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!
We only perceive color the way we do because our eyes have evolved to pick up certain wavelengths
Color is not a constant even amongst humans, even excluding cultural and linguistic differences, you got various forms of color-blindness
It's just one of those things where thinking about it starts to be really trippy after a while
okay so wavelengths are a thing... but are they consistent & measurable?
i.e. is a red bucket always emitting the same flavor wave? what kind of wave is brighter than others (or is it the number)
Yea I believe there's a general band of frequencies that generally is described as red or whatever other color, as generally perceived by the human. (Bc ofc some of it can be cultural or subjective or even change depending on color blindness or other conditions)
You can find charts describing the ranges, eventually the visual range gives way to ultraviolet and so on.
There are ranges that we aren't able to perceive but birds are.
If only we could see microwaves, we'd finally be able to catch the culprit behind Havanna syndrome
im sure this is a joke but ofc we have tools that CAN see microwaves. Oddly enough we can't find these dang havana microwaves though
So, if you're going from a pure "this is what we've measured" science standpoint, the visible spectrum begins past infrared where the wavelengths are too long for us to pick up
As they tighten up, we get the standard ROY G BIV stuff you probably got taught until they tighten up so much we can't pick them up either, ending with ultraviolet
Everything there has a set of wavelengths that we pick up and perceive as those colors, it's the human visual spectrum
But that's only because our eyes evolved to pick those up
Other living things perceive that exact same spectrum wildly differently because their eyes evolved differently for them
It's one of those things that I love because it keeps me up at night
Yes. Lots of chemistry uses the fact that color frequencies are specific wavelengths of light. Measuring wavelength and intensity of light passing through a sample can tell you exact concentrations of your colored chemicals in samples.
it's the wavelength of the photons that bounce off the surface of a thing, after some wavelengths have been absorbed. so like, green things aren't 'green', the stuff they are made of reflects green. so no, 'colour' is not a physical property, but an emergent one on how light and matter interact which is dependant on a lot of things like brightness and the medium the light travels through and all sorts. and even then, the actual colour spectrum you and I see is entirely constructed by our brains and specifically how the human brain compiles that sensory information as something you and I understand
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-humans-can-see-infrared-light-02313.html
This :crab-party: got not only like human eyes 3-4 different receptors in their eyes to then get what colours are, but 12!
Of those 4 are in the UV spectrum, so they can see stuff that is invisible to us.
Basically the small part of physical reception in the eye is simplified that we got some "hills" in our eyes (typically named cones), in which there is a chamber that contains a molecule which can react when a photon gets absorbed by some active part of it. This leads over some steps to electrical signals via Neurons and via optical nerve to the brain and such.
After one of those molecules is activated (it is basically like a bucket of water over a door that falls when the door is opened - or the photon gets absorbed) the molecule needs some help and some time to get back into its previous state.
We got a high count of those receptors in our eyes in different places. This is part of what enables us to see intensity of light. The receptors differ in as much as they can absorb photons of different wavelengths.
There are also Rod cells which work to the same principle in general, but many of those are behind each other and give their signal combined into one way before it is passed on, this enables more colorless seeing with low light outside (e.g. in the night where you can't really see colours).
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.
It's genuinely mindblowing shit.
Linguistics and language are seriously fucking powerful and I suspect they govern a lot more. Colour is just an interpretation of inputs, those inputs can be interpreted WILDLY different though depending on the computer you're interpreting them with.
It definitely throws the concept of colour into the philosophical realm in my opinion. A foundational cornerstone of how they see and interpret the world is fundamentally different. To me it makes me wonder what other possibilities there are if you changed other cornerstones. What else is just an interpretation of inputs? Smell? Taste? Hearing?
Presumably you could change the interpretation of the other senses via changing the base language interpretations of them. What if instead of high to low on the sound spectrum we instead had mixes of highs and lows together with some other spectrum being the basis of it? Would it produce the same result?
We probably can't answer that question because we can't actually run ethical experiments on the topic but it's pretty crazy.
Absolutely mind blowing.
The video makes me wonder if it's like, some environmental factor that independently affects the color perception and also the need for more color words.
Maybe when you look at certain colors a lot growing up, or care about certain colors, it'll stretch those wavelengths out in your mental color wheel, or something, and compress others.
Theoretically we could create a language without a colour system at all.
esperanto 2 when
The problem with that question is that "color" is multiple distinct things, some of which are physical or have discrete properties and others of which are entirely subjective or cultural. Like the actual color of an object, as in how it absorbs, refracts, and reflects light is a physical property of its surface and material. The color of light is a physical property of its wavelength, which can be altered by the medium it's passing through. Your personal perception of color is internal and subjective. The concept of general blocks of color with names is entirely cultural.
No, colour isn't real beyond perception. Like it's no more real than "beauty", in that they're both based on actual measurable properties but the terms aren't descriptions of those properties but rather a description of the sensation of witnessing them.
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...
colour = frequency/wavelength, brightness = intensity completely different peoperties of a certain wave
Tangentially related, PBR does a fantastic job of modeling how color actually works with light and brightness in the real world. The core rule is that you have to have conservation of energy, so a surface reflecting light can never appear brighter than the light it's reflecting.
my eyes are a pretty unique color but a side effect is i cannot perceive most 'mixed' colors like at all
is that dark red or is it dark gray or brown? i will never know
plus side is i can see even in the darkest of rooms and nights. i once got lost in a forest as a kid with a bunch of other kids and they didnt have flashlights but i totally saved our asses cause i could see perfectly :gigachad: one almost stepped on a snake and i grabbed him lol
big downside is that i feel the need to wear sunglasses all the time cause the light burns us
i sometimes feel the need to wear them indoors lmao, those bright office lights got me all :squirtle-jam:
side effect of wearing sunglasses indoors and being clumsy af: one time a girl thought i was a blind person
“Colour” is britbong bourgeoisie decadence colorblind leftists like me are the only ones with a chance of being free thinkers and the “one true leftist” :markkks-juggalo:
If more people read Lenin’s “On Color” we would be free of the shackles of labeling subjective impressions of reflecting light
It isn't a physical property because color is what humans perceive given a scene. For instance, shadows are dark blue. So grass under a shadow is dark blue. But when you look into the shadows, you eyes adjust and change color, making it no longer dark blue. The exact lighting situation will change the perceived color.
Your eyes recalibrate your color perception for darkness faster than your actual vision can adjust. So if you look into a dark pit on a bright day and quickly look around before your eyes adjust, colors will be out of whack for a second. It may take a few tries to learn how to do it right.
Another oddity, the sun peaks at green. That is, the brightest wavelength the sun gives out would look green if it was separated out. Yet the sun looks yellow. And the light it gives out is pure absolute neutral white.
Another thing that is weird. On a foggy day, put on yellow sunglasses or look through a yellow filter. The fog reduces by a lot. This is because fog would look light blue when put next to a clear sky. But you can't see a clear sky to compare when it's foggy so you don't notice this. The yellow filters out the blue and makes other colors easier to see.
Color perception is incredibly complicated. You can literally do it as your job for decades and still learn more about it every day.
I took biopsychology in college almost two decades ago but I remember reading and learning about all sorts of fascinating stuff about perception and color.
The electromagnetic field is a thing that exists everywhere and can be disturbed, creating waves (photons) that travel throughout space. Think of how you can disturb a perfectly still body of water to send waves to whatever direction. Waves are simply a way to transfer energy through a body (mechanical waves) or through space (electromagnetic waves). The light from the sun, for example, is just energy released through photons as a byproduct of nuclear fusion that occurs in its core. Photons always move at the speed of light, but you can have a source of photons release them in a difference frequencies. Radio waves, visible light, your wi-fi connection, the x-rays you take when you visit the doctor, are all electromagnetic waves being released in different frequencies.
Therefore, light waves are just disturbances in the EM field, and "Sight" is basically the mechanism that life on earth obtained, through evolution, to be able to perceive and detect these disturbances. We can't, however, detect the whole spectrum of EM frequencies, just a small part of it. All colors are simply light waves of different frequencies, humans can perceive them from violet to red, and nothing else. We like to call "infra-red" and "ultra-violet" waves as invisible light because our eyes can't detect them. Some animals, however, can. Ever heard of the mantis shrimp, which are said to be able to "see" way more colors than us? Their eyes are simply able to perceive a wider range of EM wave frequencies.
Does COLOR exist? It's a human concept invented to give name to the different feeling we get when one of our senses is stimulated by a wide array of different light wave frequencies. Does SOUND exist? It's also a form of wave, just a mechanical one. Energy can be transferred through air in the form of waves, the air vibrates which makes our cochlea also vibrate inside our ears. The different pitchness of sound is the way we can sense different frequencies of sound waves. All of these things "exist" in the sense that they're ways our brain interprets the signals sent by other organs responsible for our senses. They're just how we managed to find a way to sense the world around us.
the sound comparison is really good, for some reason it's less confusing to think about even though its passing through the same hoops of perception
