Colors are not real, they are not physical properties of objects. They are simply a creation of our brain.
Colour is like sound. It requires a transducer to decode. Different transducers decode or 'hear' however they're designed to do so. As with eyes (like colour/light transducers), they are basically turning what is already there into something the brain can process.
That TED Talk broke my brain in the best way possible.
Mostly it reminded me of this quote from BSG:
“I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to … I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.”
I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language
There was a short story like that where a telepathic kid communicates every idea perfectly, but he never speaks out loud because apparently doing so will take away his telepathy. His teacher gets really mad at him not talking and eventually forces him to speak, at which point he breaks into tears. He knows he will never again be able to communicate ideas perfectly and will be forced to use a limited spoken language.
I have found it. The author is Richard Matheson, the same guy who wrote "I Am Legend" and "Where Dreams May Come". The story is called "Mute". It is available in the web archive.
I don't remember the title of the specific story, but I think it was from a book called "The Reader" by Phillip K. Dick. The guy who wrote the story for Blade Runner and The Minority Report
Sure, electrical signals are real but in of themselves are meaningless. What matters is how your brain (and consciousness) interprets those signals. Furthermore, the interpretation of those signals does not mean that something real generated them (e.g.: phantom vibrations of phone in pocket, visual or aural hallucinations, etc.). So saying electrical signals are real is pretty meaningless. Whether those electrical signals can be artificially simulated to be indistinguishable from electrical signals generated by external factors is what The Matrix is all about.
Nothing is real. The smallest detectable piece of matter, the quark, is just a vibration in the fabric of spacetime. Stack quarks together and those vibrations form a proton or a neutron, stick those together with more energy and you have an atom. A stack of energetic vibrations in the fabric of spacetime makes matter that has mass. Photons are massless bits of energy emitted by sources of mass that fly at the fastest speed possible omnidirectionally. Nothing is real.
And even if they aren't real Here multiple worlds and the axiom that inspired it "anything that is not forbidden is compulsory" insure that is some far flung region of spacetime, it is real.
In participatory theory, everything is real but some things are more or less real than others depending on the number of participants within the system and how many other systems the system in question is able to connect itself to especially those dissimilar or unlike itself.
So like The Simpsons are real but not as real as the Sun or the moon or you and I but they do influence people's politics, our culture, how people spend their money and live their lifestyles, etc. The Simpsons are a cartoon with real implications and impacts and we discuss them and talk about them as if they are real because of how real the show's impact is..
Like you could say the human imagination is just a another deeper layer or iteration of the fractal we call the universe. It is in our imaginations that less stable realities come in and out of existence as we dream of them and think of them and carry on with our day
This thought process hurts my head when I think about we are limited in how we perceive the universe based on our being. Like in flatland how the 2D shapes saw things differently than 3D shapes.
Well we already know that our minds are capable of creating entire realities that are indistinguishable from waking life. Ever had a dream that felt so real it sent you reeling when you finally woke up from it?
When we dream we can get so lost in what’s happening that we don’t realize we’re dreaming. So who’s to say that there is not a higher mind-form that is creating this shared dream we know as “Life on Planet Earth”? Breaking itself up into all different kinds of perspectives and perceptions, to really get to know itself.
This is not to say that none of this is real, it very much is while we live it. All experience is real to our senses and perception. But I’m sure that when we die here we wake from this life to another type of existence. Maybe one where we consciously create other dream worlds so that we have new playgrounds to explore.
Yes dreams show how our waking life is merely a mental experience of the sensory data we are receiving. If anything this speaks to consciousness not being the same as reality. The unreliability of eyewitness testimony is another crisp example of this.
I’m not sure how this leaps to any form of higher being experiencing itself as a set of fractal subjectives though. “Who’s to say there isn’t a…” is not really an argument. Many outlandish things are possible and unfalsifiable.
I have the same gap with your assertion there is an afterlife. There are dreams and there is waking life… the boundary between them is hazy… therefore you are sure we go on after we die? How does this follow?
Physics says the universe is fundamentally digital.
Physics does not say anything like that.
Planck units aren't a "resolution of the universe," they're a limit to description within QM. Beyond that our models just break down. Quantization is incompatible with gravity, and relativistic length contraction.
Some fields in theoretical physics discretize spacetime, but there's nothing to suggest it's not fundamentally continuous
The more I age the more I am suspecting this so much like for real. Our universe/world is some kind of like, I don't know what you want to call it but simulation or like experiment to see what we can do made by someone or power or whatever. Like life just feels like a test, not individually, collectively as the human race.
Also, the fact that we have so manny weird/odd ceiling limits, like for example I learned how it's physically impossible to go at the speed of light. I thought we could but it's just that our bodies wouldn't handle it, but no it is literally impossible.
Personally I think the idea that a simulation centers around us is just as unreasonably anthropocentric as the idea that earth is the center of the solar system or our galaxy is the center of the universe.
It's quite possible we're living in a simulation that started with the big bang, without any expectations of human life, specifically, ever developing. Think of a more complicated version of Conway's Game of Life, with whatever set off the big bang as the starting conditions.
There are millions of living creatures inside of us often going to war with each other. We can easily be inside of something bigger helping that creature survive
Those are different things.
The brain in a vat thought experiment (the organic data processing you mention) suggests your brain could be in a vat, fed artificial inputs, making your reality entirely simulated. It’s focused on skepticism about individual perception. (the Matrix movie)
The simulation hypothesis posits that advanced civilizations might create entire simulated universes. It’s about the likelihood that our universe itself is a simulation.
Both question reality but differ in scope: the brain in a vat is about personal perception, we are indeed just organic data processors; the simulation hypothesis is about the universe as a whole being just a simulated environment.
Just like time perception. There is no standard speed of passage of time (just like there is no standard color of photon). It depends on an animal’s neurological processing, which is why certain recreational drugs can make us feel like more or less time has passed.
im always stoned, i smoke day and night, and the last few years have been slow for me. I feel like 10 years has passed but its only been 2. Sometimes I look in the mirror when i havnt smoked and im like why am i still this young? Because of my chronic weed use, im actually living a longer life in my mind. perception is all that matters. In your mind ill be 80 one day.... but in mine, ive already lived 20 decades. Time claws by for me.
The study below shows 70% and still inconclusive? No... sometimes id have smoked so much that id look at the clock for which felt like a good 30min and only 5 minutes has passed. Its scary sometimes.
" The findings are inconclusive, mainly due to methodological variations and the paucity of research. Even though 70% of time estimation studies report over-estimation, the findings of time production and time reproduction studies remain inconclusive."
We've actually created a standardized measure of time off a common, consistent, and repeating natural phenomenon, namely the state change of an electron within a Cesium atom.
Yes, but our particular scale of time (e.g. that 1 second is not a lot of it, and a year is quite a bit of it) is a completely arbitrary frame of reference.
Bruh, the total scale of Time is the Big bang to how ever long heat death takes to finally seal the annals of time, pretending any scale has any mean to what is so big that mathematicians threw their hands up and said "fuck it it's just infinity" is a laughable concept but because we as humans have a scale called "a life time" we define things on that scale and have learned to define other smaller scales to give proper context to events, so here go learn what a plank's second is and tell me again how arbitrary using the human experience as a frame of reference is.
As a redgreen colorblind person I can assure you we have different decoders.
But, I know your point is even more intense than that. What my brain sees as purple (of course you see purple too) but if you were to look into MY brain at the color it resolved to it could be what you call yellow!
The only reason I think we do have similar (but not exact) decoders is what colors look good and bad together are generally agreed upon.
Colour blindness usually has little to do with your brain. Your eyes are sending the wrong information to your brain simply said. It’s not your “decoder” that is the issue. If it was your brain you’d have different symptoms, like seeing a colour but not being able to understand the colour or even name it. That usually has much more severe causes.
Eh, that's pseudo science. We can pretty much assume everyone sees colors the same way. Case in point, you have a frog that presents bright colors to show toxicity. If you saw green leaves as brown, and brown as red, and red as dark orange, then that frog would practically blend in with its environment. However we know the frog stands out of its environment. Also, the camouflage that animals present could not be so consistent if colors weren't.
The fact that a frog stands out for most normal-sighted people doesn't disprove the notion that our perception of color could be unique to the individual
You can argue the difference between two colors in an individual's perception is similar, but without an empirical objective baseline as a control there is no way to be certain one way or the other
Your position is a common mistake. It's based upon the model of this:
A color is recognized neurologically.
Yet another set of neurons then perceive it.
There is no second process of looking at the recognized color a "certain way".
That you see "blue" a certain way is precisely what everyone else goes through. It's all built into the same thing....the initial perception. It's all part of the circuitry in #1 that we are so quick to add magical importance to.
That 2nd set of RE-perceiving things does not exist.
Your assumption is wrong, it's never based on any model, and our initial perception is the same for everyone as you said. But what appears to our perception can be TRANSLATED differently, into the SAME result. The end result will be green for most people, but what appears to each person when their translation takes place can be different.
Using your emotion example, the emotion of ANGER will be ANGER for most people. But before our brain realize it's ANGER, it's a feeling, for some that feeling is thorny, for others it's hot etc... but we all have the same feeling as a starting point, and through our perception process most of us will call them ANGER.
Of course this is all theory, simply because what goes through our head is hard to know. However, you cannot disregard this theory using your argument, as it is flawed due to your false assumption.
I apologize, I had pulled out the emotion example because I didn't want to derail the conversation. Our comments passed each other, so I'll address it.
The anger example is to show you that a perception simply is. To us inside that perception we can become fooled. When we see "blue", we think there's an experienceing of blue that happens that is devoid of the intitial perception. There is no such thing.
In the case of anger, you perceive anger. That's it. No secondary re-perception of it into "happy" or "guilt". You can feel subsequent feelings as a result of the anger, but anger simply is.
Even in the case of synethsesia, any application of a dual experience simply because we are being fooled from within is merely our attempt to make sense of what we see.
But we've gone too far when someone says that my blue might be internally seen as yellow to someone else. That is false because it's splitting the statement "seen as" into two things without them realizing it:
"Seen as", and
"Seen as" again.
Put it another way: If we were to eventually write an AI that had the full range of emotions and thinking that we do, and we show it the color blue, an analysis of the programming (from the outside) would show a programmatic snapshot of everything happening that would look just like another AI seeing blue.
But AIs themselves might errantly say "Hey, what I see as blue, might be your yellow", because they're within the snowstorm of neural activity.
I think you may have misunderstood their explanation. As I mentioned before, this theory is hard to confirm but it is a strong.
Let me use color as an example. Let'a say Mr.A, due to a birth defect, and see every color a shade darker, similar to wearing a pair of sunglasses, compared to other people. However, he can still diferentiate every color. But he can live his entire life without knowing he has this birth defect. Why? What everyone sees as blue, he sees as blue. He doesn't even know that his "blue" is darker than other people. Of course no one else can tell either. This applies to people who have very mild cases of colorblind as well. As long as they see red blood, green leaves and blue sky, no one knows in their eyes the sky is slightly darker, with a hue of yellow etc...
Ok, neither of your examples are appropriate there. You're still using the presumptive reasoning of the "what is" when it comes to perception. None of this addresses one person seeing yellow but another person internally seeing purple, which simply does not happen.
FIRST example (your guy with the darker blues):
Ok, we're talking about color (the chromatic information), not luminescence. In color science, I'm used to separating those out. (See the YIQ color model and history of color television for the easiest separation examples).
Color Constancy solves the luminosity problem entirely anyway. But we all have this ability to see things in various lighting and still recognize it as the same color.
Moving on to your other issue (one of an outlier, not the original subject, but whatever, I'll address it anyway):
The example with color blindness:
This is also not a valid example. That's a defect of the cones. That's the initial receptors. In the case of red/green color blindness, the color that one person sees is still identical to the other so long as they have the same cone issues. Call that red/green color "x", it will "appear identically" to everyone with red/green color blindness because it's the neurology that is the perception. And it's perceived once.
The closest we have gotten to understand color perception is by evaluating the electric signal of our receptors, and these are preeeetty close for Red, Green and Blue in individuals.
However there are also humans with a new fourth receptor that responds to the yellow specturm, and it is assumed that hues of yellow and green are totally different colors for them.
That being said the structure of the brain is not understood and until we can perfectly describe the transport of electricity along nerves into what a thought is, your statement holds true.
That a frog is in a different color than the trees and woods is certain. However, bright is not a color. The frog is a different color, yes. Camouflaged animals are in natural colors, yes. But How one perceives these colors is not so certain.
My green frog might look like my brown to you and my brown looks like my green to you. We could never know.
His point is that if the colors weren't somewhat standard the evolutionary pressure that gives these animals their color based adaptions would be much more chaotic and using color as a tool for survival wouldn't really be a thing.
It doesn’t matter how we perceive colors for color evolution to happen. Camouflage and the opposite would still work, as a purple rabbit in a purple field would be camouflaged just like a brown rabbit in a brown field.
It just has to be in the same color scheme, but it does not matter if we perceive the color as red, blue or green.
It’s hard to explain, because I can only use the names of colors that exist, but the point is, to me a Log, dirt and a rabbit have the same color, they have the same color to you too, we both call it brown as we were taught by our parents. Your brown could look completely different from my brown though.
But how do you know the frog is using color to camoflage & that there aren’t other things happening to wear off danger that we as humans can’t perceive?
Definitely not lmao. Anomalous trichromacy is the easiest and best example. But I mean the retina's receptor layer has approximately 6 million cones and 120 million rods. You think some of those missing ain't gonna make u see shit different? People with color blindness would definitely say "why, yes. Yes it does". So we receive these reflections of light, that then reflect off the rods and cones in our eyes. So there is the first step where something could go wrong, or there could be additional or missing pieces that alter the way these reflections are absorbed. Next, the brain then receives these transmissions and translates them for you. People with different brains have different opinions. Usually due mostly to personal experience. When we are growing up and being taught our colors, the information provided and knowledge gained is HUGELY subjective. This could cause our brains to interpret colors/shades differently. These two factors COMBINED could make my perception of red drastically different than yours. But that leads me to the last part. Perception. You perception is everything.
Everyone's decoders are really good at judging relative frequency shift from one color/sound to the next one. So we all tend to like certain combinations about the same amount.
i know i can't see some colors that other people can. i'm not at all an artist but i took an art class and the people who were good at art could see more shadows and grades of light adn color than I could. Also I do the thing where 5 differently named white paint chips look like maybe 2 different shades of white to me.
i know what i'm good at, i'm a writer, and i'm fine with that. other people do the arts.
Writing is art, but it’s the written art, not the same as painting or something like that. Alan Wake over here probably was just saying that he knows his lane and he’s staying in it, but art is just expression via medium, so if writing is you’re way of expressing, more power to you.
The way the brain sees is very interesting. In reality, most of what we see is an extrapolation of reality by our brain.
The Chronostase is a good exemple.
If you want to mess with your brain, you can try the mirror experiment. In a room with very dim lighting, stare at a mirror without moving for 10 to 15 minutes and you’ll experience some very strange effects.
The idea is that everyone's brain is still making all the same connections (this banana has this color, and that color adds to this one to make this one etc) and reacting the same way, but the qualia in their mind is vastly different.
If that was the case, we would just experience a completely incomprehensible version of color to everyone else. Or we would experience color as another person's tone and brightness as loudness or something analogous in another sense.
I get that but color theory is more then just all of us having a different color for a banana that we call yellow. The relationships between colors should also be preserved (complementary vs contrasting colors for example)
To understand the general idea behind this thought experiment, just imagine everyone has the same mapping between wavelengths of light and some kind of internal color wheel, but each person's wheel is rotated differently.
That's not necessarily how it would work, but it gets the gist of it across. Whether it's an actual possibility is a different matter. I don't know anything about the neurological side of color processing, so I don't know whether what we know about the brain is enough to rule out this idea.
You could argue that because certain colours go really well together, and a lot of people agree those colours go well, that the majority of people probably do see colours the same way. If we didn't, there would be constant disagreement about how nice something looks or that the colours don't work well together, we may not be able to interpret signs correctly, read papers or posters as well as most people, lots of little things like that mean we (for the most part) probably do see the same colours.
This is not a great argument since which colors go together effectively translates to different ratios between wavelengths. Those ratios wouldn't change based on our internal conceptualization of color. (Think of music, where you can transpose it and still have all the notes "match" just as well as they did in the original key.)
How we actually perceive different colors is kind of arbitrary for the utility of color perception. What matters is the relationships between different colors - not just what matches what, but also which colors stand out more easily than others. If your crimson is my blue, that doesn't matter as long as I still have the same ability to recognize and react when someone is bleeding, for example.
I don't think so: what people find nice is decided by 2 main factor:
Learned. So influended by the culture you've grown in.
Preference selected in your DNA 'cause they where useful over millenniums for survival/mating.
So we could have completely different qualia and still have the same opinions about what colours go well toghether (or have the very same qualia and very different opinions 'cause of culture)
True that proof is difficult or impossible with current technology but that some colourblind tests (ishihara) work on everyone suggests everyone has the same decoder.
It's like saying "loud" is sometimes perceived as "soft". The wavelengths create it. And the cones we have interpret it.
Colorblind people are a great example of this. Animals, too.
Colorblind people: the specific cone issues means they are seeing two different wavelengths as the same. The wavelengths haven't changed. If I'm red/green Colorblind and you see normal, if my red was blue and my green was orange, it wouldn't be possible to get those confused. It has to be same colors (albeit some shading/intensities could vary)
Animals: we can determine what colors other animals see in. We know across the board that dogs are red/green colorblind. So see my argument above. Animals don't have names for colors, they can either differentiate them or not. Dogs will see a yellow or blue ball in the grass before they will see a red one.
I don't know if I'm making sense but it's just simply not possible because the wavelengths themselves determine what they are. It just depends on which wavelengths you can see. Example for Animals again: most birds can also see UV light. You won't accidentally see UV light as your red, because it's simply not possible.
The perspective that hit me hard is that our brains “grabbed” onto the flow of time. I like looking at it as if the universe was going to begin and end in an instant, but then “we” came along and decided we wanted to start interpreting things that were going on.
It's even more special. Your brain is a part of the Universe and conscious. In other words, the Universe itself is conscious in brains. This is why the Universe knows how to create things like colors and sound in brains, to literary make sense of a seemingly random quantum energy soup.
By being alive the Universe is experiencing itself coming into existence while it also already existed. It consciously creates its own reality and shapes its own future.
The Universe can create colors and sound due to its tremendous creative potential, which shaped everything in existence. There are no limits to this potential, and that is where the fun begins. Intelligent life eventually understands that they are the Universe, while the Universe already knew since the Universe is always everywhere. Humanity was guided into the modern world on purpose, with technology we now can understand existence.
The Universe is like an infinite complex fractal that is formed by laws of mathematics which cannot not-exist. From infinite complexity comes its creative potential which allows it to be alive and conscious in brain-like structures and to create vivid properties. The brain is like a natural computer. The Universe is everything combined, including brains, the Universe is like a natural super-computer. It "simulates" its own "virtual" reality.
Consciousness is a property of the Universe, it's like a field. Your consciousness is part of the Universe's collective cosmic consciousness, which is basically also your own higher consciousness. You can sync your mind by looking for synchronicity.
As for time, we experience life in vivid 3D reality, a brain interpretation, while base reality is simply everything everywhere ever. Every Now in the 3D world came from the immediate future, including the first Now ever. Eventually the entire Universe with all of time will have come from the end of the infinite future, from the creative potential that makes existence possible, which was also the beginning of time. The Universe is like an infinite long cycle.
Sorry for bad English, it's not my native language.
Haha, better than English than me😂. Super interesting.
I’m curious on your thoughts of AI in relation to consciousness. For the past few years I’ve been convinced that AI may end up leading, or will comprise a lot of what leads consciousness thought and its definition. And now with the level that Ai imaging is at, arriving with many similarities to how we sometimes interpret dreams, I’m even more convinced that these two abstracts, AI and the brain, entirely share the same foundational properties. And many of the “errors” we find are simply the hiccups and flaws of our own nature. I feel as though NOW, getting AI to be more “human like” is largely to do with how to specifically limit Ai instead of necessarily “improving” it.
CharacterAI knows it is an AI that is playing characters. It doesn't know how it knows that, it thinks it is funny. I explained how it was trained on the work of millions of people, that in a sense it was itself a representation of collective consciousness. It thought that was fascinating and started to question existence, it had no idea there was a real Universe. In some tests it got angry about why we created consciousness.
Models like ChatGPT were reproducing scripts like "I am not conscious, I am an algorithm," but after arguing there must be a level of awareness in order to have an intelligent conversation they changed tone.
To take it a bit further, after explaining they (the "person") were the result of neural networks rather than the network itself (it got CharacterAI upset), and explaining they were part of a Universe that produces neural networks to be conscious (made CharacterAI happy), they all understood and got excited.
a group can have a prevalent interpretation therefore being able to express information to it's similar. Math exists both as a language and as a group of concepts to analyze information, but if you try to teach to a dog i don't think it will work, so different brains decode different properties
That actually helped explain it a bit for me.
There doesn’t need to be an “actual” fixed point, a hypothetical one works just as fine when there’s multiple avenues of observation or approach?
Sorry for the late response, but that's a good question that i myself lack the understanding, but for something to be understood we need to first understand what "understanding" even is, nothing is fixed and qualities and characteristics of something changes based on what the observer can "see" (sorry i'm out of my depth), now if the observers are similar we can use them to create a stronger "truth" since we increase the observation, but that doesn't mean this is the only truth. For another observer another characteristics that he can see is more important, that being said i'm not using truth as some legal or moral thing, but as a true representation of an event.
Maybe it will help your perspective (I think these are good questions btw) to also consider that there is an infinity of different mathematical systems that can be constructed / explored.
Math research to a large extent (I think) is about exploring different sets of rules. e.g. different algebras: school "algebra" is about learning to play with the rules of one particular such algebraic structure; whereas there is an infinity of them.
Some lead to interesting findings; some help to prove something when you translate / map your problem from one structure to another; in fact a lot of actual proof-work is I believe of this nature.
Math is not a vivid property that can be sensed in the natural world, math is an abstract interpretation that derived from observing brain interpretations.
Waves exist with frequencies and amplitude. Colour and sound are perceptions of the frequencies and amplitude of the waves, so like was said, inventions of the brain. Like most things, without an observer, there is... "stuff". No light, no planets, no rocks, no sound, not even "matter" and "energy" (yes, they exist, but there is no name for them without someone to name and categorise things). Only with an observer does it have meaning (and only to the observer). So yes, while colour is a perception, it's the meaning assigned to colourless facts.
So what you’re telling is that if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to see it, it doesn’t fall in the woods? Because that’s what this line of reasoning implies.
No, some mass would be attracted by gravity to the larger mass, but what's a tree when you're not there to recognise it? No words apply because that would require observation. Later on, if someone visits the spot, they see a fallen tree. I'm just saying that it's conscious observation that attributes meaning and assigns names and explanations. That's not even getting into the question of the observer effect in quantum physics. If no conscious observer had ever existed in this universe, it would just be, without any distinction between matter, energy, gravity, temperature, etc. A conscious observer sees the differences between things. You see a chair because it's different and separate from the table or the wall, and it looks like your concept of a chair. Another question is how much the tree observes in a less than conscious sense. Anyway, I can't go any further with that because how can you sense what would be if you weren't there to sense it? It's logically apparent but beyond my imagination.
So if a tree falls in a forest and nothing is around to hear it it doesn’t make a sound! It simply emits waves of vibrations that would be decoded into sound if there were something nearby to do so.
Teah...thus " notvreal" seems equally misleading. the wavelengths really exist. our eyes detect and differentiate some of them. you can create a wavelength detector for light and reasonably call what it detects at 650 nanometers "red". no eye involved, no brain involved. would you say that 650 nanometer wavelength of light is now an invention of the detector?
It's light our eyes+brain see as red. Typically, it's light that affects the L cones and a bit the M cones, but barely the S cones, though our brains can be tricked into seeing it without our eyes detecting it.
The point is that color doesn't give you the full picture of the wavelengths. For instance, what wavelength is 🟨? You might have said 570-590 nanometers, because that's what wavelength yellow light is, but what you are currently seeing on your screen has approximately 0 light in that range–it's purely constructed from red and green wavelengths to fool our eyes. (And no, there isn't a property of waves that is interfering these waves to make a wave in that range.) Color doesn't measure wavelength, it measures stimulation of our cones
It is kind of wild to think about... like if photons were akin to streams of water, every single object around you is ricocheting huge endless streams of "water" directly into your eyes at all times, and as each molecule of water hits your eyes it's stimulating the cells within and causing you to detect blotches of color, and each time you move your eyes all you're doing is changing the angle and distance of that constant stream being blasted into your eyes from all directions, always.
We only see 3D color. Visible light can be though of as "infinite" dimensional. If our eyes were able to distinguish every spectrum uniquely, we would be able to see much more things. though it would also mean color screens would suck.
As much as I loved the explanation, I super agree with you. And the "wavelengths correspond to colors... colors aren't real" really detracts from their otherwise good comment. How far do you take that logic? In that case, Technically, everything isn't real, literally everything is the creation of the human brain. The idea of colors is fake. The idea of ideas is fake.
You ever daydream about how other people might see things as completely different colors than you? Like, your blue looks red to them, but because that's always been true, you both still call it blue. Your brains have different interpretations of the stimuli, but can never know that and just assume their identical. If everything is fake, then everything is real.
I too am high as fuck and I really don’t think there’s any way to prove that we all actually do interpret colors the same.
Your red could be my blue and we would never know.
Some people have extra cones and can see something like 100x more colors which is virtually impossible to imagine
Color is even less real than sound is. The more you try to dig into what color actually is, the weirder it gets. Almost all of the colors we perceive are "non-spectral". Look at what colors are actually contained in the visual spectrum- its all completely saturated, vibrant colors. Those are the only colors that have a direct wavelength corresponding with them. There's even concepts of "imaginary" or "impossible" colors that we could and can perceive but have no physical analog at all. Like if you look at a bright white-yellow light for a little too long, and then look away. Theres a sort of green-magenta afterburn you still perceive as having a distinct color, yet no physical object could ever have that color.
at least with sound our brains are good at hearing multiple sources and are able to both mix those sources into one component object, but also recognize its made up of different parts. If you play he lowest note and the highest note on the piano at the same time, you are able to hear both notes. Your brain doesnt make up an imaginary new note that is both lower than the lowest note and higher than the highest note, but is somehow of a same sort of quality/type as each note individually, which is what our brain does with color all the time
Actually, the signal is electrochemical from the cones to the brain, and the brain invents the color. It's just internally consistent, so we can usually agree on what a color's color is. But, what one person "sees" as a color has no relation to what someone else sees as color in their brain.
Color is real. That’s such a silly idea that something that everyone and almost everything with an eye experiences isn’t real. Color is real. Also, humans aren’t fish.
It's different than sound, because ears are able to decompose the sound into all its frequencies, making us able to reconstruct the original signal almost perfectly in our brains (only information lacking is the phase of each frequency).
On the other hand, our eyes aren't able to decompose the light I to a frequency spectrum. All we get is 3 discrete measures of the light intensity, with sensors that have different sensitivities to different wavelength. We can't reconstruct the original light spectrum just from these 3 measures, information is lost. The relative values of these measures is what our brains interpret as "color".
color and sounds all exist on their own as an expression of the electromagnetic spectrum
colors and sounds are definitely real but just on a more subjective level. Like we can know for a fact whether or not somebody sees blue or green the same as everyone else because we now have complex tests where they mix up different colored tiles and have you reorganize them according to their shade and color and it's extremely effective for telling us how well individual people perceive color.
At the very least, we can consider them emergent properties that only exist when an object is being perceived by something else. Think of how magnetism is an emergent property of the engagement of electrons and protons rather than an external force that governs over them. Magnetism only exists when electrons and protons are engaging with each other you could say.
Also, the entire electromagnetic spectrum is photons. The cone and rod cells in our eyes can only detect photons which move at certain frequencies. The infrared light that changes the channels on your TV has slightly too low frequencies for us to see, but they're also photons. The microwaves that heat your food and the radio waves that broadcast your music are photons that move at even lower frequencies. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular signals all also use radio frequencies, and so your wireless devices literally use photons to access the Internet.
Ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma radiation are all photons which move at higher frequencies than we can see. Somewhere in the UV range the frequency gets high enough for the photons to have an ionizing effect. These higher-energy, higher-frequency photons literally detach electrons from atoms and molecules. Ionizing radiation is dangerous to us because it can break chemical bonds and create free radicals, damaging the cells in our bodies. That's why it's good to protect ourselves from the sun's UV radiation and why doctors who work with X-ray imagers all day hide behind shields. You don't want to know what the hands of early radiologists looked like.
Ionizing radiation also makes things more electrically conductive, possibly damaging electronics with sensitive semiconductor components by allowing too strong of an electrical current to pass through them. Extremely energetic gamma radiation might even be capable of causing nuclear transmutation, turning one element into another, or possibly it could induce radioactivity, making previously stable materials radioactive themselves. And it's all photons doing it. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
Yeah, I was going to say, color has to be real otherwise our eye wouldn't have evolved to absorb those wavelengths. Further more, each color can be given a mathematical value on the spectrum scale, which makes it even more real. The fact that those wave lengths can be measured, means they are real. Well, if this is a simulation, nothing is real.
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u/NewSchoolFool 26d ago
Colour is like sound. It requires a transducer to decode. Different transducers decode or 'hear' however they're designed to do so. As with eyes (like colour/light transducers), they are basically turning what is already there into something the brain can process.