Mark Changizi

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236 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Mark Changizi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi · 28 Nov 2024 podcast

But most of them don't really have to think about Darwin because they're doing mechanistic experiments. They're not doing hypotheses about its design. I'm one of the rare people back in the 1920s, You had the ethologists who did a lot more thinking in terms of the design and the function, really thinking about their evolutionary connection. But that's gone way away.

Everybody's dealing with really complicated experiments with mechanisms. They don't have to think about it. So they've somehow developed this knee-jerk reaction that you don't have to understand design and purpose. But you cannot understand any machine without understanding what it's designed for. So I often use an example.

If you were to find a stapler out of the middle of nowhere, natives find a stapler for the first time. And they want to try to understand it. There's not much to a stapler. There's like four parts or whatever, six parts. But you might work out all the mechanisms. This opens this. There's like seven things, let's say, and they do these sorts of kinds of actions.

Well, that's not an understanding of it. You might start saying, well, maybe it's a weapon. And you start shaking it around like nunchucks. You open it up. Well, now you can work out how does it break when you hit someone in the face? Is it bent? Maybe that's part of it. There's tons and tons of mechanistic behaviors that it has that have nothing to do with what it's in fact for.

how it deforms when this happens. There's lots of infinite numbers of kinds of mechanisms that are involved with it that are completely irrelevant, right?

Only by understanding the mechanisms in the context of what the function is for, this is where the computational heart, you've got function, you've got the algorithm level, you've got the mechanistic implementation level, you have to understand all these systems by understanding it by all of these parts all cohering together in one. In relationship to function.

In relationship to function at the top. And so they're throwing out the very thing that allows you to understand, even if they are only interested in mechanisms, which my eyes glaze over with mechanisms, you can't understand mechanisms without inherently understanding the functions.

Well, I mean, ecological, capital E, ecological perception, ecological vision with Gibson ended up biting onto a whole lot of philosophical baggage that I never bought into. I consider myself a lowercase e, ecological vision person, in which case you can't understand what vision or anything.

Horny mechanisms are doing it unless you understand what it was functioning for in the natural environment for all of those millions of years. And so let me just give you some specific examples. So one of the things that I had noticed was that people had talked about color for 100 years and color vision. First of all, to back up, we primates, we and some other primates, have a third dimension.

Your dog just has gray scale. And yellow-blue, two dimensions. All the bunny rabbits, horses, just have two dimensions. But some of us primates have a third dimension, red-green. And so for 100 years, they thought, well, maybe it has something to do with finding fruits in the forest. And there was never any good evidence for this at all.

There's incredible varieties and variability in terms of the kinds of diets that they would have.

not to mention just even generation to generation is going to experience radically different kinds of diets of fruits but they all have the same um pegged the exact same um kind of color vision and it's a weird this is across primate groups across all trichromate primate groups all the old world uh trichromats have so dog um dogs and bunny rabbits have one low wavelength sensitive cone down in the 550s and then the other one um sorry um in the in the 400s 450s or so and that's sort of the

blue cone and then the other ones we have one in the 550s or so for the dogs that's around here so you've got two and then what you'd expect if you're going to have a third one would be that suddenly it may be over here you'd have the uniformly distributed like rgb for your cameras they're uniformly distributed across the spectrum which is sort of a poor man's spectrometer you've got three across the spectrum you put them uniformly but in fact ours is this

we ended up with another cone sensitivity right next to the other one. They're exactly side by side in a really weird, peculiar way. Why would you want to have a third cone sensitivity the same part of the spectrum? It's just like 15 nanometers away.

All right. So I realized later that when you look, you know, I've noticed that one of the things that matters is blood under the skin, blushes, blanches, health modulations. All of these kinds of emotions, signals that humans and other primates are doing on bare skin is shown by virtue of the blood of the skin.

And it's by virtue in particular of the oxygenation, deoxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin. And it turns out that when you're looking at the completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin, which is a bunch of, it has a little W in one, this one part. So it goes like this, and there's a little W. And when it's, that's when it's oxygenated.

And when it deoxygenates, that W in that little region turns into a U. And so these little peaks right there in the W part If you wanted to be sensitive to this oxygenation, deoxygenation, you actually have to have two cones right there.

So the little W peak in the middle, as it goes down in terms of you and the other parts that go up, you have to sense that you have to have a peculiar spots of two cones in this exact spot.

So I was like, oh my God, exactly where you'd have to put cones to be sensitive to the only spot where you could tell that it's getting oxygenated versus deoxygenated is exactly in the spots where we have our cones.

So this is an empath sense. In short, our color vision, our primate color vision is an empath sense. It's only by virtue of that that we can see these blushes and blanches. And it's only by virtue of that that you can actually see veins at all. The veins, of course, are the deoxygenated parts. And the more fleshy red parts are the more oxygenated parts.

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