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> Better to go through life thinking that color perception is based on light frequencies wait, is it not? > evolution selecting more-fit individuals Do you

> Better to go through life thinking that color perception is based on light frequencies wait, is it not? > evolution selecting more-fit individuals Do you mean that it is simplification from "more-fit individuals are more likely but not certain to be selected"?

ysofunny 3y ago
it's the underlying physical phenomenon. but color is apparently more in your head (brain/mind) than in the light itself.
- smsm42 3y ago
  With that approach, literally everything is in your head. Physics itself exists nowhere but in the heads of humans. Even "light itself" exists in our heads - it's just a mental construct that we use to describe certain kinds of electromagnetic energy that our bodies react in certain ways to it. "Color" is no closer of farther to the underlying reality than "light".
  - ysofunny 3y ago
    > literally everything is in your head. yes it is. in some form. specifically, in model form. most things are modeled by our heads. our culture, for the most part, teaches all of us how to do this. so i'm saying color is a lot more like "flavor", or "texture" in a broad sense. the funkiest difference is that in the frequency viewpoint, color is linear. however in color theory it's a wheel!
mrguyorama 3y ago
>wait, is it not? What frequency is magenta?
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  "is based on light frequencies" is still true AFAIK, it is just not a nice 1:1 match of all colours to frequencies.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Well, we have three types of color "cones" in our retina, sensitive to different overlapping parts of the frequency spectrum, so the sensory input for any given color (mix of frequencies) of light is going to be those three types of cones all firing to varying degrees. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm... So, since magenta is a mix of red and blue, our "red" and "blue" cones will be most active, but also our "green" cones since its frequency sensitivity also includes red and blue. Some people have 4 types of color cones, not 3, and can therefore differentiate colors (mixes of light frequencies) that normal people can't. But, anyways, our brains neural inputs when seeing various colors does not directly correspond to how we perceive them.
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
We sense color by light frequency, but our actual perception of it (what color we think something is) is far more complex. Here's a classic illusion. The strawberries in this photo are not red. https://petapixel.com/2017/03/01/photo-no-red-pixels-fascinating-optical-illusion/ https://petapixel.com/2017/03/01/photo-no-red-pixels-fascina... This has to do with "color constancy" - we learn to see the same object in different lighting conditions as being the same color, even thought the light frequencies reflected may be different. We basically see what we predict we'll see. Evolution really acts on populations, not individuals, and often it's more about the environment changing than the population. Basically isolated populations of a species interbreed and (as a population) accumulate genetic changes as long as they are mostly benign. Then, once in a while ("punctuated equilibrium") something in the environment changes - food supply, pathogen, weather, etc, and some of these long-term accumulated changes (maybe collectively) suddenly become important and result in one population surviving/thriving better than another.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  "is based on light frequencies" is still true, right "is based directly on light frequencies with no other transformation" would be wrong
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    Yes - it's the light frequencies that let us differentiate colors, but we're not always going to perceive the same color each time our frequency detectors (cones) detect the same frequencies, since color perception is more about the whole scene and what we're experienced before. Another simple experiment that proves this is when you put on color tinted sunglasses or ski goggles - initially everything will seem color tinted, then after a while colors go back to normal. It's not just color - the whole idea that our eye works kind of like a camera and what we see is what is is really there is wrong. There have also been experiments done with prism-based inverting goggles that make everything look upside down... It turns out that after you've worn them for a while then everything flips the right way back up again and looks normal to you, even though the googles didn't change.
mkehrt 3y ago
I assume what they meant was that only some colors are pure frequencies, and most are more complex waveforms. As the sibling comment gestures at, "magenta" is the sum of a pure blue wave plus a pure red wave. "Color" also can refer to several different phenomena which were historically conflated in a way that made teasing apart certain observations difficult. It's a property of objects (apples are red), a property of light (lasers are red) and a property of perception (I see red).

ysofunny 3y ago

it's the underlying physical phenomenon. but color is apparently more in your head (brain/mind) than in the light itself.

smsm42 3y ago
With that approach, literally everything is in your head. Physics itself exists nowhere but in the heads of humans. Even "light itself" exists in our heads - it's just a mental construct that we use to describe certain kinds of electromagnetic energy that our bodies react in certain ways to it. "Color" is no closer of farther to the underlying reality than "light".
- ysofunny 3y ago
  > literally everything is in your head. yes it is. in some form. specifically, in model form. most things are modeled by our heads. our culture, for the most part, teaches all of us how to do this. so i'm saying color is a lot more like "flavor", or "texture" in a broad sense. the funkiest difference is that in the frequency viewpoint, color is linear. however in color theory it's a wheel!

mrguyorama 3y ago

>wait, is it not? What frequency is magenta?

matkoniecz 3y ago
"is based on light frequencies" is still true AFAIK, it is just not a nice 1:1 match of all colours to frequencies.
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Well, we have three types of color "cones" in our retina, sensitive to different overlapping parts of the frequency spectrum, so the sensory input for any given color (mix of frequencies) of light is going to be those three types of cones all firing to varying degrees. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm... So, since magenta is a mix of red and blue, our "red" and "blue" cones will be most active, but also our "green" cones since its frequency sensitivity also includes red and blue. Some people have 4 types of color cones, not 3, and can therefore differentiate colors (mixes of light frequencies) that normal people can't. But, anyways, our brains neural inputs when seeing various colors does not directly correspond to how we perceive them.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

We sense color by light frequency, but our actual perception of it (what color we think something is) is far more complex. Here's a classic illusion. The strawberries in this photo are not red. https://petapixel.com/2017/03/01/photo-no-red-pixels-fascinating-optical-illusion/ https://petapixel.com/2017/03/01/photo-no-red-pixels-fascina... This has to do with "color constancy" - we learn to see the same object in different lighting conditions as being the same color, even thought the light frequencies reflected may be different. We basically see what we predict we'll see. Evolution really acts on populations, not individuals, and often it's more about the environment changing than the population. Basically isolated populations of a species interbreed and (as a population) accumulate genetic changes as long as they are mostly benign. Then, once in a while ("punctuated equilibrium") something in the environment changes - food supply, pathogen, weather, etc, and some of these long-term accumulated changes (maybe collectively) suddenly become important and result in one population surviving/thriving better than another.

matkoniecz 3y ago
"is based on light frequencies" is still true, right "is based directly on light frequencies with no other transformation" would be wrong
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Yes - it's the light frequencies that let us differentiate colors, but we're not always going to perceive the same color each time our frequency detectors (cones) detect the same frequencies, since color perception is more about the whole scene and what we're experienced before. Another simple experiment that proves this is when you put on color tinted sunglasses or ski goggles - initially everything will seem color tinted, then after a while colors go back to normal. It's not just color - the whole idea that our eye works kind of like a camera and what we see is what is is really there is wrong. There have also been experiments done with prism-based inverting goggles that make everything look upside down... It turns out that after you've worn them for a while then everything flips the right way back up again and looks normal to you, even though the googles didn't change.

mkehrt 3y ago

I assume what they meant was that only some colors are pure frequencies, and most are more complex waveforms. As the sibling comment gestures at, "magenta" is the sum of a pure blue wave plus a pure red wave. "Color" also can refer to several different phenomena which were historically conflated in a way that made teasing apart certain observations difficult. It's a property of objects (apples are red), a property of light (lasers are red) and a property of perception (I see red).