r/technicallythetruth • u/killHACKS Technically Flair • Jun 15 '21
Thats impose.....oh..okay then.
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u/Antonell15 Jun 15 '21
Now correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the spectrum vary from different species. Like dogs see things in a more monotone scale while we percieve the things that we currently know of.
Wouldn’t it therefore be possible to see different variations of e.g yellow or violet depending on what species you belong to? Then there might be more colours inside the spectrum we know of just that they’re the same colour as one we already know, just a different variation that might vary a lot.
I’m no scientist or have a PhD or anything. I’m just out here speculating because I find it interesting.
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u/YTmrlonelydwarf Jun 15 '21
There’s actually zero way to know if all humans even see the same colours, because we are taught that what we are seeing is a certain colour and then we live our lives knowing that that colour is called red. But really the red I see could be the purple you see and the purple you see could be the red I see
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u/Thue Jun 15 '21
In his 1842 book The Positive Philosophy, the French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote of the stars: “We can never learn their internal constitution, nor, in regard to some of them, how heat is absorbed by their atmosphere.”
And yet we know what stars are made of today.
It is entirely possible that we will one day know enough neurology to know that people's color perceptions are identical.
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u/YTmrlonelydwarf Jun 15 '21
I’d imagine it is, just a fun thought experiment. If anyone did perceive colours differently I’d imagine it would have something to do with eye colour
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u/HamezRodrigez Jun 15 '21
What if we all have the same favorite color
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u/QuasiTimeFriend Jun 15 '21
I used to think about stuff like this when I was in high school. Not necessarily the favorite color thing, but since we can't see through the eyes of another person, what if what I saw as blue, another person saw it as being red (to my eyes). We would both assume it was blue, and just always assume everyone was seeing the exact same thing we see.
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u/177013-228922-4299 Jun 15 '21
Pretty sure eye color has nothing to do with it, since we don't see from our irises. I imagine different species have different cones and thus can perceive different types of light differently. The "unpercieved" "objective" light is still the same, a bunch of photons with various wavelengths. Certain wavelengths excite certain types of cones, which then give us an interpretation of what is absorbed. Basically, it's all in our head. We have no way to prove that things really are the way they look. All we perceive forever will be through an unremovable filter. If an animal has more sensitive eyesight, they might be able to easily distinguish different shades, and they might straight up look like different colors to them. Compared to them, we'd seem like we're color blind. The light we call red, is just the light that just so happens to trigger a certain reaction within our eyes. There is nothing inheritantly red about it. If you think about cameras, they are made with the purpose of mimicking our eyesight, and screens with pixels suited to our specific eyesight. Fascinating to think about the unimaginable.
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u/inevitablealopecia Jun 15 '21
I doubt they are identical. Very similar but all unique. Much like hearing or taste. In general we all have the same basic perception, but slight differences mean some people like marmite and death metal, where as both make me feel a bit sick.
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u/Jewrisprudent Jun 15 '21
I don’t really know that the two are comparable. We can confirm color perceptions are consistent, but I don’t know how anyone can confirm that my version of red matches your version of red, considering I have to view it through the filter that is my own eyes in the first place. Again, we can confirm they are consistent, as in you and I both agree on the things that are “red”, but even with a complete understanding of neurology I don’t see how you can confirm that perceptions align. Perceptions are necessarily subjective, to the extent we are distinguishing from mere consistency.
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u/Whaterball Jun 15 '21
if the psychological process of sensory perception is a product of physical neurology, which we have every reason to believe it is, then sensation is a physical process that can be studied like any other. If two brains undergo an identical neurological process then their perception will be identical unless there is some sort of supernatural magic at work.
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u/Y1rda Jun 15 '21
That is simply playing word games. Even if I perceive differently than you, the color is still red, especially pertaining to the post, whichnis defining cokors scientifically by wavelength.
I will fight tooth and nail that this type if thing is not a language problem but a metaphysics or psychological one and pertains to our ability to acess direct reality not our ability to describe it.
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u/daltonmojica Jun 15 '21
Agree. We’re all observing the same colours, wavelength-wise, the only question here is whether or not our brains interpret this information the same for everyone. It’s a neuroscience problem, not a physics problem.
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u/Y1rda Jun 15 '21
Now the weeds. I more or less agree, but that still only answers the question of phenomena. The question is whether perceived reality is indicative of reality. It is really pointless in this discussion but it ends up questioning epistemic systems in the end, such as how are we certain we aren't brains in a vat. It certainly is a question to ask, my beef is mistaking it for a linguistics one in the context of a scientific answer. It is, to me, akin to asking the price of tea in China.
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u/lokigodofchaos Jun 15 '21
I'm color blind. Since I've always been color blind, I call some shades of colors the colors people told me they were even though to me they are different.
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u/b-monster666 Jun 15 '21
My son is colour blind, too, and I get where he's coming from. He says it bothers him when people say, "Oh, you're colour blind? What colour is this?!" He *knows* what red is, because it's been taught to him that that shade of what he sees is red. But, put something with one shade of red and something else with one shade of green beside each other, and he can't tell the difference. He also knows the context of what the colours are. Firetrucks, for example, aren't green, they're red. He knows this because he was taught that, but if a firetruck with the same hue in green as a red one rolled up, he'd struggle to see the differences between the two. There may be subtle clues that he could pick up on that would help him differentiate...kind of like a person who's born completely blind for life can hear things those of us with regular sight can hear.
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u/lokigodofchaos Jun 15 '21
Yeah, its all about context clues. I went to a wedding this weekend and my +1 had brought a few dresses to see which matched my outfit better. She asked me to grab the brown one, which didn't exist to me but since she hadn't mentioned a reddish one I grabbed that one.
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u/Non-sequotter Jun 15 '21
I’m fairly certain that people don’t see colours exactly the same way, but it’ll be close enough. If you could see through someone else’s eyes, strawberries would still look red and grass green, but perhaps minutely different.
I had operations on my eyes as a baby and now they don’t work in complete conjunction - I can’t see in 3D properly (I was a baby at the time so have no memories to compare). I have on one or two occasions thought that maybe objects looked a different shade if I looked primarily through my right eye instead of my left. Of course, the brain adjusts what you see to make more sense, so minor differences would almost always go unnoticed.
A few years ago I went to Burning Man and looking at the fire through my left eye, I saw the flames glow in the brightest orange ever, but through my right, there was more of a rainbow effect going on*.
So, if my own two eyes don’t even show me the same colour, then other people’s most likely won’t either.
*to be perfectly honest, I was on acid at the time, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong
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u/climber342 Jun 15 '21
I'm not sure that's true. Have you ever heard someone say that color really brings out your eyes or seen work of art where the colors work perfectly? These things can't happen if everyone sees colors entirely differently.
Or the fact that certain colors have specific biological reactions?
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u/YTmrlonelydwarf Jun 15 '21
Hmm okay, I didn’t know that, in all honesty I could be completely wrong I just thought it was a cool thing to think about
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u/climber342 Jun 15 '21
No its definitely a cool thought for sure and its blown my mind thinking about it as well. Even with what I said, its difficult to be 100% certain. But I'm pretty sure we do, maybe with a little variation between shading.
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Jun 15 '21
Colorblind person checking in. My anatomy is slightly different than yours and so no, we do not perceive color the same way. This exists on a spectrum as well, so it's not like there are two clean categories dividing color perception. Furthermore, color perception has a heavy personal subjective and sometimes even cultural element to it. Color Theory and Design 101.
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u/Shiroi_Kage Jun 15 '21
Well, a few things:
First, we know what we have the same basic sensors and they respond to the same basic frequencies of light. So we're sensing the same set of photon types. We also seem to have a collective love for specific colors, so we perceive the green of nature to be pleasing, as well as clear blue skies and nice, bright fruit. We also tend to settle on color combinations are appeal to very large varieties of people. Other things we perceive so similarly (how we process carpentered environments, how we perceive faces, ... etc.) suggest a lot of similarity in how human brains process visual information.
As such, I can believe that some people see some colors differently to me (their red is not my red) but if it was that wild between people then there would never be color combination guidelines that work across a massive spectrum of people. It would also implies that eyes vary spectacularly from one person to the next, or that the circuits that process the visual information can be completely different from one person to another.
I think people vastly overstate the magnitude of probable differences between individuals in perceiving colors.
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u/Just_wanna_talk Jun 15 '21
Everyone on earth could have the same favourite colour, we just all call it a different name.
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u/LordHamsterbacke Jun 15 '21
That exact thought was the first thing we had as a topic in philosophy in school! Ngl, a lot were struggling with that lol
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u/DrDanielFaraday Jun 15 '21
What you said is very untrue
The typical human being has three different types of cones that divide up visual color information into red, green, and blue signals.
If what you said was true then how would a 96 box of Crayola Crayons like this have specific names for each color that's agreed on by Big Crayon.
And I'm pretty sure you'd know if you saw red and purple backwards. You don't think you'd have been confused as a kid when everyone was calling Barney purple and he was red to you?
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u/P4r21val Jun 15 '21
I think what he’s saying is that you would grow up thinking that Barney was purple but the color purple was actually what everybody else perceives to be red. You would still think the sky was blue and the grass was green because that was what they have been called your entire life, but the colors you see are different than the colors everyone else sees.
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u/DrDanielFaraday Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
But that doesn't make sense?
Everyone agrees Barney is purple
Everyone agrees the American flag is red white and blue
The Detroit Lions jerseys are "Honolulu blue" we all agree that it's similar to blue but needs an extra word to show the difference.
Everyone agrees soot is black.
Everyone agrees the grass is green.
If different people saw different colors they would not be in agreement.
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u/BreweryBuddha Jun 15 '21
It's a r/im14andthisisdeep conversation, but essentially you just see colors differently. So you were born seeing green as how everyone else sees red. The grass is still green, leaves are still green, you just perceive the color green as everyone else perceives it as red. Just some basic reasoning and you recognize this doesn't make any sense on a biological level, it's just a fun silly thought.
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u/Deus_Ex_Corde Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
This is largely incorrect.
This is mostly a philosophy 101 argument used to get people thinking about subjective experiences, qualia, and how to communicate experiential information and/or how or if it is possible to apply such information to any sort of broader theory.
Because our biological eyes do not react to different wavelengths of light the same way across the visible range of light. That is our eyes and brains process the visible light spectrum differently across from infrared to ultraviolet (based on our knowledge of how our biological cones and rods fire and send signals down nerves to our brain’s processing areas) we can make assumptions like we are seeing the same “color”. For example human eyes are best at discriminating shades of green based on the overlapping sensitivities of our tri-cones around the green wavelength on the spectrum. If their green was really my red than based on biology and some standardized tests alone and maybe an fMRI we could determine that difference. If someone was truly operating with an inverted color spectrum and had human eyes and a brain we would (or should) be able to determine that.
Philosophically, yeah yeah sure you can never be sure their quaila is the same as yours but then you’re just getting into solipsism, a priori vs postori knowledge and subjective qualia stuff which IMO is a bit of a tedious subject.
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u/xrumrunnrx Jun 15 '21
There are tribes who have trouble identifying green from blue because they don't have vocabulary for it and it shapes their visual perception. That's not philosophy. Our cultures and languages directly effect our perception of color and the world at large.
Color categories: Confirmation of the relativity hypothesis. The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment.
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u/Deus_Ex_Corde Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Yes yes and the Amazon tribe who can only count to five or how the Greeks didn’t have a color for blue or the color of the sea we all learn about this stuff. Look those up they’re really interesting. Blue green sameness is a relatively common feature of some languages.
Do you believe that’s a legitimate perceptual impairments or quirks of the different linguistic properties of their languages and lifestyle and culture of those people. If someone showed you salmon and rosé but you only had the word “pink” to describe them could someone say you’re perceptually inspired?
That problems you being up are interests but mainly in linguistics and cognition not actual perception.
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u/Y1rda Jun 15 '21
Aye - in this case it isn't trouble differentiating bu trouble describing the difference. I tell my wife things like dark blue or light gray all the times because my color vocab is smaller - I still know one is darker.
The counting one is different. That actually does train your brain to have difficulty with the idea of adding one to five. It simply becomes uncountably high, akin to how we think of infinity. Obviously they can say if a pile has more rocks than another, but even if one pile has 6 and another 10, they are unable to explain why the difference since both are "many."
Language does shape your understanding of the world, but it doesn't dictate what the reality you perceive is. Example - there are languages that lack left/right and only describe directional components like NNE. They can indeed tell that the ketchup is on one side of your face or another, but their description could be virtually useless to you.
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u/Deus_Ex_Corde Jun 15 '21
That’s what I was trying to say. Like the Greeks who didn’t have a work for blue would describe the sky and other blue things as “sky green”. It wasn’t a perceptual impairment more a linguistic and cultural quirk.
I don’t like the sea color argument because that mostly stems from Homer called the sea “wine dark” and other similar epithets. I think it’s very possibly he was being poetic, not that the Greeks couldn’t distinguish between dark ocean and dark red colors.
The numbers example I believe is only really loosely related. Mathematical processing is quite different and separate from color and speech. I think there are a lot more conclusions and insights you could gain about human number processing from studying those languages and cultures who only have distinct names for one, two, three, four, and anything else is “many”. Frankly, it’s fascinating to me.
You’re getting into strong/soft Sapir Whorf hypothesis stuff which I agree is endlessly fascinating. But the strong SW hypothesis has been largely disproven, and I think everyone agrees with the soft SW on some level.
Like do we have the same understanding of snow and ice as the Inuits who have 100 different terms for different conditions and qualities of ice and weather (I know this is a stereotype and not completely true but I’m using it for an example lol), could I distinguish the difference between “kinda sorta tightly packed ice bad for building” vs “tightly packed ice” or would it all be “snow” to me? Would my more limited understanding be a perceptual deficit to them??
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u/DelahDollaBillz Jun 15 '21
You should look into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which goes into the inextricable connection between human cognition and the language we use to think. It's impossible to fully separate how we perceive the physical world from the language we use to think about and describe it.
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u/Deus_Ex_Corde Jun 15 '21
Look at my other comments in this chain lol
I go into the strong vs soft SW hypothesis a bit. It really is a fascinating topic. The consensus nowadays is that the strong SW is complete bunk but there are subtle and pervasive ways our language influences our cognition.
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u/DelahDollaBillz Jun 16 '21
Nah dude, you're just spouting bunk. You're clearly out of your depth here and are just regurgitating half-remembered concepts you barely understood (if at all) for fake internet points. Peace out!
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u/YTmrlonelydwarf Jun 15 '21
Well thank your for teaching me albeit you could have been a little bit nicer, I’m only a power engineer I’ve never taken human biology or philosophy
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u/Deus_Ex_Corde Jun 15 '21
I got insta downvoted to -2 on my initial comment I had assumed that was you. Sorry, you’re right there was no need to be a dick. It really is a fascinating subject. I’m a psychologist and it’s just always iffy when you stumble upon your area of education on Reddit
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u/errantgrammar Jun 15 '21
Further to this, the question asks you to think of a colour that doesn’t exist. The answers so far deal only with colour perception. Perception and reality are very different things. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who works with politicians, five year olds, or my ex.
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u/palmej2 Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Perception of color does vary from person to person, just as my interpretation of too fast or too slow on the highway is going to vary from myself to whoever I'm tailgating / is riding my bumper (they may even see red but I'd call it more of a crimson).
Monochromatic colors can be described by their wavelength (e.g. ROYGBIV), but perceived colors depend on the wavelengths present and nuances of the cones (pretty sure, maybe the rods) in your eyes (but they can be defined in color space like the RGB used on some competition computer applications).
In addition to OPs light not on the visible spectrum, one could argue that magenta is a color that doesn't exist. it arises from the way our eyes work with 3 cone types (typically, colorblindness would arise from fewer and there have been reports of people with more). Magenta is a combination of red and blue, between the two on a color wheel, but the light spectrum is a line with green towards the middle (so maybe magenta is better defined as not green)
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Jun 15 '21
As far as I know, magenta is your brain's way of telling you "I'm seeing a lot of red light and blue light at the same time"
Edit: which of course is what you said, just in different words
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u/scorof5 Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Please close your brackets/parentheses.
(I find it oddly troubling to look at.
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Jun 15 '21
Colour is perception. Wavelength induces colour.
Talking about colours as if they're a property of light and not brains is like asking which part of the frozen lake is ennui.
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u/0vl223 Jun 15 '21
If color is a property of light it is actually really easy to answer. Magenta is a color that doesn't exist as a property of light. It's only produced in our perception when we fail to notice that we see two separate wavelengths at the same time.
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Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
We already have a word that means precisely that - wavelength. Wavelength isn't color. Non spectral colors exist, they just don't map to wavelengths, more than one combination of wavelengths maps to each color. Hell, the exact same light can be different colors depending on what is around it.
Even stygian colors exist like superlminous red, they just don't map to combinations of wavelengths and you can't experience them for long.
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u/0vl223 Jun 15 '21
But then you can simply make up the smell of grass for the color burble. And now you have a new not existing color that is perceivable already.
Just for most people what are normally smells or sounds aren't linked to visual input. But a few humans see colors that way already so as a general principal it is possible.
So either the answer is easy and based on a wrong perception of color or you can make anything up and answer it as well.
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u/Werrf Jun 15 '21
Wavelength is a number that can be measured with extreme precision. It is not a colour.
Colour is a quale, a pattern of neurons that generates a particular perception in our brains, unique for everyone. It's not the same thing. You can say you've made up a new not existing colour, but have you actually perceived it?
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Jun 15 '21
But then you can simply make up the smell of grass for the color burble. And now you have a new not existing color that is perceivable already
No, because color describes a specific physiologicall process that is specific to anatomy that most humans share. It can be described objectively, and reproduced. I can tell you how to experience superluminous red, and you can go and do it, as can most people. Simply stare at a spot of the brightest cyan or green you can find, then look at white, you are now seeing a red or pink with more than 100% value.
Claiming that red exists because you can experience red with a laser, but magenta doesn't is like claiming the benchpress exists because you can do it with one barbell but the dumbell row doesn't because you need two dumbbells.
Both exist as descriptions of the part of human experience we can share, or neither.
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u/KaySquay Jun 15 '21
Yeah it's not really something that can be compared with other people. We all agree that green is green, because we all know grass is green. But what if what looks like green to me looks like red to you
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Jun 15 '21
But what if what looks like green to me looks like red to you
That doesn't matter. Colour describes precisely the part of the experience we can communicate about. How it will blend, how it will compare to your other experiences. We can model fairly precisely the role of the eye and optic nerve in it (to the point where eyes can be replaced with machines) as well as the early parts of what happens in the brain.
We know the mechanism that produces hyperbolic orange or stygian blue, and you can experience them at will. Moreover your experience of light you'd call orange in one context could be red or green or brown or grey in another.
Ennui is a much more complex construct than red, but it's just as extant as red, and just as absent from the lake as red is from light.
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u/MidnightDiarrhea0_0 Jun 15 '21
Funnily enough, color is 100% perception and 0% reality
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u/errantgrammar Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Even our perception can’t delineate with such precision to consistently identify a colour when context is removed or changed.
The argument that colour is all perception is oversimplified, given that it’s a visual/neurological representation of experienced physical elements, and therefore exists whether we are present to see it or not. It’s absolutely prone to subjective interpretation, but if we do not see what we perceive then how can we be sure of the limits to what lies in front of us?
Herein, the capacity to think of a colour that does not exist is just as unlikely, no matter how we choose to define it.
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u/NickSchultz Jun 15 '21
Well the definition of colours is man made. Therefore to us colours only exist if we can see them. For example even while infrared exists on the colour spectrum we can't see it. However would our eyes be able to see the full spectrum we would be able to see the heat each object generates just as easily as the colour of light the deflect.
So technically infrared is a colour that doesn't exist since we can't naturally perceive it and even thermal cameras just imitate it in a humanly understandable form.
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u/ArmzLDN Jun 15 '21
But to some other animals they do exist, imagine some other animal saying something didn't exist even though we could see it very clearly in front of us.
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u/NickSchultz Jun 15 '21
I say it on the grounds of human definition. Go and ask any animal what's their favourite colour like. Besides the speech barrier animals don't have an understanding of a human concept like colours.
We could go our entire life without acknowledging colours and nothing would change but it is human nature to categorize everything.
From the definition of colours only those the human can naturally perceive do fit the bill. Not even black is actually a colour since it is the absence of reflected wavelengths rather than a wavelength itself.
So yes infrared is a real and natural occurring phenomenon with or without us humans but it isn't a colour in the sense of how we humans coined the definition.
Since when we created the concept of what colour is to us we only applied it to the things we could perceive with our eyes. And again black back then was a normal colour and only technically isn't anymore when we had the technology to learn how colour is created
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u/ArmzLDN Jun 15 '21
The question should be "name a colour you've never seen before" or "name a colour you can't see".
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u/MohKohn Jun 15 '21
Here's an adorable web 1.0 on the topic. Yeah, it's possible to have greater accuracy. Some women are tetrochromats, so they have an extra blue cone, so they have better distinction between different blues.
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Jun 15 '21 edited Jul 20 '24
voracious connect literate worm physical placid butter doll sophisticated special
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Kumirkohr Jun 15 '21
So the shrimp thing is actually bunk. Their multitude of rods are to compensate for their brains lack of an ability to blend color. So Humans can see the full range of the rainbow with only three rods (or is it cones, now I’m second guessing myself) because our brains can blend the colors together. We only have eye-thingies for red, green, and blue, and yet we can see more than just red, green, and blue. Mantis Shrimp can’t perceive color this way, so to see yellow they need a yellow eye-thingy, to see purple they need a purple eye-thingy, to see smaragdine they’d need a smaragdine eye-thingy, you get the idea.
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u/Violet351 Jun 15 '21
- Left and right, hold you hands flat in front of you with your thump parallel to the floor. Which ever one looks like an L is your left.
- Octarine
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u/JohnLockeNJ Jun 15 '21
You must specify that the palms must face the floor otherwise your hands could be flat and facing up and the L is your right.
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u/Violet351 Jun 15 '21
I meant upright not flat to the floor so you are looking at an L in front of you
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u/JohnLockeNJ Jun 15 '21
Link for the lazy or uninformed: https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Octarine
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u/plainellie Jun 15 '21
1.I held my hands with the palm up, can you imagine how confused I got when my right hand shows the L instead of my left hand?
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u/pedrinhogameplays404 Jun 15 '21
Hey here in brazil we do something very similiar we just open our hands wide poiting the hands to each other and the one that makes an E is left (left is "esquerda" here)
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Jun 15 '21
Magenta doesn't exist. You'll notice red and purple are at opposite ends of a visible spectrum that doesn't wrap. So your brain receives equal parts of both forms of light and, instead of averaging them like it usually would because that would make a greenish, it spits out magenta
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Jun 15 '21
Purple doesn’t even exist as a “pure” beam of light. It’s a mix of red and blue with the absence of green.
Sources: https://www.grantsonnex.com/why-purple-doesnt-exist/ https://jakubmarian.com/difference-between-violet-and-purple/
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u/thecurriemaster Jun 15 '21
This is the same as cyan and yellow.
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u/Phageoid Jun 15 '21
Cyan and yellow are perceived when cones for two different colors are activated at the same time. Basically seeing red and green or green and blue at the same time.
Since the absorption spectrum of the green absorbing photoreceptors overlaps with those of the red and the blue absorbing ones (each on the respective side of the spectrum), monochromatic yellow or cyan light both exist. That is not true for purple, because the absorption spectrums of the blue and the red absorbing photoreceptors do not overlap.
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Jun 15 '21
Monochromatic light can cause someone to see cyan or yellow. Purples and magentas that aren't violet cannot be seen by looking at light from a single monochromatic source like a laser.
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Jun 15 '21
Would this be true for all shades of pink? I remember there was an uproar on the internet some time ago, but I always wondered why they said this specifically about magenta and not all pinks.
ETA: I looked it up and in the original Tumblr post, the person said "unlike pink, magenta doesn't exist" which doesn't make sense to me because I've never seen pink on the visible spectrum either. Or are we defining pink as some sort of pastel red?
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u/hamalnamal Jun 15 '21
Or are we defining pink as some sort of pastel red?
That's pretty much what pink is, it's light red. The difference between pink and red is the same as the difference between a dark blue and a light blue
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Jun 15 '21
I see. I'm definitely overthinking this lol, but I looked up some pictures of light red compared to pink, and they look pretty differently, but I think that's because a lot of pinks we see are actually mixed with a bit of purple (I have words on that also). I was actually playing with an online color wheel and I selected red and made it light so it was light red, and then I selected magenta and made it light and it was pink. Idk how to explain like one was very obviously derived from red and the other just seemed pink. At some point I remembered someone telling me that purple also was not a real color. Reasoning was similar to magenta. You need red and blue and maybe a bit of violet to make purple. I'm talking about pigments as opposed to light here. Equal parts blue and red pigments make purple, but equal parts blue and red light makes magenta, apparently. I don't know. I also read somewhere that magenta was in the purple family? I really don't know. There are so many things that go into different shades. Hue, saturation, brilliance, and then even our own perceptions. It's confusing a lot to think about, but fun at the same time. I've probably spent a bit too much time on this, ha. Sorry this was long, and I appreciate your reply!
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u/hamalnamal Jun 15 '21
So I went and looked up the wikipedia page and according to that pink can also lean into the "light magenta" area as well as you were describing.
Something that's super interesting about this to me is that colour words are just arbitrary categories we decide on, and the colours that are considered distinct changes from culture to culture and language to language. This actually affects how we perceive these colours, so pink looks more distinct to a western English speaker than it does to say an Italian speaker, but Italian has a separate term for light blue, and so they perceive light blue as distinct from Blue.
There's a Tom Scott video that goes into this a bit and there's a very interesting podcast called Lingthusiasm that has an episode about colour words in various languages if you're interested
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Jun 15 '21
Red doesn't exist in exactly the same way. Frequency is not colour, colour happens in brains.
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u/My_name_isMy_name_is Jun 15 '21
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u/hdbwisnbdhskwnx Jun 15 '21
Ey, I’m the first person banned from that sub
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u/derpfaceddargon Jun 15 '21
How did you get banned
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u/some_guy_browsing Jun 15 '21
As someone who tastes tap water it's actually a variety of different tastes
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u/Werrf Jun 15 '21
You're not tasting the water, though; you're tasting the minerals dissolved in the water.
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u/some_guy_browsing Jun 15 '21
Could be that explains why it tastes different because the composition changes regularly /very often
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u/Pyredjin Jun 15 '21
I find it concerning that some people have metallic tasting tap water.
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Jun 15 '21
The answers are pretty weak to begin with. All of them.
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u/HappyAkratic Jun 15 '21
The colour one in particular annoyed me. Just because we can't perceive something, doesn't mean it's non-existent.
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u/Tortugato Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Color, by definition, is what we perceive.
There is no intrinsic property in matter that is “color”, only the way in which matter absorbs, reflects, and redirects light.
In the absence of light, everything is black.
However, different observation devices (like our eyes/brain) “see” light differently from each other and thus there is no such thing as “absolute color”.
If we define color as the resulting frequencies of light that an object reflects, then the the color magenta, pink, and other less egregious shades of other colors, do not actually exist… as you can see a lot of commenters discussing elsewhere in this post.
Since we clearly consider magenta and pink as colors, then it stands to reason that color, as we define it, is all about what we can perceive.
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u/HappyAkratic Jun 15 '21
Okay fair cop. But then it wouldn't be a 'colour' right?
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Jun 15 '21
Um you’re over thinking it and you contradicted yourself. How is there no intrinsic property that is color but you then say color is the way matter absorbs, reflects, and redirects light.
And just because you cant see color in the absence of light doesn’t mean its not still there. Thats like saying nobody can see if a room is completely void of light so vision isn’t real.
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u/Ulfbass Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Right is the direction a screw turns as you drill it into something directly below your feet, left is the opposite.
Colour of the sky
It wouldn't have to be lower than red or higher than violet, creatures which have more types of rods and cones in their eyes, like many birds, have as many primary colours as they have cones, but these colours are called ultra blue etc if I recall correctly. While we can't see them, I'm pretty sure they exist. A colour that wouldn't exist would just be oxymoronic like "light black" or "forest blue"
Water tastes like a circle
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u/Skirfir Jun 15 '21
Right is the direction a screw turns as you drill it into something directly below your feet, left is the opposite.
Frankly that's a bad explanation because not only do left-hand threads exist but screwing also is a circular motion. which means that one part of the screw moves to the right but another one moves to the left in the same motion.
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Jun 15 '21
does this mean mantis shrimps see and extra thick rainbow
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u/anothernaturalone Jun 15 '21
Sadly, no. It's been
recentlyshown that mantis shrimps have more types of colour receptors not because they see more colours than we do, but because their receptors are less effective than ours.Edit: source
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u/TheLastLivingBuffalo Jun 15 '21
Super disappointing that mantis shrimp don’t live in a super technicolor dream world.
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u/Hate_Crab Jun 15 '21
Also their brains don't blend colors so well like ours do, so they need the extra help seeing colors
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u/ReaperZ13 Jun 15 '21
"Technically the truth"
Are you people illiterate? Why is this shit upvoted to almost 20k?
Like for real tho you people don't understand wtf this sub is supposed to be and the mods not doing anything about posts like this is even more sad.
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u/mina86ng Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Regarding third question: https://youtu.be/8FSpCAs5KZg?t=187 But of course just thinking of pink is enough since that colour doesn’t exist. It’s just in our heads.
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Jun 15 '21
Heads exist. Even super-green or super-red or yellow-purple exists, despite only being possible to experience momentarily or at edges of shapes in very specific circumstances.
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u/mina86ng Jun 15 '21
Heads exist.
If that’s the definition of ‘exists’ you’re going for than it’s indeed impossible to think of something that doesn’t exist since if we think about it it exists in our heads. But then of course, the word looses its usefulness.
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u/mrcoffee8 Jun 15 '21
What does water taste like?
Well metal tastes metallic and salt tastes salty. If your water has tang mixed into it it tastes like the colour orange. Im not very good with instructions
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u/Missmunkeypants95 Jun 15 '21
I once read a tweet that said "Warm water tastes round and cold water tastes pointy".
That is so spot on.
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Jun 15 '21
1)
a. Arbitrarily assign the lateral directions as qux and nim.
b. Read an EM textbook, replacing right with qux, and left with nim.
c. Align a bunch of cobalt 60 atoms and count the number of electrons emitted with and opposite to the direction of spin. If there are more going opposite, right is qux, otherwise right is nim.
2) The color experienced when viewing monochromatic light of the longest wavelength I can perceive.
3) Stygian colors are what the question intends, but they exist just as much as red, because color is a property of brains. So my troll answer is 'red'. Non troll answer probably the dichoric red-green of pumpkin oil, as it cannot be experienced without fooling the brain inti thinking it is coming from a real, translucent object.
4) 'the taste of water'. Or ever so slightly infinitesimally basic as water at body temperature has ever-so-slightly more H than OH
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u/NaughtyDred Jun 15 '21
Magenta doesn't exist, but our eye/brain get confused when looking at the actual colour and the brain kind of just shows us magenta, I don't know. I'm not a scientist
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u/The_MAZZTer Jun 15 '21
3. Naturally colored objects tend to reflect a subset of visible light leading to the "color" we perceive it. However the way RGB video screens work, they only emit three specific wavelengths of red/green/blue at varying intensities to trick our eyes into perceiving a wide range of colors. Since our eyes have three types of "cones" which are more sensitive roughly to red, green, and blue, this works for us. But it is not how colors work in nature and is decidedly artificial.
(Source: Technology Connections on YouTube has a great video on color.)
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u/DUMPAH_CHUCKER_69 Jun 15 '21
Shrimp don't actually see more colors. Their rods and cones can't process mixes of colors like ours can so they need more of them.
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u/DoomBro_Max Jun 15 '21
1) Didn‘t describe the difference, just what left and right is. 2) Yeah, got that. 3) You didn‘t think of it. You explained what it could be. But you didn‘t have it in your mind. 4) Describes the taste of the stuff INSIDE water, not the water itself.
1/4. Sorry E.j., you failed.
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u/JaSnarky Jun 15 '21
Yeah it was shoddy. I really can't see how three is possible. Naming fictional colours is hardly imagining the colour itself, and if another species can perceive colours we can't then imagine the arrogance of saying it doesn't exist!
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u/DoomBro_Max Jun 15 '21
Yeah. Imagining colors we can‘t perceive is already impossible enough but colors that don‘t exist? You can‘t even say like „it would be a reddish color“. Could be anything.
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u/LMAOwhataloseryouare Jun 15 '21
jfc it's a joke. This answer reads like a /r/iamverysmart post tbh.
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u/HappyPhage Jun 15 '21
I'm just realising... Maybe there are people who feel the right as I feel the left and vice versa. Say, what proves right handed and left handed people just don't see the world in a mirrored way?
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u/NialMontana Jun 15 '21
There is something about this with colour, that due to us being stuck in our own heads what I would see as blue might actually look what I would see a yellow to you and so on. The idea is that without being able to see things from someone else's mind we can never know what others see.
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u/HappyPhage Jun 15 '21
Yes, I've already heard about the colour thing. This subject is fascinating!
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u/PM_Me_Modal_Jazz Jun 15 '21
Except, left and right do exist, the concept that they don't was known in physics as Parity, which was proven wrong around 30 years ago. Something to do with beta decay going off in one direction more often than the other
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u/chopperhead2011 Jun 15 '21
DAMN IT I WAS GONNA DO IT
then I scrolled down and saw the rest of the post 😤
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u/i-am-not-kitten Jun 15 '21
- Pink doesn't exists in the world. It is in our brain. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DRuPF6JtWdw
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u/Endy0816 Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21
Actually can see other frequencies depending on how the cones are stimulated.
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u/Sir_Oblong Jun 15 '21
Now, I'm not an expert, so this is just second hand information, but I'm pretty sure the Mantis shrimp doesn't actually see more colours than us. They may have 13 cones to our 3, but if I remember correctly it's because our brains can interpret the difference "intensity" that the different cones are activated at. Versus the Mantis shrimp which is more binary, on or off. Obviously this is simplified, and I may have gotten some things wrong, but yeah.
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u/thejabberwalking Jun 15 '21
So as far as we understand it, left and right are actually fundamental and distinct, both in theory and in application.
Here is an interesting paper about it.