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Blurble
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Memes
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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
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Pick any two adjacent known colors. Find the wavelength midpoint between these colors. Determine if this is a known color. Repeat until you've found an unclassified color.
This isn't an imagination problem, its a math problem.
Everything is a math problem. It just needs to be written in the proper form.
Colors aren't sharp combinations of wavelengths though.
They are not talking about the mathematical definition of color, but how the color is represented in the mental image you have in your head. Think about how a blue wavelength becomes a blue "pixel" in your head. It is possible to imagine other colors? If we could see ultraviolet, what color would it be? Is my blue the same as your blue or what my brain interprets as blue is different from what your brain does?
That's not a color, its an abstraction of a memory
It depends on the definition of "color". For us humans, in our everyday life, the abstraction we have in our mind is more meaningful than the wavelength, which is what formally defines a color, but not how we cognitively perceive it
Yeah, pretty much all arguments about colour can be solved if you realise each side is using a different definition of the word "colour" out of the four or five common ones. It's frustrating.
Same with holes - people always bring out topology as if it wasn't a super specialised piece of abstract math with barely any relation to anything physical.
This doesn't really work because colors are a spectrum. You can split and merge existing colors like using a single word for blue and green (like Japanese) or distinguish between light and dark blue (like Italian) but "light blue" isn't a new color. It's part of the blue spectrum
Yeah tell that to Pantone LLC
A spectrum isn't a color, its a range of wavelengths. "Light Blue" is a narrower range of wavelengths with higher brightness value than the "Dark Blue" end.
We define a unique "color" as a specific combination of hue, saturation, and brightness value. "Inventing" a new color is just a question of finding a combination of attributes that hasn't been produced before. Thanks to the midpoint theorum, you can do this right up to the point of Plank's constant.
I meant spectrum as in it's not a fixed value but, fine, I can call it range instead. Doesn't change my argument.
What do you mean "hasn't been produced before"? That comes with a huge burden of proof. People produce color gradients all the time. Pretty many colors in them.
And if you produce a shade of blue that by happenstance is either more or less saturated than anything else, what have you found there? It isn't a new color by any meaningful definition. It won't blow anyone's mind, it's just a shade of blue similar but not identical to other blue shades. It falls into the blue range. The observable light is devided into colors, each inhabiting a range. The exact way is different depending on language and other contexts but by no meaningful definition is a color just a single value.
Before you double down on your definition: the implication is that your definition doesn't make much sense and to demonstrate it from a different angle: how precise are you going to measure these? Let's say a common blue has the saturation of 63%, would 64% quality as a new color? What about 63.2%? Where do you draw the line? And if you have to draw lines anyway, why not choose a meaningful way as in defining "blue" as one color?
Sure. But, again, that's not a question of creativity, just an exhaustive exercise of proving uniqueness.
Because color isn't an invented concept, it is a perceived wavelength value/range. Asking for a "new color" is like asking for a "new number".
Under your broader definition of color, we've already found the three or seven or I guess nine if you want to count black/white, existing colors. The only way to "invent" new colors is to expand the spectrum by which humans perceive light.
Understanding how light works and how one might accomplish this takes creativity. But if we're excluding ultraviolet or infrared because they're outside the natural visual spectrum, all we can creatively accomplish is proving we've exhausted the range of available colors.
Which is the point of the meme and I agree with it
There is a lot we can do creatively besides creating new colors from stretch. The meme is about how the human mind is creative but this one thing it can't do.
Besides, how is your method creative? You said yourself it's pure mathematics.
The point is based on a faulty understanding of creativity. It's not a counting problem.
It's not. The problem isn't a problem of creativity. That's the underlying flaw in the comic's conceit. "Give me a color that's not a composite of primary colors" is an impossible task because of how we define the concept of colors, not because an individual is incapable of coming up with a color permutation that has never been seen before.
I think you're conflating creativity and imagination. The task isn't about physically creating a color but about imaging it. About a mental image of a color you never saw before. Not about actualizing that color.
You made it into a counting problem so I really don't see your point here
Exactly. It's even impossible to imagine. We can imagine shapes and form and stuff we never saw and will never see but for colors, this isn't true. That's the whole point.
How on earth do you tell someone they haven't imagined a new color? That's quite literally impossible to assert or deny.
It is inherently a counting problem because of how sight and color recognition functions.
It is impossible to for a second party tell a first party that they have been unsuccessful in imagining something.
Looking at the last panel, I can say with certainty, that dude failed at the task.
It's, again, no question of sight and color recognition but about imagination.
You're still looking that the comic from a very wrong angle and say "it makes no sense". Well, from my angle, it does.
It's a thought experiment, reminds me of zen Buddhist koans. "What is the sound of one clapping hand?" or "What did your face look like before your parents were born?" don't have an answer. You can tell me you know the answer and I can't proof you wrong but that's not the point. It's about making people think. "Imagine a color you never saw" is the same. You can tell me you made it and maybe that would mean enlightenment for you but it's beside the point. It's a thought experiment obviously meant to have no answer (again, look at the last panel). The more you tell me that makes no sense and there is no answer, you're proofing my point. The comic makes it explicit that there is no answer. You impose a very different meaning onto it that doesn't lead to anything and say "the comic doesn't lead to anything".
The last panel is a fantasy by the artist.
You can answer these questions. People just get anger when you do, because they want the question to be mystical rather than nonsensical. When they get silly-but-correct answers, it denudes the questions of their woo-woo faux-wisdom.
So you have to fall back on even vaguer and more imprecise language, to try and obscure the original badly worded riddle.
This might come as a surprise, but the whole comic is. If you read the first 3 panels as being historically accurate, I see where your confusion comes from.
Anyway, you have a very unimaginative and literal approach to all this and that's just not the layer the comic communicates on. Maybe at least acknowledge that.
The one thing I really dislike about lemmy in general is that there are sooo many people like this here.
No fun. No whimsy. All philosophical challenges are puzzles meant to be conquered by misinterpreting the point and then writing a 4-line python script. It's linux people, man, I swear.
The first panel is a challenge by the author, which is real at least in so far as it's a sentiment the author actually has.
The next two are filler.
The fourth is an invented response.
I feel if I do that, I would been seeing the same color for a while