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Comment by mfeole | Hacker News Reader

I think you're misinterpreting color and wavelength. No color exists "in the wild". Colors only exist in the consciousness of beings that can capture photons. Wavelengths do exist in the wild I guess, or at least it's a human description of how electromagnetic waves move in the wild.

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Purple is a measurement, but wavelength is a measurement too. Ultimately everything is a measurement to us as that is the only way we can experience "the wild".

But wavelengths are a property of the waves that exist in the wild, while color is a property of our brains interpreting those wavelengths. There's a fundamental difference there: one could say that wavelengths exist independently of the existence of conscious beings (even if no one measures them), while colors only exist if a conscious being can capture photons and has a certain brain system that can interpret those photon's wavelengths.

Wavelength measures something in the wild. Whatever that something is, colour (and thus purple) offers a different way to measure the same thing. While the measuring unit differs, the fundamentals are the same.

interesting, so you're saying wavelengths are also a construct of the human mind (handed with a device to measure them). Maybe then the Buddha was right when he said "form is emptiness"? Which would mean there's no way that something really is independent of the way of looking at it, that things are empty, there are only ways of looking...

There's a common abuse of language that the ancestor comment uses, where we also use the names of colors for the wavelength of the pure light that we perceive them as; perhaps they could have been more specific about that. Hence because of this abuse of terminology we have words like infrared and ultraviolet to refer to spectra beyond human color perception, but are so called for their relation to the particular pure wavelengths that we perceive as red and violet.

Color is a mixture of wavelengths of visible light. Mixtures of wavelengths of visible light exist in the wild.

Color, as we know them, are a human interpretation of wavelengths and one we know is semi-subjective based on things like color blindness. A creature with less sensitive receptors could see one color were we'd see a much wider range. The reverse is also true that a creature with more sensitive receptors could see far more colors than we do.

No, color is a subjective experience a conscious being has. Different colors each correspond to different mixtures of wavelengths, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing. Color is the thing that you see with your consciousness. The difference is fundamental: wavelengths exist independently of the existence of conscious beings, while colors only exist if a conscious being can capture photons and has a certain brain system that can interpret those photon's wavelengths.

Colors don't even require photons. There's a phenomenon called phosphenes that produces colorful lights (green and purple for me). You can see them by rubbing your eyes sufficiently hard, or copy Newton and stick a blunt needle in your eye. They're caused by mechanical deformation in your optical cells rather than any photons being captured, but they produce the experience of color regardless.

You're confusing the qualia of colour("what it's like" to perceive colour) with the property of colour. Both can be referred to by the word "colour".

You're essentially just arguing that one definition of a noun is "more valid" than another, which is completely arbitrary.

And of course the qualia of colour is entirely subjective and only in the mind. That's literally the definition of qualia. That doesn't mean the property of colour is also subjective, just because it's referred to by the same noun. And besides, qualia is a philosophically controversial term in the first place.

If you were trying to cross a river and someone told you walk over that bridge over there, you wouldn't respond that it's impossible because a bridge is a device that links two computer networks together at the link layer, and couldn't possibly be used a cross a river, would you?

you're right, I'm just arguing that when we talk about colors we talk about the subjective perception of it, the thing that we see, which is what is usually referred to as color in any normal conversation. I didn't know there was a different definition of color which was a synonym of wavelength, in that case you're right. So as you say, the debate is arbitrary because it's about different definitions of color.

However, both measurements of wavelengths, the qualia or subjective one and the numerical wavelength or objective one, both exist only in our minds. There exists a measurement if and only if there exists someone that measures, even if it is an objective measure

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