like as a physical property. i don’t know any color-ology maybe there’s a simple way to make me get it but
IT SEEMS like color depends entirely on BRIGHTNESS so an OBJECT can’t have a fixed COLOR because BRIGHTNESS changes all the time!
Yes color is very very real and very very important. No offense to some of the people here but there is a lot of misinformation. For some reason this is like one of my nerdy knowledge centers cause its right at the intersection of chemistry, photography, indoor lighting, and linguistics. None of those I am an expert on but I am pretty knowledgeable about all of those topics. The color you perceive is absolute, and is essentially the inverse of the absorption spectra of a material. Your eyeballs then perceive the light in terms of general brightness (rods) and the brightness of three different wavelengths of light. A graph that illustrates this is attached here. Each type of photosensor best perceives a different part of the visible spectrum. The three “colors” you perceive are roughly red, green, and blue. It can become hard to discern colors (but the actual color is physically unchanging) for two general reasons:
Firstly, poor lighting that isn’t providing all of the available wavelengths. I will use a scale where each wavelength of light gets a brightness/intensity from 1 to 10. Remember that color is the subtraction of absorbed wavelengths, so the wavelengths have to be present in the first place. The object in this scenario absorbs 3/10 red, 9/10 green, and 1/10 blue. This object should appear mostly purple to us if we start with light that produces 10/10 red, green and blue light. The resulting reflected light from the object would be (this is a simplification and isn’t entirely accurate) 7/10 red, 1/10 green, and 9/10 blue. However if our light source has ratings of 7/10 red, 5/10 green, and 1/10 blue (the light itself would appear yellowish) the light that reflects off the object into our eyes would reflect the light 4/10 red, 1/10 green, 0/10 blue which would appear red. Our object, due to the lighting conditions has changed from a bright purple color to a dark red color just due to the wavelengths emitted by the light source that we are using to illuminate our object. This is also why paint can look radically different inside when compared to outside. The sun is the highest quality light source that most people are used to, and emits nearly evenly across the visible spectra . This is likely why we and many other creatures evolved to see in the visible wavelength.
The second reason is more complex but is easier to explain now that the prior groundwork has been laid. Our photo-receptors absorb on a spectrum, so when in dim lighting conditions it becomes more and more difficult to tell different colors apart.
For more than the raw physical reasons color is really interesting on a linguistic level. @Awoo mentioned this but I believe her interpretation is rather incorrect. While there are difficulties in determining intercatagorical differences in all of the subjects, the demonstration does not determine an incapactity to discern color, only a difficulty. Instead it is that you learn to quickly categorize colors into categories as designated by your language and not that the color categories themselves determine your capacity to perceive those colors. We are much better at things we are required to do on a day to day basis than things that we rarely do. A useful counterexample is that russian has two words for “blue”, голубой (light blue) and синий (dark blue). You as an English speaker can perceive the two different colors but as it not common requirement to conduct conversation a native english speaker to will take longer perceive the difference between dark blue and light blue when compared to a native russian speaker. I can provide further details and evidence towards this fact if requested but this viewpoint is (hopefully) fairly representative of the linguistic community’s consensus.
If I can clear something up please ask.
Why do you think my interpretation is incorrect?
The mechanical measurement of inputs that produce colour is absolute. I agree with that. But the INTERPRETATION is what we call colour, not the mechanical inputs.
If you take those mechanical inputs and arrange the interpretation of those inputs around a different system, the output is fundamentally different. We can see this factually in the video. It isn’t just a matter of them being “better” at it, their brains have developed around a completely different system and are interpreting the inputs in a completely different way. They are literally seeing differently.
I disagree that it’s just practice at seeing slightly different shades. They don’t see them as slightly different shades, they see them as glaringly different colours like we see the ones that they can’t see as glaringly different colours.
For my part, i know nothing about science but I always thought color and Colours are pretty fucked up, so be suspicious and on the look out
I know David Hume wrote about this and I think he thought it was a secondary property, meaning it wasn’t simply intrinsic to the object but was produced in the mind of the observer.
But I’m guessing there’s been a few hundred years of scientific/philosophical advancement since then…
A lot of people in this thread are focusing on interpretation of colour as if it is an inherently concrete biological thing that is always the same for every single person and can not possibly be different except in the case of the various colourblind disorders where people’s receptors receive things differently. But that’s not true.
Colour is not just a product of light but also linguistics. The language we use to interpret colour actually affects the physical ability for us to see it. There are tribes that have different colour systems to us, and they can see colours that we physically can not see not because their eyes function biologically differently but because the language systems they use result in their brains interpreting the information in a completely different way to us.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1
So to answer the question: Is colour real? That really depends on what language system you are applying to interpret it. Theoretically we could create a language without a colour system at all.
I don’t think they see differently, they just don’t differentiate pink and red, or maybe they do differentiate dark blue and light blue, like russians and italians
Did you watch it? Including the tests? They physically can’t see differences between very obvious colours to us, and we can’t see differences between extremely obvious colours to them. There’s a lot more going on with colour than just a mechanical process from eyeball to picture.
whoa I didn’t see that
This makes no damn sense.
First, when they show you the green squares full screen, the colors are way, way closer than they are when you see it on the TV monitor.
Second, like
There are tons of colors that fall into the same word category for me. I don’t know fancy schmancy color words hardly at all. But I can tell the difference between 100 different blues if I’m asked to point it out.
I know people call green and blue the same color in a lot of languages, such as Japanese. But these people were literally racking their brains over which box was a different color. If it was linguistic you’d expect them to say “oh they’re all BLEEN, but this one is a different shade of BLEEN”
but they can’t even see it. And the color is way further off compared to the slightly different greens. Like objectively, a farther shade, with bigger differences in the light wavelengths.
There has to be some environmental stimulus causing colors to appear different as people grow up, or something. Like neurological training.
Either that, or there’s a language barrier and they have a different philosophical concept of color, and they aren’t asking the right question.
