The Analogy of the Painter’s Palette

Fire Ologist

As with any analogy, the language of the analogy has express meaning to it, that should be plain, simple and clear, but it also has a metaphorical meaning, or many meanings, in addition to the express meaning. From the start, analogies are more literature than they are science or rigorous philosophy. Science is best when it uses words to convey one express meaning at a time. However, we have all learned much philosophy from analogies and allegories, and images, and even literature, and can construct the science of what is learned thereby later, if that is what moves us. But for now, as if the single meaning and use of words is not enough of a struggle, I present the Analogy of the Painter's Palette, and what I think it helps analyze.

The Analogy
The painter’s palette has two colors of paint on it. The one is a smear of blue paint, and the other is a smear of yellow paint. When some of the blue paint mixes with some of the yellow, the color green emerges from the mixture and we have a third paint, namely green.

This picture of simple activity on a palette, paints an analogy of many things.

Sense Perception
The blue is analogous to the world that can be sensed – full of its many objects. The yellow is analogous to the senses – eyeballs, ears, nervous systems, etc. The green is what is constructed when, for example, the ear touches vibrating air, namely, a sound. The blue, the world, is what it is, separate and hidden, until sensed. The shade of yellow, is unique to each sensing being. The yellow of the bat’s eyes and ears is a different shade than the yellow of human’s eyes and ears, which is different than the shade of yellow for the dog, etc. Therefore, the green perception constructed when the bat hears, what a bat is conscious of through its bat ears, is a specific green to the bat (I assume it is more than just a sound for the bat), and the green of the human is specific to the human, just as the dog senses things the human may not know even exist. None “hear” the same exact "sound” in the world, as what they sense is shaped by their senses. And if we see a red car, we only see red because of our eyes. The dog sees a more gray colored car. So what color is the car itself? May as well be blue paint, because our yellow eyes will make of it what they make...

Kant
The blue is the noumenal, thing-in-itself. The yellow is the structure of the mind, with its categories and the conditions for experience. The green is the phenomenal world thereby constructed, as the mind seeks to know things in themselves. We humans, live in green world. Utterly engulfed behind the phenomenal veil. The noumenal blue objects we seek remain hidden, in themselves, and only indirectly inferred, as our yellow minds build our green experiences. Our only direct access to “things” we might experience, is not directly with things, but is directly access to phenomena, the green world in which we are submerged, cut off from the blue, noumenal, things in themselves...

Nietzsche
The blue is the Dionysian, the undercurrent that moves, as it is moving. The green is the Apollonian, the appearance, the reification of which has mesmerized so many in history in so many ways, and easily deceives. The yellow is the will.

And we could go on and on to force the analogy, or uncover its truth, the truth being blue, this analogy being what I will, as I use it to reinvent the green analogy that you now read about…

Heraclitus
The blue is Fire, or flux. The green is the bow, the barley-drink, or, that which stands fixed only under tension. The yellow is that tension, between the motion and the things moved.

It rests from change. – Heraclitus, Fragment 84

What is essential, what is, is always the fire (blue, flux) (becoming, but that is a can of worms in the can of worms), and its particular form (the green thing being a thing) (but now being is the worms in becoming's can), which only persists in tension (yellow).

All things are an interchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods. – Heraclitus, Fragment 90

Things represented as green; interchange represented in yellow; and fire being the blue.

Hegel/Fichte
You would think with three things, we could easily make an analogy for Hegel’s dialectic. Maybe we should change the colors to make things more starkly analogous using, black, white and gray, black being like thesis, white being its antithesis, and gray being their synthesis. Seems promising.

Green may be a synthesis of blue and yellow, and gray may be a synthesis of black and white, but something seems off. It all seems already synthesized as paint; the analogy just doesn’t capture the binary of the dialectic very well.

Yellow paint is not the antithesis of blue paint, so green paint may be a nice shade of mixture of the two, but green paint cannot represent a synthesis, where there is no thesis and antithesis. Also, for Hegel, the synthesis, once synthesized, immediately becomes a new thesis, and generates its own new antithesis, and moves through history towards some newer synthesis. Here that would mean that the green or gray (the “synthesis” of the prior "thesis-antithesis"), becomes the new thesis. And just as yellow really isn’t a good representation of an antithesis of blue, what on earth is the antithesis of green now going to be? What is the antithesis of gray paint? So I haven’t figured out how the Analogy here can represent Hegel in any truly instructive way.

So in a way, the Analogy of the Painter's Palette is antithetical to understanding dialectical movement. And in another way, understanding how the analogy does NOT work, can be instructive when seeking to understand Hegel, as I may have done here; one needs to be dialectical with the analogy before it might be of any use to further clarify Hegel. (But then, you would also need some understanding of Hegel before you could see this. The Analogy is also not a good way to explain making the color purple, or how Spanish works...)

The Moral Act
Blue here would be the causally determined world presented to the conscious human being. Blue is not only someone or something pushing you from outside, but your own passions and instincts (Nietzschean blue again). The yellow is the individual subject's deliberation, your particular spirit, the daemon. It moves like the blue moves, but it actively pauses the blue, resists, imposing it’s yellow on the motion, identifying options, comparing them, determining goals and purposes and new directions for the moving blue, mixing itself, and its yellow with the blue. Green is the act, the moment of consent and action, where what was caused by the outside forces of blue is now also caused by the inside forces of yellow and placed back into the world as something the world could not have caused without you, something whose responsibility can be traced to the particular shade of yellow, as much as the particular shade of blue, so something now particularly green - the acting blue made into your act alone.

An analysis of "response" in the word "responsibility" emerges here. The yellow subject responds to the blue stimulus making something green that follows, something both determined by the blue stimulus but something that the yellow is now responsible for causing to be green.

And an analysis of "liberty" in the word "deliberate" emerges, as a rational as well as intentional activity. A subject must disconnect or liberate itself from the blue in order to not be blue, to not be caused and determined by the blue, to fashion a space to be its own cause, to not only react, but take deliberate action and thereby inserting into the causal chain, something not-blue, but mixed with the blue, something yellow, recoloring what is in the causal chain green...
________

The simple analogy can help clarify the moving parts of other areas and concepts and systems. Of the above, I think it works best to help explain sense perception, then secondly, Kant's noumenal/phenomenal distinction. But does the analogy work in the above areas?
How does it fail, or lead one astray from understanding the areas I claim it analogizes?
What other areas, things, concepts, experiences, might it depict?

frank

What other areas, things, concepts, experiences, might it depict? — Fire Ologist

Reproduction. Maybe not synthesis, but synergy.

Fire Ologist

↪frank

Man, woman and child.

Let's see. Seems like the child has to be green, so we can make the man or woman, each either blue or yellow.

I guess what is odd, is that a child is also male or female, so the child, who is green, is also just blue or yellow.

Maybe just cellular reproduction. The cell is the blue, the two cells produced are each the green, and the moment of division is the insertion of yellow.

Difficult... but maybe worth some further thought to see if it can be made useful.

frank

Let's see. Seems like the child has to be green, so we can make the man or woman, each either blue or yellow. — Fire Ologist

But you are a blend of two different people. If you have siblings, they're other ways to combine the two, just as there are different greens that can emerge from the same blobs of yellow and blue. It just depends on how much blue.

Synergy is the idea of something extra appearing out of a combination, the result being greater than the sum of the parts.

Fire Ologist

Synergy is the idea of something extra appearing out of a combination, the result being greater than the sum of the parts. — frank

Can we use the analogy to help understand the concept of the whole being greater than the sum of parts?

A man is a whole.
His brain and his liver are parts. You can have a pile of all of the different parts of a man, but only when they are arranged in a certain way, and functioning, only then is there a man, and it can then be said that this man emerges as greater than the sum of his own parts.

Green is the whole man.
Blue represents some parts and yellow can be the formal arrangement that produces functioning…

I think that can work. Green is not necessarily greater than blue and yellow (green sort of supplants and is just other than those other colors), unless you see green as blue and yellow plus their mixture.

——-

Honestly, I never liked the notion “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” I think the truth that notion is capturing is that the whole is other than the sum of its parts. I see why the first thought is “greater” as for instance a functioning man is certainly better and greater and more than a rotting pile of body parts. But isn’t a liver a whole liver of sorts? There is nothing wrong with distinguishing parts from the whole and giving them equal weight, value, import, in an analytic sense. “Greater” has baggage that distracts from a good concept.

I think the truth of it is that there is the whole, and there the parts of the whole, and you do not get a whole until you have all of the parts functioning as parts of the whole. But that is not a catchy notion like “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” And now is see that maybe it works to say “green is greater than merely blue and yellow.”

ADDED:
And so back to reproduction:
Blue represents the sperm part.
Yellow the egg.
The living, newly formed conceptus is the green whole new animal life that is greater than the mere sperm and egg piled next each other as mere parts.

frank

Green is the whole man. — Fire Ologist

Or another thing comes to mind, there's a mystical saying: "The one becomes the two, the two becomes the three, the three becomes the fourth which is the one."

Blue is the 1. We understand blue by comparing it to something else, in this case yellow, so this is the 2. They combine to make the 3, which is green.

But the green is just like the blue in that we understand it by comparing it something else. This is how the 3 becomes the 4th which is the 1. In other words, green implies something other than green, it's grand opposite would be everything that's not green, but in we can pick a stand-in, like red. Now we're back at the 2. Green and red make brown. And the whole thing starts again.

Fire Ologist

"The one becomes the two, the two becomes the three, the three becomes the fourth which is the one."

Blue is the 1. We understand blue by comparing it to something else, in this case yellow, so this is the 2. They combine to make the 3, which is green. — frank

That sounds like Hegel again. So maybe I need to rethink my sense that the analogy can’t help an understanding of dialectic.

Sounds like we need a fourth color to represent “not-green”. Maybe the palette itself needs to be brought into it…

frank

So maybe I need to rethink my sense that the analogy can’t help an understanding of dialectic. — Fire Ologist

For explaining dialectics I would ask: if everything in the universe was green, would the word "green" have any meaning? Trying to drive toward the realization that every object of thought appears against a backdrop of its opposite.

It's kind of an obscure point that red is an example of not-green. :grin:

Mww

Of the above, I think it works best to help explain sense perception, then secondly, Kant's noumenal/phenomenal distinction. — Fire Ologist

Before that help is affirmative, it should be stipulated in what sense “yellow is analogous to the senses – eyeballs, ears, nervous systems, etc.”, insofar as in Kant, the sensory devices are not part of what is commonly understood as the nervous system. They are only the physiological bridge, nowadays called the peripherals, between your empirical blue of the external world, and rational green of internal sensibility, justified by the fact that each object, or product/output, of five different and physically distinct modes of data reception are all treated the same way….governed by the same fundamental criteria….by subsequent procedural mechanisms, which makes explicit the senses, while only distinct from each other, are necessarily distinct from that to which their respective sensations are given.

In addition, also only with respect to Kant, “The noumenal blue objects we sense and come to know…”, is a contradiction.

The Kantian references falsify your thesis; it may have been more helpful overall, without it. But you did say helps secondly, so….

Fire Ologist

“The noumenal blue objects we sense and come to know…”, is a contradiction.

The Kantian references falsify your thesis; it may have been more helpful overall, without it. But you did say helps secondly, so…. — Mww

Yes, good catch.

So I think the he analogy is a useful tool when describing sensation best. I lumped all of the senses in as yellow to make it most general about all sense perception. But the point is, the empirical world is the blue. We never directly
contact the blue because our senses take the input from the world and process it to become whatever we experience. So less general analogy would be to say, the world is blue (or some unknown color); eyesight is yellow and when mixed with the world we experience the sight of things as green. And hearing is red; and when mixed with the world we experience sound of things as purple. Etc. The point being, our senses are active participants in building the experiences we naively call the color or sound or taste of the thing.

Second best is to understand Kant’s insight regarding the noumenal/phenomenal distinction. You are right. The discussion is not about “sensing and coming to know things.” That was inaccurate. Kant’s point is not merely about sense perception, so I shouldn’t even use the word sense. And Kant’s point is specifically that we can never know the thing-in-itself.

But the analogy holds if you just use the paint to understand that experience is green, that all we can “know” are phenomena.

So blue represents the thing-in-itself that we never know (shouldn’t even call it “blue” but maybe Kant shouldn’t even call it “thing”); yellow represents the categories of mind that construct or allow for our experience which is all green phenomena.

Does that make more sense?

Mww

Does that make more sense? — Fire Ologist

More I’m happy to accept, given the general intent of your analogy. Shades of that “ways to philosophize” thread….I’m quite in love with dissecting minutia, in high hopes of philosophizing with clarity and precision, donchaknow.

Probably more than required to grasp the point.

Fire Ologist

in high hopes of philosophizing with clarity and precision — Mww

Always.

The ways to philosophize thread(s) seem to be about one way to be clear and precise.

But always hoping for clarity. Either the analogy works to depict Kant’s idea, or it doesn’t. I think it does.

Mww

Either the analogy works to depict Kant’s idea, or it doesn’t. I think it does. — Fire Ologist

Depict as to give an idea of perception in general, yeah, maybe. Under Kantian textual scrutiny, I think it does not. That being said, I have no wish to upset the resident applecart.

Fire Ologist

I’m quite in love with dissecting minutia, in high hopes of philosophizing with clarity and precision, — Mww

As an analogy to Kant:

So blue represents the thing-in-itself that we can never know in its blue self; yellow represents the categories of mind that construct or allow for our experience; and our experience is all green phenomena. — Fire Ologist

How does it not work? Upset all apples and carts.

Why wouldn’t Kant agree we live in green world, behind the phenomenal veil that our mind construct, keeping us separate from things in themselves?

Mww

Why wouldn’t Kant agree we live in green world, behind the phenomenal veil that our mind construct, keeping us separate from things in themselves? — Fire Ologist

He would agree with that, I’ve no doubt. But he would not agree with “So blue represents the thing-in-itself that we can never know in its blue self; yellow represents the categories of mind that construct or allow for our experience; and our experience is all green phenomena.”

First….we have no way of knowing the blue self of a thing. It is only ever blue because we say it is;

Then…the yellow as category belongs to understanding, hence is not the OP’s yellow analogous to the senses, which is mere sensation belonging to sensibility;

Then…our experience is not of phenomena, but is the synthesis of phenomena with conceptions. Phenomena represent only that which is conditioned by both space and time, thereby are only the determinant conditions for the possibility of experience.

Finally…the green of sensation in the Sense Perception bracket of the OP is not the green of the phenomena found in the Kant bracket. Phenomena, in Kant are the “…undetermined object of empirical intuition…”, but sensation is merely “….that of reality by which the senses are affected…”

So….behind the phenomenal veil the mind constructs, keeping us separate from the things-in-themselves….yep, spot on. No metaphors needed. On the other hand, neither of your iterations of green in the aforementioned brackets, is a sufficient metaphor representing the world we live in.

Again, I have no warrant to critique your analogy in general, only that of it which reflects improper attributions to Kantian speculative metaphysics, as I understand it.

Fire Ologist

Why wouldn’t Kant agree we live in green world, behind the phenomenal veil that our mind construct, keeping us separate from things in themselves?
— Fire Ologist

He would agree with that, I’ve no doubt. — Mww

First….we have no way of knowing the blue self of a thing. It is only ever blue because we say it is;

Then…the yellow as category belongs to understanding, hence is not the OP’s yellow analogous to the senses…, — Mww

The analogy to sensation is one thing, and the colors represent the things of sensation.

The analogy to Kant is taken as another thing entirely.

So if you agree Kant would agree with this:
“we live in green world, behind the phenomenal veil that our minds construct, keeping us separate from things in themselves?”

Then it makes sense to me Kant would agree the analogy holds:
Blue represents noumena.
Yellow represents subject.
Green represents phenomena. We live in green, experience is all green, never blue. Not even yellow, which is just conditional framework and not “phenomena” nor “thing”.

Mww

The analogy to sensation is one thing, and the colors represent the things of sensation. The analogy to Kant is taken as another thing entirely. — Fire Ologist

I understand; my point was only that the three colors in Kant don’t do what you’re suggesting.

That, and, sorry, I misspoke in saying Kant would agree we live in a green world of phenomena. Our intelligence functions on representations, from which follows our knowledge is not of things as such, but we exist as objects, thus live, in a world of real things.

Fire Ologist

Our intelligence functions on representations, from which follows our knowledge is not of things as such — Mww

Intelligence functions = yellow.
Representations = green.
Things as such = blue.

Still no?

Mww

↪Fire Ologist

Nahhh….all that fits well enough.

Did you keep the palette at three colors only to represent a relatively simple idea? How are the “moving parts of other areas and concepts and systems” affected?

Bigger palette?

Fire Ologist

Did you keep the palette at three colors only to represent a relatively simple idea? How are the “moving parts of other areas and concepts and systems” affected?

Bigger palette? — Mww

I found it pleasing how well the analogy captures sense perception, and, I think, Kant’s observation.

I also find it interesting how the picture of such a simple mixture explains more than one more complex idea; something so simple not only capturing one complex idea, but many more ideas.
I think it helps align the basic parts of Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian theory of spirit, and the moral act of a person, but not as directly.

Bigger palette might do some work, but analogies can only take you so far. And Kant and sense perception and Heraclitus are what make the analogy, not the other way around.

I thought it was neat when I thought of it. Frankly I figured someone else probably thought of it before and that by posting it here someone would tell me who already wrote that.

I also think you can squeeze Plato’s Allegory of the Cave into it (blue being the man in chains, green being the shadows, and yellow being the light against the puppets), but if you need an analogy to understand an allegory better, you probably are being led too far astray from the human experience Plato was really trying to speak about. But it is another interesting picture reflecting the simple mixture of two colors of paint. At least I thought so.

Mww

↪Fire Ologist

Be cool as hell, wouldn’t it, to find the palette idea in the marginations of the very first outline of his magnum opus? When he was, like, 18yo? His rather extensive corpus doesn’t give that clue, as far as I am aware, but to find something like it would be quite interesting.

On the other hand, the applicability of analogies are somewhat the opinions of their creators, and opinions are assertorically denied as syllogistic devices in CPR, so, there is that….

At any rate, it was fun.

Harry Hindu

What other areas, things, concepts, experiences, might it depict? — Fire Ologist

Information and information processing? Input-output? Blue and yellow the input, mixing them together is the process, and green the output?

What color is the paint when the lights are out? We don't see paint. We see light.

Fire Ologist

…information processing…Blue and yellow the input, mixing them together is the process, and green the output? — Harry Hindu

Good one, although I’d say blue represents the input, yellow represents the processing, and green represents the output…It could work.

What color is the paint when the lights are out? We don't see paint. We see light. — Harry Hindu

That is a question of sense perception, specifically sight. That’s the first analogy. And your question is the whole point of the analogy. We don’t see things like paint and “the color of paint” without the influence of the eye. We have to remember, the colors in the analogy represent concepts, not actual colors. So, maybe the answer is, there is no “color” absent the eyeball and brain that receives light and processes it. Once processed, we perceive the color now constructed by the brain as the light reflected off of some object, now “seen” as whatever color our eyeball can make of whatever light it receives. Right?

Unless your question is simply what are the physical moving parts of sight - in which case the blue paint is meant to represent all of the elements in the world that contribute to sensation. So for sight, the blue paint represents the object with light bouncing off of it just before the moment it hits the eye. Once the eye (and brain) receive it, yellow is mixed in. Then, what we are conscious of is something reconstructed out of the light reflecting off the object (blue paint), the eyeball and brain and all of that processing (yellow paint), forming “what we see” (always now particularized by the influence of the yellow paint, which makes it a new particular vision, of green).

So really your question of what color is the object without light does have an answer; it has no color, because what color is requires light (specifically reflected light) as one essential ingredient for whatever color to emerge (the second essential ingredient being the particular eyeball, represented as yellow paint).

You could also ask, what color is the object without the lights on and no eyeball, and we again have to say no color, because color is what eyeballs create as a sensation. Or what color is empty space that reflects no light (what is the color of no objects)? Again, no color. What we see is represented as green paint analogously; this doesn’t happen until light reflected (blue paint analogously) hits our eyeball (yellow paint analogously).

Harry Hindu

Good one, although I’d say blue represents the input, yellow represents the processing, and green represents the output…It could work. — Fire Ologist

That doesn't make sense. What makes the blue the input and not the yellow when they both exist in equal terms prior to mixing them? What role does mixing the two colors play because you don't get green until blue and yellow are mixed? It is the mixing that is the process. A process is the interaction of two or more causes (colors) that produces a (single) output.

So, maybe the answer is, there is no “color” absent the eyeball and brain that receives light and processes it. Once processed, we perceive the color now constructed by the brain as the light reflected off of some object, now “seen” as whatever color our eyeball can make of whatever light it receives. Right? — Fire Ologist

Sure. Just as there is no you in this moment absent your mother and father having sex, giving birth to you and raising you.

Colors are the effect of prior causes - of light reflecting off an object, into your eye and processed in a way that informs an organism of the nature of the object the light was reflected off of, the nature of the light in the environment and the state of our eyes and brain. Because all of these things are within the causal chain that precedes the existence of a color, color can be used to inform us of the causes that preceded it. If I don't experience color, the issue could be that the object absorbs all light, or there is something different about the light in the environment (no light or the presence of a light filter on the light source, etc.), or my eyes and/or brain are not functioning properly.

I'm not sure that I would say that we perceive colors. We perceive the characteristics of the causal chain by way of the effects it leaves - color. I would only say that we perceived color when we start thinking about thinking, or perceiving perceptions - when we turn our mind back upon itself, like turning a camera back upon the monitor, or the microphone to the speaker, it is connected to.

Fire Ologist

A process is the interaction of two or more causes (colors) that produces a (single) output. — Harry Hindu

I think you are thinking about the terms of the analogy too literally. The blue paint would represent all kinds of different inputs. The yellow paint represents the processing of the imputs, and the green is the output. We aren’t mixing paint anymore; we are using the concept “mixing paint” as an analogy for generating output by data processing. But it was your idea, so maybe I just don’t follow how blue, yellow green will be enough to analogize data processing if you use up the blue and the yellow to both represent input data. If you want blue and yellow to both be different data inputs, it seems to me you need more elemental pieces be added to the analogy to take those inputs, process them and cause outputs, so my simpler analogy doesn’t actually work (unless maybe you use it as data input blue, processing yellow, data out green.)

Colors are the effect of prior causes — Harry Hindu

Just to be clear, in my analogy, the green represents any all colors perceived. I don’t think the analogy contradicts anything you are saying about how perception works; in fact I think it analogizes what you are saying.

I'm not sure that I would say that we perceive colors. We perceive the characteristics of the causal chain by way of the effects it leaves - color. I would only say that we perceived color when we start thinking about thinking — Harry Hindu

So I like what you are saying here. I think you are getting at use and definition of the word “perception” which I will consider/look in to further. But I think the end result here would be a better description of what the analogy analogizes; what you are clarifying about perception doesn’t mean the analogy is not a good one. Sense perception connects subjects to separate things being sensed. The perception itself (what is analogized as green) is internal, so you may be correct in saying we don’t perceive color because color IS the perception itself, not that which is perceived. I like the reflexivity aspect here worth pursuing.

I actually think there is a whole separate process called “Reflection in Mind” (or “thinking” or “self-reflection”) that the analogy may apply to, where blue is the (for lack of a better term) “flection” and green is the “re-flection” which has now been influenced by the act of reflecting (the yellow bit). But so haven’t thought this through yet (obviously, using words like “flection”). Maybe the blue is the consciousness (similar to any animal with sensation), the green is reflected consciousness or self-consciousness, and the yellow is the act itself upon the consciousness that generates the green self or the green reflection. Working on it.

Harry Hindu

I think you are thinking about the terms of the analogy too literally. The blue paint would represent all kinds of different inputs. The yellow paint represents the processing of the imputs, and the green is the output. We aren’t mixing paint anymore; we are using the concept “mixing paint” as an analogy for generating output by data processing. But it was your idea, so maybe I just don’t follow how blue, yellow green will be enough to analogize data processing if you use up the blue and the yellow to both represent input data. If you want blue and yellow to both be different data inputs, it seems to me you need more elemental pieces be added to the analogy to take those inputs, process them and cause outputs, so my simpler analogy doesn’t actually work (unless maybe you use it as data input blue, processing yellow, data out green.) — Fire Ologist

Then I don't understand how you get green paint without mixing blue and yellow. Mixing seems to be a very important part. It seems to me that blue and yellow would represent multiple inputs (we could add more colors if we wanted and we'd get a different output). Maybe your thinking of yellow as the actual program, or algorithm, and the blue as the input. The program exists but it is inert until it receives input. Mixing here would be the action the program takes with the input.

Fire Ologist

Mixing seems to be a very important part. — Harry Hindu

Yes, mixing, as it relates to blue paint and yellow paint, is an important part of the analogy. But like we aren’t really talking about paint, or blue, or yellow, when we use them to analogize something else, we aren’t really talking about mixing necessarily either.

Maybe your thinking of yellow as the actual program, or algorithm, and the blue as the input. The program exists but it is inert until it receives input. Mixing here would be the action the program takes with the input. — Harry Hindu

Blue paint = inputs/data/garbage in
Yellow paint = programming/processing (yellow paint itself represents a sort of mixing; mixing the blue data with the yellow code)
Green paint = outputs/garbage out.

I think it follows the analogy.

I still think it is interesting how such a simple analogy can help us see som many different ideas.

Harry Hindu

Yes, mixing, as it relates to blue paint and yellow paint, is an important part of the analogy. But like we aren’t really talking about paint, or blue, or yellow, when we use them to analogize something else, we aren’t really talking about mixing necessarily either. — Fire Ologist

But we are. We are talking about mixing causes to produce a new effect. An effect only occurs as an integration of prior events. An apple only rots when it interacts with bacteria. An apple cannot rot on its own, and bacteria need attach themselves to something for it to rot. An apple does not rot in the vacuum of space.

I still think it is interesting how such a simple analogy can help us see som many different ideas. — Fire Ologist

I think that information is a fundamental part of reality and is the relationship between causes and their effects. The analogy can describe evidence, or reasons (the blue and yellow paint), reasoning (the mixing), and a conclusion (the green paint).

Fire Ologist

I think that information is a fundamental part of reality and is the relationship between causes and their effects. The analogy can describe evidence, or reasons (the blue and yellow paint), reasoning (the mixing), and a conclusion (the green paint). — Harry Hindu

So you would come up with “the Analogy of the Information Processor” to describe sensation, Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal distinction, and maybe some other concepts?

“…Information is the relationship between causes and effects.”

“Information is the relationship”

I am going to think about that. :up:

The Analogy of the Painter’s Palette

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