Seeing red

[emjay]

I'd guess the palette is just what evolution settled on.

Bees seem to have a completely different palette.  White is Blue-Green, Red is black, Purple is blue.

Seems like once the brain gets the data, it can do whatever it wants with it.

That's very interesting indeed, thank you   I'll look that up about the bees cos that could be very helpful.

I realise my post may have been gobbledegook to people because that's what happens when you combine introspection with your own private logic, but it made sense to me   But with my own private logic, what you've said leads to a couple of observations. a) that it might be worth, just as an exercise, trying to figure out what sort of system requirements would lead to those 'choices' of colours for the bee - i.e. what different states bees need to differentiate in the environment and why those colours are best suited to representing it and b) that what you've stated are still colours that we know... so leading to questions of whether colour is the only way to represent the raw data and that the range of 'seeable' colours is limited. It certainly appears to me to be the case that colours are produced in the brain on-the-fly as it were - that we have not necessarily seen every colour it is possible for us to see and if each one was neurally encoded individually the brain would be a lot bigger than it actually is because there would be so many possibilities. So given basically a red-green-blue neural input much like for TV, the resulting colour appears to have to be produced on the fly, and that's why I think it may be the case that colour is the only way to differentiate the required different states. I mean that's one constraint but there are others - other features of the visual scene that need to be differentiated - and I think maybe the combined effect of these constraints leaves the colours that we see as the only possible way to fit them in the system. In the more data that is integrated, the more constrained the output is.