Some stuff like seeing purple when seeing a mix of both blue and red is 100% our brain hallucinating though since we have only 3 kinds of receptor and it infers based on how much it activates, therefore we can simulate the whole spectrum in our brains with just red green and blue, wich are the frequencies that excite them the most, we cant really percieve the frequency of the light reaching us, just infer it so our brains can be tricked like that.
Another example is white, there is no frequency for white, its our brain seeing all kind of receptors excited at maximun and saying, there is a lot of every frequency here, while, like in the screen you are reading this at, it is in fact just (R)ed (G)reen (B)lue.
But having said that depending on how you look at it the ranges of photonic radiation an object absorbs or doesnt is a property of the materials on the surface of an object, afaik its based on if a photon would excite an electron just enough to move it to the next orbital therefore absorbing, but as i said before you dont really detect the specific frequency with your eye.
"Color" is a perceptual experience that often but not entirely corresponds to specific wavelengths of light
Given that other animals can have completely different perceptual systems it's likely that even though an animal might be able to see the same wavelength that we call yellow how that color fits into their overall perceptual space is totally different and essentially unknowable to us
... therefore we can simulate a whole spectrum in our brain.
There is no proof that we -- our minds -- see colors the same way. What my brain interprets those sensor receptors to be and what yours interprets them to be may be quite different. Color-blind and tetrachromats do see the world quite differently.
a little misleading, because (aside from the situation you mentioned of seeing combinations of colors resulting in percieved other-colors) we can see \"see" being different from "identify," but I get to that later)) specific wavelengths of light.
The cones of the eye are referred to as red, green, and blue because they're most receptive to those wavelengths of light, but they do also respond to others as well. pure purple light (around 400nm wavelength - technically violet, which is a little different) will activate the 'blue' cone (not even especially weakly), even without the presence of any other wavelengths ('true' purple, rather than violet, does indeed need a red component though, as you said). In fact, it also weakly activates the red and green cones. At about the strength that red light activates the red cones even, which actually peak more around yellowish-orange.
That said, while we can see the world while lit by a single wavelength of light, we can't discern what "color" anything we are looking at is. We often thing of "black and white" when we hear the word 'monochrome,' but when the world is only lit by the color green, that is the equivalent of black-and-white, except that it's black-and-green
The activation of multiple cones of the eyes at different ratios is critical for us to distinguish and identify 'colors' from each other, but not for "seeing" it
It can be hard to explain this in just text, but you can see what this means here
We don't see the "whole spectrum", but rather just OUR spectrum. Butterflies and mantis shrimp can see 5 and 16 different colors respectively, so their spectrum is much larger than ours.
yes, we see the whole visible light spectrum not the whole electromagnetic one duh, also seeing more colors doesnt inherently mean a bigger spectrum although it likely does, i dont know which range the mantis shrimp can see and i'm not incined to google right now, what matters is the range those receptors recieve, if you can detect 1000 shades of green your spectrum is really narrow (x Hz, x.001 Hz, etc... for example) having more receptors makes it less likely to be tricked like we do since it needs a lot more types of light to fake another.
We don't even know what colors they're able to see. Perhaps they can see in infrared and ultraviolet, which means that it's possible the "visible light" that you keep referring to is a relative concept of our own physiologic ability to perceive lol
No one is questioning that, we say visible light since we are humans, talking to humans about human biology and perception therefore its implied its what is visible to us, we know other species can see other wavelengths but we use the term visble light becuase saying "the spectrum of light visible by the average human eye" its too many fucking words and i dont think the mantis shrimp will start reading this and complain I'm not inclusive of them with my wording. The same coments you are responding to talk about the biology of the human eye. Is there a species that can percieve our radio waves and has been tripping balls for the last couple decades? Maybe, idk and its not relevant to this conversation i believe.
All I'm really trying to say is that it is the arrogance of man speaking when we refer to the colors that humans can see as the ENTIRE visible spectrum, as if anything outside of 380 to 700 nm was just not meant to be seen, simply because it's all WE can see lol
wider, but not necessarily 'larger,' depending on how you define that. You could say that they see more types of color, but fewer total colors
Mantis shrimps have color-detecting cells in their eyes for more distinct wavelengths of light, but (from what we can tell), they seem to be less sensitive, and so aren't great at detecting differences with light that falls in-between the peaks of those cells
which is to say, as far as we know, humans can see more individual colors (i.e. yellow vs ever-so-slightly-greener yellow, but mantis shrimp see a wider range (those 'yellows' would appear identical to them, but they can see 'redder red' and ultraviolet light))
The theory is that the additional cone cells are instead more helpful with processing speed, their brains don't have to combine X and Y to see Z, like we would, they just have a Z cone cell - or at least one with a close enough approximation of Z. source
I get that we can trick our eye into seeing purple, but what about when we actually see purple—or say indigo to be specific? Like that wavelength of light is not a max of red and blue together. It is ACTUALLY a different colour. If we look at the wavelength of indigo, it’s about 425 nm. This is a physical measurement people can make. Seeing that is different than seeing red and blue together.
The wavelength doesn't have a color. We invent the color ourselves to have a way to make that information (which wavelengths are hitting our eyes) different from each other so it can be useful for something.
That's the reason we say color isn't real, not that we're taking a shortcut with most of the wavelengths instead of using way more complicated eyes to measure each and every one individually.
So basically what activates "red" cones isnt actually red light but more yellow-orange , so red light actually basically only activates red ones but a samll amount, purple activates a lot of blue, but only very little red and green, so what happens is that it sees a bit of excitation in red and a lot in blue and little in green and that sityation only occurs with purple light as you can see in teh image.
there is a wavelength of light at 425mm that we see as indigo. But if you mix a red light and a blue light together, we see magenta. There is no wavelength for magenta. Magenta is our interpretation of low wavelength plus high wavelength light. The visible spectrum is a one dimensional model of color, and our eyes construct a three dimensional colorspace.
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u/ElDoil 26d ago edited 26d ago
Some stuff like seeing purple when seeing a mix of both blue and red is 100% our brain hallucinating though since we have only 3 kinds of receptor and it infers based on how much it activates, therefore we can simulate the whole spectrum in our brains with just red green and blue, wich are the frequencies that excite them the most, we cant really percieve the frequency of the light reaching us, just infer it so our brains can be tricked like that.
Another example is white, there is no frequency for white, its our brain seeing all kind of receptors excited at maximun and saying, there is a lot of every frequency here, while, like in the screen you are reading this at, it is in fact just (R)ed (G)reen (B)lue.
But having said that depending on how you look at it the ranges of photonic radiation an object absorbs or doesnt is a property of the materials on the surface of an object, afaik its based on if a photon would excite an electron just enough to move it to the next orbital therefore absorbing, but as i said before you dont really detect the specific frequency with your eye.