What does it mean that color a “visual phenomenon”? Does color not exist outside of our brains?
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You have red, green, and blue sensors in your eyes.
Show your eyes magenta and the red and blue sensors shout. You interpret red and blue sensors shouting as magenta.
Now, show magenta to someone who does not have red sensors (say, a genetic anomaly that makes them red color blind) and only their blue sensors will shout. Now, show them a shade of blue and their blue sensors will shout the same way as seeing magenta.
This someone will see blue and magenta as identical!
However, take blue and magenta and put them in front of a wavemeter (machine that measures wavelengths) and they will have two different wave lengths.
So, the color blind person can only perceive 1 color but the wavemeter can still detect the difference. The person’s perception of color is not the same as the wavemeter’s perception of color.
Even non-color blind humans are the same way, but our eyes can figure out most visible colors pretty accurately using only red, green, blue sensors. However, there are some colors that can fool human eyes called “impossible colors”. They are two different colors the eyes perceive as being identical (similar to the color blind person, but partially color blind people perceive a lot more colors as impossible.)
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