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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We can tell the apple is red because we defined “red” as the “color of an apple.” We gave words to all the colors before we knew anything about different wavelengths of light or the color receptors in the retina.
People with certain types of color blindness and animals with different eye structures don’t perceive red the same way you or I do: To a dog, the apple looks to be a shade of brown, even though it is reflecting the same wavelengths of light. Likewise, certain species of birds and insects would see that a flower we would say is just red, and see that it is actually highlighted with ultraviolet stripes. But to us both the apple and the flower are red, because “red” is the word we gave to the subjective experience of seeing those things.
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