My dog generally isn't arsed when he is wolfing down whatever disgusting thing he's found on the floor. The colour of said "tasty" snack is the last thing on his mind!
Colour is not real is it?
- Thread starter rubberduck
- Start date
My dog generally isn't arsed when he is wolfing down whatever disgusting thing he's found on the floor. The colour of said "tasty" snack is the last thing on his mind!
Last edited:
Why stop at colour tho? The entire picture... everything you "see", is your brain's interpretation.
A camera can detect the light entering it, and turn it into a digital representation, which a computer program can match against known patterns. But the computer never "sees" the image at all.
Everything we "see"... is our brain's interpretation of detected signals.
There is no such thing as "Light"
It is no more special or different than medium wave or the 25M SW band or the cosmic background radiation.
It is all just EM radiation. As far as objective physics is concerned, "Blue" makes no more, and no less, sense than "Atlantic 252LW" (Showing my age here
)
The "Visible Spectrum" is simply the "Waveband" (Like, say,. medium wave or FM) that our eyes can tune into in order to allow our brains to interact with the real world. and yes, we actually can never really have any real understanding of what the "Real World" is really like. (Yes, it is scary) Our brains interpretation of the "Real World" is a sort of VR that has been internally created. Ultimatly, we all live in our own Matrix of our own creation..
Beyond that "Colour" is likely to be a very personal thing. I am colour blind so my range of radio reception is more limited than for other people (However, I can see in low light levels that non-colour blind people are completely blind in -Interesting?? But that is evolution for you. It is rare for Women to be colour blind. Contrary to what others have said earlier. Humans actually have pretty good low light level vision. In the past we were probably crepuscular hunters who took advantage of the full moon for finding food (Women's "Monthlies" were probably synchronised with full moons to make them unattractive when hunting opportunities were at their optimum, hence the 28 day cycle
)
It is no more special or different than medium wave or the 25M SW band or the cosmic background radiation.
It is all just EM radiation. As far as objective physics is concerned, "Blue" makes no more, and no less, sense than "Atlantic 252LW" (Showing my age here
)The "Visible Spectrum" is simply the "Waveband" (Like, say,. medium wave or FM) that our eyes can tune into in order to allow our brains to interact with the real world. and yes, we actually can never really have any real understanding of what the "Real World" is really like. (Yes, it is scary) Our brains interpretation of the "Real World" is a sort of VR that has been internally created. Ultimatly, we all live in our own Matrix of our own creation..
Beyond that "Colour" is likely to be a very personal thing. I am colour blind so my range of radio reception is more limited than for other people (However, I can see in low light levels that non-colour blind people are completely blind in -Interesting?? But that is evolution for you. It is rare for Women to be colour blind. Contrary to what others have said earlier. Humans actually have pretty good low light level vision. In the past we were probably crepuscular hunters who took advantage of the full moon for finding food (Women's "Monthlies" were probably synchronised with full moons to make them unattractive when hunting opportunities were at their optimum, hence the 28 day cycle
)I don't find it scary, but it is pretty interesting
The complementary side of this is that we can see things that aren't really there. 1) Hallucinations 2) Dreams. This helps demonstrate that what we "see" is our brain's rendering of the data it's receiving, much like your GPU renders an image from whatever numerical data you feed it.
Soldato
- Joined
- 25 Nov 2005
- Posts
- 12,469
So just pondering physics whilst in the shower
If you were to travel faster than the speed of light, obviously the light inside your spaceship would be relative with you so all would seem normal, but if you were to look outside, would all light behind you cease to exist as you would be travelling faster than it so it could never reach you whilst in flight ? And what affect would it have on the light you are travelling towards ?
If you were to travel faster than the speed of light, obviously the light inside your spaceship would be relative with you so all would seem normal, but if you were to look outside, would all light behind you cease to exist as you would be travelling faster than it so it could never reach you whilst in flight ? And what affect would it have on the light you are travelling towards ?
I don't find it scary, but it is pretty interesting
The complementary side of this is that we can see things that aren't really there. 1) Hallucinations 2) Dreams. This helps demonstrate that what we "see" is our brain's rendering of the data it's receiving, much like your GPU renders an image from whatever numerical data you feed it.
I was talking earlier today to a friend about the "Voices made me do it" thing.
Many years ago I had a friend who was actually (Asylum level at times) schizophrenic.
Because we all live in our own personal Matrix, sometimes that Matrix can go badly wrong. All our brains actually receive from the outside world are clicks from our sensory organs. The Eyes send clicks, the ears send clicks. The other senses send clicks too (An awful lot of the data processing is done by the sensory organs before they get anywhere near the brain. The Brain gets the edited version. and that is just clicks...)
I have no idea what the experiance of voices/halucinations is atually like. But I do sort of undersatnd it. Our whole experience of the world is basically internally generated. None of it is really "Real" It is just a sort of VR representaion of reality.
If something goes wrong with the way in which we interpret that reality, I can easily see how the internal Matrix might end up going almost anywhere.:/
My Friend was intelligent, educated, artistic and creative.
She could paint, sing and write poetry, she even had her own website for a while..
But, On a bad day she tried to kill her next door neighbor because she became convinced that he was putting poisen in her milk and she died in a nursing home with no teeth becase she eneded up becoming obsessed with eating Sugar...
Such a waste...
Man of Honour
I had a different but similar experience with LSD - I saw sounds. Which happens all the time to some people. It's rare, but proven and has a name. Synthesia...something like that. The root words would mean something along the lines of "artificial sense" or "fake sense". Input from one sense gets copied into the processing for another sense, so you get an extra interpretation of the input. Seeing sounds is the most common one, but it can be anything. Tasting colours, smelling sounds, whatever. It sounds horribly confusing but it isn't. Your conscious mind is getting information from your senses in the same way it usually does, so it's not confusing at all. It feels completely normal. It's also consistent, e.g. if a certain sound is a certain shade of green then it's always that shade of green. It also doesn't obscure your normal senses. I find it hard to explain how I could see normally and at the same time also see the colours of sounds. It's not an overlay of colours, like some sort of augmented reality thing. You see both at the same time and neither obscures the other.
On a more related note, tetrachromacy was recently confirmed in humans. The very few humans with tetrachromatic vision also see colours that don't exist for humans with normal human eyesight, but the colours they see are between the colours we see. It's sort of the reverse of colour blindness, in a sense. Normal human vision approximates the wavelength of light from 3 data points, which gives a quite accurate approximation but still leaves ranges of wavelength approximated as the same wavelength. Colour blindness is duochromacy - approximation from 2 data points, which is much less accurate. Tetrachromacy approximates from 4 data points, which gives a much finer approximation. Something that looks exactly the same colour to normal human vision could be dozens of different colours to tetrachromatic vision. Even hundreds. Or just one. It depends on the wavelength of the light and the "tuning" of the extra type of cone they have. A fascinating subject - you might find it interesting to read up on it. Their sight is "realer" than normal human vision in the sense that they have a more accurate approximation of the wavelength of light.
Is colour truly a matter of interpretation, though? We really do see an approximation of the wavelength of light. Is the way that data is presented an interpretation? I think that the interpretation aspect lies in what meanings we associate with a colour rather than the colour itself and that the colour is a direct representation of data rather than an interpretation of it.
EDIT: A post later in the thread changed my mind. We're not seeing just an approximation of the wavelenght of light - there is interpretation in that part of it too. Some great optical illusions in the linked article show that very well.
Last edited:
Presumably no real impact on the light you were travelling towards? Whether it comes to you or you come to it, the determining factor is whether your retina gets a chance to interact with the light? Just guessing
And yeah, the picture behind you would just be blackness, since you'll never interact with light coming from that direction. Would also screw up your peripheral vision. So yeah, when going faster than light you'll have a very narrow cone of vision in the direction you're travelling, only.
Man of Honour
It depends on the comparison. Humans have pretty good general purpose vision. If you compare one aspect of human vision to one aspect of vision in an animal with more specialised sight humans will come off badly in the comparison, but that's a rather unfair comparison. For example, cats have vastly better low light vision than humans. Cats can't actually see in the dark, but they can see in levels of light low enough to appear dark to a human. They can also adapt to low light faster than a human. A cat walking from bright light to near darkness will see just fine almost immediately whereas a human would have to wait minutes to see badly. But that specialisation comes at a cost. In other aspects of vision, humans beat cats. Humans have better distance vision and vastly better colour vision. Which is better overall? I'd argue neither in general - it depends on the circumstances.
Soldato
- Joined
- 25 Nov 2005
- Posts
- 12,469
Presumably no real impact on the light you were travelling towards? Whether it comes to you or you come to it, the determining factor is whether your retina gets a chance to interact with the light? Just guessing
But what about Doppler effect ?
We can experience it with sound because the speed of sound is relatively slow so it's slow enough to notice how frequency changes
Surely if we're going at close to the speed of light or surpassing it then doppler effect will affect light waves at a rate that is noticeable/measurable ?
I'm gonna watch this and see if it has my answer
It's a devil's advocate discussion and red vs blue is obviously for illustrative purpose. Of course we all believe we see the same as each other.
But ultimately, without being able to tap into another's consciousness to see through their eyes, you cannot state that they see the same as you because of graduation and colour contrasts. If you invert an entire colour wheel, each colour is still unique as well as the graduations between.
Complementing/clashing colours is more a social construct than instinct. You don't look at scenes of nature and decide that the colours don't match. You appreciate the variance.
Last edited:
Man of Honour
Which is a good illustration of evolution in action. There might be or have been a dog or a few dogs that can or could see colour much better than is normal for a dog. It's not impossible for a dog to have 3 types of slightly differently "tuned" cones in their eyes rather than the usual (for dogs) 2, but it wouldn't help them be more successful (in evolutionary terms) so there wouldn't be any selection pressure. Dogs do sometimes eat plants, so I suppose it might be a bit useful in identifying plants that are edible and plants that aren't, but any such information from better colour vision would be negligable in comparison with the information from a dog's remarkable sense of smell. It would be like having an extra 5p coin next to your thick wedge of £20 notes.
Soldato
What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain