What is Color? & Who Cares? | Philosophy Tube
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- čas přidán 14. 06. 2024
- Let's look at the philosophy of colour! (Or color, if you're American.) Is colour wavelengths of light? Mental perceptions? How do anthropology, linguistics, and the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon come into it? What does Wittgenstein say? Do trees falling in empty forests make a sound? Also, who cares?
- Zábava
Like for the "My mum" moment
Yeah, I paused the video right before that to look up tetrachromacy and got all excited reading the Wikipedia article. Then I return to continue watching just to get my mind completely blown.
the most ambitious crossover in history
I am blown away that your mother is the Tetrachromat. I read about that story when it first came out, but I never thought I'd actually find out who it was beyond "a teacher from England". I would love to hear from her how she sees the world, if it just allows her to see more variations between colors that we see as "close enough" that they look the same, or whether she can distinguish colors from each other more easily, so things have harder edges. What does a rainbow look like? Just a more blended together band of light, or a more distinguished one? This stuff is just fascinating to me. :D
The extra cone is yellow, halfway between red and green so it just helps you distinguish between "true" yellow (a single wavelength) and yellow made from red and green.
@@d.l.7416 That's still a whole new dimension of colorality. TV shows and computer screen images must look quite fake to her.
@@Eudaletism Yeah I guess somethings that are pure yellow may look slightly weird on a TV
Dude, we learned about your mum on my biology course at Nottingham uni. This is extremely surprising to me.
small world, huh?
u should interview your mother!!
+
Very important question Oly: Is your mum a Professor X or a Magneto type of mutant? Will she use her powers for good or for awesome?
Liked for the strong bad reference.
I can't believe you didn't bring up the history of the color blue. Historically, blue has typically lacked its own word throughout most of (western) history. For a very long time, green was used as a catch all for both green and blue - the two were seen as just different shades of the same color. The same is true of red and orange - speaking of which, the color is named after the fruit, so that's one age old debate answered, lol. Homer wrote of a "wine-dark sea" to describe what we assume to be blue waters, raising the question of whether the ancient Greeks perceived color the same way as us due to linguistic differences. And, to this day, many Japanese people have trouble distinguishing green from blue, since they are both encompassed by the word "ao".
I realize I'm responding to an old comment, but it's not true that Japanese people have a hard time distinguishing between blue and green. In the context of someone describing a thing as being the color 'ao' (青), it can be unclear in some situations whether the thing is blue or green. This is because only red, black, blue(ao), and white used to exist in Japanese vocabulary before about 1100 AD. However, it is clear nowadays that the word 'ao' usually refers to blue and 'midori' refers to green. So while Japanese people perceive blue and green as separate colors, the consensus is that 'ao' *can* mean blue and green, but is usually the word for blue.
The West didn’t use to have separate words for green and blue either?? Same here in the East (East Asia at least)!
(i heard this fact a long time ago so i’m probably wrong on a few details) i’ve heard in russian, light and dark blue are considered two separate colors like how pink and red are two separate colors in english
Homer used the word 'kyanos' to refer to blue. you're wrong.
@@sumdumbmick
No. Homer didn't mean "blue" when he said kyanos.
That's not how words work.
If I were to say "the sky is bright", you can not conclude that the word "bright" means blue. Same applies for kyanos, Homes was using it to describe the lightness of a color, not the actual hue.
I feel like this video includes more chest hair than normal
Very distracting, though not necessarily a bad thing :P
It does: I was very warm that morning so I decided to just shoot in what I had on
You don't need to make excuses about why you wanted to show your chest hair we understand
Mike Hermida not for a real man
Perhaps it is more distracting to you becuase you see more kinds of black and brown than we do!?
I want to know what your Mum thinks of the impressionists, Cézanne, Van Gogh, etc.
Does she have a strong reaction to the visual arts?
Monet
I'm honestly just wondering if screens look wrong to her.
I think there's a case to be made that we all definitely "see colors" differently.
I think when people talk about seeing colors differently they're imagining a person who's brain reacts to, say, red, the way ours reacts to blue and vice versa. But how exactly does our brain normally react to seeing red things? It makes us think of other stuff we've seen that's red. Maybe it makes us a little hungrier or maybe it'll increase our heart-rate or something. But we've all seen different red stuff, so we'll all have different memories associated with it. Likewise, our emotions will be affected by the colors we see in different ways, and those emotions will manifest themselves differently.
Basically, the only way for us to really see the same colors is if our brains react to them identically, which is impossible unless we have identical brains.
...unless you believe in metaphysical qualia, but that opens a whole other can of worms.
What are you doing here? You should spend your time doing linguistics videos instead of commenting!
Xidnaf You're supposed to be making videos. Where are they? Seriously though, I know they require time and effort to make, but damn they're good. I showed your video about linguistic prescriptivism to my Sociolinguistics teacher and she really liked it. Kudos!
I miss your linguistics videos. :(
***** And I miss making them!!!! School and being an adult is hard though.
Doesn't your comment imply the existence of metaphysical qualia anyway? You're describing colour as a purely phenomenological thing; if we all experience colour subjectively in accordance with our own idiosyncratic brain chemistry, then how can we express the phenomenon of colour in any physical terms at all? Colour as it is experienced seems to be ontologically distinct from anything physical, even if it might have a correlation to physical processes such as evolutionary advantage. But ultimately what does the redness of red reduce to in the physical world if it's different for everyone?
at 3:05 I took off my headphones and screamed internally for several seconds because for my whole life I firmly held the viewpoint that "well DUH it makes a sound" and you are the only person who has ever caused me to question that assumption congratulations.
*Knowing Better Intensifies*
Yeah I recognised that immediately, I’m here for the philosophy not the biology 😅
My intuition is telling me that color is just one specific example of how everyone's visual perceptions in general may differ entirely but we happen to use a consistent language (to some extent depending on cultural discrepancies) to describe them. For example my "up" might be your "down" but we end up labeling it with the same word. And this wouldn't interfere with our spatial coordination because we could still be moving and looking in the same directions anyway. It's just how we see our own movement relative to our surroundings.
i am absolutely devouring your older content! awesome thing to find out about your mother! (shes very proud of you, by the way, as Tallerico says)
！！！！I was thinking about this question when I was young. Never know this is a philosophy problem until now
uhm that's because children are kinda philosophers? (cuz they're not used to "be alive" YET unlike most people)
Children are kinda philosophers because they've yet to have their curiosity crushed out of them by the weight of 'Because I said so, now get on with your life already.'
I read a book on synesthesia once called "Wednesday is Indigo Blue". In it, the author describes some studies on grapheme-color synesthesia. Basically, people with grapheme-color synesthesia generally perceive the same colors when they see the same letters. For example, "A" is perceived as red for most synesthetes. If the way we perceive color were random assigned in our brains, then this correlation would difficult to explain; however, if each individual's color perception were normally similar, then this consistency is more understandable.
An offspring of a woman with 4 cones and a descendant of the crown? That's a bit of a stretch olly
Is it really that weird? In my history is the first female superintendent of an American hospital, and the first senator of the state I'm in. If you look back in your family history long enough, you will almost certainly find at least one extremely important person on each. Just due to how reproduction works, we're basically all related to kings and prophets, revolutionaries and artists.
This was really interesting! I love colour theory but I've never encountered colour philosophy. Especially as it pertains to language. It was actually something I noticed about English in comparison to Gaelige (the Irish language) before.
As an example, in Gaelige, there are three distinct words for white but with different meanings and usages.
Bán - the most commonly used for white coloured objects, but more specifically means pale. You'd use it for skin, wine, snow, all sorts. Bán also means empty or blank (i.e. Áit bán means "an empty place".)
Geal - is often translated as "clear white" but in use it implies brightness and freshness. Geal is used to describe the colour of a lime, despite limes being green. It can also be used for the sun or frost or clear days.
Fionn - can be translated as "fair" as it's most often used for light coloured hair. But you can also use it for sunlight or even sea foam. (Things which, in english, youd say are yellow and green, respectively). This to me, implies a kind of faintness or a lack of vividness.
It goes further, most colour words in Gaeilge have associated implications or idiomatic meanings. With this video in mind it feels as if there's more of an attempt to capture the experience of an object rather than name it's colour.
I find it astounding that our sensory perceptions are so incredibly hard to describe. You can explain how red looks unless you point to an object which is red. You can't explain how something sweet tastes without giving a person something sweet to eat. I mostly think in language and it's interesting that you just can't find words for it.
I also don't understand why and how our brain creates a visual image. Would it not be enough to collect the visual information? Why do we need an image? I know that we haven't found a unicorn on earth until now. That's knowledge that is just there. Why isn't it the same with sensory perceptions? Why do I see a door, why is it that I don't simply know it if the light arrives at my retina? Of course, maybe it's easier that way. But that still leaves a question: How the hell does do brain do this? And where in space is this image? It isn't really outside of our brains, but in our brains there is nothing physical where you can find this image... really weird. A soul could solve this problem of course, but well, there's no evidence for it until now.
Yes! I used to dismiss this question, viewing it as basically woo. I would have said something like it's just our brains' interpretation of information or whatever.
But that doesn't actually say anything about where perception comes from. And how are perception and conciousness related? I wish I could say...
How come we are conscious in the first place, and not just philosophical zombies that simply reacts to physical stimuli.
As is likely mentioned in some Philosophy Tube video, the philosophers and scientists don’t even know what questions to ask, that they can find answers to.
I don't think I'll ever get bored of this channel, it's my all time favourite channel on CZcams. Thanks for making these videos!
Some of my own experiences of how language affects colour: the obvious one is the idea of 'red' hair, in a lot of languages, hair cannot be 'red', there is a distinct word for it, like we say 'blonde' instead of 'yellow' for example. When I was teaching in Indonesia, people were surprised to learn that I thought my hair was 'red', they perceived it to be either blonde or brown (tbh I think the ones who called it blonde just thought all white people had blonde hair). Also in Indonesia, the difference between blue and green is different, it was at first difficult trying to teach this as I thought my class must have had the English words mixed up but it turns out that they just saw the point where green changed to blue and vice versa as different. Fun video, and your Mam is class! Her life must be a permanent game of blue or gold dress!
I'm not gay but damn you're handsome
K.S.R.-TV Thanks
Well I'm gay and I think he's pretty damn cute too
I’m not handsome but damn you’re gay?
fuck off all of you just say hes handsome and leave it at that... "no homo" is so boring
I'm bisexual and have a massive crush on Olly.
2 minutes in and holy fucking shit, that's amazing!
I do not comment on anyones page. I have to say this is my new favorite channel. Thank you for your service. I really appreciate it.
My pleasure!
Could you do a video on linguistic relativity?
i second this!
I third this! I'm currently studying it in English!
I think this has been my favourite video that you've released. This was fucking fantastic!!
Thanks for making this. My students have just been studying Locke's primary and secondary qualities before moving to Berkeley's idealism, so this could prove to be a very useful recap or revision tool for later on. Keep up the good work!
I found this video among several others because I just had a bit of an existential crisis when I figured out something that literally changed how I interpret colour.
My young daughter and I talked about colours while she was painting. She wanted to know how to mix pink and I said red and white and she said "so pink is just light red?" and I said yes. Then she wanted to mix brown so I said mix the three primary colours but she ended up with grey.
So I was thinking about that later and I realised that brown is just dark orange. For some reason that blew my noodle. And now, while my eyes still see the same colours and my brain still experiences the same colours in some sense, some part of my brain is now "seeing" browns as dark red-oranges, dark yellow-oranges, and straight dark oranges.
TREE TRUNKS ARE ORANGE!!!!
CHOCOLATES ARE ORANGE!!!!
CARDBOARD IS ORANGE!!!!
Obviously it is not just the change in colour interpretation that is melting my mind but the implications ... how do we ever agree on anything? if i failed to see such a basic thing for so long then what else am i missing or misinterpreting? how can i trust myself? etc. etc.
But more importantly, how can Abigail be both the daughter of the tetrachromat and the heir of the Stuart kings while I get stuck with disturbing, obsessesive thoughts of orange poo in the philosophical tower of Babel?
The real question this video posits isn't about color, but rather collar. And my, oh my, the answer is yes!
An x-man who can think critically about whether their approach to stopping mutantism is the right one (and is also good at seeing shades of green). I'd buy that comic.
When it comes to colours I have a real example that helped my mum understand how I see. I dropped my dark green dish sponge on my terracotta kitchen floor. I know the sponge is green. I know the floor is red (-dish brown). But I couldn't see it anywhere. In the end I found it by looking at an angle. They're different colours but similar shades, so it just didn't stand out enough. There was also a time when I saw children picking up small bright red toys from a bright green carpet and I could only see the toys when I looked directly at them. They vanished as soon as I looked even slightly to the side. It would've taken me hours to find them all.
I hope you know that you here presented an idea worthy of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Excuses. Now I can blame the mess in my apartment on total colorblindness.
This is one of the best videos I've seen you produce. I'm an artist and color is in my life every day. There are so many interesting ideas you put forth in this discussion. It is really making me think! I agree with others- I would love to see you interview your mum- that would be a really interesting video. Thanks for what you do- it makes me think!
this is the first time I've heard someone agree with me about the tree falling in the woods question. nice
I would love an updated version of this video. I think you could come up with some lovely vibes to go with this.
That's so interesting, your mum a tetrachromat! I have only read fiction books that hinge on the idea of a lead character with that vision, and it makes for interesting stories for sure. What is also interesting is without knowing it was an actual field in philosophy, I have questioned before whether what I perceive as being a certain colour could be very different to what another would see if they looked through my eyes. I feel kinda validated with the silly ideas that come to my mind every so often......
i think about this all the time. thanks for putting it in words
You've got my curiosity piqued. I need to have these tests done. I already know I have a weird form of synaesthesia that enables me to taste and smell colors, but I also have unusually sensitive visual perception of color.
When you say Pirahã have a "complex" language, your actually making a similar mistake to what Wittgenstein did. Only he calls it "evolved" and you call it "complex."
It is kind of a misconception to say a language is "more complex" than another language, or "more complex than average". As I understand it, linguists argue that it is impossible to define how complex a language is, because the mechanics each language uses differ so much from each other. The ways in which languages differ are very difficult to compare quantitatively. So we could never develop any kind of scale for linguistic complexity.
Did you miss the "finger quotes"?
They probably mean morphological complexity (how complex are your grammar rules). English has lost verb tenses, noun cases, and grammatical gender, yet it works as well as old English. Ussually, when languages become simpler in one aspect (like grammar) may become more complex in another (like vocabulary or pronunciation)
You could absolutely use information theory to come up with some metric of complexity or relative complexity.
I'm interested in finding out why and how the mind can perceive a greater spectrum of colours under the influence of LSD-25 and N,N-DMT. Having tried both before, it's astounding how clear and highly detailed individual colours become against similar shades.
Ah… Yes! To find out why and how, you need to study philosophy and science while under the influence of the same medicaments.
(No, please don’t.)
as a child I always asked myself if people seems colours the same way and if language affects the behavior and even the way people think, and today I learned that me, as a child, was asking myself philosophical questions, that is fucking awesome.
Great video, keep up the excellent work Olly!
The idea of linguistic relativity has a long a tenuous relationship with the field of linguistics at large. It's hard to talk about without bringing in the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis," which is also known as linguistic determinism, which is also known as a completely bonkers idea Whorf came up with when studying the Hopi language. I'm studying linguistics in university and the general consensus seems to be that linguistic relativity, if it really exists, only effects fringe parts of semantics. There's also the chicken & egg problem of asking if language determines culture or vice versa. I wrote a pretty long paper on this for a class once and there's a lot more to it that gets into some pretty nasty and foundation-less stuff and can sometimes result in overly-totalizing allegations about certain languages and the people that speak them-racism, sometimes. Just some stuff that maybe one should be aware of when looking into this.
atm I don't agree but I didn't study linguistics or anthropology much. I do know that I often believe that I have a good reason for thinking something until I take the time to actually form my reasoning into full sentences. If there are aspects of different languages which cannot be translated properly, I can't see how this wouldn't affect my behaviour after processing certain complex thoughts.
Or is it just that there isn't sufficient evidence to show that such untranslatable things do, in fact, exist? Again, I only have cursory knowledge of Everett and the Pirahã tribe. Criticism of it makes sense, but doesn't seem to invalidate his claims (which also aren't substantiated enough to invalidate anything else).
It does seem to me though that a lack of recursion in a language (if there is, in fact, a lack of recursion) would definitely have a bearing on both my ability to reason (not because it would otherwise be impossible to do but because it may make the ideas too complex to be able to hold in my head) and possibly the conclusions I come to if the lack of speaking this way influences how often I think about certain parts of what I'm saying. I mean, have you noticed how long my sentences are? :p
Also with the chicken and the egg thing, the video described Linguistic Relativism as the belief that language affects how we behave which wouldn't negate culture also affecting language. Only Universalism was described as just one, not the other. Again, don't know if this is entirely accurate but it would definitely make a difference for that argument if it is.
Hello mate. Would it be possible to read your paper on the subject?
It sounds interesting.
i don't know why, but the thing with your mom made me very happy
The notification for this video popped up on my phone just as I sat down to write a post-structuralist reading of colour in several modern novels. It may make its way into my Works Cited as I explore colour, signification, and lived-experience. :)
Lera Boroditsky wrote an article about how language influences us. The most interesting part to me was that "in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself." That has huge implications about our criminal justice system. It also talks about how Russian speakers can see more shades of blue because they have different words for light and dark blue. There is also a TED Talk were economist Keith Chen talks about how "futureless" language speakers tend to save more money than "futured" language speakers. So yeah, language plays a vital role in how we see the world, how we plan our lives, and even how we treat others.
Tetrachromacy is so neat, it's so cool that your mother is the first one identified!
i asked my mom this question when i was little, but what i really meant by it was "How can we know that we all experience reality and consciousness in the same way"
That is a hugely interesting topic! I would really love it if you could recommend more reading material on the topic.
Linguistic relativity vs. linguistic universalism seem to appear the same as the essentialist dichotomy of rationalist epistemology vs. empiricist epistemology. I'm reading about anti-essentialist epistemology in the context of a Marxian theory of overdetermination, and indeed Wittgenstein has already come up a few times. My question is (as a linguistics noob), since there must be an anti-essentialist school of thought in the field of linguistics, what is it called?
Fantastic as always Olly! Thanks for your work. What a wonderful story in this video :)
In Korean, apart from the basic “rainbow colours”, we have a different way of saying each colour depending on the properties the colour has. For example, Red and Blue are “Bbalgang” and “Parang”. But when those red and blue are... sort of bright and closer to primary colour tones, it’s called “Saebbalgan” and “Saeparan”. When they’re a stark darker tone it’s “Shibbeolgun” and “Shipeolun”. There are about seven or so variations, each with an intuitive rule. For example, when the colour word variation starts with a Ah vowel, it’s bright. When it starts with a Uh vowel, it’s darker. Every Korean knows a corpse’s blue is a “Purudangdanghan” blue without being taught so.
mind = blown
Awesome video as always!
I had an argument with my brother about these "colour blind fixing" glasses (we are both red-green colour blind). He was trying to say that these glasses gave people the experience of new colours. I argued that this was impossible. You can put on goggles which allow you to perceive UV or infa-red ligh. However you are only seeing this as colours in your usual spectrum of colour - they apear as red or blue etc. You are not able to see a new colour which you have never percieved before.
This comes at an interesting time because I have gotten my hands on Jonathan Culler's book on Ferdinand de Saussure, and later I acquired Course in General Linguistics. Saussure is known to be the father of modern Semiotics, or, as I believe, the study of how signs actually represent things. In the philosophy of colour, instead of thinking of things as colours, we have labelled everything in the category as red as a social fact? I may be seeing red differently than you but we still have the same symbol in place to recognize the communication.
According to Jonathan Culler, "In short, sociology, linguistics, and psychoanalytic psychology are possible only when one takes the meanings which are attached to and which differentiate objects and actions in society as a primary reality, as facts to be explained. And since meanings are a social product, explanation must be carried out in social terms." (Pg. 86) But then the question becomes: if we are assigning symbols to things are different to the subject, does that mean the structuralism fails?
Well said. Your video reminder be of this quote by Friedrich Nietzsche
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.
The statement that dance and mime do not rely on human language implicitly makes the assumption that all language is verbal in nature and overlooks the communicative potentials of my funky flow.
Oh wow i greatly envy your mum haha, though seriously this topic is very interesting to me as an artist. I love seeing how, in the renaissance for instance, or even further back, many artist were also philosophers and inventors and writers and scientists; so! there are many great journals and theories on the nature of colour and how it intersects with other human persuits of knowledge. Maybe Goethie's theory of colour is possibly the most well known?
Loved this video! We all need to meet your mum!
I just love your choice of subjects, and I'm grateful for your effort. What I find a bit frustrating though, is the way you remain on periphery of relevance. To pose the question "Does language influence our behavior?" in juxtaposition to a presentation about vision and colors while completely ignoring the 2-word vocabulary this language uses to describe the infinite shades of human skin is almost criminal, yet entirely commonplace among academics, politicians and media people.
Racism could not exist without language, Olly. Or should I say - racism was purposely created by the oversimplification of our experiential reality into a bipolar conflict with just two words, neither of which may accurately be applied to living human skin.
Speaking of skin and colors - do you know how hard it is for a painter to mix the so-called primary colors into those resembling human skin? So how did red, yellow and blue become so important as to be called primary? We don't have a blue receptor cone in our eyes - we have green. So why isn't green a primary color? Green exists wherever there's chlorophyll, but where's the blue, Olly? They used to say it was in the sky but that lie fell through once we could fly. The Homeric Greeks didn't even have a word that equates to blue, and we don't have a biological receptor for it, but somebody decided it was more important than green, and they did that a long time ago.
Since blue pigments are by far the most expensive, it's a safe bet to assume that whomever profits most from them invented the color system we know today. Thanks for helping me get that out! I hope you feel closer to having an answer to that uber-important question. Yes - language totally controls the way we think! Think about it - if we slaved all day in some shitty mine, would we naturally call it mine? The mine you work in is never your own - what about the mind you work with?
Cheers!
I remember thinking about this when I was a little kid. When I think back, I realize that I was a little philosopher with the questions I asked, but I never really got farther than the questions.
Linguistic Relativism is the basic premise behind "The Story of Your Life" which the upcoming movie, Arrival, is based on, albeit with aliens and a bit of wonkiness with time. I highly recommend the book "The Story of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang because all the short stories in this book are thought-provoking and really fun to read. Any Philosofan would enjoy these stories.
Personally, I lean towards the idea that color is only in the brain. There is a biological process takes a signal from the eye and tells the brain it is here or there on the color spectrum. It is important to know that human eyes can't distinguish between a wavelength of light and an appropriate mixture of red, green, and blue light, thus computer screens work (Unless you happen to be Olly's mom). I think that the brain creates this spectrum and its delineations because it is far easier than picking out wavelengths directly. Our ancestors needed a fast and easy way to recognize blood or separating a predator from a background. A quick and dirty method of doing this is to bin light into simple wavelength blocks. But this doesn't answer how people actually perceive color. It just points out where color comes from if we accept that it is just in our brains. It could very well be the case that if I were to take the output of your eyes into my brain red would be blue.
As a physics ph.d. candidate, I am inclined to say there is no such thing as color in the physical sense and that when we call a thing red or blue we are saying this object gives off wavelengths of light that my human eye and brain tell me are red or blue, whether that be purely mediated by biology or filtered through language.
My design project for Uni is making an art exhibit to explain the elements of visual art (color, value, line, shape, form, space, texture) to those who have been blind from birth. Speaking with them, they find the way that we use color attached to emotion (Seeing red, feeling blue, green with envy) to be very odd and non-intuitive, and they're amazed at how it influences the decisions that those with color vision make.
Also, the concept of three orthagonal colors (Red, Green, Blue) is amazingly useful, since its the only thing that we're normally exposed to that has three orthagonal states, not a linear gradient with two extremes and a middle. Most of the time I've seen scientists try to explain something that can be in only two states, they use terms of up and down, on and off, etc. But when they describe three orthogonal states, they usually use red, green, and blue to differentiate them. Just look at quantum chromodynamics.
I hope there will be a part 2 for color, since it's such a rich topic.
I think to understand how our minds perceive color, we have to consider why we evolved to see the colors we do in the first place. Like why do cats and dogs not see a difference between red and green, but humans consider them the most distinctly opposite colors? Probably because the difference between red and green is just our perception of whether or not fruit is ripe, and since cats and dogs generally don't eat fruit, they have no need for there to be a difference. I see a huge difference between red and green, because like other primates, I'm more interested in the apples on the trees than the leaves surrounding it. Richard Dawkins (while taking break from religion-bashing), even suggested that bats might perceive sounds as colors, because sound is their primary sense, and I've often wondered what a dog's ability to smell must be so complex that it's the equivalent of reading a novel.
Then there's the possibility that our perception of color might be influenced by our psychology. Just like how a food I once ate when I was sick and threw it back up will probably taste bad to me from then on, a color that I associate with a particular sensation from my past might affect the way the color looks to me without even realizing it.
I had a dog that “picked” and ate berries. BLUEberries though (the Scandinavian type that grows in the lower vegetation). I’ve been informed that wolves eats them too!
Love this theory
Funnily enough you remind me of James McAvoy in your facial features and now you've talked about your mutated vision, it's cemented in my mind!
Also I work with preschool children and they do have different colour words for the same colour, for example F points at 👽and calls it blue while J would call it green. Personally I see different colours to my partner even though we look at the same thing and it's fascinating.
I see color slightly differently in each of my eyes. One is more yellowish and one is more blueish. Most obvious when I look at something green.
I have just spent my day quietly reflecting on colours and just trying to make up new colours in my mind in the ultraviolet and infrared range, well it was difficult but I managed to invent the coolest colour ever in my mind. I like to call this colour Marionetta, and it can be seen when you look at stars the colour makes you feel spontaneous and chaotic, energetic, it is a colour in the infrared spectrum that represents pure plasmic heat and awesomeness, and I was quite happy to have invented the most beautiful star I ever did see... in my mind. If I could go for genetic modification to see marionetta I would do so happily so I can gaze at those stars :P
Needless to say marionetta is my new favourite colour and I can't even see it.
I am quite passionate about colours I guess, colours are just sweet.
i do think there's good reason to study colour for purposes like science and the classification it enables, or physics and the properties of different wavelengths especially when trying to understand the photon mysteries; socially i agree it's more interesing than necessary to understand how different contexts change the use and impact of colour.
but most of all i am personally of the belief that all knowledge is valuable in itself, in reafirming the possibilities of the human mind to interact with it's enviroment
this is sooo coooool
There is a basis for describing the way different languages use different words for colour as an "evolution" as the order in which languages acquire words for colours is very predictable, following the pattern of either: black and white -> red -> yellow -> green -> blue, or black and white -> red -> green -> yellow -> blue.
Wish u were my teacher irl, but I'm grateful to have u online ^^
I guess I always kind of assumed that basically all fields of study overlap with each other and that everything is basically connected in some way. Maybe I was just a weird kid but I think that's a pretty good way to look at the world.
This question is part of the reason I have spent a lot of my psychology undergrad reading up on synaesthesia. I have a great many papers and ideas I could talk about in this arena but I'll just talk about one, Dixon et al (2006). These researchers did an experiment where they presented grapheme-colour synaesthetes (i.e. those who see written text, like words, digits or letters and experience colour) with an ambiguous grapheme that could be interpreted as the number 5 or the letter S (I hope you can imagine the squiggle, the keyboard makes them more distinct). What was interesting however is that they would surrounded the grapheme with either numbers or letters so as to prime the synaesthetes to conceive of the grapheme as either 5 or S. And what they found was rather than the colour experience remaining the same, it *changed* depending on how the synaesthetes *thought* about it.
The conclusion that might be drawn from this is that colour is not a property of the environment but a property of meaning. "Fiveness" entails blue "S-ness" entails red, say. There's a growing school of thought on the matter called ideasthesia which I recommend people google if they think that's interesting. There are other related effects and papers supporting the notion.
I wonder how this concept applies to people with synaesthesia
It seems important to mention how colors affect emotions. For example, blue "causes" feelings of security, and red "causes" feelings of passion. I'm not sure how this varies across cultures.
"So to you language is _more_ than just a means of communication?"
"Of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is"
The more interesting question to me is not the biology of the eye, but the mechanism of perception that apprehends distinctions in color. It is hard not to imagine that the boundaries or center-points of color on a color wheel as being innate in the way that we perceive them. I have heard such basal components of sense as being called "qualia", and that this term applies to more than just sight, but to sound and temperature, and all the senses in the way they can be divided to presumably innate components. As far as I know, it is the modern consensus that the mind could not exist or begin its growth and development in learning about the world without innate bootstrapping mechanisms that help us to perceive and frame the world so as to get an initial understanding of it. Notions of space and time, for example, as well as primal distinctions between what is alive and what is inert, and the list could go on for quite a while. Instincts that are necessary to have the advantages of having a brain in the first place considering its evolutionary cost. The things, for example, that would allow a flatworm to hunt prey without having to starve to death first. Despite the sense that we carry, that when we perceive the world that this perception is direct, it's been shown by various studies that we do quite a bit of pre-processing to our senses to be able to use those sense impressions to make a full but quick picture of the world we can apprehend and make decisions about. So, what I am interested in, is whether or not your mother actually sees a distinct fourth color, and not just whether her eyes see a fourth color. Does she have an additional qualia mentally? Is it possible that additional qualia can be so constructed, or is there something about cognition which forbids it? Would an alien perceive the world with the same colors? How is a color different than the sensation of a bitter taste? Both faculties are evolved from the sensory cells in our skin, by the way, so it would make some sense to say they somehow mentally branched off from touch or temperature sensations in the evolution of those senses. But they seem nothing alike, to me anyway.
You could understand it as primary vs secondary qualities, borrowing from philosopher Locke's ideas. Primary qualities are objective/universal. These could represent the basic colour concepts like red, green, yellow, etc. Secondary qualities could represent what we perceive and what we are able to perceive - sky blue, maroon, turquoise and other fancy names. xD
Just subscribed to this channel and found the content amazing. Could you do a video on consumerism? Perhaps towards the stance of being in favour of it!
Whaaaaaat! That's incredible. Was your mum in the Radiolab episode that talked about this? Y'know, the one with the mantis shrimp?
You were discussing elimitavism and the presidsposition to see colour and suddenly I understood the importance of Kant
When I was in 5th grade I asked this question. She just told me it was a dumb question and I should only ask questions based on the curriculum.
I think colour is just a product of mental processes that occur when we take in information about our environment. The subjective experience of which we cannot explain in physical terms. (at least for now)
gosh this was very interesting also rather jealous of your mother :')
I have had waxing and waning depression for over two decades and am a trained eye surgeon. I've experienced a marked increase in saturation of color that signals when I am coming out of a depressive episode. My psychiatrists in Chicago and at Johns Hopkins say they have seen this in other patients, as well, that the emotional component of experiencing color as something pretty or vivid, is reduced during depressive episodes for some people. When I'm depressed I just don't notice color. I can point to a color if you ask but color is just an attribute of an object. There is no beauty in it. When I am healthy not only do colors bring me feelings of happiness, but I also can distinguish the variation of color in something like the leaves of a tree or the blue of the sky. So I can attest that color is seen and experienced differently within a single brain depending on the relative levels of serotonin, norepinephrine and whatever other neurotransmitters are responsible for affective mood disorders.
I like to play a game called I love hue where you basically just place blocks of color where they belong on a color spectrum and when I haven't played it for a while it gets way harder than when I play it a lot. Like my eyes can learn to differentiate color better? I wonder if your mom would be really good at that game.
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As a dancer and a philosopher, I would say I have developed my philosophy of dance over the years, and I use language to describe this philosophy as do all the other fields you didn't insult (besides mime). Have you ever picked up book on art, music, painting, or even math. You will notice that they contain lots of prose, more so, in fact, than the actual non-prose content (pictures, musical notation , equations)
Good luck trying to learn to dance without using natural language.
Other than that, I love your channel, and I've read cool stuff about your mom's Tetra chrome for years... Ask her on to a show‼️
Yeah… My nephew, when young, tried to teach me to do some dance moves! She just said “do like this”. And I completely failed. Perhaps if she had used more words I would have succeeded. No…?
I thought you would be talking about Qualia
I want to push back a bit on the idea that dance is one of the few professions devoid of language, because it substitutes spoken or written languages for all languages. Sign languages, like ASL, can and is incorporated in certain dance performances. Obviously not all dance contains language, but it definitely can
I want to unattatch other people's attachments to chakras and chakra colours. So as to look into the mystical philosophy if colour.
@ Philosophy Tube: Have you read *Fact, Fiction, and Forecast* by Nelson Goodman? One of my favorite philosophical texts, BTW, next to the *Philosophical Investigations* by Saint Ludwig and *The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages* by Alfred Tarski.
Not that it matters to the topic of this video but we don't have yellow color receptor cone cells. We have red, blue, and green-a fact that will surely come in handy during your next game of Trivial Pursuit.
I have been asking this question since I was 6 years old, and everyone told I was thinking too much about it and nobody cares. CHECK MATE MOM.
You believe what you want to believe in and that become your life
I love the question "what is colour?" Someone can go there whole life never even asking that! even once you know that colour is because of light that just describes how it comes about. Somehow this process of electrical signals leads to our perception of the world
I feel like you would enjoy the book "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
I've once said that it's entirely possible that all humans have the same favorite color, but the word we use to identify the color is different from person to person. So, my favorite color is purple, and let's say for sake of argument that my friend's favorite color is green. His 'green' and my 'purple' are the same, however he's been taught to identify that as 'green' and me 'purple' and all the associated properties and imagery that comes with those things. All people love the color that I perceive as purple, however where they perceive that actual color qualitatively is where I would perceive green or red or blue etc on the color spectrum, and socially they were taught to associate that with different things (where I might associate my favorite color with royalty or certain flower petals or the like, my friend may associate it with leaves and grass and nature). There's no way to really prove this, but I think it's an interesting idea.
This would've been soooo useful when I was writing a paper on color. Goddamn.
What are your thoughts on George Lakoff's work (e.g. Metaphors We Live By)? His position seems to be that there are certain elements of our cognition that constrain how we talk about basic physical stuff, but once language settles on physical metaphors it can bootstrap into very very complex and abstract metaphors.
So for example, in English we think of the future as being "forward" and the past "behind" but other languages have time moving back to front. From there we get metaphors like "time is a river" (which wouldn't make as much sense if time moved back to front).
The natural light colour changes throughout the day so our brains adapt to that to show us the colour we think the thing actually is (the blue/black white/gold dress thing was an example of this being odd). So colour is what we think something is, not what our eyes see.
We really can't see colour outside of the macular, so our peripheral vision is all black and white. We see colour in our peripheral anyway as our brains fill the colours in based on what we expect to see.
You can tell a colourblind person what colour something is and they will start seeing it as that colour even though they couldn't tell the colour beforehand. So our brains will accept secondhand information in the dorm of language to augment our own vision.
Our brains lie to us all the time and try to show us the world as it is, even if we can't see all of it and it involves making things up to fill in the gaps.
So brains are pattern-seeking lie machines? That makes a terrifying amount of sense.
In an article published by Journal of Vision, titled "_**The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy**," under discussions, they write, "Carriers of deuteranomaly constitute about 10% of all women (Pokorny, Smith, Verriest, & Pinckers, 1979), but most carriers in our sample showed little evidence of a salient tetrachromatic signal. /*Our one candidate for strong tetrachromacy is cDa29*/."
There is also this tribe in Afrika (not sure how they are called) but I once saw a documentary about how they percieve colors differently because of their language. They categorize colors in a different way for example they have a single term for a set of green and blue shades and one word for a collection of greens and browns.
So they made an experiment hith a set of colored squares, all apart from one squaer had the same color, now they were supposed to find the one in a different color, in this documentary they only showed a example of green squares with one kinda blueish and they couldn't distinguish them at all, in a second try one of the suares had just a slightly different shade of green that the others (such that it was intistinguashable for most other persons) but all the persons from that tribe immediately recogniced it as the different one.