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Comment by meindnoch

5 months ago

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.