Comment by magicalhippo

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