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No tomatoes.

I keep getting drawn back to the weirdness of this joke, or at least something tangential to it. If something is invisible then it therefore has no colour, yet if we imagine an invisible tomato, we're perfectly happy to consider it to be both invisible and red. The two conflicting pieces of information don't give rise to any kind of cognitive dissonance.

Weird, huh?

I've a few ideas of why this might be, but wanted to hear what others thought about it first.

It's interesting that you would use the color RED in this point in that simple polarization techniques makes a Red something, translucent. It's a classic bit of magic from the early 70s

Mr_Grue wrote:No tomatoes.

I keep getting drawn back to the weirdness of this joke, or at least something tangential to it. If something is invisible then it therefore has no colour, yet if we imagine an invisible tomato, we're perfectly happy to consider it to be both invisible and red. The two conflicting pieces of information don't give rise to any kind of cognitive dissonance.

Weird, huh?

I've a few ideas of why this might be, but wanted to hear what others thought about it first.

Naked Mentalism to the rescue again! Let's see if I can do this without sneezing all over the keyboard.

The strength of connection between related concepts in your mind is called the forward strength, or FSG for short. The ten strongest FSGs for tomato are as follows:

0.195 - RED
0.062 - FRUIT
0.062 - POTATO
0.062 - SAUCE
0.056 - LETTUCE
0.046 - SALAD
0.031 - JUICE
0.031 - KETCHUP
0.026 - SOUP

On seeing or hearing the word "tomato", you access what you know about tomatoes in a process called priming. This is an automatic process and quite beyond your conscious control. Don't imagine a green fox. You had to imagine it and then dismiss it, didn't you. This is because your mind works in positives, not negatives. It had to imagine a green fox and then imagine a lack of green foxes.

The FSG data above shows that the concept of red is over three times more strongly linked to the concept of a tomato than any other, and so is accessed first and most strongly. Even if a tomato could be made invisible in a machine, the strength of this FSG would still mean we could accept the tomato as being in some way red even if we couldn't currently see it. There's no FSG on record between "tomato" and "invisible". It's something you have to actively imagine and evaluate for truth, regardless of the underlying colour the tomato's state of invisibility doesn't currently allow you to see.

However, look again at the exact wording of your joke. The punchline is "no tomatoes". The tomatoes are never invisible. The joke revolves around mistaking the space left by the absence of the subject of the joke for the presence of something invisible. There's no cognitive dissonance involved because the joke resolves itself without paradox.

They say dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog. No one laughs and the frog dies. I agree, but then again, my dog's got no nose from chasing bacon slicers.

Tomo wrote:Naked Mentalism to the rescue again!

I really need to buy that book, even if it's for the geeky language stuff like that...

Tomo wrote:Even if a tomato could be made invisible in a machine, the strength of this FSG would still mean we could accept the tomato as being in some way red even if we couldn't currently see it.

This sort of touches on my take on it, that our understanding of invisibility, at least in this context, is that it's not the tomato's natural state, that it has been rendered invisible, and that invisibility is a transient state, or at least a state that has been added to the ordinarily red tomato.

I'm now going to devise a load of threads to pump you for FSG lists.

Although I've only understood the joke on this thread, I've found it quite interesting!

That is a classic. I like red jokes. Here's another....

Q: What's big and red and if it hits you in the eye it will kill you?



A: A fire engine!

Oh dear!

What goes black, white, red, black, white, red, black, white, red?
A sunburnt penguin rolling down a hill

Why, what else was you thinking of?

Gary Dickson wrote:That is a classic. I like red jokes...

What's red and fluffy?


Red fluff.

(Well, you did ask for it!)

This one is equally as poor (and vaguely red if you think about it!)


What's got two legs and bleeds a lot?




Half a dog!

Back on topic...

That post by Tomo regarding FSG is fascinating stuff and far too clever for the likes of me. But fascinating, nonetheless. I feel like I've just had a free taster of Naked Mentalism. A little Naked scratch and sniff (matron!), if you will.

Replicant wrote:Back on topic...

That post by Tomo regarding FSG is fascinating stuff and far too clever for the likes of me. But fascinating, nonetheless. I feel like I've just had a free taster of Naked Mentalism. A little Naked scratch and sniff (matron!), if you will.

I dare Tomo to write that on the back of edition 2.

What's pink and hard?

A pig with a flick knife

What can you hold in your hand, is pink, and has a red tip?

A match...

What's black white and crying? A nun who fell down the stairs...
























What's black white and laughing?




















The nun that pushed her