The colours are just wavelengths of light intepreted by our brains. I've always been amused that although we claim certain things have the property of a colour those things actually have every other colour property except that one we claim it has.
For example, when we claim a chair is blue, we are mistaken. It is actually every other colour except blue. Every other visible light wavelength is absorbed by the chair, it only reflects the wavelength we associate with blue.
I also don't buy into the idea of the world of the forms colour nonsense. Colours aren't anything more special than our method of interpreting data. When the digital camera turns those same wavelengths into 1's and 0's, do we claim the 1's and 0's reveal some truth about the object? I don't, it's all perceptual and subjective. That we humans happen to share the same biological apparatus to allow us to experience similar perceptions does not reveal some truth about the object, it only allows us to communicate and cooperate.
Common perception is a survival mechanism, not an inherent truth.
Quote:
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Even if what you say is red, I see as blue, we both call it red, so the idea stays the same,
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So long as our perceptions are consistent.
This brings us to the differece between idios kosmos (one's own world) and the koinos kosmos (shared universe). Everybody's idios kosmos is a little different from everybody else's, and that's usually fine. But when someone's idios kosmos differs from the general koinos kosmos too much, then he/she is treated as defective. (i.e Colour blindness, or some other perceptual problem)
From
http://fusionanomaly.net/synaesthesia.html
synesthesia also synaesthesia (sîn´îs-thê´zhe) noun
1. A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.
2. A sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.
3. The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another.
- syn´esthet´ic (-thèt´îk) adjective
"Franz Liszt, the19th century composer, pianist, and conductor, saw colors in his mind's eye when he heard music? He experienced a "rare phenomenon called color hearing, (in which) the senses become crossed and every musical sound is shadowed by colorful, formless visual imagery. And so, Liszt would instruct an orchestra, 'Please gentlemen, a little bluer if you please. This key demands it.'"