Does atheism inspire people?

[Angrboda]

It varies more than just that. The color we perceive can be influenced by many things independent of wavelength of light, from intensity, to the presence of neighboring colors, the perception of edges in the visual field (which occurs partly in the retina itself), to visual inferences based on other things in the visual field, to our mood or even something we smell. Visual perception is a process involving many layers, and it doesn't all flow from front to back, but can have interactions both forward and backward in the chain, with low level features and processing determining higher-level features, but also the reverse, with high-level "conclusions" influencing how the lower levels process their information, ultimately determining what we see independent of what is actually there in the visual field. A particular wavelength of light is a standard for scientific measurement, not a complete determination of perception. Basically, both sound and color are mental constructs, and in that sense, they are neither a representation of the reality, nor tightly constrained by it. And just as true and false don't exist in the real world, and melody doesn't exist in the notes of a song, our qualia are every bit as much abstractions and interpolations constructed by the mind as any other. Sound doesn't exist in the real world. Color doesn't exist in the real world. But phenomenon which give rise to the experiences we call color and sound do.

An interesting side bar to this is experiments where they have created a matrix of tactile stimulators, hooked up to a camera, and placed the stimulators on a blind person's skin. With some practice, the blind person learns to "see" via the stimulators in a way that is described as visual. If we can have visual experience resulting from tactile sensation, it would appear prima facie obvious that the physical manifestation which gives rise to the experience of color vision and its process, is doing a lot more than simply translating certain wavelengths of light into certain experiences.