Never before seen colors

Wow, I'm not the only person who thought of this.

Not 100% the way you put it, but I've always tried to imagine a completely new color but couldn't, and I wondered if it wasn't because it was impossible, but just because I've never seen another color.

Maybe there is...maybe there is...

I have thought about this many, many times. It seriously boggles my mind. But every time I think about it I seem to picture maroon and blue. I have no idea why

From Koka

Note: My favourite colour is "soqub" which is sort of a cross between cordrouy and E#.

You have no idea how much that made me laugh




Far too much is the answer.

How about the complete absence of colour? perfect white, just light.

Big red button on thermo-nuclear device says DO NOT PRESS, soooooo, you press it.

Perfect white

Originally posted by Now_Then
How about the complete absence of colour? perfect white, just light.

Big red button on thermo-nuclear device says DO NOT PRESS, soooooo, you press it.

Perfect white

Would a complete absence of colour not be black as colour relies on light.

No light no colour, at least we would not be able to perceive it, except of course for my favourite colour "soqub".......

Black or white is absence of colour. this is a pretty boring reply - sorry

White light is all of the colors combined. Black is the absence of radiated or reflected light. Equally boring.

My mom, who is now 77, used to ask such questions when I was a little kid. She wondered once if there were colors that human eyes had never seen. I didn't know what to tell her back then, but I know the answer now.

It's the same question as "If a tree fell in the forest and there was nobody there to hear it, would it make a sound?"

The answer is No... We define "sound" as the vibrations of air molecules that occur within a specific range of frequencies that are received by the human ear. If there is no human ear to hear it, then there is no sound.

Same thing with visible light. Our eyes and brains have evolved to perceive a specific range of radiation that we call visible light. Therefore, a normal, healthy human eye and brain can only perceive the range of visible light, and all the colors that we can see are all the colors there are.

In other words, there are no strange and wonderful new colors hiding on the dark side of the Moon waiting for us to discover them, you see, because we're going to see only what we can see.

Now, if you are severely color blind and have been so since birth, then you are definitely not seeing the full range of visible light. This would be the only valid instance in which you might someday "see new colors"... Say, 20 or 30 years from now, computer-assisted computers manage to design a totally artificial human eye, so they pop out your color-blind eyes and plug in some brand new ones (with a warranty).

If your brain is normal, then the new eyes will allow you to see the full range of visible light. You would be able to see red and green for the first time as "new colors"... What a treat that would be!

However, they couldn't design an artificial eye to allow a human brain to perceive infrared, ultraviolet or X-rays as "new colors," for example, because your brain isn't wired to perceive those wavelengths. Instead, the artificial eye would have to translate the information into a color that you can perceive. So you might see X-rays as yellowish-orange, and ultraviolet as a purplish color, and so on, but you could only see those odd wavelengths in terms of visible light.

Any questions? Good. Class dismissed.

— Doc Velocity

[edit on 2/22/2007 by Doc Velocity]

You know it is nearly impossible for us to imagine a different color as our brains can only process what we know.
There is one thing about color that I would like to bring up though.
I see red and then you identify the same object that I am looking at as red. That is easy. we have been trained. But what if my hue of red if you were to see it through my eyes you would actually see black or brown or a totally dif color?
We have been trained since a young age that for instance your parent would say "this color ball is red" So from there on when you saw that same shade of color you knew it was red. Now what if I could see through your spectrum and that shade to me looked like actually brown or purple?
Just food for thought.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, color-blindness presents us with unique opportunities to compare the way different humans actually see the same color.

Little anecdote: I had a boss in Washington, DC, a couple years back who was the most driven fellow, a real leader, with a million ideas and the knowledge to make them work. He impressed everyone he met with his ability to delegate, organize, argue his point, et cetera.

I worked for this guy for two years before I finally discovered that he was so color blind, he was almost viewing the world in monochrome. Seriously, he could only see in shades of gray, he was diagnosed as severely color blind, and he had been severely color blind his entire life.

This boggled my mind, because we had worked together on presentations and case studies and so forth, which required that we agree on color formatting. He knew what colors I was talking about, could point to them and everything, and I knew what colors he was talking about. We had consensus... But he was referring to the different colors as very subtle differences in grayscale. That's the way he saw colors.

So, it's all a matter of consensus. I agree with you that an apple is red, even though your perception of "red" might be my perception of "blue"... Who would ever know? As long as we agree, it makes no difference. It's when one of us starts going color blind, and I start insisting that your "red" isn't red at all, but blue — that's when problems begin.

— Doc Velocity

And here's some mo' food for thought. The pothead philosopher Robert Anton Wilson (now mercifully deceased) once suggested an interesting thought experiment having to do with colors and how we choose to perceive them.

Wilson observed that an orange (the fruit) wasn't really orange (the color) at all. Here was his reasoning: When we look at an orange, we only see the light that is reflected off of the fruit — in other words, we are seeing the light that the fruit rejects as vital to its life and growth. The fruit doesn't need red and yellow light, and those colors are rejected/reflected back to our eyes. The fruit needs and is absorbing BLUE light almost exclusively.

Cut the fruit open. Every part of it, inside and out, is rejecting red and yellow light. Everything about the fruit is absorbing and making use of blue light.

So, given this scientific revelation, why isn't the fruit more properly called "a blue"...?? Wilson's point, I suppose, is that we choose to perceive and label the world based on erroneous information all the time. This little fruit that thrives almost exclusively on blue light has been labeled not for what it is, but for what it is not.

Yeah, Bob Wilson was a funny old cuss.

— Doc Velocity

Originally posted by Arcane Demesne
So photons don't vibrate?

They do, but they don't vibrate a medium. Really, photons are still the subject of research, and no one knows for sure what they are...

Sound is like waves in a bathtub. That's what your ears pick up.

Light... Basically, for sound, there has to be something to vibrate in. For waves in a bathtub, you need water. Or it can travel through air. Light doesn't need that, because (as far as we know today) it's its own medium. The photons themselves vibrate, in a way. That's why it can travel through a vacuum, while sound can't.

I explained light kind of incoherently, so... en.wikipedia.org...

as we evolve, New colors may appear out of the ultraviolet range. Some folks think we couldnt see blue thousands of years ago. This thread is a sychronicity for me because i woke up this morning thinking of how i could paint pictures in the ultaviolet. good stuff.

Originally posted by Stewart Lewis
i woke up this morning thinking of how i could paint pictures in the ultaviolet. good stuff.

You should paint in the ultra violet, bees are very short of good art!

Language shapes conciousness as well. In Paul Von Wards book GODS, GENES, and CONSCIOUSNESS
he states,

It has been suggested that with with fewer words for the nuances of colors, ancient Egyptians actually did not see as many shades as modern artist.

(227)

Wow, thanks for all of the interesting replies.. i didn't think this thread would get passed the first page. Nice responces everyone i've enjoyed reading them.

Doc Velocity you say a tree in the forest dosn't make a noise cuz theres no one to hear it, right? Well do the vibrations and frequencies we percieve as sound still exist in the area the tree fell but theres just no one there to hear it, therefore it is silent?

I've always been interested in reality and the way the brain sees it. According to some, everything exist in your head ((mind or brain)), so do we see the actual colors as they are or does the light hit the eye which in turn encrypts it into an electrical signal to the brain which in turns decipher the signal telling us what color it is ((or thinks it is)). And that orange post blew my mind! Never thought of it like that.

Well, if you believe in physics, yes, you have to acknowledge that the molecular disturbance is there in the forest. IF there was a human ear there to hear it, it would be "sound," as we define sound.

On sort of the same token, we can't see X-rays because we don't have the eyes to see such a thing. If we didn't have devices and techniques for translating X-rays into visible light representations, we wouldn't know that X-rays exist. Before we discovered how to detect and label them, X-rays in a very real sense didn't exist at all!


— Doc Velocity

yea it makes perfect sencejust a bit hard for my head to compute!!
thansk doc

Originally posted by biotic
All we know is life on earth and what we see on earth. Well what if somewhere in our solar system, in our galaxy, or in our universe there exists colors we've never seen before?

Color is not an objective quality. Reality, or at least the world outside of mind's, doesn't have 'color'. Color is an imaginary perception that our brains associate when they are stimulated by specific electromagnetic wavelengths.

Hmm bit of a strange topic i know but i'm interested in some of your responces

But a damned neat one either way!

It reminds me of the idea that 'not everyone sees the same colors'. As I said above, color is just a perception of the mind. The eye receives wavelength signals from the sky, the brain processes them, and applies the color 'blue'.
But, WHAT IF in my head, the sky is called "blue" in color, but the color that I perceive is what you call "Red". But since we are both conditioned to call whatever color the sky is 'blue', we both say the sky is blue.
Infact, what if these things are completely different for everyone? What if the human brain has a 'pallete' of colors that are all the same, but associates them with completely different wavelengths of light?

I could be seeing what you'd perceive as Green Skies, Blue Trees, and Purple dirt. And we'd never know.

I've thought the same thing since I was about 7. I always used to argue with kids in school, but they could never grasp the concept. They didn't understand that what they knew is only what they had been taught. It's a great concept. It's always intrigued me.

Everyone has a favorite color. What if everyone's favorite color was the same color. We've just learn to call the color somthing else since we were children. I like the color "blue", but what if what you see as "red" and is your favorite color abut it is actually what I see as "blue". Thus both of our favorite color's are "Blue" but we'd never know that.

Originally posted by Nygdan
Color is an imaginary perception that our brains associate when they are stimulated by specific electromagnetic wavelengths.

The way we label colors may be subjective, but the visible light range is hardly imaginary. The radiation spectrum (or what we now call the spectrum) has been out there all along, long before our primal ancestors developed the tumors in their heads that facilitated imagination. Our brains and eyes evolved as they did over millions of years because of external stimuli, including that small range of of radiation that we call "light," which was apparently a successful evolutionary arrangement for our species.

I understand what you're saying regarding mere mental imagery as a result of external stimulation, but I think that's over-analyzing the process. It's equally valid and more efficient for a human to observe, "That object over there is red, and I'll fight any man who says otherwise." Perfectly legit observation, and it stimulates the survival reflex more efficiently than trying to rationalize and explain why that red object is only an illusion manufactured in our brains.

Hard to go wrong with the time-worn advice: Just stop thinking about it and DO it!

Originally posted by Nygdan
It reminds me of the idea that 'not everyone sees the same colors'... what if these things are completely different for everyone? What if the human brain has a 'pallete' of colors that are all the same, but associates them with completely different wavelengths of light?

Earlier I discussed how people suffering color blindness can give us a good opportunity to compare how different humans see the same colors.

—Doc Velocity