Blue

Forthcoming in Derek Brown and Fiona MacPherson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour (Routledge, in press, expected 2016)

Bird's Hut is, to say the least, a mixed environment. The land itself is a scrappy bit of bush with steep cliffs rising up on two sides that wrap around a small clearing through which a deeply sunken creek bed flows. A 19th Century shepherd's hut is its chief architectural feature, and though predominantly intact, it has clearly suffered from decades of abuse and neglect that mix its rustic ruin with jarring modern accents of graffiti and repair. The clearing is littered with several old cars and odd flimsy structures showing signs of weather and gravity. Despite the 'mixed environment', Bird's Hut has a kempt appearance. Nevertheless, every broken artefact that sits within its frame argues with the natural environment, and the conflict disrupts the peaceful unity that the visitor is tempted to compose out of its idyllic context. It is a challenging setting for an art exhibition, to say the least, as any object placed within its field of vision is necessarily drawn into and absorbed by the shear complexity of detail, from the speculation of sunlight in the leaves of every tree to flakes of paint and the objects of rust and the warping water-stained wood of a collapsing caravan. There is a reason that art appears most regularly between white walls where, detached from the messiness of the world, it can assume its heightened object status as the thing itself: the art object. At birds hut, the art object struggles to maintain its special status. The world in its plenum threatens to demote it into just another thing, another bit of junk littering this remnant of nature.

Literature and Medicine, 2020

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Why the Sky Is Blue answers this ancient and surprisingly complex question in a more entertaining and accessible way than ever before. Götz Hoeppe takes the reader on a historical and scientific journey to show the various ways people in different times and places have explained why the sky looks blue. The richly illustrated story begins with ancient myths and philosophy and ends with the cutting-edge science of optics, statistical physics, and ozone depletion. Most importantly, it is the story of how scientists discovered that the sky’s blue depends on life on Earth and the makeup of our planet’s ozone layer. Without microbial life’s impact on the composition of the atmosphere, the clear daytime sky would probably lack its distinctive color. And without the ozone, the twilight sky’s color would also be very different — not the sapphire tone of l’heure bleue, but rather a yellowish or greenish hue. Why the Sky Is Blue shows that skylight can be viewed from a surprising variety of vantage points. We learn how our physiology and cognitive capacities govern our perception of the sky’s color. And we discover why this everyday experience has been such a source of fascination and controversy over the centuries. Delightful and intriguing, Why the Sky Is Blue shows how the attempt to answer this age-old and deceptively simple question only enhances the magic of the blue sky we see above us.

2019

Popular opinion holds that color has specific affective meaning. Brighter, more chromatic, and warm colors were conceptually linked to positive stimuli and darker, less chromatic, and cool colors to negative stimuli. Whether such systematic color associations exist with actually felt mood remains to be tested. We experimentally induced four moods-joy, relaxation, fear, and sadness-in a between-subject design (N = 96). Subsequently, we asked participants to select a color, from an unrestricted sample, best representing their current mood. Color choices differed between moods on hue, lightness, and chroma. Yellow hues were systematically associated with joy while yellowgreen hues with relaxation. Lighter colors were matched to joy and relaxation (positive moods) than fear and sadness (negative moods). Most chromatic colors were matched to joy, then relaxation, fear, and sadness. We conclude that color choices represent felt mood to some extent, after accounting for a relatively low specificity for color-mood associations.

Critique is directed against lingering philosophical Idealism and its counterpart; rationalistic physicalism. The remarkable discoveries of quantum physics invalidate them both, findings that have largely been ignored. The objective world constitutes of both mind and matter, and so does the subject. There exists no metaphysical barrier. Rather, subject and object are interactive and partake of the very same substance of reality. This has complementary nature, that is, manifests either as mind or matter. Keywords: philosophy of color, theory of mind, ontology, epistemology, Idealism, Orch OR, qualia, reprentationism, artificial intelligence, AI, machine-human, physicalism, rationalism, complementarity, wave-particle duality, Kant, Descartes, Roger Penrose, James J. Gibson.

How could the colors of our universe change the standard cosmology?

Color Research & Application, 1989