Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Color : "Why Everyone is WRONG and I'm Right!"

This particular post is going to discuss a topic that is a well-fought foe of mine in both the sense of fallacious arguments and term papers. This beast is such a massive topic that I can only explain the logic of the situation here, and it will be enough information to have the reader entranced for a nice length of time...
But, I will try.

In Fallacious Logic - people may stake the claim that there is no such thing as subjective truth because of this topic, and that our minds will always work the same. That this is somehow an evidence of a Creator, some ultimate moral authority.
(You can first point out that you're not talking about Color, you are talking about Morality. And THEN you can crush their feeble argument)

Color is something we don't often think about in life. Most of us have lost the idea of how lucky we are to be able to see in color. Some of us are forced to see in contrasts only - of Black, gray, and white (Color blindness). And, there are a cursed lucky few of us who have the honor of seeing color in response to certain stimuli during normal aspects of our day in the form of sound, touch, patterns, and smell (Synesthesia).
Now, in the cases that variate from the norm, we must state where their problems originate. In Color blindness, the problem mainly stems from broken or fried-out nerve receptors within the eyes, causing them to be unable to comprehend differentiating wavelengths. In Synesthesia, however, the mind takes other signals and interprets them as color, or other senses - essentially, it is a processing error within the mind.

It is with these three cases that we can draw three conclusions about color:
1) Color is a primary computation of the rebounded wavelengths of light, captured by our eyes.
2) This information is processed by and interpreted by the brain.
3) Color is a function of both the mind's calculated interpretation of input, and the capture of our eyes.

It is from here that we must step out of our own little bubble for a moment and fully define Color.
Color is the mind's interpretation of captured wavelengths of light, based upon the different wavelengths of light absorbed or reflected by the pigments in the object. [ref]

That underlined statement is possibly the most important part of the entire rambling. It tells us that, ultimately, it is up to the mind's chemical and reasoning processes to take this information and process it... And here, my friends, is where science can go no further.
There are no more tests that can be done. No more research. This is where the evidence comes to a grinding halt.
The truth is - there is no evidence to make the claim that everyone sees the same color. That my blue is your blue. That my pink is your pink. That my green is your green.
For all we know, what my mind processes as Blue is what your mind processes as Green. And what my mind says is Red, may be your Yellow.
This observation was first made in a paper called:
"How Culture Conditions the Colours We See" by Umberto Eco [ref]

In his paper, Umberto Eco made the genuine observation that Color is less than an observation and more related to language. It is a description of objects and pigments, more than the actual colors themselves. Color is not a fixed definition. It is just as ambiguous as the culture prescribing it. He also made the conjecture that color is something we relate to based upon how we are raised and taught as children as to the description of.
I will make this example:
 Step back into a time machine. You are now 2 years old. Your look into the sky and your mother begins explaining to you: "The sky is Blue." It was not until that moment in time that you knew what blue was. Now, everything you see that looks like the sky is now, of course, Blue. Water is Blue. Daddy's Jersey is Blue. The bottle of Pepsi is Blue. And so on.
As you can see in this example I have made - Just because we ascribe everything that looks like the sky "Blue" does not mean that we are all seeing the same thing. It just means that we have, as a culture, ascribed "Blue" to a certain wavelength of color that our minds can perceive.

And so here we are at the end of this explanation of Color.
So, what did we learn from this entire page? What conclusions can we draw?
First of all, we learned that we cannot scientifically provide evidence for or against the idea of a universal or subjective color scheme.
However, we have also learned that the color scheme is not a fixed definition - but instead, a result of what culture we were raised in and are simply descriptions of common wavelengths that reach our eyes. It is simply a category we place things in.


Anyone who makes a positive or negative claim on this topic is full of bullshit. Science has yet to obtain evidence of a universal color scheme, or a subjective color scheme.
There's just as much evidence for both sides.


  1. You just made something completely simple turn into something really complicated... lol...

    I guess that's what scientists do though :L

    PS thanks for making the text easier to read by putting the black background :)

  2. Wow, this is exactly the same argument I have with my neighbor each and every day, thanks for a great post!

  3. Very interesting post. But ye going very complicated hehe

  4. Wow, I really like it when people combine philosophy and science.

  5. Pretty interesting. I'm on the face and can see both sides of the argument. Oh and thanks for changing the blog layout, its a lot easier on the eyes.

  6. Well this post made me shit brix. Because I was planning on making a post very similar to this tomorrow(on synesthesia). But here's something to think about... scientist can measure the wavelengths of light so that becomes a constant blue wavelengths are the same length all the time you might also be able to study the part of the brain that interprets color comparing it to others to see if the brain functions in the same way which would give over whelming substantial evidence that we do see the same colors as others. But as far as damning evidence there is none. Also I have a mild case of synesthesia. Colors feelings and words intertwine for me. 10/10 post good sir. But now I have to come up with a new topic for tomorrow dang it.

  7. It's less of philosophy and more of conjecture based upon observations. It's more like... A Hypothesis in either claim.

    And yes - but we would have to run chemical tests on a live brain from a random set within the population. It's not about the area of the brain that processes the image - it is the fact that the brain is just as fucked up and independent as we are sometimes.

  8. I am amused that the next post was color after we qq'd about the background(but I do thank you for making it solid :p)

  9. Hmm, from now on if asked what color I like, I'll answer that it lies between 466nm and 483 nm :P

    But interesting arguments, I've heard them before but whenever faced in a situation I could use them, they're somehow missing =/

  10. I am currently taking a logic class at my college right now this will deff come in handy thanks man