At risk of sounding arrogant, pretentious and everything else, I feel compelled to add that the formulation of scientific inquiry largely began with religiously minded people like Newton and Ibn al-Haytham. Not too many people are familiar with al-Haytham, one of many great muslim scholars who helped found the scientific enterprise and who assisted in the formulation of many of its formal guidelines. al-Haytham was also the first person to draw an accurate diagram of the human optical system. For al-Haytham, Newton and many others of their time science was explicitly for the express purpose of studying the "works of God" and admitted of no possible means of studying God.

However, in modern times people are of the indefensible belief that God is an object of some sort that can be collectively studied in a laboratory. It is not just reductionist-materialist types that think of God as a finite object, but most Christians do too! That is why there is such an apparently conflict, because Christianity has descended from enlightenment into idol worship. Idols which are objects capable of being scientifically refuted, and so science and religion appear to be at odds, but it never used to be this way. It is only because "God" has fallen from heaven and become a Man that there is any conflict at all. In 'his' infinite formlessness there is nothing to study or compare God to, but in the God-as-Man formula commonly worshipped today, all of that is possible, and God is frequently compared to human beings with all kinds of contradictions and conceptual problems. This is not what St. Anselm imagined when he said "God is that than which nothing greater can be thought" which is called today "The Ontological Argument". While the argument still stands as a great proof of God as infinite formless being, it is so often used in an attempt to prove the God-man idol of modern Christianity and that is just absurd. If a man is the greatest thought these people can have it says a lot about our current society.

So, this God I mention is no more than everything in existence, and everything that is in existence is no less than God. The Egyptian Great Hymn to the Aten by Amenhotep IV (c 1440 B.C.) says it this way: Thou bringest forth as thou desirest
To maintain the people (of Egypt)
According as thou madest them for thyself,
The lord of all of them, wearying (himself) with them,

It would be a bit better if the last line had read "The lord of all of them, wearing himself with them". It would be put by Shakespeare this way: "All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts."

For the Bible's part it spends a long time getting to this realization because the average human mind just can't comprehend it and "moves within a sphere of worldly interests" [to quote Buddha]. The Bible tries to represent the "sphere of worldly interests" by the flesh or sinful nature.

So, not to be too critical, I think its entirely possible that it is actually the other way around, that religious people actually have some extremely profound insight into reality that scientists can never find in a microscope. They aren't looking inward to find the source, they are looking outward and there is reason that doesn't work for finding God, the reason is our minds rend the whole of God into discrete parts and then we look at those parts and try to determine something from the parts. We don't see the whole which is God.

So the Bible says "There is but one God and no other beside him" and from this God is said to be omnipresent. Now, if God is omnipresent and if there is no other beside him, then neither you nor I are apart from or beside God, but must necessarily be God in some aspect, and that is to say that we are actually just aspects of God, or personas, images, reflections, appearances, dust in the wind, here to play a part in God's plan. Which plan somewhat amounts to "life" or "existence" or "actuality". So it is as if God created us so as to experience himself through us. Because were God not differentiated into the finite form of a human being with a fragmented relativistic consciousness, he could never actually become aware of himself, as I said; the totality is relative to finitiude, it is through the bounded-thingness of the world that the totality, and thereupon God becomes known to us. But only through understanding our relativistic consicous life. Otherwise we are apt to find the most value in some particular finite thing, like a car, a job or a spouse. So they say, we are made for God and our highest duty is to direct our awe and appreciation toward God, but because we cannot know God without first knowing finite things, we tend to direct our awe and appreciation towards those things and consequently ignore God. This is quite literally the old teachings of religion, within which the claim "God cannot be scientifically proven" is both 100% true and completely false if its intended to refute God. Because in this way God transcends all scientific inquiry.

@Petra

I would like to point out that "scientific vs. common usage" is a potentially fallacious dichotomy. I think theory is used in much the same way, colloquial theories are tentatively based in evidence and are subject to such revision. But scientific theories tend to be more rigidly held.

I would like to outline a definition of God which cannot be refuted and therefor must be true and neither can it be verified by observation or scientific inquiry. That definition is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Rather than postulate all kinds of lesser 'things' that might be transcended by an elusive God-concept, I'd sooner point to the moment of undifferentiation in our conscious processing. Every thing we can conceive of has a boundary, is bounded if not in space and time, then at least in quality. Every quality we conceive of, in-fact, everything we can possibly imagine is bounded as such. I cannot generate a thought that is not defined and therefor differentiated from the totality. Even the concept of totality is a mere reflection of the concept of finitude, and I could not conceive of a totality without also conceiving of its parts. So the God I wish to point to, is not a concept, nor a percept, but actually transcends all concepts and percepts and all finitude. Such a God is not this and not that, nor is it anything else you can think of. And this is solely based in recognition of the relativistic nature of thought, we cannot conceive of such a being, not even the brightest or wisest among us. All thought and verbal expression is relative, all scientific inquiry is relative, all physical matter is relative, God is the one absolute.

So such a God - to recognize it - requires you to do some meditative work and figure out what lies beyond relative thought and conception. Any exertion of effort in this regard is like a descent into relativity, so the masters direct us to let go of our concepts and percepts, because no formulation thereof can bring us toward God. It is rather in the dissillusionment of concepts and percepts the unbroken ground of all being becomes noticable. But only as through a glass-darkly, because all subsequent conceptualization reduces the infinitude of God to the finititude of verbal and conceptual expression and thought.

With this in mind, it is quite possible that evolution is also true as there is no real conflict between an infinite God of this sort and physical phenomena, the physical phenomena belongs to the realm of relativity, of conceptual thought, and so must remain internally consistent. There must be a constant chain of causes and effects stretching back and forth indefinitely and with cold logical rigidity. This is a requirement of the conscious mind dwelling in relativity, but it is not the nature of reality. Reality itself is non-dual, absolute and neither this thing or that. And when we conceive of God as the absolute, unbroken ground of all being, we must be referring to this undifferentiated totality which cannot be expressed with the use of finite concepts and language.

Such a God is not theoretical, but is undeniable, and equates to that which is draw to mind in reflecting on reality as a whole without "breaking it down".

@Jessss

You are right, my mistake, color-blindness is a recessive allele on the X chromosome

By the way, though it looks complicated there are simplified rules for articifial neural networking. They may not be exactly as the brain is, but they are close enough to create some of the same results. For example for Optical Character Recognition. To be able to read characters from print or cursive and digitalize them. The simple way to conceive of neural networks is to work in binary. Each nerve cell has a threshold value which when exceeded causes depolarization of the cell-body. Na+ and K+ ions move around to cause what is called an action potential (note the name of my blog is re-action potential). An action potential is a wave of electrochemical energy that surges down the cells axon with the depolarization. Afterword, the cell-membrane drops below the resting potential by a slight dose and this is called the "under-shoot". The cell then returns to resting potential until another wave of energy causes it to reach it's threshold again. While there are all kinds of neuroplastic adaptations happening at every point of this process, we can think in relatively simple terms and only consider for the moment that the cell does not emit any output unless the input exceeds the threshold value and in that sense, the whole system is digital and can be represented on a binary truth table.

If I create one cell that has a threshold value of 5 millivolts and a dendritic weight - this is the multiplication of the input voltage that occurs on the incoming dendrite - of 1.5 and an input charge of 4mv the cell would fire because the input charge of 4mv multiplied by the dendritic weight 1.5 would exceed the threshold value of 5mv by 3mv. The additional 3mv would not count for anything, we are only looking for "fired or did not fire".

So the representational structure works in a way because not everything is going to produce the input voltage necessary to trip that nerve cell, though they may trip other nerve cells that have different connections, weights and thresholds.. And all this representational data is then integrated in a process that forms the whole field of phenomenal awareness.

But none of this can explain consciousness qua consciousness. That is trickier.

@Mitch

Depends on what you are trying to understand. The information needed to understand consciousness is already within your consciousness. However, because we do not have the skills necessary to draw any conclusions from this, we often need to look outwardly.

What the representational structure of the human brain can tell us is how our concepts and percepts are formed on the backdrop of the omnitudo realitatis. The wording Kant used to refer to "Everything that exists". What was true for the color-oppenency process - mainly that colors are created in tandem and by contrast to each other, and are part of a larger color continuum. In-fact, the light meets our eyes as an unbroken continuity and the three cone types in our retinas split the continuum into three distinct colors. They are distinct but not in and of themselves, they are distinct as they relate to each other which is what the color-oppenency process indicates.

So it is with all conscious things or objects, they are relative to all that they are not, this "all that they are not" is the "backdrop of the omnitudo realitatis" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It can also be gleaned from Aristotle's formal rules of logic, mainly the law of identity in conjunction with the law of non-contradiction which can be mathematically represented as A=A. A bit of formal logic which the famous mathematician Leibniz argued should be a criminal offense to deny.

So all this is described in A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Mind by Gerald Edelman. The representational neuroscience only tells how the content of consciousness is formed by relativity or "opponency" creating the dualistic perception we have, where everything is either this way or that, up or down, left or right, etc...

Really, in the absence of this kind of insight, we are frequently idiotic and small-minded. Though we'd never know it because we just assume the content of our minds are direct reflections of reality and not dualistic-relativistic constructs.

I should say it goes a lot farther, after woman has made man a slave to her sex, she begins using her power to control and manipulate him further into submission. To the point where he has to ask her for permission for anything he does and is stuck marvelling at her beauty, begging, and in-fact praying to her, to let him into her heaven. It's enough to make one want to puke when that is really whats going on. But I believe there are some women who are above all that too.

That's pretty sexist eh, like it is degrading to men to portray us this way. I could almost care no less about sex. Yea, it feels good for a time, but this is nothing like a noetic realization or the orgiastic state induced by thought contacting reality. So the old theosophical story goes; Sex, and everything else man enjoys or hates, are mere utilities directing his conscious mind toward his true destiny; God. The completion of his consciousness! But men frequently get hung up on the sirens, who want little more than to be the object of man's awe and devotion, that very awe and devotion which is rightfully owing to God. Women swoops in to snatch it for herself. It has some pragmatic application to say the least, but that is the old Gnostic sort-of theosophy. At least I can say from some experience that knowledge is more satisfying than sex.

Yet, last I checked 'normativity' a word in use by philosophers for centuries, still isn't.

So here is a great article from "Scholarpedia: The Peer-Reviewed Open Access Encyclopedia" this article on color-vision including the opponency process is written by Karen K. DeValois and Michael A. Webster.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Color_vision

A very common kind of color-based illusion. If you find something wrong with this one, there are thousands more.

For a complete explanation pick up one of these books (they all explain it): The Engine of Reason The Seat of the Soul by Paul Churchland, Brain-Wise by Pat Churchland, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul by Francis Crick, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach by Christoph Koch.

There is also a video called The Neuroscience of Nothing which explains contrast luminosity, but the simplest way of explaining any of this kind of thing is to point to the completely relative nature of everything that the human mind produces. Color is not a concrete empiric quality, but is a relative continuum generated by your mind. Just like... your idea of your self and your idea of an actually existing objective world.

Interesting. Though I think the theory behind imprinting is cultural and culture bleeds together. I don't think blue is a distinctively male color because my parents bought me blue pajamas and a blue blankie, but because the entire culture associates blue with boys and pink with girls.

On another note, women cannot be color-blind and men cannot have super-color vision like some women. Whereas men will be color blind because they lack a third cone responding to the red range, women can have a fourth cone that bisects the red range and gives a richer spectrum of colors. Then there is achromatopsia which is the inability to see color and a really bad name for a baby girl.

Perhaps some of the difference is in the color-opponency cells in the occipital cortex and perhaps the associating of different colors. A part of me suspects women are trained by the culture to recognize a greater range of color names and men are basically not expected to. Wine-tasters also have a wider range of names for flavors, using terms like "earthy" that non-wine-tasters by and large don't use. I doubt the wide range of color names employed by women are innate. But like the wine-tasters, they learn to discriminate.

Even given all that, which is done to be fair, I think there might actually be some innate predilection, but devising a conclusive experiment for that is problematic.

Would it matter if I looked it up? I'm not trying to be smart, I'm trying to answer the question for senor's sake.

As a first step, the project succeeded in simulating a rat cortical column. This neuronal network, the size of a pinhead, recurs repeatedly in the cortex. A rat’s brain has about 100,000 columns of in the order of 10,000 neurons each. In humans, the numbers are dizzying—a human cortex may have as many as two million columns, each having in the order of 100,000 neurons each http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/cms/lang/en/pid/56882

But I guess this one has some meaty bits and Blue Brain is all simulated on supercomputers.

Blue Brain is the big one.