Color perception arbitrary?

[Faith No More]

Those tests are bad for people like myself who is rather severely colour-blind. I can't even start one of them, it is just impossible for me to do. Stupid people and their stupid normal colour seeing eyes.

Fuck 'em, frankie. Fuck them and their rainbows.

[pocaracas]

I can't answer your question, but here's a color gradation test I think is interesting: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

Those tests are bad for people like myself who is rather severely colour-blind. I can't even start one of them, it is just impossible for me to do. Stupid people and their stupid normal colour seeing eyes.

hehe... These online tests depend on more factors than your eyes... one important one, the screen. Another one, ambient light. These things need to be taken in a controlled environment, or else, the result is a bit meaningless.
OTOH, I scored 12, on my LED back-illuminated laptop screen, set to maximum brightness, indoors with relatively low ambient light.... at some point, I had to tilt the screen a bit to the back to distinguish the squares....

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I scored a 23 on that test on a scale of 0 to 99, 0 being best. I'm hoping that's at least average. I have to wonder how valid such a test is on a computer screen. I know print is still able to reproduce finer gradations of color.

[NoraBrimstone]

I can't answer your question, but here's a color gradation test I think is interesting: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

I scored 15. That's good, right?

[Faith No More]

I don't even know where to begin on that goddamn test.

Stupid fucking colors...

[FlyingNarwhal]

I scored a 4 on that test, but full disclosure...I work at a paint store and have to do a lot of color stuff.

[pineapplebunnybounce]

I scored 7.

Anyway, the question about colour perception. I read an article about how people who speak different languages perceive colours differently, but it isn't that they see it in another colour, it's that they're not as good at detecting ranges that speakers of other languages are. For example, japanese use the same word for blue and green, so it's harder for them to differentiate between the two. http://boingboing.net/2011/08/12/how-lan...ption.html Here's an article on another language vs english speaker. The one I read is more in depth but it was in my psych textbook I think, and I sold it.

Although I think it can be argued that because a certain people detect colours differently, their language address colours differently? Not too sure.

in terms of physiology of the eyes, we can differentiate some colours better than others. For example green and red is easier to differentiate than blue and green. And our eyes read faster if the text is black against a while background. But yea ... don't know why we see colours the way we do.

[Anomalocaris]

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.

[Napoléon]

still the names are just names and are arbitrary.

The names are arbitrary but the colours themselves aren't. Why is white, white? I'm not talking about labels, I'm talking specifically about the colour. Alternatively why do we have only 3 colour receptors as you say? Why not 4? Would we perceive new colours if that were so? Are there more colours to what we can see now? For that matter can you imagine a new colour? How come we only perceive the colours in our imagination that we can see with our eyes?

Mind fuck.

---

Also, I got a 4 on that test. Oh yeahhhh.

[Anomalocaris]

The names are arbitrary but the colours themselves aren't. Why is white, white? I'm not talking about labels, I'm talking specifically about the colour. Alternatively why do we have only 3 colour receptors as you say? Why not 4? Would we perceive new colours if that were so? Are there more colours to what we can see now? For that matter can you imagine a new colour? How come we only perceive the colours in our imagination that we can see with our eyes?

Mind fuck.

I try to address two separate questions:

1. Why not 4? Because of our evolutionary history.

Our distant precambrain evolutionary ancesters did in fact have four, (3 usually in wavelengths visible to us, and one extra one sometimes sensitive to ultraviolet), and can perceive 4 separate primary colors and see the world in combinations of those 4 primary colors. This is the ancesteral condition of the biological lineage that culminated in us.

Unfortunately somewhere on the way to us our early direct mammalian ancesters lost the genes for two of the four receptors, so many mammals perceive the world in combinations of only two primary colors.

But fortunately for us, early primates somehow through mutation developed a new red color receptor, so most living primates have genes for three color receptors and perceive the world in a pallate consisting of combinations of three primary colors, including red.

Other mammals would not see red directly. Instead they would see red as combinations of two other primary colors.

So we have three color receptors. Two of which we inherited from precambrain ancesters, one of which we have our early monkey ancesters to thank for. We lost two other color receptors, I don't know whether we know exactly which of our direct ancesters we can blame that on.

2. Why do our eyes perceive the three primary color that they do, and not some others?

This question can't yet be answered in detail, only in outline, because genetic changes can in fact make each photo receptor drift in the color of its maximum sensitivity. So we are only loosely limited by genetics and biochemistry to our three primary colors, it is certainly possible biologically for our primary colors to be somewhat different. The answer in outline is our immediate ancesters in their environment experienced the most survival advantage, ie, see the things most clearly that they need to see in order to survive, with our set of three primary colors.