What is a color image? An RGB image of pixels. Put another way, three images with red, blue and green filters. If Mary could only see black and white, reading

What is a color image? An RGB image of pixels. Put another way, three images with red, blue and green filters. If Mary could only see black and white, reading every book about color would not give her the experience of red. Like a child could read every book on cycling, but not know how to ride a bicycle. However if Mary could interface a color camera to her visual cortex, she would experience red over time. She could add a bigger spectrum of infra red and ultraviolet and be able to experience more than a normal human being. Similarly for cycling, if someone had VR goggles, and could simulate forces on their body, they would learn how to ride a bicycle. Words and writing are a highly compressed version of shared experiences. When we read "red apple fell from the tree", our minds are creating simulations of apple, tree, falling symbols from the raw experiences we've perceived. To understand an "apple" we have to see many different kinds of apples, taste them, touch them, feel their texture and weight, smell them, the sound when we bite them. All of that is compounded into the symbol "Apple". But we also disambiguate the internal symbol {apple} from the fruit Apple and company Apple.