Mm, I had read a similar description of albinism vision several years back, which makes sense, yet at the same time is very hard to imagine when you have no experience in seeing like that. Pixellated computer images are one thing, but to have your whole world like that? I just can't comprehend. You can't imagine something you've never seen, like trying to explain color hues to someone who's colorblind and doesn't see red the same way we do, or what have you.
I think we take sight for granted. Even though I'm near-sighted, I don't really notice it until I put on glasses (which I don't have, btw) and I can actually see road signs and stuff. I always thought it was interesting to think about things we've never seen, like, what if other colors existed? What would they be like? What would another planet of life look like after going through millions of years of evolution and coincidences completely different from our own? It hurts ze brain, but is nevertheless interesting to think about, even if there's no conclusion to find.
They do! We miss a whole level of color and pattern in flowers because we can't see ultraviolet. I saw a couple of examples on a nature show, and it was striking--perfectly plain little flowers became gaudy. The ultraviolet patches appeared as darker spots on a black-and-white computer screen, a necessary workaround to make an invisible color visible, but can you imagine what the color might look like to an insect that can see ultraviolet?
Yea, I'm familiar with ultraviolet light, but is it actually creating different colors? I know it makes patterns and stuff that insects can see (*pictures a helicopter landing zone on the flower*), but I wonder if it's just a variation or a glowing or if it is a completely different color. It's hard for our brains to imagine any other color since the color wheel is a gradient; how could other colors exist between blue and purple, say? I mean, you have violet and different variations of the the colors, but a completely different color, like red or green? So when I think of ultraviolet, I think of it more as a different kind of light creating a different kind of visual, rather than it creating different colors.
And I'm going to stop there before I start sounding like a moron because I could ramble on unintelligently about this forever. XD
Are they more likely to have more or fewer? I know European medieval and renaissance sources tended to blur darker reds and non-royal purples.
As it happens, we don't have seven colours anyhow: even without going into the debate on black, grey, and white as colours, the rainbow lacks all the browns.
Well, whether you call it a "different" color or being able to perceive finer distinctions within the range of a existing color is I suppose a matter of semantics.
Think of the difference between the way a color-blind person sees colors and the way you see colors, then extrapolate that difference outward.
From what I gather, people with one kind of color blindness perceive both green and red as shades of what the normally sighted would call tan, caramel, chestnut - shades of orangish brown, perhaps more vibrant and energetic than true browns, but hard to discriminate between. Yet we think of green and red so different that they are opposites. Are we just perceiving finer distinctions in the greenish-reddish color range, or are we seeing more different colors?
Here's another relevant experiment. Bring up Photoshop and open the Color Picker. In the HSB entry fields, set your color to 110 hue, 100 saturation, and 100 brightness - an intense neon green. Close the dialog. Open it again. You know how there's that little square that shows the old color at the bottom and the new color at the top? Watch it closely as you slide the Hue slider up and down within the green range. If you have typical color vision, you will not be able to see any difference between the old and new colors until the Hue goes over 135 or under 90. That's a span of 45 degrees on the Hue wheel, one whole eighth of the circle, where all the fully saturated hues are indistinguishable to most of us. Objectively those are quite different light emissions coming off the screen, but we can't tell. Suppose you could see the differences? Would you just be perceiving finer distinctions between shades of bright green, or more different colors?
The fact that we are biased towards saying "more different colors" in the first case and "more shades of bright green" in the second case probably has more to do with a difficulty in imagining that which we can't see than it has in any true qualitative difference between the two situations. Someone who could easily perceive color shifts as the Hue slider moved between 100 and 130 degrees might feel as odd about calling them all shades of the "same" color as we would to calling red just another shade of green.
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Date: 2007-01-16 06:21 pm (UTC)I think we take sight for granted. Even though I'm near-sighted, I don't really notice it until I put on glasses (which I don't have, btw) and I can actually see road signs and stuff. I always thought it was interesting to think about things we've never seen, like, what if other colors existed? What would they be like? What would another planet of life look like after going through millions of years of evolution and coincidences completely different from our own? It hurts ze brain, but is nevertheless interesting to think about, even if there's no conclusion to find.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 06:09 pm (UTC)They do! We miss a whole level of color and pattern in flowers because we can't see ultraviolet. I saw a couple of examples on a nature show, and it was striking--perfectly plain little flowers became gaudy. The ultraviolet patches appeared as darker spots on a black-and-white computer screen, a necessary workaround to make an invisible color visible, but can you imagine what the color might look like to an insect that can see ultraviolet?
no subject
Date: 2007-01-19 03:52 pm (UTC)And I'm going to stop there before I start sounding like a moron because I could ramble on unintelligently about this forever. XD
no subject
Date: 2007-01-19 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 05:48 am (UTC)As it happens, we don't have seven colours anyhow: even without going into the debate on black, grey, and white as colours, the rainbow lacks all the browns.
seeing more colors
Date: 2007-01-20 06:28 am (UTC)Think of the difference between the way a color-blind person sees colors and the way you see colors, then extrapolate that difference outward.
From what I gather, people with one kind of color blindness perceive both green and red as shades of what the normally sighted would call tan, caramel, chestnut - shades of orangish brown, perhaps more vibrant and energetic than true browns, but hard to discriminate between. Yet we think of green and red so different that they are opposites. Are we just perceiving finer distinctions in the greenish-reddish color range, or are we seeing more different colors?
Here's another relevant experiment. Bring up Photoshop and open the Color Picker. In the HSB entry fields, set your color to 110 hue, 100 saturation, and 100 brightness - an intense neon green. Close the dialog. Open it again. You know how there's that little square that shows the old color at the bottom and the new color at the top? Watch it closely as you slide the Hue slider up and down within the green range. If you have typical color vision, you will not be able to see any difference between the old and new colors until the Hue goes over 135 or under 90. That's a span of 45 degrees on the Hue wheel, one whole eighth of the circle, where all the fully saturated hues are indistinguishable to most of us. Objectively those are quite different light emissions coming off the screen, but we can't tell. Suppose you could see the differences? Would you just be perceiving finer distinctions between shades of bright green, or more different colors?
The fact that we are biased towards saying "more different colors" in the first case and "more shades of bright green" in the second case probably has more to do with a difficulty in imagining that which we can't see than it has in any true qualitative difference between the two situations. Someone who could easily perceive color shifts as the Hue slider moved between 100 and 130 degrees might feel as odd about calling them all shades of the "same" color as we would to calling red just another shade of green.
Re: seeing more colors
Date: 2007-01-20 02:34 pm (UTC)