Colorful thoughts
The author believes information should always be accessible and free for all.
Do you know what the colors are?
Colors can be described as energetic experiences.
I know it sounds a bit exoteric, but that is what they are.
“Colours are light’s suffering and joy.” –J. W. von Goethe
They don’t have matter as we consider matter. As a matter of fact, they are even better!
They are light and energy.
And depend on the eye’s ability to encode natural spectral signals. A result of combined factors allows our eyes to distinguish amongst all the visible shades of color in the electromagnetic spectrum.
They are the different wavelengths of white light reflected by an object and perceived by the visual system of any being.
Humans are not the only animals that perceive colors. It depends on their photoreceptor spectral sensitivities.
And they can induce learned sensory experiences, like cold or heat on an observer.
They are not a property of an object. Unless the object emits radiation. They are phenomena experienced by the retinal cells of an observer, under the proper light conditions.
Retina is a light-sensitive membrane that acts as a transducer for the conversion of light into neuronal signals in the optic nerves, in the back of our eyes. Each animal species has its own peculiarities and a different range of the light spectrum. Even amongst people there are differences in visual perception.
One of the questions that has intrigued me the most ever since I have started asking questions (and those are not a few) is:
How could I ever be sure the colors I perceive are the same as everyone else perceives?
Well, I guess we can only be 100% sure that we will die at some point, other than that nothing is certain. But for a long time I have dwelled on such matters.
For instance, I know that the sky is blue, and everybody learns that the color they see in the sky is called blue.
But how do I know that what I see as blue is not somebody else’s green? Or red?
By language alone I cannot see a way of explaining to anybody how I perceive colors.
Nor can I imagine a color I have never seen. Everything that I describe as blue will still be called blue by somebody else. But our brains might perceive things very differently as to the meaning of our visual “blue.” Also what we mean as “emotional blue”.
I suppose that holds true for any empirical assumption one makes out of one’s reality based on bodily senses. Whether at describing colors, scents, pain, each being’s experience of reality cannot be completely conveyed into words.
Our nervous system is deeply entangled in our emotional status and hormonal levels. Brain plasticity and anatomical differences make it even more difficult to access or communicate subjective experiences and what they really mean to an individual.
Just as not everybody has the ability to comprehend the full scale of visible light waves, not everybody responds in the same manner to pain and emotional distress.
John Dalton (yes, the atom guy) had a condition that impaired his ability to perceive colors, mainly red and green. Does the name ring a bell?
Almost all animals with eyes can perceive colors. But in very different ways.
The same holds true for how we understand someone else’s behavior when in pain or experiencing any other emotional status.
One can only grasp such experience if one has felt it before.
You can tell a child that fire burns. Tiny humans usually want to check if the proposition is valid by themselves. They are small scientists. And there is no better teacher than the burning flesh.
In my opinion it is beyond a doubt easier to understand a nonhuman animal than a person.
When I started college, I was afraid of mistreating an animal by my own inability of understanding its needs. Even worse when it comes to wildlife.
One would expect to be awfully hard to treat animals because they don’t speak. Surely, it’s challenging and demanding to understand how each individual is experiencing something that cannot be put into words.
But I think that might be the awe of the whole thing.
They do not try to put into words what cannot be translated into words. We do. And fail at it. But so much time is lost doing that and rarely the correct message is — in fact — conveyed.
Animals are always honest to their feelings. They do not pretend to feel less pain or being less hungry. They simply act in accordance to their feelings — be those what they may.
If an animal likes someone, it likes that someone. And that is the end of it. It will be fond of that person and will not try to hide that.
Obviously, they can manipulate people and other animals for food, shelter, or attention. And they learn most of these tricks with humans. Regardless, they do not pretend to like someone just by social convenience. Nor will they pretend to dislike someone to maintain their pride or social convention.
Animals can be tainted by human contact and learn some tricks and unnatural behaviors, but they are for the most part sincerely truthful. I admire that and hope that one day people can become animals again.
Obviously, some animals don’t display signs of pain as their defense strategy, mainly wildlife species. Cats are also very peculiar when displaying their personalities. But then again, they are not completely “companion” animals. They nurture some wild habits and instinctive behavior.
Anatomical and emotional traits decide how uncomfortable an individual gets whenever level when pain is elicited. The same holds true for color perception.
To make a discrimination between one wave-length and another (different hue colors), an animal must have at least two types of receptors with different spectral sensitivities.
The receptors may be two types of cones, or they may be rods and a single cone type.
Some animals even have two types of rods, e.g. the frog, but this is unusual.
Everybody remembers Newton by “breaking” the light into colors. But the experiment that would render Pink Floyd their most famous album cover was not Newton’s idea.
It was long-known that light formed rainbows when going through prisms. But the common sense at that time was that this happened due to impurities in the glass.
Newton’s originality was to separate off individual colors from a prism’s output and send them through a second piece of glass. Since no individual color was changed — he concluded that prisms did not add the color, merely separated the white light of the Sun.
If all colors come from the white light, when light falls on a object, the color we perceive is the color the object reflects. Therefore, it absorbs all the other wavelengths.
If we see a red door, that door absorbs many of the colors in the spectrum while reflecting only the red.
Newton determined that there are 7 colors in the rainbow. But that is also not entirely true. There’s plenty more under the microscope.
Asides, humans cannot perceive all colors possible.
The only time someone has described seeing different colors than ever before were those who survived atomic bombs.
“I saw a bright blast, and I saw yellow and silver and orange and all sorts of colors that I can’t explain. Those colors came and attacked us, and the ceiling beams of the wooden school along with the glass from the window pane all shattered and blew away all at once.”
Kodoma says what she witnessed next are horrors that no child should ever experience. “[There were] people whose eyeballs had popped out their sockets. There were those who held their babies — burnt black; they themselves had no skin. There were those whose intestines had come out of their bodies, and confused they struggled to put them back in.”
This eye-witness was exposed to more than new colors, she endured more realities than should have ever existed. So it is quite an expensive price for perceiving new colors. We are better off with the ones we already know and atomic weapons should never be used again.
Only seven colors suited Isaac well. It gave plenty of motives to the wave/particle dispute over the centuries. Until the matter was “enlightened” by the famous tongue displayer with the formula that explained quantum theory.
Aristotle’s color theory stated that God’s celestial rays of light were connected to his idea of the four basic elements (water, air, earth, and fire). In his opinion, we exist due to the imbalance between lightness and darkness.
But that has been Science so far — a collective contribution of people building up on previous knowledge, rivalries and deceptions amidst a lot of animal and human suffering and unethical behavior. Many have been fooled by it, tortured in the name of it, excluded, persecuted, torn apart for it, burned for it.
Rarely original, usually retold in incoherent manners.
Truth-seekers were often persecuted for clashing against dogmatic beliefs. Or they were considered possessed by evil spirits.
Science looks like it is all about debunking wrongly mystical and absurd assumptions.
But at a closer look, science has been applied as weapon of choice for inexcusable “false moral” practices that persecuted, slayed, enslaved and got rid of those considered different and inconvenient — who were tagged as criminals or inferior by scientific practices.
Meanwhile the real criminals might pose as Nobel Laureates.
That is the reason why scientists are required to exercise critical thinking and must be ethical individuals. For many are the ones ready to subvert its immense — but dangerous — constructive power.
How do we create colors?
Newton observed that colors in light added together can produce new shades, while colors in a pigment were subtractive and had to be treated separately. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell would build upon Hermann von Helmholtz and Newton’s observations and help us understand the colors that surround us.
He realized that the true primaries of light are red, green and blue or violet — he made up a color disc of those and by spinning, got white in result. Those are the RGB system we use in our pixels. But an artist’s palette has different primaries — their opposites.
At the time, many scientists believed that red, yellow and blue were the primary colors, but failed to prove it.
Nowadays we use four main color systems in the world of print and on-screen design: CMYK, Pantone, RGB, and RAL.
CMYK stands for the four colors applied during the printing process: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (key).
This is a subtractive color system, which means that the ink must be removed to obtain lighter colors.
The RGB is based on the three primary colors: Red, Green, and Blue.
The system starts with Black (screen), then adds the variations of Red, Green, and Blue lights to create colors, and when all the lights are combined, the result is white.
Each pixel on a computer screen displays a certain color.
And why would someone hate colors or persecute people by their skin color?
Those are still big mysteries, invisible to our eyes.
And many hearts are colorblind.
