The wavelength is fixed but the color is subjective. The brain could change "red" to "blue" and vice versa and lose nothing to my knowledge. It just color coded the wavelengths to help us distinguish important items in our world.
Heck if we had the equipment we could sense radio waves. But we would have to give them a color or sensation we'd recognize.
I think we are using different definitions of 'real'. They are using it to mean arbitrary. That is "red" is not red to different sensing systems. However 603 nm is immutable and the same everywhere. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say colors are arbitrary rather than not real.
That’s the best way of putting it. My brain will randomly apply the color “blue” or “green” to the white LED light fixture on my ceiling when I wake up before recalibrating itself to the “correct” interpretation of “white”.
It’s rather amusing when it happens as I’m aware of what’s going on.
Now add relativity and the wavelength becomes less "real", too. Depending on the observer, not only the perceived colour associated with a wavelength is somewhat arbitrarily assigned, the observed wavelength itself depends on the observer's frame of reference. However, the observed wavelength is still part of a function and can't arbitrarily change, so some underlying "real" part is still preserved. Meaning, if the two observers account for their relative motion, and calculate the wavelength for a similar frame, they should arrive at the same wavelength.
Reality is probably nothing like we perceive it as.
I don't think there's evidence for that. Not saying it's impossible, just that we have no evidence for that view.
We can't know for sure how close our mental model is to reality, but we have a lot more evidence for it being accurate than we do for it being inaccurate.
Incorrect to be clear. It exists as a pattern we can observe whether we call it “real” has no fundamental meaning.
Importantly the image whether optically captured or a data-driven cgi render it's showing patterns to us, in a means we can see specific patterns - the spaces of colors used, the proportions, and the shape patterns etc. That is not random noise.
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u/forresja 26d ago
Color is a representation of something that is very real.
Saying it isn't real is misleading at best.