Comment by furyofantares
5 months ago
I love that this opens with a matter-of-fact statement that colors aren't real, just a phenomenon of perception. This has come up randomly in my life a few times and people always look at me like I'm stoned outta my mind.
And what is not just a phenomenon of perception?
The light hitting our eyes is not a phenomenon of perception. Each photon hitting our eyes has a certain wavelength, but the resulting color we see is a perception.
A related concept is sound vs psychoacoustics[1]. Sound is just pressure waves, but what we hear is a perception and has all sorts of aspects like masking[2]. The pressure waves contains two different signals but thanks to masking we might only perceive one.
Personally I think color constancy[3] really drives home that color is a perception and not something fundamental like the wavelength of photons.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy
The association of specific wavelengths to hue exists only in our perception, nowhere else.
On the other hand, we perceive temperature yet its impact on the physical world is universal.
Mathematical proofs based upon axioms?
Fun fact: just like people have different heights, they have different perceptions of color!