3 ms·

The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating. These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more. And t

by jcul 6mo ago

The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating. These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more. And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.

awesome_dude 6mo ago
But also - colours don't exist without a name eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
- jjk166 6mo ago
  The colors most certainly exist without the name. You may have described the fruit as being a weird shade of red, but if someone held up something red and said "so it was this color" you'd say no. Conversely if someone held up something that was actually orange colored, you'd say "yeah it was that color." Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
  - davidmurdoch 6mo ago
    I don't think so. Just becoming fluent in multiple languages can result in the perception of more distinct colors. And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. Color is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colors to create "meaning".
    - jjk166 6mo ago
      > And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. The ability to label more colors is not the ability to perceive more colors. The ability of your cone cells to recognize a difference in color between two samples is unaffected by language.
      - c22 6mo ago
        I think you are correct, but the likelihood of perceiving probably is tied to language. It's amazing how much time we spend on autopilot.
        jjk166 6mo ago
        There is a difference between perception and categorization. You perceive the difference between salmon and fuchsia regardless of whether you have a word for them or not. You might refer to either color as pink, not because you failed to perceive the difference but because you don't particularly care about communicating the difference. It's like measuring with a ruler. If you have mm notches then you'll be more likely to describe one thing your measuring as 31mm and another as 29mm, whereas if you have only cm notches then you'll probably say one is just over 3cm and another is just under 3cm. In the second case, you're measuring with a less accurate tool because you don't care as much about accuracy. Hell you may say they're both about the same size if that 2mm difference is insignificant enough. But regardless of how you communicate the length, their lengths exist and you qualitatively perceived them.
      - davidmurdoch 6mo ago
        Your cone cells do not perceive anything whatsoever. Your brain does that part. Those who grew up with words (meaning) assigned to subtle variations in colors can tell those colors apart without a reference to compare it to better than, and much faster than those who haven't grown up with learning the distinction. We know this to be obvious of sounds, musicians who can tell if a note is slightly out of tune when others who haven't learned how can't, or taste/smell: wine connoisseurs who can tell very similar wines apart that all taste the same to me. You're not thinking in photons. Your brain is making up meaning from the stimulation your eye received from photons. The perceiving part is learned.
  - awesome_dude 6mo ago
    You're actually further away from the truth than you will ever know. 1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum? 2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language. Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.
- travisjungroth 6mo ago
  The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.
huflungdung 6mo ago
[dead]
da_chicken 6mo ago
I think it's important to remember that we're not perceiving some fundamental aspect of light. We're perceiving how the photosensitive portions of our retina convert light to stimulus, and how our brains construct a meaningful image from that stimulus in our mind. Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.
- TomatoCo 6mo ago
  It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process. It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
  - hank808 6mo ago
    Most records these days use CDs as masters, sadly.
    - dotancohen 6mo ago
      Are you referring to the loudness wars?
    - hank808 6mo ago
      No. A friend of mine worked at United Record Pressing. The majority of the masters they received from customers were commercial CDs. No special master.
  - com2kid 6mo ago
    Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps. Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired. It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes. Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.
sgc 6mo ago
> what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence.<< Anybody who understands English, 'understands' it. But what it means to understand it is perhaps completely different for each person. As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview (Lewis Caroll's Carrollian syllogisms come to mind), practically it often doesn't matter beyond recognizing the wonderful uniqueness of each human being. Likewise, unless somebody is color blind or perceives more colors than others (tetrachromats), it doesn't matter since the relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color perception or anything we know, that despite the minor differences in relationships, we understand each other because the differences must be minimal given the practically unlimited data points constraining our perceptions. In fact, when people's perceptions of things vary too much, they can be classified as mentally ill even if they understand many things perfectly well.
- patapong 6mo ago
  At the same time, there's some commonality for what words mean in different contexts. For example, even though we all have our own experiences with the concept of "dog", there's a common core where we have enough of an understanding what other people refer to as "dog" to allow discussing the concept. Likewise, for most people, dog is more similar to cat than to house. Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a bunch of texts and tries to extract this meaning by looking at which words commonly co-occyr with other words in different contexts. Perhaps something interesting would happen...
  - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
    Yes, but the qualia could be completely different and we'd never know. For all I know you don't just have a completely different experience of red, but a complete different experience of geometry and spacetime. Your subjective experience of vision could be a mirror of my own. But we'd both still associate "right" with the same half of the body. You might not "feel" curves and lines the same way. As long as everyone's mappings and weights are identical, the qualia themselves could be anything. We assume the qualia would at least be recognisable, and they can't be too different because there has to be a common core of experience categories, with recognisably consistent relationships. But beyond that - anything works. This isn't a hypothetical because once you get into politics and ethics, the consistent relationships disappear. There are huge differences between individuals, and this causes a lot of problems.
14 6mo ago
I have thought about this before as well. Like maybe what I see as red you see as purple but since we have always been taught that what we both see is red to both of us it is red. I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. But it is one of those things that could never be proven. Another interesting thought that comes to mind speaking about color perceptions is I recently read an article or post I honestly don't remember where that discussed what do blind people see like do they just see blackness all the time. According to what I read it claimed that people born blind don't actually see a blackout picture they literally just don't perceive anything. I think for most it would be hard to imagine nothingness but I could accept that as a true fact.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  > I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. Some of us explicitly don't see colour the same - I'm partially colourblind, and have pretty concrete evidence that I don't see colour that same way the average person does. Turns out that while we tend to assign a binary colourblind/not-colourblind threshold to this, in practice humans exist along more of a spectrum of colour acuity (not to mention there are half-a-dozen distinct variants of colourblindness)
- joquarky 6mo ago
  Try to visually perceive well outside your field of vision.
topham 6mo ago
This is true, and illusionary at the same time. While our precise perception of red may not match, the interplay between colors is such that people perceived them to go together, or clash, etc, in a somewhat consistent fashion. This means that, over the general population the perception of color is very similar from person to person. Ignoring genetic defects.
- prox 6mo ago
  I worked in a creative shop, so we sold a lot of colors of ink, paint, crayons etc. It’s interesting to watch people trying to pick “red” when there is like a whole gamut of red. Not only that, but it depends on the lighting around as well. (Is it evening, day, what kind of lighting fixtures are there?) Creatives usually have 10 kelvin white boxes for a neutral color experience. A bit like audio folks have calibrated monitor speakers.
jojobas 6mo ago
>subjective experience of them is so much more It's just that our eyes kinda suck and evolution had to make up in buggy software.
phrotoma 6mo ago
I have seen Wiggtenstein's language games invoked to explain this "your red isn't my red" possibility, but I've never really been able to follow the reasoning. Perhaps some philosophically inclined HNer who passes by here can let me know if this is a legit application of his ideas?

by jcul 6mo ago

awesome_dude 6mo ago

But also - colours don't exist without a name eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds

jjk166 6mo ago
The colors most certainly exist without the name. You may have described the fruit as being a weird shade of red, but if someone held up something red and said "so it was this color" you'd say no. Conversely if someone held up something that was actually orange colored, you'd say "yeah it was that color." Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
- davidmurdoch 6mo ago
  I don't think so. Just becoming fluent in multiple languages can result in the perception of more distinct colors. And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. Color is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colors to create "meaning".
  - jjk166 6mo ago
    > And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. The ability to label more colors is not the ability to perceive more colors. The ability of your cone cells to recognize a difference in color between two samples is unaffected by language.
    - c22 6mo ago
      I think you are correct, but the likelihood of perceiving probably is tied to language. It's amazing how much time we spend on autopilot.
      - jjk166 6mo ago
        There is a difference between perception and categorization. You perceive the difference between salmon and fuchsia regardless of whether you have a word for them or not. You might refer to either color as pink, not because you failed to perceive the difference but because you don't particularly care about communicating the difference. It's like measuring with a ruler. If you have mm notches then you'll be more likely to describe one thing your measuring as 31mm and another as 29mm, whereas if you have only cm notches then you'll probably say one is just over 3cm and another is just under 3cm. In the second case, you're measuring with a less accurate tool because you don't care as much about accuracy. Hell you may say they're both about the same size if that 2mm difference is insignificant enough. But regardless of how you communicate the length, their lengths exist and you qualitatively perceived them.
    - davidmurdoch 6mo ago
      Your cone cells do not perceive anything whatsoever. Your brain does that part. Those who grew up with words (meaning) assigned to subtle variations in colors can tell those colors apart without a reference to compare it to better than, and much faster than those who haven't grown up with learning the distinction. We know this to be obvious of sounds, musicians who can tell if a note is slightly out of tune when others who haven't learned how can't, or taste/smell: wine connoisseurs who can tell very similar wines apart that all taste the same to me. You're not thinking in photons. Your brain is making up meaning from the stimulation your eye received from photons. The perceiving part is learned.
- awesome_dude 6mo ago
  You're actually further away from the truth than you will ever know. 1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum? 2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language. Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.
travisjungroth 6mo ago
The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.

huflungdung 6mo ago

[dead]

da_chicken 6mo ago

I think it's important to remember that we're not perceiving some fundamental aspect of light. We're perceiving how the photosensitive portions of our retina convert light to stimulus, and how our brains construct a meaningful image from that stimulus in our mind. Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.

TomatoCo 6mo ago
It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process. It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
- hank808 6mo ago
  Most records these days use CDs as masters, sadly.
  - dotancohen 6mo ago
    Are you referring to the loudness wars?
  - hank808 6mo ago
    No. A friend of mine worked at United Record Pressing. The majority of the masters they received from customers were commercial CDs. No special master.
- com2kid 6mo ago
  Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps. Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired. It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes. Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.

sgc 6mo ago

> what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence.<< Anybody who understands English, 'understands' it. But what it means to understand it is perhaps completely different for each person. As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview (Lewis Caroll's Carrollian syllogisms come to mind), practically it often doesn't matter beyond recognizing the wonderful uniqueness of each human being. Likewise, unless somebody is color blind or perceives more colors than others (tetrachromats), it doesn't matter since the relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color perception or anything we know, that despite the minor differences in relationships, we understand each other because the differences must be minimal given the practically unlimited data points constraining our perceptions. In fact, when people's perceptions of things vary too much, they can be classified as mentally ill even if they understand many things perfectly well.

patapong 6mo ago
At the same time, there's some commonality for what words mean in different contexts. For example, even though we all have our own experiences with the concept of "dog", there's a common core where we have enough of an understanding what other people refer to as "dog" to allow discussing the concept. Likewise, for most people, dog is more similar to cat than to house. Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a bunch of texts and tries to extract this meaning by looking at which words commonly co-occyr with other words in different contexts. Perhaps something interesting would happen...
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  Yes, but the qualia could be completely different and we'd never know. For all I know you don't just have a completely different experience of red, but a complete different experience of geometry and spacetime. Your subjective experience of vision could be a mirror of my own. But we'd both still associate "right" with the same half of the body. You might not "feel" curves and lines the same way. As long as everyone's mappings and weights are identical, the qualia themselves could be anything. We assume the qualia would at least be recognisable, and they can't be too different because there has to be a common core of experience categories, with recognisably consistent relationships. But beyond that - anything works. This isn't a hypothetical because once you get into politics and ethics, the consistent relationships disappear. There are huge differences between individuals, and this causes a lot of problems.

14 6mo ago

I have thought about this before as well. Like maybe what I see as red you see as purple but since we have always been taught that what we both see is red to both of us it is red. I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. But it is one of those things that could never be proven. Another interesting thought that comes to mind speaking about color perceptions is I recently read an article or post I honestly don't remember where that discussed what do blind people see like do they just see blackness all the time. According to what I read it claimed that people born blind don't actually see a blackout picture they literally just don't perceive anything. I think for most it would be hard to imagine nothingness but I could accept that as a true fact.

swiftcoder 6mo ago
> I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. Some of us explicitly don't see colour the same - I'm partially colourblind, and have pretty concrete evidence that I don't see colour that same way the average person does. Turns out that while we tend to assign a binary colourblind/not-colourblind threshold to this, in practice humans exist along more of a spectrum of colour acuity (not to mention there are half-a-dozen distinct variants of colourblindness)
joquarky 6mo ago
Try to visually perceive well outside your field of vision.

topham 6mo ago

This is true, and illusionary at the same time. While our precise perception of red may not match, the interplay between colors is such that people perceived them to go together, or clash, etc, in a somewhat consistent fashion. This means that, over the general population the perception of color is very similar from person to person. Ignoring genetic defects.

prox 6mo ago
I worked in a creative shop, so we sold a lot of colors of ink, paint, crayons etc. It’s interesting to watch people trying to pick “red” when there is like a whole gamut of red. Not only that, but it depends on the lighting around as well. (Is it evening, day, what kind of lighting fixtures are there?) Creatives usually have 10 kelvin white boxes for a neutral color experience. A bit like audio folks have calibrated monitor speakers.

jojobas 6mo ago

>subjective experience of them is so much more It's just that our eyes kinda suck and evolution had to make up in buggy software.

phrotoma 6mo ago

I have seen Wiggtenstein's language games invoked to explain this "your red isn't my red" possibility, but I've never really been able to follow the reasoning. Perhaps some philosophically inclined HNer who passes by here can let me know if this is a legit application of his ideas?