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et us build a
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or catch a ball. These
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there are elements
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hilosophers) refer to
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Felix Cohen runs the Manhattans Project, an occasional cocktail residency in and around
east London. He's been bartending for over a decade, and also makes websites when he's not
making drinks (and has rent to pay!). He likes whiskey most of all.
>>
Wine tasting is fascinating to watch; people
taste various different wines and wax
lyrical about all the flavours they perceive;
something is vanilla-y, has notes of stone
fruits, finishes with a note of leather, and
so on. But only expert wine tasters tend to
say: this tastes like Beaujolais. When
people taste wine, they pull it apart
into other flavours they already know,
and it takes an expert to look at that
‘constellation’ of other flavours and
reassemble it into an identifiable wine.
It’s the same when we talk about food;
‘it tastes like chicken’ is a tired trope, but
only because we need to say it all the
time. Everything tastes like something else,
but we don’t tend to talk about taste in
terms of what psychologists call primitives.
Instead, we cast about for likenesses.
When we see, we don’t do that. Instead,
we have a ‘gestalt’ view. Our brain
identifies things like cubes, spheres, flat
surfaces or the path of a moving object –
basic functions that let us build a
comprehensible scene in our heads that
lets us sit on a chair or catch a ball. These
primitives tend to be things we can talk to
each other about, but there are elements
of our senses that we find impossible to
talk about, like the concept of red.
Psychologists (and philosophers) refer to
these as qualia: the completely subjective
impressions of a colour you see, a texture
you touch or a flavour. There is no way
to know if your perception of red feels the
same as somebody else’s.
“
there are
elements of our
senses that we
find impossible
to talk about, like
the concept of
RED