A number of thoughts I haven’t really bothered putting in words, but I’ll start with this one: The inverted spectrum problem does not just apply to colors. It applies to everything, making it a lot “scarier” (i.e. detached from reality, or trippier, I like to say).
First, I would like to rant about something to get it out of my head: Like 20 years ago, I thought about the inverted spectrum problem a lot, which at the time of course I did not know existed as a generally known philosophical problem. It was just something that I thought about a lot because I couldn’t find an answer to it. I thought of it as the “problem of colors”, and it bothered me that I had absolutely no way of knowing whether the color “red” I perceived was the same “red” as understood to any other person in the world at all, or if my “red” were their “turquoise” or what. We would always agree on what were red, but I would never know whether the same red apple that anyone else saw would still look red to me if I looked at it through their eyes. I thought it was a problem regarding the nature of eyes rather than the nature of the mind.
One day I finally asked my mom how I could ever know if my red were the same as hers or anyone else’s, and she explained to me the scientific functioning of eyeballs. I then threw away my color question as irrelevant until it was finally introduced to me again as the “inverted spectrum problem” in a college lecture. This disturbs me a lot. I wish I had kept on thinking about it back then. I felt like the idea was stolen from my head when I saw it presented on the giant powerpoint screen in lecture. I feel that way a lot when I tell people about some of the things I think about, and then they respond with “Oh, that’s like [insert philosopher’s name], and [blah blah blah insert random history of philosophy knowledge]”. This irritates me a lot because most of the time when I’m describing some sort of theoretical thing I’ve been thinking about and people don’t “recognize” it, then they don’t really react or just think it’s completely irrelevant, and when they do, they start talking about blah philosopher, and it’s as if an idea had no relevance unless it were part of some greater sea of documented knowledge, some “knowledge”. I don’t care!
I don’t read philosophy! It’s irrelevant! I think it. I don’t read it!
People need to stop saying things like “you know so much philosophy” because there is nothing to “know”. It is not knowledge, it’s just a bunch of thoughts, it’s like saying “you know so much art”. WTF are you talking about? I can’t “know” art. I make art, I don’t “know” art, unless you’re talking about art history that’s different. Or I need to just change my definition of philosophy (but DEFINITIONS ARE IRRELEVANT) or just not care! Ughh!
Anyhow, point being I hate it when I realize that some really cool thought I’ve been thinking about is actually some really big philosophical problem that tons of philosophers have been writing about, and all of a sudden it’s a big deal for people just because Plato or Descartes or whoever famous philosopher has thought about it, then it’s a super big deal. That’s retarded! Most if not ALL of these problems can easily be thought of by ANYONE who has the ability to think at all.
Just because some people put it in writing does not make it somehow more epic of a philosophical problem, and I hate those philosophers who get to “possess” those ideas that they happened to write about, like Descartes, what was so special about him? Any 3-year-old has probably sat down to question everything and stumbled upon the same questions (btw, Descartes’ argument is really stupid), but some grown-ups dismissed them as irrelevant just because grown-ups have lived in their perceptions of “reality” for too long, and they’ve lost the ability to even think at all, and then the 3-year-olds stop thinking about it.
End of story, moving on. Just needed to convey that that’s really sad. And this makes me really angry. But why do/should I care? Stupid grown-ups, don’t know a thing. I hate talking to grown ups, especially the ones who have a lot of “knowledge”.
No comments:
Post a Comment