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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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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.