged. It's just a total coincidence. Would you miss pink? I would.
Robin:
because it had been integrated. So let me give you an analogy, a kitchen tool. So at the moment you have a kitchen, it has a set of kitchen tools. We're gonna compare two things. One is we're gonna go to a kitchen store and pick a random new tool and give it to you for your kitchen. Another is gonna pick a random tool in your kitchen and take it away. And you won't even notice it until the time you need it. You finally see us, you don't have that tool, right? I feel like you're going to be more averse to losing one of the tools you have than getting some new tool that you could learn to use.
Agnes:
Okay, I mean, it's just that in this particular case, the main way that I use the tool of seeing pink is to see pink. It's just that I like to see that color. If you told me there's a color that's just as nice as pink and you've never seen it, and you can give up seeing pink for the rest of your life in exchange for seeing this new color, I'd probably go with the new color. That's exactly it. Yeah, exactly, because I'm going to have some memory of what pink was like. It's precisely because I don't much use colors. Like, on some level, I'm using them in order to see things. But I think I could see things pretty well with a lot fewer colors and still be able to navigate my world, like, really pretty well.
Robin:
Sure, but you have an association with things you've seen in the past that were pink, the kinds of associations other people have had with pink. That is, pink is integrated into your worldview of colors. It isn't just a thing you see sometimes. It's a concept and it has associations. And if you couldn't see pink, you would lose the ability to use those associations.
Agnes:
Right. I guess so. I mean, to some degree, maybe I could use them even if I couldn't see the paint. If I knew that something was pink, but, but it, it seems to me that colors are functioning in my life, less like tools for doing something else and more like, um, of the thing itself that I'm enjoying or experiencing.
Robin:
So there's this hypothetical of the experience machine, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And from one point of view, it sounds like a terrible thing because all you're seeing are appearances that don't have... I'll probably explain what it is for those of our listeners who don't know. So the idea is just some sort of a machine where you're getting light and sound and feeling into your body, but it's not actually coming from that outside world. Some computer is composing it like virtual reality to give you experience. And from one point of view, that's terrible because you want it to be connected to the real other things. But when you think about color, I think it makes it sound more okay because the color is in some ways the thing you wanted. So if the experience machine gives you the color, then you're getting the real things. And maybe that's a way of thinking about what color is different than other things.
Agnes:
That's a great point that I think that it's right that color is a case where It's maybe going to be the best case scenario for me not caring that much whether my experience corresponds to reality. I mean, there are these interesting cases of color illusions. Um, where, you know, I can to, um, uh, like, well, the dress, you know, that dress that people thought as white and yellow, and other people saw it as blue and black, and people cared a lot about whether they saw the same people, right? So they weren't there just concerned with their own mental states. And then there are these other kinds of color illusions, for instance, where A color can look like two different colors depending on what background we put it against and then I can see at a certain point that it's actually the same color. And you would expect that if people really had a kind of resolutely subjectivist approach to color, these things wouldn't bother them, but they do. So that's a bit of pushback.
Robin:
So other things like Bambi taste, at least in some modes, people only care what the food tastes like. They don't care what it is, perhaps, or nutritionally. And so then in the Experience Machine, if it, I mean, that was a famous scene in the Matrix movie where the character takes the steak and he doesn't really care, it's not real, he wanted the taste of the steak.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
But there aren't that many things in our lives that are like that, where it's just the very surface experience. I think people sometimes categorize, say, sex that way, and it's not really that way quite as much. I think people actually there care more about what's causing the feelings than they do about just the surface feelings.
Agnes:
Right, if they didn't care about those things, there would just be a lot less fantasizing with masturbation, right?
Robin:
Right, exactly.
Agnes:
Why do you need to represent the coming from a certain source that they don't come from, unless you really care about the causes, in a way that I think we care less.
Robin:
So the guy in the Matrix tasting his meat isn't trying to put a mental image in his mind of what the meat is, right? It's enough to just taste it.
Agnes:
Or it's not undermined.
Robin:
Right. Him anyway. By the lack of the other.
Agnes:
Yeah. Right. But I ching.
Robin:
This is interestingly related to just what is pleasure anyway. You see, sometimes pleasure is just seen as the surface experience, ignoring all that deep context. but clearly there are pleasures where we do care about the context.
Agnes:
I wonder if we would care more or less with sound, like take a beautiful piece of music that I'm hearing and suppose that it isn't really being played or something. I'm just kind of hearing it in my head.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
I mean, if I was confused about that.
Robin:
I mean, that's the difference between a recording and a concert. And so people do pay a lot extra for the concert.
Agnes:
Yeah, but less and less. People are going to the concerts as much as they used to, and people are pretty happy with the recording. That's a good point. It seems to me that with music or even less, we even more would go in the experience machine for music than we would for color. Color, I think, is still meant to connect us to a world outside ourselves. And, you know, the experience of music, as I was saying, for me, it's the experience of feeling myself on the inside to be alive in a certain way. And it doesn't matter so much where it's coming from.
Robin:
Right, but the idea would be that the music itself could cause that internal feeling just directly from the music. Now, maybe that's not true. Maybe you need a certain social context for the music to cause a feeling like a concert. Maybe hearing the same music without a concert might not give you the same emotions as it does in the context of a concert.
Agnes:
In just six weeks, I'm going to my first ever Taylor Swift concert, so I'll be able to test that. whether listening to her music on my own, as I've done for a very long time, is different from listening to it. I mean, I suspect that it will be different, but You know, I've found that watching movies in a movie theater with a bunch of people is really different from watching the movie on your own on the screen. And the cause is pretty similar in that it's like a screen. In the one case, it's a bigger screen. But just the fact of other people being there makes a huge difference.
Robin:
So I notice a correlation I'm going to suggest for your commentary. Things vary in how much we just care about the surface feeling versus sort of deeper context. Like color is one of these things where, you know, you might vary and then things also vary in how much they're supposed to be part of fun. And it seems to me that things that are supposed to be fun tend to be more surfacy. Yeah. Like at a fun thing you eat and you don't care about the nutrition. You just care about how it tastes. You're the fun thing. You have music. You don't that much care if it's real or not at a fun thing. You have maybe lots of stimulating, you know, fireworks or, you know, bouquets or something that it seems like fun is supposed to be surface. to a larger degree. Like, you know, for example, even you're not, you might have a fling at a, you might have a short fling when you go to Vegas. And the point is just enjoy the slow fling. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas because that's part of fun is just, you know, paying attention to the surface of the relationship and not having a deeper relationship. There's some sort of idea that fun and the sort of lively celebrations that we might have that we idealize compared to work and dour other things, those celebrated fun is shallow in an important way. And we tend to denigrate shallow, but then when it comes to actually fun, shallow is most of it, right?
Agnes:
Right. Well, people don't always praise what's fun.
Robin:
That is, it can be a bit of an insult, but... But when we set up parties and weddings and, you know, receptions and, you know, ceremonies, like when we do events that are supposed to be... You're supposed to focus on your experience in that event. We tend to focus on relatively shallow experiences, I guess.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
You might think a church service is supposed to be deep, but on the other hand, what you're seeing there is, well, you've got the stained glass windows, you've got music, you've got, you know, air conditioned thing. And, you know, basically it's oddly a church service. What they're doing is putting a lot of pretty shallow experiences in order to facilitate something supposedly deep.
Agnes:
Well, when there's a candy bar and it's a fun size, the fun size is smaller. Okay. Maybe part of what's happening with these superficial experiences is there's a low commitment. You're not going to have to- Yeah. engage in this thing for a long time, you're gonna get to have a little taste of it. And the church service, it's like no one just goes to one church service. People go to church every week or whatever.
Robin:
But still, if we had a one-hour reception, it just can't be as fun as an all-weekend bacchanalia, right?
Agnes:
But the all-weekend bacchanalia itself would be fun insofar as we took it as separated from everyday life and not tied into other kinds of, like, the run-out reception, there's probably gonna be networking, right? That's what people are doing there. And so it's not as fun because actually it is in everyone's eyes. It's tied into all the stuff you do before and after, whereas that separated-out weekend is like a little chunk of time that's on its own.
Robin:
Okay, so is separation and shallowness go together then?
Agnes:
I think it does a bit.
Robin:
Because I think whatever we do, it'll be colorful, right? If we're going to have a time devoted to fun, we're going to make, we're going to up the color on that thing, right? And we're going to up the taste, the food will be more tasty, we'll up the music and sound, right? A party time will focus more on surface experiences of taste and sound and color and light and touch. That's what fun is.
Agnes:
Right. Well, the thing about like. if you see a bunch of color, and then it leaves no effect afterwards, right? Like you see a bunch of color, you just move on. Even with sound, you turn it off, you move on. And so there's, yeah, that's like a short, it's like a short investment. You can have an intense experience, but it's not gonna leave a residue. Whereas in the networking, you know, maybe you made some connection will then serve you later. So yeah, I guess a lot of sensory experience doesn't leave much of an imprint on you except for maybe the memory and our memories of sense experiences are not very good.
Robin:
Although we will look back on the ones we remembered most as the best ones in some way. A favorite movie will be one that we remember, even though it's a short sensory experience. Our favorite vacation will be a vacation that we remember, even if it was a set aside.
Agnes:
To say we look back on it fondly and to say that we remembered are not the same, I don't know how, I mean, I just have a poor memory. As do I. Often, even a movie that I really love and that I've seen a bunch of times that I look back on very fondly, when I re-watch it, I'm saying to myself over and again, wow, I didn't remember this, I didn't remember this. I don't think our memories are so good, even when, at least mine,
Robin:
Well, so I was, I mean, we started this talking about color and one of the things that stands out to me is that color is lively. And so I was trying to make a connection there with lively. That is, party is lively. You see, there's some sense in which we think of partying as more lively than other sorts of behaviors. And there seems to be this correlation of lively things and things that are shallow and immediately, you know, accessible without needing to connect other things. And that's what makes for fun, lively experiences. So color is a prototype of that, it seems.
Agnes:
I guess the one, the odd man out is smell. No, maybe texture too. Like, because sounds can be lively, right? And taste can be lively and colors can be lively, but are there lively smells?
Robin:
Certainly, sometimes strong smells, although food has many strong smells.
Agnes:
I guess that's true. Maybe it just goes along with the food then. Maybe smell just goes with taste. Then texture.
Robin:
A texture with food, there's definitely texture in food, but if we mean other sorts of texture.
Agnes:
Maybe there's something like there's a connection between liveliness and superficiality and something that we experience at a kind of distance from ourselves. So like with color and with sound, the thing that's happening is not right where I am. Unlike taste and right much and even smelling so far as it's the smell of the taste and so you get an extra dose of superficiality if you're not in contact with the thing right in any substantial way just So that there's no permanent effect There's like there's a kind of freedom that you have from right causal interaction
Robin:
Yeah, on reflection, it's striking just that an ideal of fun is detachment, distance, you know, limited effect.
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
That's actually puzzling.
Agnes:
We're scared of having fun. We don't want to have too much of it or something. We're scared that there's going to be, we're going to have to pay.
Robin:
There'll be consequences or something.
Agnes:
Right. And so we want fun without the consequences. So we want to like, you know, I don't know, see a play or something where like you can be pretty sure you're going to walk out of there and it's like locked in. Go to a movie.
Robin:
So if I think of, you know, my life's ambition to produce insights.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And I enjoy finding insights, but I don't call it fun in part because It has these long-term big connections, which is what I treasure about it at heart, right? Like meaningful experiences that you would take a long time searching and that very rarely happen and you'd be very important to you. Even so, because they connect so much to the other parts of your life, you are searching, spending a long time looking for them and then they'll affect what you do afterwards. They're not fun, but well that they're great.
Agnes:
Right. And they might even be very enjoyable.
Robin:
Yes.
Agnes:
but to call them fun would seem trivial.
Robin:
Right, or even just imagine a fantasy of like a huge crowd is roaring and cheering you and you're standing up on stage and they love you or whatever, you win the Oscar or something. We don't call that fun.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
It's great, it's enjoyable. There's not much downside, but it's not fun. There's a sense in which when we're looking for fun, we're not looking for that sort of thing.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean the way that it doesn't quite fit with color is just that fun would be like, it would be separated out from the other moments of your day. you know, the fun weekend or something. But color is there all the time. I mean, we just don't attend to it all the time. It's not like we only have color on special occasions. Music is something we do on special occasions. Right. It's not for special occasions.
Robin:
I guess you might ask, when is an experience of color lasted the longest for you? Like, is it the romantic sunset? Or, you know, what is a compelling color experience where It's richly integrated with other experience and then it just resonates for a long time. You remember it for a while.
Agnes:
I mean, I actually think forget about remembering if you just say, what's a color experience that's lasted the longest? That is where you've sat there and looked at the colors for the longest amount of time. The answer for me is being in an art museum and looking at a painting. Because I can look at the painting for a long time, there's very few things I can do for as long as I can look at a painting, which might, that's only gonna be maybe an hour.
Robin:
Sure, right.
Agnes:
But, you know, almost nothing that I look at will I look at it for longer than like a few seconds. So the painting is way above anything else, pretty much, including a sunset. Sunset's not that interesting.
Robin:
I haven't gotten to see the Aurora Borealis, but I guess I might hope that you would sit and watch those for an hour.
Agnes:
Right. If it was changing, yeah. So I'm not going to count a movie, right? I was imagining stationary.
Robin:
Well, I understand they don't change very fast at all. It's a very slow change.
Agnes:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Then I wonder how long I would be occupied by looking at it. I suspect less time than a painting, but who knows? I've never seen it either, so it treads me.
Robin:
Maybe it's striking that we have these things we treasure, but not for very long.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
You would not want to lose color in your life. It's so important. But any one color moment, it's done soon and you're over.
Agnes:
Sure. That's a good point. That's one of the things I like about color. It's like you can have a whole lot of one night stands.
Robin:
It's fun. Exactly.
Agnes:
Okay. We should stop.
Robin:
Okay.
Agnes:
Thank you for talking about color.
Robin:
Thank you for talking.