Posted on 05/23/2015 6:28:43 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Roses aren't red and violets aren't blue.
At least that's the premise of a new book, 'Outside Color', which puts forward the debate that colour is, in fact, an illusion.
Author Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta uses the book to explore the historical debates that suggest colour doesn't exist - at least not in the literal sense.
Light, however, does exist, and it's the mind that transforms that light into colour.
'Of all the properties that objects appear to have,'writes the University of Pittsburgh professor, 'colour hovers uneasily between the subjective world of sensation and the objective world of fact.'
Optical illusions, such as the blue and black dress that went viral this year, show how objects have colours that observers perceive differently.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
the brain interprets the wave spectrum which, yes, really exists.
Exactly. Our brain interprets it but color really does exist.
You can really screw with people if you tell them that leaves are every color but green.
For that matter sound wouldn’t exist either. Neither would any of the senses. Sensations like color, tones and smell are known as sensory qualia. They are similar to atoms of consciousness. In a way, our conscious experience is a virtual reality based on our senses.
EVERYTHING we experience is a “conscript of the mind”. Perception really IS reality. Creation is not just mostly empty space. It really DOES have more in common with “the Matrix” than what people perceive to be the real world.
Physical objects are basically “coagulated energy”. And if God says, “Meh, this bores me.”, it will simply revert to the energy which it is. It will “burn up”.
And when you press your hands together, nothing really touches. It is only the force of the atoms repelling each other that our brain interprets as “touching”. And for all practical purposes, they ARE touching, except they’re not.
Same goes for light, color, gravity, etc. When it is all you’ve known since your mother’s womb, you learn to interpret everything in a way that is productive.
It is said that what you see is actually upside down at the back of your eyeball, but your brain has learned to upright the image with its software. Well, there was a guy that walked around for months with a special viewer that caused him to see everything upside down. Guess what? After a month or two, his software was modified and he saw everything as upright.
And when he removed the glasses for the first time, everything “looked” upside down.
i.e. the book is stating the obvious.
In my courses I call this a "conscious fiction": it is in our conscious mind (and in some people's dreams), but it is a fiction because while the electromagnetic waves exist, our "narrative" about them (that they are separate colors) does not exist at a physical level.
As a (Lutheran) Christian, I would assert that the experience of light waves as color is a gift from God, on at least two counts: it allows us a more nuanced view of physical existence (we see objects more effectively because of the experience of separate colors) and simultaneously provides aesthetic pleasure--as I type this I am watching a couple of white herons walking through my green back yard, below brown and green trees pointing to a blue sky.
I’ve thrown that at a few over the years. Is color the absence of reflection, or the absence of absorption?
Interesting. I can’t see any difference in the green squares, even after I know which one is supposed to be different.
Some folks want to gain notoriety by making claims contrary to accepted norms.
It is the motivation behind “Diversity”.
>http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2014/07/diversity-destruction.html<
...Diversity is an anti-religion, and anti-ideology, a nepotism which promotes everything except one’s own family.
Diversity therefore equals the destruction of any and all religions and of all positive ideologies.
Because Diversity can only be destructive: whatever IS is insufficiently or inexactly diverse.
Whatever IS must therefore be destroyed in order to make it MORE Diverse.
And there is no conceivable or measurable end to it. Yesterday’s Diversity is today’s intolerable lack of Diversity.
Diversity is the destruction of Good; and it is the destruction of all types of Good - however defined. All are chewed up and spat out by Diversity.
Diversity is the promotion of chaos by the destruction of Good; and then there-naming of chaos as Good.
There are people with normal eyes that don’t see color the same way others do.
We are trained to identify colors in school now that hide this. Games such as what color is this?
There are actually people who see blue as red, but many of them aren’t aware of it.
The spectrum isn’t the problem, the problem is what does the brain tag that spectrum with.
Stupid article about a trivial observation.
Only in Britain and Commonwealth countries. Elsewhere, color only exists in our brains.
You may think it's all about you, but there is no u in color...
Reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon.
Calvin asked his dad why all old photos were in black and white.
Dad tells him that color hadn’t been invented yet and the whole world was in black and white.
Calvin asks why old paintings are in color and dad explains that most of the great painters were insane.
Both are true, it's the connection that (probably) isn't :-)
Except in the winter.
Artists work from the position of light and most are well-aware of the notion that light creates color and objects have no inherent color of their own.
Great points arthurus.
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