Color perception

I've wondered this myself, actually (my father and brother are color blind, so I guess I've had reason to reflect on such things).

"Colors" are finitely knowable as a specific wave length in the visible spectrum. What they are called is immaterial, so long as those who see them share a consensus which prevents people from running red lights and eating green hamburger . . .

Yep. 450 nm is 450 nm. People do have different aesthetic reactions to different color palates (pallets?), but dunno if that's to do with brain wiring or acculturation...

Could be acculturation, there, doggies . . . many academics in the Useless, But Highly Paid Speculations industry have opined that the ancient Greeks could not see the color blue. They say this because Homer constantly speaks of "the wine dark sea," the implication being that they could only see a similarity of depth of color, but could not see blue (hmmmm, the sea usually looks grey-green to me, but, then i'm a Paddy, what do i know)--pretty damned flimsy, but, of course, them boys an girls don't have to meet methodological standards or pass peer review when they come up with something like that . . .

My god, man, you know what the odds of an entire culture connected to much of the world via trade and warfare being color blind to blue would be? Crikey.

Anyway, wasn't this Homer cat blind? Might that have had something to do with it?

Or perhaps it's friggin' poetry?





Please don't tell me stuff like this, setanta. I've got a very short fuse, y'know.

Oh, have i got a book for you . . . put all sharp objects out of reach, then settle in with The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind by Julian Jaynes . . . one of the true giants of the Useless Speculations industry . . .

hugefan

I used to lose tons of sleep on that very question as a kid. The exact same question.

As I grew up I realized it has many other philosophical implications.

I don't know of any way to "prove" that any two people experience exactly the same mental perception of 450 nm wavelength light, especially since people with synesthesia may perceive numbers as colors, hear colors, feel sounds or taste shapes.

Synesthesia

Extending that concept to all of our other 'realities,' it would seem that concensus by the majority would rule as a general principal. c.i.

I just read the responses and think the original question is unrelated to wave length.

I think Terry picked up on that. The interpretation of the light might be different. What if one wave length that I see as red for you looks like what I see and call blue.

It's kinda silly but this was my initial foray into perception as a child.

Yeah, I just see it as a dead end question (or at least one that leads into fuzzy areas that don't much interest me), so I selfishly took a thwack at it.

The practical upshot of our perception, though, is that, if you are sighted and speak the same language I do, you can say, "Pull the blue lever" and I will know which one you are talking about.

That said, though, not everything is interpreted inside the brain. The retina is capable of interpreting basic geometric shapes, for instance, before it sends signals to the brain -- perhaps this is one of the reasons we can recognize collections of ovals on a two-dimensional surface as a human figure, or as a smiling face, even though it scarcely resembles one.

I suspect most of us experience things in very similar ways, though. The brain is a vastly complex and highly conserved structure.

patio,

Yes it is moot. Since we don't know what interpretation the other brains are working with we use the same term for it.

I also suspect that the interpretation is similar and the original question does not have direct relevance.

But it is still an interesting mindtrip (to me, if not you) that led me on many a journey into abstract thinking while people were forcing me to take naps.

The Matrix and other such mind trips based on perception were concepts I explored based on this question.

If we all have the same understanding for a red traffic light, that's good enough for me! c.i.

Yeah, the information travels through the ether in the same way (lightwaves, soundwaves), but how the brain processes it is a different story.

E.G.'s colorblind and we go through this a lot. We just did a defrag, and he was talking about the white boxes, and pointing at the screen. I said "those aren't white, they're turquoise." He said, "No, THOSE boxes right there!" (point point) "I know, THOSE boxes right there are TURQUOISE." "White!" "Turquoise!"

Etc.

I've thought about this from an artist's perspective, too -- what if the color red I see if different from what other people see? What I decided is that if I make the color red as similar to the object I'm representing, it doesn't matter, since the point is to represent the object. If I see an orangey red ball, and someone else sees it as purply-red, if I paint it close enough to reality, the person who sees the ball as purply-red IRL will see the painting as purply-red, too.

There has been some speculation about Van Gogh's perception of color, especially yellows, and also the swirliness -- that he was really painting what he saw. I forget what medical condition was suspected.

Anyway, I think we all DO perceive things at least slightly differently.

c.i., that's a too pragmatic and limited approach.

The question is not what our eyes "see", but how do we transmit the sight to the brain. How do we use colors as an element of survival and joy (that's what the brain is for, in that order).

There are also cultural elements to notice. All colors are a combination of the four basic ones (the cmyk law): cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow and black. Different cultures -and persons- assign different names-perceptions to the different combinations.
I have a turquoise green shirt and about half of the people say it's blue. Not that they are color blind, only that we see the green-blue boundary in different places.

As for associating colors with numbers and other stuff (many of us did it as children), the Aztec culture had clear cut ones. Colors blended with feelings, orientation, activities, days of the week, months of the year, years in blocks of four and groups of 13 years in every 52 year "century". All set and defined by the stars:
Yellow-East-Birth; Green-South-Work; Red-West-Sex; North-Black-Death.

So is the question just about seeing the color, before investing it with any symbolic baggage -- as Craven and soz and I seem to have taken it -- or about what the colors mean after they've been processed, which seems to be where fbaezer is coming from?

As to E.G.'s color-blindness, that is a physiological anomaly (in most places), the lack of one or more cone pigments. But I've no idea what implications that might have for the brain. (Perhaps those bits of the brain that usually get used for dealing with color get reassigned to something else -- spatial perception, perhaps?)

But that's off-topic. Sorry, dude...

fbaezer, I like and enjoy simple in my life. As far as human perception is concerned, even the psychologists and psychiatrists that study it have differing ideas about it. My conclusion is that genetics and environment have the greatest influence on our perceptions on most things we perceive as our reality. Beyond that, it's way over my head. c.i.

The answer lies in the meaning of "same".

My argument is that the only meaning of "same" is "functionally equivalent". If you consider ANY two states of being they are simultaneously both "the same" (they are both the object of a comparison) and "different" (there are two). These two polarities are always mutually existent and our attention merely focusses on one or the other pole.

Hence it is philosophically meaningless to ask whether he sees "red" when I see "red" if outcome of such states such as the utterance "red" occurs in both cases. The only situation that matters is when our subsequent behaviours functionally differ, e.g. when he runs what I consider a "red" light.

(NB The modern view of child language aquisition has shifted significantly because of the recognition of the point that a child never actually "repeats" accurately what a parent utters but produces a functionally equivalent utterance.)

This view of course has major implications for a discussion of "truth" and "facts" which I would argue are essentially a function of social consensus.

Interesting point, fbaezer, about the socialization aspect of what we "see." I know that there are parallels in what we hear, with phonemes et al. I'm thinking of snow, too, with the famous 54 different kinds of snow or whatever for Innuits, while we say "uh, it's white. And cold."

And I hadn't known that about color blindness, patiodog -- for some reason I thought it was a processing thing rather than a physiological thing.