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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It can be misleading to think of light as only the visible light our sun gives the planet. The truth is visible light is only a very small sliver of a large spectrum of energy. On the low end we have things like radio waves. On the high end we have things like x rays. All of them are the same energy at higher and higher frequencies. In between we have visible light. That is the energy frequency the human has evolved the cells to capture the reflected energy and interpret it as color. Other animals have evolved to see smaller bands of energy. Even still other animals have evolved to see wider bands. So where we can’t see infrared or ultraviolet light some animals can pick up those energies which are invisible to us and interpret them to colors which we have no name for.
So color is an incredibly subjective experience. We can describe it mathematically by measuring the different energies it reflects. But colors themselves are the human way we describe an experience and just like any other sensation our descriptions may differ. For instance what I describe as pink, others might call rose or their native language might describe it in a way that translates to “very light red”
Though on the note of “pink”; did you know it’s not a color that exists on the color spectrum. Pink is simply the way the human brain interprets white light that has most or all of the green wavelength removed. Another animal may see it as a different “color”. Again just an example of how the way we describe our experience of color is very subjective.
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