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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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