Above you see what looks like a green tree among some green grass and other green trees. However, the tree is not green. The color green is not a property of the tree. Green is only an idea in your head.
Imagine yourself in your bedroom during the day. The only light you have is the light coming in through your window. You see all objects in your room and their associated colors. Fast forward to early evening. The room begins to darken. Notice that the colors in the room have decreased in intensity. Fast forward several hours. The room is dark, but you can still make out objects if you squint your eyes. Colors will have faded into almost a black. This occurs because there is very little light to reflect color to you. If your room was pitch black you would experience a complete absence of color because there is no light.
Achromatopsia is a condition in which people cannot see color due to structural abnormalities to either their retina or their brain. These people have total colorblindness. Say you are standing at road intersection. You see the light as green, shift to yellow, then red. People with achromatopsia would see the light as grey, shift to grey, then grey. Green, yellow and red are properties of the traffic light. The color is in your mind.Imagine yourself in a park on an autumn day. You're surrounded by reds, yellows, oranges, browns, and greens. What you are looking at is not a park full of color, but a park full of all different shades of grey. Light from the sun is reflected from all the leaves. Due to the atom configuration of the leaves, it causes the wavelengths of red, yellow, orange, brown, and green to reflect to you. Assuming that your biological hardware is properly working, you will only perceive all the beautiful colors of autumn.
2 comments:
What a fun post. It strikes me as the old “if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound” argument. Yes the tree falling will create sound waves in the air regardless of whether a person is there or not, but in order for the sound to be heard and interpreted as such a person has to perceive it. I think it just depends on how you define sound or colour, as a stimulus or as an interpretation of a stimulus. The things in nature are going to reflect light whether someone sees and perceives the colours or not (so technically the world is in colour regardless of human perception) however, a person has to witness and interpret the colours for them to be colours as we know them. So which is more important in this case? Is it the existence of the stimulus itself that is the sound or colour or is it the interpretation of it that is important? And is it only important with reference to humanity or does the simple fact that any organism perceives or even has the potential to perceive these stimuli important?
-CP
p.s. In the case of seeing colours in low light, the issue is with the eye not the brain. In low light different photoreceptors (rods) which do not perceive colour but process light very well are firing more actively whereas in scenarios with abundant light other receptors (cones) which process colours are dominant. This is also why you don’t see very high definition in your peripheral vision.
The koan you really want is ... Who is the master who makes the grass green.
Basically the cones in the retina and the mind interpret the grey scale as colours.
All comes back to relativity ie your observations are based upon the equipment you have.
btw cp ... colour is merely a band of electromagnetic wavelengths interpreted into the 7 primary colours. If your eyes were black and white, you would "see" shades of grey. The colour is merely interpreted by your equipment. There is a massive range of the electromagnetic spectrum that you cannot see, because you do not have the equipment. However man can build equipment to see it for him/her eg x-rays/infra red sensors/ultra violet cameras etc. We only really know what we know because we have used "devices" to extend our natural senses.
Great Article
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