This topic will be familiar to anybody who's spent a fair bit of time in the company of children, or who remembers the thoughts of their own childhood. It's by no means a childish or simple topic--some aspects range into philosophy.
"Is color even real? The true nature of the rainbow is deeper than it seems" |
Salon (https://www.salon.com/2024/11/16/is-color-even-real-the-true-nature-of-the-rainbow-is-deeper-than-it-seems/)
QuoteWhite light can be blinding, cold, unforgiving. Our physical reality often finds it too much as well, splitting it apart any chance it gets. Plants are green because such wavelengths of light help it keep a consistent vacuum on the electromagnetic energy it slurps from the sun. The sky is blue because of atmospheric particles that scatter light in slower wavelengths. The skin of an apple, a cherry, a tomato: all different ways of twisting light into hues of red. But despite attempts from the best scientists and philosophers, what color truly is, if it's even anything tangible, remains elusive.
When it comes to the vexing problem of red or any other gradient, when we both agree that a thing is some color, is it really exactly the same as the color in your mind? Put another way, we might ask: is color even real?
Democritus believed that light refracting through atoms caused the phenomenon that we perceive and describe conventionally, or by mutual agreement, as color. By contrast, Aristotle believed that color inhered in objects. Throughout the scientific revolutions of the 17th Century, color was dismissed, along with other aesthetic properties like scent, as a secondary quality — that is, one lacking the explanatory role in the behavior of physical objects of so-called primary qualities, like motion or size or shape. Color was a frill, and perhaps an illusion. David Hume, the 18th Century philosopher, described it as "the phantasm of the senses."
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As we know now, colors aren't just in the eye of the beholder, but it's the brain that does the work, interpreting the information that the body gathers. Color occurs because our eyes are equipped with rods and cones — specialized light-absorbing cells in the retina at the back of the eye. The three different types of cones in our eyes each absorb different wavelengths of light. When light enters our eye through the pupil and hits the retina, our visual system compares the amount of light absorbed by each of the three types of cone. That information allows our brain to decide what color we think we're seeing. In low light levels, only rods are able to absorb light, giving us grayscale vision. But if there's a little bit more ambient lighting, colors look washed out, or low in chroma.
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There are competing factions on the question of what a color actually is — or if it's anything more than a figment of our imagination.
"It is reality-based, if you like," [Dr. Mohan] Matthen [philosopher at the University of Toronto] told Salon. Colors "have some basis in the world."
Matthen takes what he informally calls the "standard" view of color. It's not as distant from reality as, say, the phenomenon of pleasure, which is far more dependent on our inner states than on the world: "If I find this cup of coffee pleasurable, that's not a quality that's in coffee — that's just me reacting to it."
By contrast, Matthen sees color as more reality-dependent than the feeling of pleasure, while still being less real world-based than a so-called primary quality, like the movement or size of atoms. Secondary qualities are thus intermediate cases, with some basis in the real world: "Colour and also temperature, hot and cold flavor, certain kinds of characterizations of sound, high-pitched and low-pitched in sound, there are a number of these," Matthen said.
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"By convention, we speak about color, about touch and sound, as if those things are in the world, but in reality, there's just atoms in the void," Stephen Westland, a professor of Colour Science at the University of Leeds in the U.K., and a member of the CLP, told Salon in a video interview. "However, I completely believe that color exists. So some people might think that either color exists out there in the world or color doesn't exist. I don't believe either of those things, but I think the majority of color scientists don't believe either of those things either."
There are other ways in which we might say color isn't real — or that it's more real than we think, depending on how you think about culture. That is, our cultural formation determines to a significant extent what colors we perceive and what we are incapable of seeing because our brains have not been taught to expect it. And while light is vital to our experience of color, what are we to make of our ability to remember in color, or to see color in dreams?
[Continues . . . (https://www.salon.com/2024/11/16/is-color-even-real-the-true-nature-of-the-rainbow-is-deeper-than-it-seems/)]
". . . just atoms in the void." 8)