From what I understand, humans can see red green and blue and everything in the middle. Some animals I’ve heard see more colors than us, so what’s to say that some things in nature are colors that we don’t see? Who’s to say that some apples are red? And instead a different color that we don’t have a name for because we can’t process it?
How can we tell if this “apple” is as a matter of fact “red”.
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If you mix yellow and blue paint, you get green paint. It’s because this is how your eyes interpret the mixed signal that is coming from the mixed paints.
A paint that’s out of your visible spectrum would appear as colorless water. Imagine a UV paint that you see as water but another species can see it and interprets as blue. If you mix it with yellow, for you the result would be s diluted yellow (like mixing water to the yellow paint). The other species would probably interpret it as a kind of green.
In such situation this is exactly what’s happening. There are some flowers with intricate patterns that we don’t see because they are in UV. Some bugs can see them. We instead see the visible components only, which gives us for example a plain white image of the same flower.
How we know it? We can make machines that see the UV for us and shifts the pattern into colors that we can see.
Another real world example could be mice. Mice can’t see red light. You can turn on a red lamp and it’s still darkness for them however we can see them in the red light. For them a red lamp looks the same whether it’s on or off. Similarly, for us a pot of hot water looks the same as a pot of cold water, although the hot water emits infrared light. A species that can see the infrared, could use a pot of hot water as lamp without us noticing, similarly for how we use red lamp on mice. That species could look at us in the dark just like we look at the mice.
Of course we can make machines that can see infrared for us and that machine would see the hot water as shiny.
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