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Is what you see real?
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I don't know if this makes sense to you. It just popped on my mind. If you're asked to imagine a color you've never seen before, can you actually imagine it? Given the case you're an animal whose vision is limited to black and white for example. If the color of a flower for me is yellow, it would only look like white or black to you then. Can you actually prove that the flower's color really is yellow just because you see it that way? I'm not really knowledgeable about this sort of stuff and am mainly asking this to satisfy my curiosity.
=p
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Re: Is what you see real?
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You already have the answer, aeris. And, it does make sense! That's why parents force us to go to school.  |
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Re: Is what you see real?
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by
on 2008-04-18 10:31:24 (edited 2008-04-18 10:35:12)
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This is a classic example of a philosophical concept that is easily misappropriated. The subjectivity of color its self is clear: what looks pink to me may be light red to you. Furthermore, a certain color, say, teal, may be personally significant to me, but not to you. This does NOT mean that the actual color of an object is a subjective thing at all! The color of the word teal in the above sentence is #00FFFF on my computer and all other computers as well. You may be color blind, but that doesn't change the way your computer renders color, nor the wavelength of light emitted by your monitor. In answer to your questions, yes, of COURSE you can prove objectively the color of an object like a yellow flower! Yellow has a physical definition: wavelengths of light between 570–580 nm in wavelength. It can be shown that the vast majority of the light emitted from a yellow petal of said flower lies within that range. On an interesting and somewhat related note, what you see is NOT always the complete story. This is not to say that what you see is not "real", but it may not be the whole reality. For example, it is possible to build and photograph an object that appears to be an Escher cube. It is an optical illusion, and upon 3-D examination, the shape is totally believable. In short, what you see is real but don't blindly trust your own limited interpretation. 
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