Humans have a qualio-perceptual syntax https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Human_Cognitive_Syntax

Individual colors are to be understood as states, corresponding to physical frequencies. Comparison between states is what gives the impression of relativity.

But the syntax, what you refer to as "code", provides an objective or absolute nature to qualio-perceptions, as it distributes the relations over the states. It's what makes the states different to one another, or provides them with "categories" a la Kant. The syntax is what distinguishes individual states in terms of the other states that they are not.

I'm pretty rigid in the ironic ecotone of world and idea where there is some kind of actuality, world and the mind or some aether of forms and the soul, I don't differentiate and refer to any conception as indirect reality. Idealistic conceptions are entertainable, but ultimately I am materialist or green not lorange like Kant.

Given that they are meaningless, how are they to be understood? — introbert

Given that the above black shapes are meaningless, I seem to be able nonetheless to understand and respond. This is because we share the socially constructed written language. I can read traffic lights too.

If you talk to insects, there will be some difficulty, because they tend to see colour better than humans, but they clearly have meaning to them in terms of identifying flowers; bright colours mean tasty nectar.

I feel I must be missing your point though; what is the difficulty with colour? Signs can be entirely arbitrary like words and letters, or entirely natural, like footprints, or a combination of the two.

The point is to discuss symbols as code that are between natural law and subjectivity. That is if a picture of colors needs a point if subjectivity is going to derail the rules of the discussion I have attempted to lay out. I say rules on this case because the experience of material phenomenon does have effect on thought. I use symbols then you experience them the law is that it will have some effect but it is not ultimately deterministic, you can think anything.

As @unenlightened pointed out, the meaning of colours are based on written language. John Locke deepened in this matter on An Essay of Human Understanding. You mentioned some colours that you are interested in: red, blue, white, black, green, yellow and orange.

Well, according to Locke's thoughts those colours are imaginary because they come from the spectrum of colour wheel. We learn that there are three "primary colors," red, yellow, and blue (or magenta, yellow, and cyan), and that when we mix these colors, we get intermediate colors, like green, orange, and purple. Mixing them all gets something like black. If we match up the color wheel with the electromagic spectrum of light, we have a considerable puzzle, for in the latter there is only one way to get from blue to red, and it passes through all the other colors, but not through purple. Violet may look a bit like purple, but it has nothing to do with red. What is going on? The discipline we need to understand this is not physics or art, but physiology. The eye has certain receptors on the retina that detect color, the "cones." These come with three different sensitivities. Hence the three "primary" colors. True purple, for which there seems to be no place in the physical spectrum, is something we see when the cones sensitive to blue and red are both stimulated, giving us something like an imaginary color.
This situation is only intelligible given Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The purple is not in the object. It is caused in the eye.
Locke's most interesting distinctions is between primary and secondary qualities

Are you wondering whether colors have inherent meaning? They might.

The Lüscher color test is a psychological test invented by Max Lüscher in Basel, Switzerland. Max Lüscher believed that sensory perception of color is objective and universally shared by all, but that color preferences are subjective, and that this distinction allows subjective states to be objectively measured by using test colors. Lüscher believed that because the color selections are guided in an unconscious manner, they reveal the person as they really are, not as they perceive themselves or would like to be perceived. — Wikipedia

The book was published in 1969; I used the test more as a parlor game, and as such it produced results that the subjects found interesting. Validity? Reliability? Probably zip, but the idea is interesting.

A second interesting title is Painting By Numbers by Komar and Melamid, two Russian-born conceptual artists (now in their 80s). Their works tend to be provocations, but this particular book is a serious examination of what kinds of art are the most popular, and among popular types, what are the most desired colors. Results vary across cultures. Orange or pink, for example, are not highly sought after. Pink is a very rare flag color.



The two books support the idea that colors have at least some inherent meaning to humans. This seems like a reasonable idea to me, as long as we keep the word "some" in mind. Colors may carry a 'code' but we don't want to get carried away interpreting it.

Is this anywhere close to what you are thinking about?

Yes, clearly on topic. I'm thinking that color is not inherently meaningful, but the signification of color is made by their association to objective truths, but the connection between color and the object are flimsy at best. Most of the preceding discussion has been abstract in a way that color is being talked about in how it is understood but not in concrete ways that it is understood. As such someone who is forming the theory is working up a way of understanding color, designing, rather than reverse engineering from concrete examples. Let me give some examples of color and code: in the mythology of ancient Ireland a 'king' who was converted by St. Patrick was convinced of the trinity as the concept was analogical to a natural form of significance that is green. Green thus has a certain code about rationality that can be in agreement or at odds with other forms of rationality and the difference in power of the epistem makes each seem irrational to the other in a relativistic phenomenon. Catholicism and Protestantism feature conflicts in rational epistem. So colour is not something with objective meaning but the relativistic objectivity in the interpretation of colour is not how the color is understood but why it is understood. When I say relativistic objectivity, I am stating my belief that biasless objectivity must be relativistic as objectivity is biased towards an epistem of one kind or another, the current prevailing one being about facts but at the same time is deindividuating to the extent that it will create agreement. That it creates agreement is not that it lacks subjectivism but the kind of objects one looks at and the way they are looked at is epistemological of collective intersubjectivity. Objectivity has contradictory nature that must be considered, and thus modified with relativism or other concept. The color code for orange is a little different, still complex but not about concept::material analogy that connects the color green to code. Orange is from a similar sounding location in France that has no material analogy to the concept. Although there is an annual meeting of gingers on Netherlands now that is an ironic implosion of rational idealusm. That doesnt mean the color has no object nature but really the predominant theme has been a rationalization of belief from ancient and primitive godlessness before Christ and the modern transmorgification of that rationalization as it itself evolved from its primitive form. This is just a very simple explanation, for communication purposes. Antischizophrenia is really effective. Cartesian antischizophrenia is a simple opposition of 'delusion' in the most general sense to scientism, and the certainty of one prevailing over the other. But it is more than that, it is a complex that is not necessarily coherent with the architectural designs of Cartesianism. As in all orange rational ideals, the repentance of sin of their rational delusions is not ironic but progress towards the future.

My friend, we'd known each other for only about 6 months or so then, was an Oxford University fanboy - he couldn't stop talking about how great Oxford is - once, only once, to prove his point, asked me an Oxford-level question which was why is grass green? I was flummoxed of course, being only 19 that time.

@BC, informative post!

Has anyone come across aposematism (warning colors in animals)? A life-saving rhyme for the layman re venomous and nonvenomous snakes is red touch yellow will kill a fellow (venomous coral snake); red touch black, safe for Jack (nonvenomous king snake).

There's also the unkenreflex when animals assume a certain posture to display warning colors to show would-be predators that they're venomous.

Color is an interesting example for "natural code". The vast majority of the different colors which we experience are created by life forms, flowers for example. If there were no life forms, the colors of the world would be very bland.

What this implies is that if you want to include colors into a code of meaning, you need to include all life forms into your definition of meaning, so that colors can be properly represented as meaningful. The colors of flowers, as well as some ornate creatures, are very meaningful to their reproductive cycles. This is why colors have inherent or innate meaning as indicates. We have a natural tendency to see an array of colors, like a field of flowers, or a colorful bird, as beautiful. This recognition of beauty demonstrates the innate tendency to perceive colors as meaningful.

So, the "relativistic objectivity" which you refer to, needs to be adapted to allow that living beings other than the human ones, produce and interpret meaning. This would adjust "objectivity" relativistically to allow that beings other than humans employ a code of meaning which is displayed in their usage of color. The result is that the term "code" may not be appropriate. We ought to say that meaning is based in something other than code.

. The color code for orange is a little different, still complex but not about concept::material analogy that connects the color green to code. Orange is from a similar sounding location in France that has no material analogy to the concept. — introbert

This grabbed my attention -- as a means for understanding "code" one could say

x::y

However, I want to say that this is only a step in a code. So where you have

Concept::material

I might add

Materialist::green

As a prior step. In a way the concept::material is in the process of decoding the flow by abstraction.


The coding of flows of desire is one of the analogies that really stuck with me from Anti-Oedipus. I can't claim to say I understand Deleuze, but it's a concept I often find myself returning to (even if I don't understand it! :D)

I'm the same way with Deleuze... Marxism has an analogy of consciousness to material conditions. Part of the hegelian dialectic, and the alienation of spirit from Feuerbach apparently. There is a philosophical game going on in history that I try to understand. There is another step. The orange green thing is not just about philosophical concepts it is about racial conflict germanic v celtic, but that is not as interesting as the philosophical conflict from ancient thinking to christianity to modernity and beyond. I look at the colors as relevant as part of a process of rationalizing 'human' thought and representative of conflict in philosophy. Obviously I am not against good sense, but there are good sense fanatics that reduce sound thinking to the absurd, which has happened to science and psychology.

There's definitely many more steps. I think of code like a bike-chain, or a string of DNA/RNA, but more abstract -- which is why you can have desiring-machines like the mouth-to-nipple desiring-machine. Abstractly there's the connection between any named entities which compose the flows of desire, be they coded, decoded, or over-coded.

The desiring-machines are composed of partial machines and flows. I imagine the concatenation of desiring-machines as the steps in a code.

Before coding you have the the formation of elements, the cooling of the elements into planets, a moon which swishes the water to ensure the beaker remains mixed -- be it by chance or God (and aren't they really the same?), the desire for self-reproduction, the simplest of desiring-machines, begins to flourish.

The ocean prior to bits of self-replicating RNA, as we guess now but who knows, is what I think of when I think of the Body without Organs -- the plenum of possibility, the complete deflation of all structures or struggles, the medium in which organs are formed out of desiring-machines.

I'm not against good sense, either, nor do I think you are. I just don't think that desire works in accord with good sense. "Good sense" is one of the names by which we can identify a flow of desire!

That is very poetic, but I am not so poetic right now. I look at the body without organs as a common schizo delusion, the psychiatric name I can't remember right now, and also the Cartesian conception of the automaton - biological machines that operate like clockwork. The cover of my Penguin edition has a body without organs and some mechanical schematic inlayed. Descartes had this delusion (not of his own body, but about other animal bodies), ironic given his ironclad doubt against unreal notions, the idea of constructing such an animal, a duck, or capitalist system makes nothing, garbage. Shit and piss (eggs, fat etc.) gives life; plastic and acid makes nothing. This is the modern schizo capitalist table overstuffed with meaningless antiproduction.

I think the Body without Organs is one pole in the description of productive desire, where the Socius is the other pole. I agree that the individual body is itself a series of flows of desire -- my copy has the same image you describe.

The part I could never figure out in there was the third part -- but I thought that might be on purpose because it is, after all, anti-oedipus, and so it'd make sense to try to break the triad he highlights of Daddy-Mommy-Me.

Rorty said something interesting in his book about irony
"Skeptics like Nietzsche have urged that metaphysics and theology
are transparent attempts to make altruism look more reasonable than it
is. Yet such skeptics typically have their own theories of human nature.
They, too, claim that there is something common to all human beings -
for example, the will to power, or libidinal impulses. Their point is that at
the "deepest" level of the self there is no sense of human solidarity, that
this sense is a "mere" artifact of human socialization. So such skeptics
become antisocial. They turn their backs on the very idea of a community
larger than a tiny circle of initiates.

Deleuze talks about libidinal impulses, but I like will to power. It is anti-oedipal after-all. So maybe he is using libidinal ironically, and perhaps will-to-power is better? The socius: the object for the 'skeptical' or individualistic schizophrenic, or the schizo: for the skeptical scientific Cartesian modern social conformist, is two converging poles of desire or libido, or alternatively will-to-power. Maybe the schizo has will to power, and the conformist has libido.

I'd say that your proposal would count as a dyad within the series of code.

.
.
.
libido::will-to-power
conformist::schizo

Or, an alternate code

libido::will-to-power
schizo::conformist
.
.
.

Or, since Marx is in the mix, we could even say these are two step codes within another two-step Code such that a circle could be formed between the two -- so a four step loop, in the notion of a code where a dyad is executed.

In a flow of desire within the Body without Organs one can see, in the place of the general "::", one could set up a series of relationships (such as "Reacts to yield", if one wanted a molecular-level description of the flows of desire) which demonstrate how one named entity leads to another named entity in a flow of desire. There is no person there, there is only the flow which resists the socius, is the very anti-thesis of the socius. Where the Body without Organs is an RNA being produced along a DNA strand, or a protein being produced along some RNA, the flow has no super-order, no telos, no function. The socius would say here is a heart whose function, something which eventually builds a psyche that can then finally be analyzed, but the Body without Organs is just this flow without identity.

***
Stepping back...

My take, at least, is that Deleuze is trying to expound a more general theory of desire which could account for libido or value, two sides of rational analysis which in his world were Freud and Marx, but rather than having it based upon a theory of desire where desire is a lack, it was meant to be a productive theory of desire. On top of that it's meant to be very general, in a sort of theory of everything way, so the political events of 1968 are also at least a creative point of inspiration.

And it makes sense when you think of the psychologist as the one who normalizes people to get back to work. The Freudian analysis will reveal and heal the anxiety within us so we can be productive and society can remain stable.

In that vein, I'm sort of just trying the ideas out rather than claiming true textual fidelity. But I thought the ideas could make sense of your notion of a color code!

In terms of the code I have described, which is only a piece of it, if you look at modernity/ capitalism as based on rational idealism, Descartes's rationalization of all thought and where that went, Calvinistic ethics producing a capitalistic culture contrasted with Marx's dialectical materialism that was not rational idealism, but that the spirit is from the corporeal like the green color code. Some 'philosophers' will never allow a concept they worship whether god of/or capitalism to ever have its rational ideals lowered to something as base as material conditions. But it is an undeniable fact that rational ideals do not necessarily produce material conditions that will promote the same spirit that created them. As for the green symbol, that is not dialectical materialism, but the ideas people had based on 'animistic' understandings likely created certain conditions that were offensive to people with 'higher' (divine from the heavens rather than Earthly) ideal understandings of god, but that was before relativism was well thought-out. People still don't understand.

Neitszche is against Platonic idealism, in favor of back-to-nature. However, the green color code changed as Christianity progressed, and at the fall-of-Rome Irish monks saved Platonic idealism / irony, so the story goes, and by the end of the 'Dark Ages', Calvin psychologizes religion, in a complex theological system. I see people acting out of individual spirit/soul as different from 'the mind' that can be taught and disciplined. The soul is individual, the individual is ironic to the community/ flock/ herd/ audience. Calvinism and Cartesianism are compatible. It is a complex matter, a long book wouldn't do the topic justice. On the matter of a long book, the German film translated as The Never Ending Story is by my interpretation a cheeky comment on the bullied 'introvert' struggling in the social world but finds freedom in a schizo escape from reality. It is not tolerated given the investiture of cultivating a social mind. He 'ironically' prevails in this fever dream.

if you look at modernity/ capitalism as based on rational idealism, Descartes's rationalization of all thought and where that went, Calvinistic ethics producing a capitalistic culture contrasted with Marx's dialectical materialism that was not rational idealism, but that the spirit is from the corporeal like the green color code. — introbert

Cool. Thanks for the opportunity to think about Deleuze. It's a rare treat.

I'm going to try to pick apart this sentence in the manner I started.


if you look at modernity/ capitalism as based on rational idealism, Descartes's rationalization of all thought and where that went, Calvinistic ethics producing a capitalistic culture

contrasted with

Marx's dialectical materialism that was not rational idealism, but that the spirit is from the corporeal like the green color code.

So a possible rendition of the above code:

.
.
.
Idealism::Materialism
Orange::Green
Descartes::Marx
Rationalism::Dialectic
Capitalist::Dialectical Materialism
Spirit::corporeal
.
.
.

But this is in categorical terms, and explicitly dyadic. I'd say that this dyadic description of the flow glosses over some of the relationships which you describe, such as the relationship between the steps of the flow of codes like Calvinism (the protestant work ethic) linking up to capitalism on the left hand side.


How does that sound so far?

— introbert

Its however you understand it. You can understand it simply by knowing thyself and thy enemy, without these major interpretations.

"it" as in color code?

So,

Blue:self:Good
Red:enemy:Bad
Green:world:indifferent

'it' is the philosophical problem you are having that perhaps makes Deleuze et al. attractive to you. But maybe on closer inspection it may not align with you. Maybe the text is so open to accomodate your soul/ will to power/ libido/ mind

Deleuze came to mind because of your mention of code, and his notion of code is the first thing I thought of.

Given that colors are "in themselves" without meaning, how is it that colors come to have this quality of meaning which is in-between a natural, necessary law and the subjective musings of an individual?

Or, so I was thinking: How do colors have meanings? Answer -- desire. But not desire as a lack, and so not a problem in need of a solution, or a disease in need of a cure, but rather unbounded desire that, again so I thought, schizo-analysis might give an answer to.

"Green", for instance, has the meaning of nature and the earth, I'd say. I wasn't sure how your orange was working so I was trying to break out a kind of logical syntax of code for clear communication (though I'd hasten to add that a given syntax is, itself, a kind of code -- so you get overcoding, codes upon coded desire) -- so where I saw where you were going with green I wasn't sure where you were going with orange, hence my positing the general "::" for which you could substitute really any linguistic relationship (and so not necessarily big-R, set-bound "Relations")

Orange is psychiatry, it is a focus on natural law (science) of individual behavior especially in adapting adjusting to modernity ( but it us also the whole regime of sanctioned thought), green is the individual in natural naive state, the struggle of naivete (inexperience) and becoming something in relation to the modern: the functionalist psychiatrist on one end or the anticapitalist schizo on the other. Naivete is tied to philosophy in Cartesian critique of direct realism, but Naivete is opposed on a deeper level. It is naive to think without doubting your thoughts, but what about the entire modern experience, the naive struggle of not learning how to think and behave, compared to the 'experienced' who are unironic in relation to expectations. The cartesian implication that direct realism is naivete does not extend to cartesian scientific dogma that pretends to have exact perception of the world. But that is fine naivete is the individual solipsistic introverted escapist maladaptive lazy daydreaming transcendant argumentative nonsensical etc. individual. This is just talking between extremes. The solipsist can manifest not as delusion but as an egoist irrationalist against collectivity. That sort of thing. This picture is just painted in bold colors/ extremes.

"it" as in color code?

So,

Blue:self:Good
Red:enemy:Bad
Green:world:indifferent — Moliere

:up: Brevity, the soul of wit!

If you look at it as sarcastic it's wit, but that was unironically agreeable to me.

If you look at it as sarcastic it's wit, but that was unironically agreeable to me. — introbert

:up: Is it not the answer you're looking for?

I would have used '=' signs rather than ':', but I get the message.

Just to be clear, no sarcasm on my part. The ideas are thick enough, no need to add more complexity :D