eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
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A huge thanks to all the people in here giving logical and reasonable explanation to all the questions in this sub.
I am learning a lot.
There are people that can see extra colours.
They are called tetrachromats and they can see a fourth dimension of colour.
Talk to one of them and maybe get your answer?
Have you read this? https://www.livescience.com/17948-red-green-blue-yellow-stunning-colors.html
One things i have not yet seen in top answer: you actually might imagened new color but did not realise it.
It is facinating to read how color conceptions were created from start.
And one of the best part is blue color, through thousands years ago sky was blue and blue thing were still blue, the word “blue” did not existed. Eg greek Philosofers craftsmans and artist called blue as “dark red” ( their logic was after saturation effect, where some blue colors looks like red if saturation is low. Other called is pale yellow drawing connection to sun. As an nice exersise i do recommend to find history if pink color and why at some point it was called “**** green”
Imagination is the act of combining things that you have already experienced or seen.
And that’s exactly why you cannot imagine new colors, because they are a closed set. No matter what colors you combine, you still remain in the original color spectrum.
Similarly:
-It’s the same reason you can’t imagine a 4th physical dimension: you can’t combine your familiar 3D directions to result in a 4D direction.
-You also can’t imagine new integer numbers because of this.
You can’t even imagine anything that doesn’t exist. I mean you can imagine a mosquito with a unicorn head, but that exists just as much as a color does.
Imagine dark yellow. It’s an imaginary color. You can’t really think about what it looks like but it is a theoretical color you can represent mathematically in LAB color space.
Humans can process three channels of color: red, green and blue. This is why we can’t see other colors that exist.
The mantis shrimp can process 12 channels of color. We can’t even imagine what a rainbow looks like to them.
Simple analogy.
Please try to imagine a direction that is not some combination of updown, forwardback, leftright.
You cant. Because 3 dimensions.
Similarily colour is 3 dimensional and trying to think of a new colour is like trying to see into higher dimensions.
There arent any new colours to see that arent just completely orthogonal to your perception.
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.
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