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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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I tried and failed to explain this to people once. It's not that a magical never before seen color exists outside our visible spectrum, its more like their red and violet ends would be shifted further along the spectrum and everything inbetween would be more differentiable. A great example is migratory birds can tell North from South by the color of the sky, because the electromagnetic field around the earth has a color gradient. It just all looks the same to us because by comparison we're colorblind to that part of the spectrum.
But how can we know if they don't experience different colors in the infrared/ultraviolet range?
Because what we experience as colors aren't provided by the physical world. The physical world solely provides a light frequency. We sense that frequency, process it, and understand it as colors because evolution has resulted in that being the most advantageous for us. It's better for us to understand what we see as colors than for example a numerical representation of the light frequency. It's quicker to process what we see as a color than a shit ton of numbers.
Imagine a painting where instead of colors, what you see is one shade with the numerical frequencies of all the light reflecting off of it. Colors are made up in our minds. It would be nearly impossible to make sense of that.
Colors are thoughts that exist solely in our visual cortex, an entirely made up human experience. For example, magenta doesnt exist in nature. It's what we make up in our heads when indigo and red are hit our eyes are the same time. Asking if another being sees different colors is like asking if another being thinks differently.
We can see what wavelengths their photoreceptors trigger on
Yes, but it shows that they're reacting to it and probably experiencing the color, but it doesn't give a hint on how the experience is. I'm falling a bit into a solipsism-like thinking, but perhaps the idea of other animals experiencing colors that we don't isn't absurd.
Do you have a source for that magnetic field sky colour gradient thing? That's really interesting!
That is... Super disappointing. I always wanted to believe there were just-- unreal colors from out of space that some things actually could see, but we'd just never really know. I love science, dgmw; but sometimes, I hate it just as much for stripping more of the wonder out of this ugly mud ball.