----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Muth" <jamth@mindspring.com> Cc: <philofractal@lists.fractalus.com> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 6:25 AM Subject: [Fractint] FOTD 22-11-02 (Forever Amber [6])
I've seen the topic of the nature of colour being tossed around on the Fractint list lately. One of the questions being discussed is whether the sensation one person experiences when he observes red is identical to the sensation someone else experiences when he observes the same bundle of wave lengths.
Personally I think that this is probably so, statistically. Imagine that each of us are equipped with colour filters incorporated in our lenses, with individually different transmission properties. If my lenses pass a spectrum centred on "green", I will, unknowingly, experience a different visual world from Joe, whose filter responses are centred on "red". Both of us will see a spectrum of colours in our worlds, but they will differ; what I might call "reddish" Joe would call ***RED*** , and so on. I think that colour perception is yet another of those natural phenomena governed by the probability curve. Mark relates that his mild red/green colour blindness has not impeded any of his colour-dependant activities...I'd bet that he can even resolve a 3-D red/green stereogram.
When I ponder this question, the topic of artistic painting (and fractals) comes immediately to mind. Different people always have different opinions of the same work of art (or the same fractal). Could this be because they actually experience the colours differently? The sensation that is red to one person might appear as blue to another person, (though he would consider it red), while to a third person, the first person's sensation of red might be totally unknown.
Again in my opinion, this is going colourfully overboard. It's unlikely that the sensations of blue and red could be totally reversed in different people. As Mark said:- "Since we are, by the nature of our 98+% shared DNA, wired basically identically, one can argue that our optico-neural wiring, and hence function, is basically the same. In mammals, certain functions such as clear stereographic vision and motion detection require sensory stimulation to train (rewire) the neural net in the visual area of the occipital lobe. But I see no reason to doubt that colour vision is hard-wired from the start". I wonder if the differences are sufficient to cause the world population to split into the two groups, who can and can not perceive those phantom 3-D images lurking in the "magic" dot stereogram.
Perhaps different people actually experience the same work of visual art in different ways, and what is pleasing to one person is truly disgusting to another. There is an old saying that goes, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". This might be more true than we realize. And could the same thing also be true of the non-visual arts such as music and literature?
Yet again, IMHO...sure! Though I doubt that reactions to art are that extreme.
Another question also comes to mind, this one also of a philo- sophical nature. Since the sensation of colours we see in the world around us does not appear until the information from without reaches the mind, what do the actual external objects actually look like? We cannot say they look like a black-and- white photograph, since shades of grey are also colour sensations that arise in the mind. We can only dismiss the question as a meaningless waste of energy, saying that the actual shades and colours of the outer world is an abstract something that we can never know, and try to be satisfied with the non-answer. It is far more convenient to project the inner sensation of colour onto the outer world and consider colour to be an objective reality. But I can never forget that by doing this we are merely fooling ourselves.
Now hang on a bit! True, the *sensation* of colour cannot exist without a mind...but the colours are out there regardless. When grass is illuminated by white light, it absorbs most of the spectrum, except for a portion centred on "green". This is completely verifiable by electro-optical instrumentation. In fact, some color-processing equipments are dependant upon such processes. You, of all people, should be aware of that! John W.