RE: Color perception arbitrary?
July 25, 2013 at 6:16 pm
(This post was last modified: July 25, 2013 at 7:31 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(July 25, 2013 at 12:25 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: I've never understood why our brains/eyes translates different wave lengths into the color we see versus translating them as other colors. Was there some evolutionary advantage to seeing the colors we see the way we see them? Why is it better for instance that we look up into the night sky and see the color black? Why not white? Or why is it better that when we look at the sun we see a blinding white rather than a blinding black?
Your question is backwards. We see what we see, in part, through photo receptors with highest sensitive to 3 specific wavelengths of light. When light arrive at the color receptors saturates all three photo receptors, we perceive one thing. Normally we call that perception white. But you can call that black or white, or gin and tonic, and it makes no difference. You are perceiving total satuation of your color receptors and you can label it anything you want.
When there is just not enough light to stimulate any of the color receptors, we perceive the lack of stimulus on any color receptor as something else. We normally called black, you can call it bloody mary if you want to.
When the incoming light neither oversaturates, nor fail to stimulate at all, all the color receptors in our eyes, but instead stimulate the three different color receptors each to a different degree, we perceive something else yet again, depending on the relative ratio to which the three receptors are stimulated. Again, each different ratio is given a somewhat different name.
Women having far, far, far more of these names for subtle gradations of ratios of photo receptor stimulation in their vocabulary than men have words of all types for all things, but still the names are just names and are arbitrary.
