eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
In: 562
Consider this exercise:
Imagine a completely blind person is standing in front of you. They have never had any form of vision whatsoever.
I put 5 balls into a bucket in front of this blind person. The balls are identical in every possible way except for their colour. 1 red, 1 blue, 1 yellow, 1 white, and 1 green.
You can’t see the balls now inside the bucket.
I tell you that without looking inside the bucket, describe each ball in such a way to the blind person so they can take the red ball out of the bucket and hand it to you.
“Describe the colour red to me.”
“Uhh well it’s the colour of our blood outside the body and Tomatoes are red”
“I’ve never seen blood or a Tomato I am blind remember?”
You can’t do it. No matter how hard you try, there is no descriptive mechanism by which you can “describe” colour to someone who has no capability to see it, nor ever has. It is a measurement by which without a medium to provide a result, is meaningless to us.
Birds can see ultraviolet light. We will never know what that is like, because we have no bodily sense in which to measure it. Our eyes do not have the capability.
We can’t imagine new colours that don’t exist in our known colour spectrum because we have no capability to measure it. It would be like trying to “describe” the colour red to our blind person in our scenario. Without some form of measurement, and by extension, comparison, there are no descriptive means available to do it.
Latest Answers