Is There Color in Heaven?

[Ben_Sinner]

I remember hearing on a VSauce video on YouTube that color doesn’t exist. Our minds are designed to “add” the color in our perceptions.

For example, most of our minds show a strawberry to be red. People who are color blind’s minds perceive it as some other color.

My question is this.

Since we won’t be in our bodies and have eyes and brains in Heaven (at least before the last ressurection of the bodies)…will Heaven be colorless?

Or is this claim that there is no color false to begin with?

 

[OraLabora]

.will Heaven be colorless?

We have no way of knowing.

 

[Ben_Sinner]

I guess I should follow this up with another question.

How will we be able to see, hear, feel, smell, taste in Heaven if we don’t have bodies or brains in Heaven?

 

[Mystical_Seeker]

It’s funny because I only recently heard of vsauce a couple days ago, and I was just learning about vision in two different classes: Cognitive Psych, and Psych of Sensation and Perception.

Just like “sound” is a psychological artifact of the mind, while “pressure waves” are not. So if a tree falls, there are pressure waves of a certain nature, amplitude, and frequency. But there is no “sound” per se because any “sound” you hear undergoes a great deal of processing. For example: have you heard of the McGurk effect? You can study it for years and it still will fool you every time.

Colors are like that. If there is a rainbow, but no eye sees it, it remains electromagnetic waves of various frequency and amplitudes and going some this way, some that. Just like radio waves and microwaves and all kinds of other stuff; there is just a certain “special little segment” that our eyes have adapted to apparently consider this thing “color” as useful – and we can now sense a certain part of the spectrum.

Also, if you have Netflix, be sure to check this out because it’s covered very well by the pilot episode of “Brain Games.”

Hey check out some of the cool features about vision in chapter 4 of my textbook companion for my Perceptions class: you can even try out the activities and the quizzes inside them, but just not the “instructor quizzes” (because your instructor has to set you up for that so you’ll have a login). Some of the activities are buggy, like the adding and subtracting color thing inn chapter 5. It’s new and they’ve requested comments so I’ve emailed them about it.

In terms of your ideas about heaven, I totally get what you’re asking. I don’t even consider that my “thoughts” will be the same as I experience “thoughts” now – like if my brain dies there is this little “thought center” that is the true eternal “essence” of me that’s going go be disembodied somewhere. That’s really kind of hard to image, I think. So really without eyes and lateral geniculate nuclei and visual cortices and all that to be connected up, seems to me there would be no “vision” in the way we know it now. So yeah, it’s all have to depend on the body getting itself back together it would seem to me.

 

[GEddie]

Color does exist, it is the frequency of visible light impinging upon our retinae.

As to Heaven, there is no time without a body. So you won’t be waiting around blind wishing you had eyes (you can’t know or wish without your head, anyhow).

When your knowing comes back on, you will have a body/head/eyes and you will see colors.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[FrDavid96]

I guess I should follow this up with another question.

How will we be able to see, hear, feel, smell, taste in Heaven if we don’t have bodies or brains in Heaven?

We will have bodies.

It’s not about “will we be able to see?” but “what will we see?”

The “what?” will be the Beatific Vision—seeing God as He is. One glance and we will never even consider looking away.

 

[TK421]

There are millions of primary colors in Heaven.

 

[Ben_Sinner]

We will have bodies.

It’s not about “will we be able to see?” but “what will we see?”

The “what?” will be the Beatific Vision—seeing God as He is. One glance and we will never even consider looking away.

So where do our bodies in Heaven come from? If we have bodies in Heaven, why is there a need for our physical bodies to be reunited with us after the last day?

 

[Beryllos]

I remember hearing on a VSauce video on YouTube that color doesn’t exist. Our minds are designed to “add” the color in our perceptions…

A good point. In fact, every perception is like that. Our brain takes simple nerve impulses from all of our sensory organs and interprets them so that we can perceive and respond. Think about this: all nerve fibers work by transmitting simple electrical pulses, and every nerve impulse is about the same, just an electrical blip. Why does one set of electrical blips “sound” like high pitch, another “looks” like red, another “tastes” like salt, and another “feels” like hot?

A simple answer is that the brain is adapted to work together with the body. It sorts and processes sensory information, and it controls movement, so that we may live. Too hot? Pull back. Tastes good? Eat. We sense and then we respond, in marvelously complex patterns, our whole life long.

Next question: What sort of perception will we have in heaven? Will our perception be limited to the quality of earthly life, or will it be adapted to heavenly life? There will be new things to take in (1 Corinthians 2:9 and 1 Corinthians 13:10-12 come to mind, but there may be better biblical citations). If it pleases God, he will provide us with the senses necessary to fully perceive heavenly life, and the mind and body necessary to fully respond.

 

[mdgspencer]

There are several bodies in heaven. So there would be color in heaven (unless we thought heaven was less than this life in this matter, color being something we much enjoy). The Virgin Mary has a body. Jesus too in fact has a body. I recall reading an article in a Catholic journal 30 years ago, “How Many Bodies Are There in Heaven?” According the tradition of Catholic thought the Old Testament indicates that one or two people of the Old Testament kept their bodies after dying.
Would there be color in heaven if there were no bodies there? Perhaps this purely hypothetical question would have to do with how you define color? I couldn’t say myself.

 

[Mystical_Seeker]

Would there be color in heaven if there were no bodies there? Perhaps this purely hypothetical question would have to do with how you define color? I couldn’t say myself.

Yes, it comes down to how we define color, as of this semester I finally have an definition that works for me. And now I have an answer for the “tree falls” question, for the same reason.

Funny how I’ve worked with electromagnetic waves my whole life, but never really thought that “color” was a “result” of wavelength (or mixtures of them, in the case of metamers – in which case the color you “see” may not even be present and are actually vastly more common than more “pure” wavelengths) and not “another measure” for it.

So for now I’m sticking with a story that “color” is a psychological experience that is influenced by the physical properties (wavelengths for example) of light.

My perception book offers the following rewrite on a popular rhyme: "Roses are red, violets are blue; the colors you see are really “in you.”

As a Steven Shevell wrote in the journal The Science of Color (2003), “there is no more red in 700 nm light, just as there is no pain in the hooves of a kicking horse.”

The book goes on to explain that like pain, color is the result of the interaction of a physical stimulus with a particular nervous system.

So what does this tell me about after I die? Not much, other than things will “appear” very differently than they do now, if they “appear” at all in the way I’m accustomed to calling “by sight.”

MS

 

[FrDavid96]

So where do our bodies in Heaven come from? If we have bodies in Heaven, why is there a need for our physical bodies to be reunited with us after the last day?

It depends on how we want to discuss the timeline.

When I first responded, I was thinking of the time after the Final Judgement, after the Resurrection from the Dead.

Based on what you just wrote, it seems like you’re asking about “after we die, but before the Last Day.” Is that so?

I just want to make sure before I participate any further otherwise we’ll all be completely confused.

 

[Ben_Sinner]

It depends on how we want to discuss the timeline.

When I first responded, I was thinking of the time after the Final Judgement, after the Resurrection from the Dead.

Based on what you just wrote, it seems like you’re asking about “after we die, but before the Last Day.” Is that so?

I just want to make sure before I participate any further otherwise we’ll all be completely confused.

Yes. Before the last day.

 

[Ben_Sinner]

So if these senses are all just individual processes of our brain, wouldn’t make make a material world unknowable, and perhaps, an illusion?

 

[GEddie]

So if these senses are all just individual processes of our brain, wouldn’t make make a material world unknowable, and perhaps, an illusion?

Not an illusion. It’s really there.

Arguably, more real than you or me, because it can end our being, while we can only affect it to a very minor extent.

The rest of your question depends on how you define “knowable.”

ICXC NIKA.

 

[Mystical_Seeker]

So if these senses are all just individual processes of our brain, wouldn’t make make a material world unknowable, and perhaps, an illusion?

Our representation of it is an illusion. As far as “unknowable” I agree with the other that it needs some definition.

For example, some argue about whether we even exist in a material way, but as a practical matter it’s convenient to accept certain things like that as a “given” unless the whole point is to have a philosophical discussion. Are we really “of matter” or are we just “information” that happens to be borrowing a set of particles that is doing what we’re doing now.

Another thing I accept is that other “consciousness units” that I seem to empathize with because I sense that I am one of them, have their own senses and perception and interpretation. That said, there seem to be things we can agree upon, and exploit our common “thinking ability” using our tools of abstract symbolic communication such as language, and pretty soon we have a high degree of agreement that there is a table here, a chair there, and a door over yonder.

But could we all be just imagining this world as in the Matrix? Technically, it is possible for us to experience all we’re experiencing and it’s all just a simulation. And although I place that chance as so remote as to not be worth considering, in a more useful way there is a “phony world” that we construct in our minds, that seems to overlay drama and judgment, on top of fact.

 

[GEddie]

Our representation of it is an illusion. As far as “unknowable” I agree with the other that it needs some definition.

For example, some argue about whether we even exist in a material way, but as a practical matter it’s convenient to accept certain things like that as a “given” unless the whole point is to have a philosophical discussion. Are we really “of matter” or are we just “information” that happens to be borrowing a set of particles that is doing what we’re doing now.

Another thing I accept is that other “consciousness units” that I seem to empathize with because I sense that I am one of them, have their own senses and perception and interpretation. That said, there seem to be things we can agree upon, and exploit our common “thinking ability” using our tools of abstract symbolic communication such as language, and pretty soon we have a high degree of agreement that there is a table here, a chair there, and a door over yonder.

But could we all be just imagining this world as in the Matrix? Technically, it is possible for us to experience all we’re experiencing and it’s all just a simulation. And although I place that chance as so remote as to not be worth considering, in a more useful way there is a “phony world” that we construct in our minds, that seems to overlay drama and judgment, on top of fact.

Phony world seems a wee-bit pejorative; it is more like a working model, vastly oversimplified, as it must be to form in useful time, but sufficient to enable us to live life.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[Mystical_Seeker]

Phony world seems a wee-bit pejorative; it is more like a working model, vastly oversimplified, as it must be to form in useful time, but sufficient to enable us to live life.

ICXC NIKA.

Yes, I believe in working models. Partly because I’m an engineer and not a scientist, I do not by profession “seek truth” as much as use working models of what we do seem to have figured out, so that I may exploit those models to make stuff do things.

But I don’t know about the term “pejorative” about the idea that our entire world may not be anything like what our collective models have made them to be. To me, that’s more like “being unassuming.” I have an idea what’s “going on out there,” and I have come to reasonable terms about my interaction with that world, but what is it exactly? That’s as much for philosophers as much as scientists and theologians IMO.

Ever since Newtonian physics, we’ll think we have a model that not only works for what we want to use it for, but is in fact the “TRVTH” about things. Then we find out by Einstein that oops it’s more complicated than that. So we think if we could grasp Einstein’s model we’d be ok but oops there we go again with quantum physics. It seems “reality” is always – and unavoidably – beyond our ability to gaze at it.

 

[GEddie]

Yes, I believe in working models. Partly because I’m an engineer and not a scientist, I do not by profession “seek truth” as much as use working models of what we do seem to have figured out, so that I may exploit those models to make stuff do things.

But I don’t know about the term “pejorative” about the idea that our entire world may not be anything like what our collective models have made them to be. To me, that’s more like “being unassuming.” I have an idea what’s “going on out there,” and I have come to reasonable terms about my interaction with that world, but what is it exactly? That’s as much for philosophers as much as scientists and theologians IMO.

Ever since Newtonian physics, we’ll think we have a model that not only works for what we want to use it for, but is in fact the “TRVTH” about things. Then we find out by Einstein that oops it’s more complicated than that. So we think if we could grasp Einstein’s model we’d be ok but oops there we go again with quantum physics. It seems “reality” is always – and unavoidably – beyond our ability to gaze at it.

True, but phony world implies that we **can know nothing; **while our knowing is simply limited by the painfully short lease we have on our heads.

Newtonian mechanics work just fine for heavy, lunky, slow-moving objects like our bodies. It wasn’t until technology got five or ten steps further that something better was needed or suggested. And that point required more than ten generations to get to.

Philosophy can lead to error as much as to truth, because there is no way to “check.” Nietzsche and Plato were both philosophers.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[FrDavid96]

Yes. Before the last day.

Of course, I don’t “know” the answer (only someone in heaven truly knows it) but here are some thoughts;

In heaven, we will see God “face-to-face” (even that is an inadequate way of phrasing it because we don’t have the vocabulary). When we can see God, we won’t care about looking at anything else.

In heaven, we will have perfect knowledge. So we won’t actually need our eyes to act as sensors as they do on earth. We’ll know what something is, and how it looks, without the need to actually look at it. Much the same way that if I wake up in the middle of the night, without turning on the lights, I already know the color of my blanket—I don’t need to turn on the light to “see” that it’s blue.