eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
In: 562
Everybody’s in here explaining how your eyes and brain distinguish existing colors, but none of that explains why you can’t imagine new ones. So here’s why:
Because your imagination is limited.
Your mind builds new ideas out of blocks that it’s already familiar with. The most imaginative things humans come up with are all framed around things they already know. Some ancient human asks “where did we come from” and answers it by analogy: we create things, so something created us. And then they ask what that something is and fill in the blanks with the familiar. Gods look like the humans who believe in them. Future technology is built on known phenomena harnessed and controlled and refined. A telephone that fits in your pocket! A spacecraft with gravity like Earth’s!
You *cannot* imagine something you have no basic conception of. If I ask you to, you’ll fill in all those unknowns with familiar analogues, but that’s not imagining something new. It’s imagining something old and considering how the unknown might be similar.
Put in a fairly direct example, imagine that you are solving an incredibly complex math problem far beyond your own capability. Now, *imagine* that you are someone far smarter. Someone capable of solving the problem with ease. You can picture confidence, calmness, and the satisfaction you’d feel after arriving at the answer, but the real process of solving it remains outside your grasp. Because your imagination is limited by your (lack of) knowledge.
“What would someone smarter than me do in this situation?” You can’t know, because you’re not a person smarter than you.
So back to colors. The color wheel you know is a more or less exhaustive documentation of known colors humans are capable of distinguishing. You can say “imagine what it would be like to perceive infrared,” but you have to imagine that by analogy with what you know.
And what you know is the color wheel. An attempt at an *exhaustive* documentation of the colors humans can perceive.
[[Edit: It occurs to me you might not be talking about colors *outside* the spectrum of visible light and instead mean new colors within it. But the spectrum is a visual representation of the whole (or a rough attempt at it). Imagining something “new” within that is just an impossibility. By comparison, imagine that you had somehow created an exhaustive list of all possible equilateral shapes. From a triangle to a square to a pentagon to a pentacontagon all the way through to a perfect circle. And then ask why you can’t imagine a shape with a “new” number of sides.]]
Latest Answers