How do humans perceive color? Is it just the way we see it or is color actually there?
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Objects reflect and absorb light at different wavelengths. Every object has its own “signature” of the types of wavelengths of light that are bouncing off of it. That’s all that really exists, for the purposes of this conversation. Light is bouncing off of things and has different wavelengths depending on what it has bounced off of.
Now, this is useful information for us because it lets us identify things based on what kind of wavelengths are being emitted by different objects around us. Is that food? Is that an animal? Is that good or bad? Knowing how to identify those different wavelengths can help us identify what we are seeing around us.
But how can our brain show us that information? By putting floating numbers over every object telling us the wavelength? Of course not. So what it does is “color” the image we are decoding in our brains. It overlays this wavelength information onto the image by causing us to “see” them through different colors in our minds. These colors do not exist physically, they are just applications of the wavelengths that are being detected.
Now we can see if something is an apple or a rock because we can sense the wavelengths coming off of it.
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