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You and the GP have both missed the point. The reason green is part of objective reality has nothing to do with human's subjective experience (except insofar a

by lisper 2y ago

You and the GP have both missed the point. The reason green is part of objective reality has nothing to do with human's subjective experience (except insofar as it leads us to attach a label to this particular phenomenon). I can predict with very high accuracy what things other humans will identify as "green", and I can even build a machine that will do this as well. That fact is hard to account for if "Green is quite literally a figment of our imagination." It isn't. Green screens would still work and green detectors would still work even if there were no humans. The green-ness of green things isn't contingent on human perception any more than the roundness of round things is.

rolisz 2y ago
I don't think you can build a machine to identify what is considered green. My wife and I disagree about whether our baby daughters eyes are green or not. There's the joke that men see 16 colors and women see 24 million. Some cultures don't even have the word for green so people there will say something green and something blue is the same color. If you mean wavelength, that's a different story. But colors are not wavelengths
- lisper 2y ago
  > Some cultures don't even have the word for green That's news to me. Reference? BTW, the word "green" just means something different when applied to eyes than when applied to everything else. And green is a continuum so there is some fuzz around the edges. But if the task is to pick out green from a palate of half a dozen canonical colors I can definitely build a machine to do it with >99% accuracy.
  - rolisz 2y ago
    Source for culture without green: https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-seeing-green/ https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/... And I agree with you on the second part: everyone agrees the sky is blue and that grass is green. But the fuzzy edges are what kills it and I don't think you can define it rigorously except by drawing some arbitrary lines on the color wheel. Which will be just that: arbitrary
    - lisper 2y ago
      > But the fuzzy edges are what kills it Why? Everything has fuzzy edges. If you think fuzzy edges are fatal you won't be able to communicate about anything in the real world. Thanks for the reference, but it's not really what you claimed. It's not that they don't have a word for "green", it's that they don't have separate words for "green" and "blue", so they use the same word for both. That is not quite the same as not having a word for "green". You can see the same phenomenon in English. We have separate words for "orange" and "brown" even though they are actually the same hue just with different luminosities. Brown is just a dark orange.

by lisper 2y ago

rolisz 2y ago

I don't think you can build a machine to identify what is considered green. My wife and I disagree about whether our baby daughters eyes are green or not. There's the joke that men see 16 colors and women see 24 million. Some cultures don't even have the word for green so people there will say something green and something blue is the same color. If you mean wavelength, that's a different story. But colors are not wavelengths

lisper 2y ago
> Some cultures don't even have the word for green That's news to me. Reference? BTW, the word "green" just means something different when applied to eyes than when applied to everything else. And green is a continuum so there is some fuzz around the edges. But if the task is to pick out green from a palate of half a dozen canonical colors I can definitely build a machine to do it with >99% accuracy.
- rolisz 2y ago
  Source for culture without green: https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-seeing-green/ https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/... And I agree with you on the second part: everyone agrees the sky is blue and that grass is green. But the fuzzy edges are what kills it and I don't think you can define it rigorously except by drawing some arbitrary lines on the color wheel. Which will be just that: arbitrary
  - lisper 2y ago
    > But the fuzzy edges are what kills it Why? Everything has fuzzy edges. If you think fuzzy edges are fatal you won't be able to communicate about anything in the real world. Thanks for the reference, but it's not really what you claimed. It's not that they don't have a word for "green", it's that they don't have separate words for "green" and "blue", so they use the same word for both. That is not quite the same as not having a word for "green". You can see the same phenomenon in English. We have separate words for "orange" and "brown" even though they are actually the same hue just with different luminosities. Brown is just a dark orange.