Unfair. We also lack cones for yellow and cyan.
(Except for the tetrachromatic 2%, who experience a 4th primary color where "yellow" ought to be.)
(Except for the tetrachromatic 2%, who experience a 4th primary color where "yellow" ought to be.)
While you could try to engineer a more efficiently yellowness-detector, engineering a better magentaness-detector would be a qualitatively different kind of biological machine.
Suppose humans experienced 12 primary colors. Is a combination of the 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 12th "on the spectrum" any more than an exclusive combination of the 2nd and 3rd?
What's interesting is differences in the MINIMAL set of physical things that need to be detected to get the experience.
The objective truth is that if I hand you a machine that generates just single wavelengths of photons, you can cause "Normies" to say "yellow" but you can't do the same for "magenta".
That asymmetry remains even when you talk about adding more sensors. You can frequency-shift an R/G/B cone to get a new kind that "peak-triggers when normal people say yellow" but you cannot do the same to create one which "peak-triggers when normal people say magenta". You would need to create a fundamentally different kind of sensor.
Mirimir wouldn't feel surprised about the absence of purple if they understood color in the context of phenomenology (rather than engineering), which is the spirit in which the post was made.
I understand the difference you are pointing to. It's not a novel or interesting position, it's the default position. If you insist on binding colors to wavelengths, you probably didn't get anything out of the blogpost.
E.g. a "yellow" wavelength is only as bright as its decomposition into red and green. The fact that red & blue aren't adjacent is a red herring.
This is important because privileging magenta does not generalize to higher-dimensional color-spaces, and therefore impedes to our understanding of phenomenology.