View Single Post
Old 01-21-2005, 11:51 AM   #17 (permalink)
Yakk
Wehret Den Anfängen!
 
Location: Ontario, Canada
Quote:
Originally Posted by Master_Shake
Now who's being silly? The rhodospin proteins in the retina absorbs the light that enters the eye. Different wavelengths excite different cells to produce our colour images. That is the process we call sight.
There are frequencies of light which, when seen by our eyes, look blue.

But, the sensation of 'blue' isn't only produced by those frequencies. You could possibly generate the same perceptual colour using completely different frequencies.

People are talking about light as if a blue chair reflects light of a particular wavelength, which we interprit as blue.

The chair actually reflects a whole bunch of different wavelengths in a coninuum. We interprit all of those photons together as blue.

There are colours we can see which no single frequency of light can produce.

This is a technical point, but a whole bunch of people kept on talking about colour as if there was a two-way correspondance with frequencies of light.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Master_Shake
I don't think that's true. I think when most people refer to an item as blue they really think the blueness is somehow in the item. When people put up blue paint, they aren't thinking that "hey, I'm really putting up a substance that reflects light that I interpret as blue," they think the paint really is blue, and that they see truth in it. Not everybody, but some of the people I've talked to about this subject.
Sure. There are people who have alot of wierd and wrong views of the world, especially when you ask them to abstract things into realms they don't deal with often. Usually these beliefs are weak and easily corrected.

People describe as 'blue' those things that, when they look at them, they percieve the colour blue, amoung other things.

They might have internal models of how blueness works that are gibberish. But, that's to be expected, really. So I'm just looking at their behaviour.
__________________
Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.
Yakk is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73