Why can't we think of a New colour?

General Philosophy
41

If impressions need conceptual anchors to survive in memory, then a genuinely new colour wouldnt just require new sensory hardware, it would need an entirely new vocabulary to even persist. You couldnt hold onto it long enough for it to become a stable idea. It would just dissolve

The centuries point is the most interesting part to me honestly cuz it suggests that if genuine novelty ever did emerge it would be invisible to any individual, too slow and distributed for any single person to witness. It wouldnt be a moment of discovery, it would be an imperceptible drift across generations

And yes saw the Meno reply, I think I responded to it further up

42

But you can, as explained to you several times. Hume goes through this. You response seems to be that imagining a new colour on a spectrum doesn’t meet your criteria.

But thiat is moving a goalpost. If that was your initial goal, then that’s fine and you’re right - but humans objectively can imagine a new colour based on attributes assigned to it, given context (i.e the asides in a spectrum).

If that doesn’t do the job for you, okay. But that is literally imagining a new colour from that person’s perspective.

Tl;dr: If conjunction is a spanner in your works, okay. I don’t think many would agree with that. It’s a new colour for hte mind perceiving it through imagination.

43

Exactly.

Right. Unless aliens showed up. Maybe they could explain to us how relativity and quantum theory mesh.

Oh, I didn’t see it. I think Menos Paradox explains why we’re bound in the way described in your OP.

44

No, it’s valid for any observer. Between two colours there’s a third no-one thought of before.

Well, since human colour vision varies significantly depending on individual physiology, lighting conditions, surrounding context, acquaintance and other factors, it’s not even unique to have unique colour experiences.

We can, of course, assume some average and call it the human gamut. In the Technology & Science category you can find a topic titled Enhanced Color Vision. There you can find a link to an article about people who can see a colour outside the human gamut with the help of lasers.

45

I think this is unfounded speculation, perhaps as a result of resistance to the power of imagination.

Can I, beyond the line Immanuel gave, have some explanation for why this would be the case? I can certainly recall colours from pure conscious (i.e internal) experiences that I can recall and, mentally, lay over the real-world. I have hte sensation of still seeing those colours. Specifically, several shades of crystal green and one shade of purple. (i accept I could just be wrong, but assuming I am not, for instance, recalling a distant memory of impression here…)

46

We cant imagine a new colour unless we see it, all the colours we have now exists in food, nature, people, animals, and space, and im not even talking about colour. Say for example, “god is beyond our imaginations”, now when I personally think of god I eithe think of a old bearded man or a bright beam of light, but those are stuff I saw before in depictions or in general, can you imagine a being with no wordly features, no light, not dark, no human featues

47

we can, though. As has been explained to you about eight times. The mechanism is sound and you are not engaging any arguments made in response to yours.

or feel free to consider me a superhero. Because I cns imagine colours I haven’t seen with my eyes.

This is ignoring that “and I’m not even talking about colour” was a complete non sequitur. I can imagine animals I’ve not seen. And buildings.

How do you think design works.

48

I want to clarify that I agree with you that we can’t have imagined colours without having seen them. The protanope can’t imagine the additional colours that those with normal vision see and those with normal vision can’t imagine the additional colours that those with tetrachromacy see.

My objection is to the notion that the colours already exist “out there” and that having the appropriate eyes allows us to sense them. It’s a misunderstanding of the nature of colours. The colours we see are the end result of the biological response to light, not properties of the light or the surface that reflected said light.

For those with normal vision, 450nm light stimulates three types of cone cells, and for those with tetrachromacy, 450nm light stimulates four types of cone cells. It is the combination of neurotransmitters released by the cone cells that is the more immediate determinant of the colours we see than the wavelength of the light itself, and so those with tetrachromacy will see different colours than those with normal vision to the same wavelength of light — and not because they see additional wavelengths or additional properties of those wavelengths or additional properties of the surfaces that reflect those wavelengths, but just because they have an additional biological colour channel.

49

Can you describe the colour ot the animal to me, and im sure its gonna be a mix of shapes and features that you saw already, and I have engaged with your points, youre misunderstanding the point of the essay

50

Appreciate the clarification and you are right about the biology, colour is a transaction not a property of light itself, I think I spoke a little loosely, but If colour is entirely a product of biological processing then it is even more tightly bound to the individual organism’s hardware. You cannot conceive beyond what your specific biological machinery produces. There is no colour out there to stumble upon, there is only what your nervous system is capable of generating in response to the world, and this issue isnt just dimmed down to colours, its also towards lets say for example an entitiy that is beyond our imagination, it has no worldly features at all, non of the colours we have in the universe, no human or animal features, no light, no darkness, when we think about someone like god, we either imagine light or a old bearded man even though hes beyond our imagination, when we create new characters for movies or series, they always look human with human limbs and legs and eyes

51

Experiences of colour are elicited by conditions of satisfaction such as vision, light, pigments and so on. If your experience is entirely produced by your nervous system, then it’s not satisfied. It would not be an experience of colour but hallucination or blind belief mistaken as perception.

52

Up front, No, I don’t think you have. That the same thing is being presented ot you seems to suggest many feel the same. Your responses seem to be about why you’re incredulous, rather than discussions of the issues. For instance, I’m going to respond directly to your challenge here, in no uncertain terms. I would hope engagement doesn’t come in the form of plum denial, which has been the order so far.

Yes, I can. A particular shade of, i use the term “crystal” Green which I saw in the eye of a gigantic anaconda (i’m talking 80ft long, 2m wide head) in the throes of an ayahuasca experience.

I had never seen it before, I will likely never see it again because a very specific combination of neurotransmitters, change in blood flow rates in the brain, and my pre-existing set and setting are so specific that they can, in fact, produce novel colours (partially, in the way you’re addressing in the post directly above this one - but many will disagree about how colour works so I wont lean on that).

It was a Green that gave the impression that the colour itself was opaque, not the vehicle (i.e the eye). It was a green that, somehow, deepened around the edges of the coloured area. It had a “hot” sensation to it, as if there was some kind of heat hidden behind it (or causing it.. you could think here of how iridescence looks “oily”). It was marginally iridescent, but more properly it gave the impression you get when you see sunlight shinning just past a ridge of the moon - it shone beyond the spot the colour actually sat in. It almost morphed - not physically, but hte effect on the mind was ever so slightly different each time I bring it to mind. The colour remains the same - the effect is slightly different - this makes complete sense, as if the colour was not “from without” as it were, or at least caused from without, then the mind would not have a grounded experience to refer to. And indeed, a drug experience, no matter how profound, is not a grounded one.

I do not expect this to do anything for you, because you’ve not seen the colour. But I can bring it to mind, no problem. And it is clearly one I’ve never seen with my eyes. You can simply deny that I’m telling you the truth, but that wouldn’t be an argument.

53

So, if we are not born with a blank slate, then it follows that some notions are innate, not learned.

I believe the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is true, and the language(s) we learn influence what we consider as “blue”, but not what we consider as color in general. I think there’s an evolutionary reason for us to have three types of cones in our eyes, and it stand to reason that our brain machinery would be equipped to deal with that since birth.

If the brain was a blank slate, then it’s more likely that we could learn to imagine a new color, but I don’t think that’s the case. There’s no evolutionary reason for our brains to imagine colors we cannot see.

You are skipping over the people that can point to both. I can force my mind to see it as black and blue, or white and yellow. The trick is to imagine two different environments: one is extremely bright, and the other is dark. This confirms that the way we interpret colors is not absolute, but evolutionary aligned straight for a particular purpose.

I know I’m looking for truth. I don’t know what my quest for truth will reveal.

There’s no paradox at all.

There’s already people with four cones that are able to see colors the rest of us don’t. The first problem you already mentioned 1) they cannot describe the extra colors to the rest of us, 2) technology cannot display them, and 3) color systems (like RGB) cannot describe them. So it’s an interesting quirk that has no application.

That could easily be an introspection illusion. Just because you think you’ve seen a new color that doesn’t necessarily mean you saw one.

54

Trichromacy probably has its evolutionary reason, but so does our ability to imagine absent or invisible things.

To imagine a colour is not a duplication of colour vision. It’s an ability to elicit an experience without seeing the colour, for example by describing it plus knowing what other experiences are like.

55

Well, yes, and there’s an evolutionary reason for birds to have four types and mantis shrimp to have twelve types.

RGB obviously can’t but ABCD can, where A, B, C, and D are the four wavelengths that each of the four cone cells is most responsive to (much like R, G, and B are the three wavelengths that each of our three cone cells is most responsive to).

56

The fact that we can imagine thing doesn’t mean we can imagine every conceivable thing, therefore we aren’t necessarily able to imagine this particular thing.

I was talking about existing color systems. Of course one can device a color system for these people, but it has to actually be done.

57

What is an example of a thing or colour that we can conceive but can’t imagine?

58

Infinity, 10 dimensions, what it feels like to have a different brain.

59

I agree at least with the narrow point.

We have the ability to voluntarily induce brain states. When we imagine red, we are inducing the specific brain state that correlates with experiencing the color.

This is a skill. I can induce the state of red, because I am familiar with it, My brain has experienced its induction through perceptual pathways, and so it is already familiar with the pattern. You can even manipulate the pattern along color dimensions, in a limited way. You can take a red, and brighten and darken it, whiten or dewhiten it, saturate and desaturate it.

But consider what you are asking of your brain. “Induce a pattern corresponding to a fundamental color I have never seen”. What is this pattern exactly? Your brain has never experienced it before. So how can it produce it? Even if some combinations of neural firing indeed corresponds to a novel color, how could this state be reached? The brain is not a database that can search through all possible states, and retrieve the one you want. It can induce states it has learned, that is all.

But this does not apply to everything. It doesn’t apply to ideas, to art, to architecture, and so on. I’ll go into more depth on this point later.

60

Good examples :+1:

I imagine an infinitely large circle looks like a straight line.

Physicists use math for imagining 10 dimensions. Laymen can perhaps use a conceptual map? Imagination is not restricted to visual stuff.

The ability to feel what it’s like to have a different brain is called empathy. You know what a situation can feel like, which evokes the same feeling when you see others in the same or similar situation.

Empathy is also used in our experiences of shapes and colours. For example, the shape of an object can look heavy or light regardless of its true weight. A colour can look vivid or dull etc. The way it looks depends on one’s knowledge of heavy (e.g. wide) or light (e.g. thin) objects, vivid (bright) or dull (dark) environments.

Thus I can imagine a new colour by thinking of some way a colour has never made me feel before (e.g. thirsty).