How can we truly know if the colors we see are the true colors of the plants and animals around us if all the information(colors we see) have to be processed through organic eyes nerves and brains?
In: Biology
The term “true color” itself is difficult. Color, as most people talk about is a perception. Like the taste of something or smell of something – there is no good way to compare perceptions across different people.
There is a more “scientific” definition of color which is the frequency or wavelength of the light waves. So a certain range of frequencies can be DEFINED as “blue” or “red”. These color definitions/names are a human construct but the light frequencies itself are measured objectively (with equipment).
So, how can we “know”? We can know and measure the exact frequency spectrum of any light. How can we “know” if everyone perceives it the same? We cannot.
We don’t! While we know that the specific wavelengths of light are detected the same, our perception of these wavelengths isn’t known to be the same between people.
In fact there’s good evidence that it isn’t and that our perception of color is influenced by neural development after birth. Trying to compare people’s perceptions is always a bit tricky for obvious reasons, but there are some ways this can be worked around, for example by gauging peoples instinctual emotional response to different colors, and trying to separate out responses that might be a result of life experience.
www.livescience.com/amp/21275-color-red-blue-scientists.html
Being color blind, I doubt whether this is true at all. Two people might look at the same object and their eyes and brains might process it differently so that they see something different.
Even for non-color-blind people. They may be might be able to distinguish the different colors, but who knows whether they actually see the same thing when they look at something blue. This might explain why people prefer different colors, because they might look different to different people.
We have ways to determine the ‘objective’ colors of things though. Color is nothing more than light (reflected or emitted) of a certain frequency. You can measure that frequency with a device. We have defined that frequencies between two certain values are red, pink, blue, etc.
It still doesn’t mean that everyone sees blue in the same way.
Edited to add: colors are a very human thing. There are many frequencies of light our eyes cannot see. Another creature might see more or less colors. A bat using sonar may not see any colors at all. Or would their brains translate the sonar frequencies to colors, so that different textures or distances appear as different colors to them?
Short answer: we don’t.
Longer answer: color is an illusion anyway.
The colors you see are just the way your brain interprets different wavelengths or combinations of wavelengths of light that your eyes pick up. We have no way of knowing if your red is the same as my red, but it doesn’t really matter. As long as everyone is in agreement that it is red, it works.
Something else to think about: We say a leaf is green, but one could argue the leaf isn’t green at all. All the colors in the sun’s rays hit the leaf and the leaf absorbs a bunch of that energy, and the light that *didn’t* get absorbed bounces off the leaf and into our eye, which we see as green. In other words, “green” is the color of light that is rejected by the leaf and bounces off of it for everyone to see, while the rest of the spectrum is accepted by the leaf and used for energy.
This is what’s known as the hard problem of consciousness: how do we explain the experience we have? There is no answer yet, and it is a problem that scientists and philosophers are grappling with today. Some think that mind and body are separate things (dualism), and that there is some yet undiscovered thing that is consciousness or even that it is not knowable at all. Others think that consciousness is strictly explainable by the physical stuff of the brain (materialism) and that consciousness emerges from it. There is an interesting third group that claim every physical thing all the way down to atoms and electrons have some rudimentary form of conscious experience (panpsychism), so it’s more like building blocks of consciousness that add up to the experience we have. Which ever camp you are in, the answer is still unknown.
Edit: Strictly speaking though, there is no reason to believe that objects even have color at all outside of our experience. How could they? By definition, color must be generated by some observational mechanism–that is, it only exists because we experience it.
There’s two ways to think about “True color”…in one sense, the true color _is_ what you see. The fact that you perceive something as a color means that is the color it is, because “color” is about what you experience when you look at something.
In another sense, the “True color” is just a description of the intensity of light of different wavelengths being reflected from an object. We can take a spectra of an object and measure just that, same as you’d measure the weight or length of an object.
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