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This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature. Crazy, weird, sure, but when you actually look at the rod and cone stru

This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature. Crazy, weird, sure, but when you actually look at the rod and cone structure that gives rise to color, there's no reason to think that more of these might not exist, and indeed some animals have different receptors, famously, the mantis shrimp has 12. Color occupies that weird junction between the subjective and objective, so we don't really have a way of working out what the subjective experience of new colors would actually be. Why this reminds me of color isn't so much the weird part, but the fact that color is a continuous surface. What would adding new colors do to the color space? Does the space remain two-dimensional or do new colors start blending a third dimension into the topology? I wish those mystics had access to spectrometers in Heaven.

dooglius 8y ago
You may be interested in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
mattigames 8y ago
Every sensory perception is just as subjective, for example sound also "occupies that weird junction between the subjective and objective" in that is how animals interpret the vibration of airwaves despite being thousand of other possible ways to interpret such vibrations; same with touch, smell, etc.
- 0_gravitas 8y ago
  I've always akin-ed sensory perception to a language interpreted to bytecode for the animal's OS, were just running a bunch of different OSs so our resulting bytecode is going to be varied.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Base sensory perception is way more subjective than objective. Two people will simply taste differently, and there's only so much you can do to bring legibility and objectivity to the table. The surface area of the physicality with the brain is too large. Color on the other hand is measurable and regular across humans to a far greater extent, such that we can measure with a fairly high degree of accuracy just how color-blind a person is. That's what's seductive about it. You don't have that with other aspects of sensory perception.
wittenator 8y ago
Just as a sidenote: In Computer Graphics (and according to Grassmann's law) colour is a three dimensional quantity.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  I had to dive pretty deep into Wikipedia in order to figure out how that works. I originally wanted to separate out hue from saturation, but all that does is oversimplify color. Here's the page that finally gave me the epiphany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV Scroll down a bit and look at the Notes section. Colors seem to have different shapes. Red occupies a corner of the cube. Cyan a whole edge. Trying to flatten the space by removing the lights and darks just doesn't work. Color is weird.
  - rubatuga 8y ago
    CIELAB ColorSpace is a better representation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space
    - vinceguidry 8y ago
      You're definitely right about that, but projecting the color space onto a cube and then seeing how it distorts everything has a certain visceral feel, like looking at the Mercator projection and seeing huge Greenland and tiny South America. You know all map projections are wrong, but the Mercator is wrong in a way that lays map projection distortion completely bare. Without seeing the cube viz in my link, I'm likely to look at CIELAB and say, "oh, sure, but you can just take out the brightness and then it's all flat again." The cube makes it clear what happens when you do that.
pmjordan 8y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans Although I have my doubts that this is what the mystics you're referring to are talking about.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  I believe that tetrachromats see the same colors as everyone else, just with higher resolution. This was, at least, the conclusion of the experiment in the linked article that identified a functional tetrachromat.
  - smcameron 8y ago
    How do you even know that "everyone else" experiences colors the same as each other? How do you know for example that it is not the case that what I experience as "red" is what, if you experienced it the way I did, you would call "blue"? You can't really get inside another person's experience.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      Everyone experiences the same colors in the sense that sunlight has a particular emissions spectrum, Earth's atmosphere has a particular absorption spectrum and light-scattering property, and any given viewable object has measurable properties for diffuse reflection, specular reflection, and its own emissions spectrum. If you point a measurement device at a particular point, you can get a histogram of light intensity over several frequency bands. A histogram with many narrow bands gives a more accurate profile of the measured light. The human eye usually has only three frequency bands: blue, green, and red. They overlap. They are not always the same width, or centered on the same frequency. The width and center of the red bar is defined on the X chromosome, so some people with two X chromosomes from lineages that see red differently have a fourth histogram bar, and therefore have better ability to distinguish between similar color profiles at the red end of the visible spectrum. Some people with only one X chromosome have a defective copy of the gene encoding for the red histogram bar, and thus only have two bars in their histogram. So while color is objectively the same, different eyes--connected to different visual cortexes--quantize and encode color information differently. Each brain may interpret the data in the color channels differently to establish an individual's world model. What I see as "red" is unique to me. If someone were to bridge my brain to someone else's, my "red" would not match to someone else's "blue". My color channels would be as their octarine, smaudre, and refulgine--three completely different color channels that they have never experienced before. But if our optic nerves were linked, rather than somewhere deeper in the brain, I would see their red as my red, even if their eye reads reds slightly differently because of a minor difference in their X chromosomes. The translation layer between raw visual data and personal worldmodel is not guaranteed, or even likely, to produce similar results.
lostphilosopher 8y ago
"It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple." - Terry Pratchett, _The Color of Magic_
arketyp 8y ago
Some females (due to the XX chromosome setup) are born with red cone receptors that are sensitive to sufficiently different ranges in the wavelength spectrum that they are in effect tetrachromats. I particularly remember reading somewhere that when asked how they experienced the world they had reported to often notice bad color matchings in the way people dress, I suppose much like it can sometimes be apparent that someone is red-green color blind by this same dressing queue. But a different kind of rod altogether, firing off some completely different signal, who knows what the experience would be like. Psychophysics is a mysterious junction indeed.
- groestl 8y ago
  There is a tetrachromatic painter who tries to visualize her experience for us common trichromatic people: https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/ https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/
- poopchute 8y ago
  From what I understand, a tetrachromat has (and expresses) the normal green cone, normal red cone, normal blue cone, as well as the cone associated with either protanomaly or deuteranomaly. With that in mind, it seems reasonable that there could exist a pentachromat that expresses all of these cones.
mattkrause 8y ago
More critically, the mantis shrimp doesn’t have opponency. In humans—-and most other animals—-the visual system represents color[0] using a relative system: is something redder than it is green? Bluer than it is yellow? To create this, neurons receive excitatory input from (e.g.) a red cone and inhibitory input from nearby green cones. This representation makes sense, given the cones’ spectral sensitivity, but it also makes some colors “impossible”. Since each color is essentially a point along these two axes, something can’t be blue and yellow at the same time, reddish green, or even some shades of “hyper-green”[1,2]. The mantis shrimp, near as we can tell, doesn’t have this sort of representation. The anatomical pathways don’t seem to be there, and some behavioral work with trained(!) mantis shrimp also suggests that they have independent color channels, and, as a result, their color sensitivity is actually not amazing. Interestingly, they may do something to “fake” color opponency: different receptor types are in different parts of the eye, and the shrimp ‘drags’ its eye across the scene to produce a sort of temporal context. That’s more than you probably wanted to know but...shrimp are neat. [0] To a first approximation, anyway. [1] There is a place called Reddish Green, which I assume is not invisible, but I’ve never been to Stockport, England. [2] More seriously, there are some tricks you can play to (briefly) perceive some of these impossible colors. The general approach is that you stare at something of one color, then quickly switch to looking at something of the opponent color. This “fatigues” (adapts) cells that signal the first color, so they provide less inhibitory input in response to the second color.
- hobs 8y ago
  A great talk about treating lazy eye with VR that discusses creating impossible colors by providing different inputs to different eyes (also just generally cool, discusses multiple methods to have the brain reset the disabling of one eye) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r1Tj5-F4XI&t=2875s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r1Tj5-F4XI&t=2875s
- andyjohnson0 8y ago
  I lived in Reddish for a while, about 25 years ago. I sometimes used to take a book and sit under the trees on Reddish Green to read. The grass was definitely just regular, visible, non-impossible-coloured grass :) https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4386822,-2.1639276,3a,62.9y,277.15h,86.87t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sV1OSAm5j5cjEurZXkszkvQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4386822,-2.1639276,3a,62.9y,...
zepolen 8y ago
Imagine you're looking at wall with 3 colored circles, red green blue - something happens and you can now see a fourth circle that wasn't there before. You've experienced it already... by shining a black light on ultraviolet pigment. It's the same principle behind color blind test patterns: https://cdna.allaboutvision.com/i/eye-exam-2017/color-blind-red-green-330x330@3x.png https://cdna.allaboutvision.com/i/eye-exam-2017/color-blind-... A color blind person sees one color - a normal vision person sees two.
ZeroFries 8y ago
It's not clear what the relation between sensory input and the experience generated actually is. For a crude analogy, one might think the client sending a certain JSON structure is what leads to a certain database update, but the server can alter that structure in arbitrary ways. You can also get database updates without sending any JSON at all. We should be looking at the server, not the client, to figure out how the database updates work. Similarly, a brain can probably generate arbitrary experiences in qualia-space (although probably dependent on the neural structure to do so).
- TaupeRanger 8y ago
  I think this is a point many people don't appreciate (or don't want to). The nature of "qualia space" or "experience space" is truly mysterious and we really have no clue what its nature is. We can draw increasingly precise correlations between brain states and reported experiences, but the question of why those correlations hold and how the two things interact is very puzzling. What aspects of reality are off limits to us due to our limited space of possible experiences? A rat will never have the experience of understanding prime numbers. What are we missing?
wes-k 8y ago
At a meditation retreat we did some form of “shanmukhi mudra” and I definitely saw some of the most intense colors of my life. I think the combination of sensory deprivation and pressure on the eyelids is what did the trick.
JackFr 8y ago
What makes it mystical is that there is color as a physical phenomenon (which relies on rods and cones etc.), and color as a subjective experience which occurs entirely in the thought space of consciousness. Typically the mapping between the two is relatively standard and static, but imagine a situation in which your consciousness registers something which has not correlate in the physical world. That doesn't make it any less real to your consciousness.
BurningFrog 8y ago
> This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature. There is infinitely more wavelength info even in the visible light of nature than the crude three dimensional mapping our eyes can present to our brains. One simple example: We can't distinguish green light from mixed blue and yellow light. So my point, which I know I'm annoying slow to get to, is that we're nowhere near seeing "the colors of nature". For sound we do much better.
c3534l 8y ago
To the color thing, I've met more than one person who has taken LSD and seen new colors. Rational and level-headed people otherwise.

dooglius 8y ago

You may be interested in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color

mattigames 8y ago

Every sensory perception is just as subjective, for example sound also "occupies that weird junction between the subjective and objective" in that is how animals interpret the vibration of airwaves despite being thousand of other possible ways to interpret such vibrations; same with touch, smell, etc.

0_gravitas 8y ago
I've always akin-ed sensory perception to a language interpreted to bytecode for the animal's OS, were just running a bunch of different OSs so our resulting bytecode is going to be varied.
vinceguidry 8y ago
Base sensory perception is way more subjective than objective. Two people will simply taste differently, and there's only so much you can do to bring legibility and objectivity to the table. The surface area of the physicality with the brain is too large. Color on the other hand is measurable and regular across humans to a far greater extent, such that we can measure with a fairly high degree of accuracy just how color-blind a person is. That's what's seductive about it. You don't have that with other aspects of sensory perception.

wittenator 8y ago

Just as a sidenote: In Computer Graphics (and according to Grassmann's law) colour is a three dimensional quantity.

vinceguidry 8y ago
I had to dive pretty deep into Wikipedia in order to figure out how that works. I originally wanted to separate out hue from saturation, but all that does is oversimplify color. Here's the page that finally gave me the epiphany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV Scroll down a bit and look at the Notes section. Colors seem to have different shapes. Red occupies a corner of the cube. Cyan a whole edge. Trying to flatten the space by removing the lights and darks just doesn't work. Color is weird.
- rubatuga 8y ago
  CIELAB ColorSpace is a better representation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    You're definitely right about that, but projecting the color space onto a cube and then seeing how it distorts everything has a certain visceral feel, like looking at the Mercator projection and seeing huge Greenland and tiny South America. You know all map projections are wrong, but the Mercator is wrong in a way that lays map projection distortion completely bare. Without seeing the cube viz in my link, I'm likely to look at CIELAB and say, "oh, sure, but you can just take out the brightness and then it's all flat again." The cube makes it clear what happens when you do that.

pmjordan 8y ago

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans Although I have my doubts that this is what the mystics you're referring to are talking about.

whatshisface 8y ago
I believe that tetrachromats see the same colors as everyone else, just with higher resolution. This was, at least, the conclusion of the experiment in the linked article that identified a functional tetrachromat.
- smcameron 8y ago
  How do you even know that "everyone else" experiences colors the same as each other? How do you know for example that it is not the case that what I experience as "red" is what, if you experienced it the way I did, you would call "blue"? You can't really get inside another person's experience.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Everyone experiences the same colors in the sense that sunlight has a particular emissions spectrum, Earth's atmosphere has a particular absorption spectrum and light-scattering property, and any given viewable object has measurable properties for diffuse reflection, specular reflection, and its own emissions spectrum. If you point a measurement device at a particular point, you can get a histogram of light intensity over several frequency bands. A histogram with many narrow bands gives a more accurate profile of the measured light. The human eye usually has only three frequency bands: blue, green, and red. They overlap. They are not always the same width, or centered on the same frequency. The width and center of the red bar is defined on the X chromosome, so some people with two X chromosomes from lineages that see red differently have a fourth histogram bar, and therefore have better ability to distinguish between similar color profiles at the red end of the visible spectrum. Some people with only one X chromosome have a defective copy of the gene encoding for the red histogram bar, and thus only have two bars in their histogram. So while color is objectively the same, different eyes--connected to different visual cortexes--quantize and encode color information differently. Each brain may interpret the data in the color channels differently to establish an individual's world model. What I see as "red" is unique to me. If someone were to bridge my brain to someone else's, my "red" would not match to someone else's "blue". My color channels would be as their octarine, smaudre, and refulgine--three completely different color channels that they have never experienced before. But if our optic nerves were linked, rather than somewhere deeper in the brain, I would see their red as my red, even if their eye reads reds slightly differently because of a minor difference in their X chromosomes. The translation layer between raw visual data and personal worldmodel is not guaranteed, or even likely, to produce similar results.

lostphilosopher 8y ago

"It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple." - Terry Pratchett, _The Color of Magic_

arketyp 8y ago

Some females (due to the XX chromosome setup) are born with red cone receptors that are sensitive to sufficiently different ranges in the wavelength spectrum that they are in effect tetrachromats. I particularly remember reading somewhere that when asked how they experienced the world they had reported to often notice bad color matchings in the way people dress, I suppose much like it can sometimes be apparent that someone is red-green color blind by this same dressing queue. But a different kind of rod altogether, firing off some completely different signal, who knows what the experience would be like. Psychophysics is a mysterious junction indeed.

groestl 8y ago
There is a tetrachromatic painter who tries to visualize her experience for us common trichromatic people: https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/ https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/
poopchute 8y ago
From what I understand, a tetrachromat has (and expresses) the normal green cone, normal red cone, normal blue cone, as well as the cone associated with either protanomaly or deuteranomaly. With that in mind, it seems reasonable that there could exist a pentachromat that expresses all of these cones.

mattkrause 8y ago

More critically, the mantis shrimp doesn’t have opponency. In humans—-and most other animals—-the visual system represents color[0] using a relative system: is something redder than it is green? Bluer than it is yellow? To create this, neurons receive excitatory input from (e.g.) a red cone and inhibitory input from nearby green cones. This representation makes sense, given the cones’ spectral sensitivity, but it also makes some colors “impossible”. Since each color is essentially a point along these two axes, something can’t be blue and yellow at the same time, reddish green, or even some shades of “hyper-green”[1,2]. The mantis shrimp, near as we can tell, doesn’t have this sort of representation. The anatomical pathways don’t seem to be there, and some behavioral work with trained(!) mantis shrimp also suggests that they have independent color channels, and, as a result, their color sensitivity is actually not amazing. Interestingly, they may do something to “fake” color opponency: different receptor types are in different parts of the eye, and the shrimp ‘drags’ its eye across the scene to produce a sort of temporal context. That’s more than you probably wanted to know but...shrimp are neat. [0] To a first approximation, anyway. [1] There is a place called Reddish Green, which I assume is not invisible, but I’ve never been to Stockport, England. [2] More seriously, there are some tricks you can play to (briefly) perceive some of these impossible colors. The general approach is that you stare at something of one color, then quickly switch to looking at something of the opponent color. This “fatigues” (adapts) cells that signal the first color, so they provide less inhibitory input in response to the second color.

hobs 8y ago
A great talk about treating lazy eye with VR that discusses creating impossible colors by providing different inputs to different eyes (also just generally cool, discusses multiple methods to have the brain reset the disabling of one eye) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r1Tj5-F4XI&t=2875s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r1Tj5-F4XI&t=2875s
andyjohnson0 8y ago
I lived in Reddish for a while, about 25 years ago. I sometimes used to take a book and sit under the trees on Reddish Green to read. The grass was definitely just regular, visible, non-impossible-coloured grass :) https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4386822,-2.1639276,3a,62.9y,277.15h,86.87t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sV1OSAm5j5cjEurZXkszkvQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4386822,-2.1639276,3a,62.9y,...

zepolen 8y ago

Imagine you're looking at wall with 3 colored circles, red green blue - something happens and you can now see a fourth circle that wasn't there before. You've experienced it already... by shining a black light on ultraviolet pigment. It's the same principle behind color blind test patterns: https://cdna.allaboutvision.com/i/eye-exam-2017/color-blind-red-green-330x330@3x.png https://cdna.allaboutvision.com/i/eye-exam-2017/color-blind-... A color blind person sees one color - a normal vision person sees two.

ZeroFries 8y ago

It's not clear what the relation between sensory input and the experience generated actually is. For a crude analogy, one might think the client sending a certain JSON structure is what leads to a certain database update, but the server can alter that structure in arbitrary ways. You can also get database updates without sending any JSON at all. We should be looking at the server, not the client, to figure out how the database updates work. Similarly, a brain can probably generate arbitrary experiences in qualia-space (although probably dependent on the neural structure to do so).

TaupeRanger 8y ago
I think this is a point many people don't appreciate (or don't want to). The nature of "qualia space" or "experience space" is truly mysterious and we really have no clue what its nature is. We can draw increasingly precise correlations between brain states and reported experiences, but the question of why those correlations hold and how the two things interact is very puzzling. What aspects of reality are off limits to us due to our limited space of possible experiences? A rat will never have the experience of understanding prime numbers. What are we missing?

wes-k 8y ago

At a meditation retreat we did some form of “shanmukhi mudra” and I definitely saw some of the most intense colors of my life. I think the combination of sensory deprivation and pressure on the eyelids is what did the trick.

JackFr 8y ago

What makes it mystical is that there is color as a physical phenomenon (which relies on rods and cones etc.), and color as a subjective experience which occurs entirely in the thought space of consciousness. Typically the mapping between the two is relatively standard and static, but imagine a situation in which your consciousness registers something which has not correlate in the physical world. That doesn't make it any less real to your consciousness.

BurningFrog 8y ago

> This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature. There is infinitely more wavelength info even in the visible light of nature than the crude three dimensional mapping our eyes can present to our brains. One simple example: We can't distinguish green light from mixed blue and yellow light. So my point, which I know I'm annoying slow to get to, is that we're nowhere near seeing "the colors of nature". For sound we do much better.

c3534l 8y ago

To the color thing, I've met more than one person who has taken LSD and seen new colors. Rational and level-headed people otherwise.