futureone wrote:
Yes I know. It would reduce contrast and also cause absurdities such as non-green grass and other things. ← It’s funny that you see this as an absurdity. I see it as the natural result of a bit of simple brain re-wiring. → Some solutions could just be sensitive aliens that have weird personalities… ← Aliens? → or aliens that all seem very human and have the same color limitations as humans, indicating our world is fake. ← Fake world? What? →
But now you’ve provided a better solution to me… ← Oh shit! → color frequency repeats. ← Well, it multiplies. → Not sure why I didn’t think of that myself, but it solves the problem. It is the same as a musical keyboard. Therefore I think I am right and there is nothing more than the rainbow colors. A musical keyboard is the same as a rainbow, it just repeats the same notes at double the frequency. You can’t get anything more out of it.
If by “musical keyboard” you mean octaves–you know, the fact that chanting “do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti…” brings you full circle back to “do” (except in a higher octave)–then you’ve shown that the auditory system in the brain was also built to pick up on these repeating frequencies (in sound waves, of course, not light).
But here I think you’ve missed the point on three fronts:
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The “do” in the higher octave may be a repetition of the “do” in the lower active, but they are clearly different notes. You will always be able to tell the difference between hearing the lower “do” and the higher “do”–therefore, they do not quite repeat.
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What color the organism sees depends on what’s useful to it. I pointed out above that the way the brain represents a mix of red and blue light is by creating a color midway between them (other than the colors that are already between them–quite brilliant, if I do say so myself!)–as opposed to a new color beyond both red and blue, a few frequencies higher than the latter. But this simply reflects the necessities of the environment in which mankind evolved. It seemed, apparently, that having a representation of light frequencies in the form of colors required, given the environment we evolved from, converting the color spectrum into a wheel. Is it not unthinkable, therefore, that one day we’ll enter a new environment, one in which it is more advantageous to represent ultra-violet as a “higher” color? A color beyond purple and even less like red than all the other colors? That too can be a more accurate representation at times–namely, when the eye really is receiving light at 730 THz (violet), as opposed to a mix of 440 THz (red) light and 645 THz (blue) light from a single source. If you want to represent 730 THz light as it truly is (i.e. on the higher end beyond blue, not between red and blue), you need a new color.
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The structure of the light waves and the mathematics behind them are not the pivotal factors here–brain wiring is–if we introduced extra neural circuitry into someone’s brain for detecting light within the ultra-violet region (maybe with special glasses to protect the eyes) and it worked in parallel with all the brain circuits responsible for processing the colors we are familiar with–whether or not it would just be a repetition of red or a whole new color depends exactly on how this newly introduced neural circuitry is wired. ← Nothing else matters.
We can wire it to perceive red if we wish. We can wire it to perceive a whole new color if we wish. The latter would simply imply coming up with a design that is different from all the other color processing circuits in the brain while maintaining certain patterns they have in common (a pattern that guarantees they are colors).
In fact, this is even easier to explain with computers and a bit of programming. We can build cameras to be sensitive to only certain frequencies. Suppose we built a robot with three cameras built into it for picking up red, green, and blue frequencies (respectively) and it fed this information into a computer that calculated which category it belonged to:
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple
If it receives pure red frequencies, it files it under “red”. If it receives, say, 2:3 red to green, it files it under yellow. If 3:2, then under orange. Etc., etc., etc. If you ask it “What color are you currently seeing?”, it prints out the name of the category to the screen: “red”, “orange”, etc., etc., etc..
What if we want it to detect a frequency beyond purple? Would that be hard engineering-wise? Not really. Just apply the same design principles you did to the existing 3 cameras onto a 4th camera, and just tweak it to be sensitive to ultra-violate light. Then is it that hard to program the software to include an additional, never-before existing, category? Call it X. And to print out X to the screen when you ask it what color it is seeing?
And if X, why not Y and Z? Why not A, B, and C? The categories are limited only by your imagination (and hardware space):
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, X, Y, Z, A, B, C, etc., etc., etc..
This is quite simple to build in robotics and software. It will experience what you program it to experience.
On top of all that, there is a very simple solution that satisfies both our arguments (well, at least mine). If our color perception ever were to expand into the ultra-violate range of frequencies, it might just repeat after all–after 730 THz light (violet) we’d simply see red again (but at 750+ THz). But like the notes repeating for every octave, that doesn’t mean they are the same color, the same red. The “higher” red would have to have some aspect to it that the “lower” red doesn’t. I suggest we call this aspect “primeness”
! For every cycle of light frequency we go through as we raise the frequency, the colors repeat but they become more and more prime, and the more prime they become, the more unimaginable. ← That might work as a very feasible design for a future leap in our genetic profile–that is, if we ever need to see colors beyond violet.
futureone wrote:
Sound and touch are Physical senses, while Color is a magical sense. ← Magical? → Vision is hybrid Physical and Magic. It is spatially physical, but the color itself is a magical property.
Are you thinking of Locke’s primary and secondary properties?
futureone wrote:
If you can’t get extra notes from a keyboard, which is a Physical sense… how could you get more colors?
I hope I have shown how above.
futureone wrote:
BTW, you mention HSV, hue sat value ← brightness? → , but that is just a computer convenience.
← Oh, yeah. And good thing too. The biology of color vision is waaay less convenient. →
Really the brain sees only 2 color types. It sees grey and rainbow. You can get any color by just mixing the rainbow with a shade of grey.
A shade of grey, huh? So you must be thinking of this greyscale as like another dimension, going from pure black to pure white. Ok, but you still need 3 factors to represent how much of this greyscale gets mixed in with the color. Your color spectrum is hue (H), your greyscale is brightness (B), and how much of the latter is mixed in with the former is saturation (S).
I see no way around this. You must have 3 basic descriptors if you are to specify any particular color. Those descriptors must be taken from a position along some dimension/spectrum (RGB, for example, is another one). But if you really want to reduce color to 2 dimensions, be my guest. I’ll still argue that “primeness” is the 3rd dimension.
futureone wrote:
You mention how the brain creates purple. But uh… Purple is what we would naturally expect to see, its imbetween red and blue…
Not always. Sometimes it’s just beyond the frequencies of blue.
futureone wrote:
Second… the brain only sees realistic colors, that you can make paints of naturally. If alien eyes see 800 Thz to 2000 Thz they would have difficulty navigating a jungle, it would be dark mostly. ← Then let them see red-to-violet as well. → And they would need super regen eyes from all the ionization.
Let them have that too. Are you saying this is beyond evolution’s capacity?
futureone wrote:
Now back to the thing about why i believe nobody is seriously hue shifted more than a little bit. ← For the record, I don’t either. → if someone was seriously hue shifted (more than 100 hz) everything would be spiritually strange, for example characters characterized by blue might look green, strange. We all know what ugly orange looks like, but then they might see some other color, strange. And blood wouldn’t be red, strange. Water wouldn’t be blue. It would all be too weird.
So is this a reductio ad cerritulus argument? It can’t be, because it would be too weird? For one thing, whoever has this hue shifted vision probably had it since birth, and so to them it would be normal. They wouldn’t know any different. Second, are you saying nothing weird ever happens in the universe?
futureone wrote:
all is not mind. There are unconscious structures such as atoms which first are the building blocks of brains.
Ah, I see you haven’t read ahead to Part II of my OP over at My Theory of Consciousness (big surprise).
futureone wrote:
Even if the universe is fake and just an illusion made by an ASI… ← Who said it was fake? → still there must be physical building blocks of the ASI.
Part II of my OP (at My Theory of Consciousness) explains this. It shows how mind is a more suitable candidate than matter for the ultimate foundation of things. All is mind, and all is based on mind, even matter. Mind is sufficient in and of itself, it needs nothing more fundamental. It is a reality generating force, and is the only place where you find necessity and being. And when you’re a pantheist like me, mind is everywhere (maybe even omnipresent).