Sorry, Q.E.D. (and I realize that this is veering perilously near GD territory), but it’s simply playing games with language to claim that color and flavor don’t exist. If you’re going to insist that color exists only in the brain you might as well say that everything exists only in the brain.
Color is defined as the experience of perceiving light of certain frequencies; flavor is defined as the effect certain compounds have on the taste buds. There is a direct connection between the frequency of light (which you call an “inherent property”) and the perception we call color. Likewise flavors. Hence color and flavor and the universe all exist.
Yes, and none of that occurs outside of the brain. If you have a continuously varying range of wavelengths of light, on inspection there is no distinct point at which one can say the color has changed. you say color is “defined as the experience of perceiving light of certain frequencies”, and I concur. But the experience of perception occurs in the brain and nowhere else.
Sounds right to me. Photon energy is like kinetic energy; it’s different for different observers. If a flying seagull bumped into you (a “stationary” observer), it’ll be a fairly gentle collision (small kinetic energy). If the same seagull bumped into the windshield of a flying jet aircraft, it’s going to be a much bigger impact (large kinetic energy). Likewise, a head-on collision with a photon hurts more than a photon hitting you on the ass on your way out.
As for the color vs. wavelength vs. frequency, I don’t see why we need to say “color doesn’t exist” for the purpose of this OP. Color corresponds to photon energy, which is proportional to the effective frequency of the photon. When a photon travels through a dense medium, the effective wavelength changes but the energy and effective frequency remains the same.
If a spectrometer tells me that the light it’s looking at has a wavelength of 500 nm, I don’t need to see the light myself to know that the light corresponds to what is called “green”.
If you’re a completely colorblind individual, are you instinctively going to know what “green” is? No. You can restate the proposition any way you like, but the actual perception of color occurs in the brain, and is not an inherent characteristic of the light itself.
If you disagree, tell me, what color is the 2 meter RF band? What colors are gamma rays?
I think most astronomers would disagree with this. Green is a name given to a wavelength range in the middle of the visible spectrum. A colorblind person can use a spectrometer and a dictionary to find the color of any visible light. If you had no sense of taste and a chemical analysis of an unknown liquid shows it’s NaCl dissolved in water, would it be wrong for you to conclude that it is salty?
The term “color” only refers to visible light. That doesn’t make it an invalid classification scheme.
Anyway, why do you feel this distinction is important for this thread? Our eyes perceive different photon energy as different color, so it’s perfectly reasonable to say “color is associated with photon energy.”
This is ridiculous. It’s like saying sound doesn’t exist because deaf people can’t hear it.
The lack of labels for frequencies outside human visual range doesn’t help you out. We don’t really have labels for different sound frequencies, either. What “pitch” is 442 Hz? The term “pitch” just means frequency. You can’t claim that a 25 kHz sound doesn’t have a pitch simply because it’s outside human auditory range.
This is ridiculous. It’s like saying sound doesn’t exist because deaf people can’t hear it.
The lack of labels for frequencies outside human visual range doesn’t help you out. We don’t really have labels for different sound frequencies, either. What “pitch” is 442 Hz? The term “pitch” just means frequency. You can’t claim that a 25 kHz sound doesn’t have a pitch simply because it’s outside human auditory range.
You are completely missing the point. Why is the name “green” given to that particular range of wavelengths? Because people who can see those colors say so, that’s why. A colorblind person can read the color name “green” but does he understand what that means? No. Show me an astronomer who thinks color is actually an inherent property of EM radiation.
I hate having to use my background to back up my statements but since you ask, I am an astronomer. I may not have a Ph.D quite yet but I make a living as an astronomy researcher.
Being outside our normal range of perception has nothing whatsoever to do with this. Color is NOT the same as wavelength, despite the close relationship. Color is the perception of what a given wavelength looks like to us. Can you prove to me that what we see as “red” doesn’t look like “blue” to some other species, for example.
To say that color is a property of light is akin to saying that pain is a property of fire. Fire can induce the experience of pain in humans. Likewise, light can induce the experience of color.
The intensity of the pain correlates with the heat of the fire. Likewise, the hue of the color correlates with the wavelength of light. However, color is not an intrensic property of light anymore than pain is an intrensic property of fire. It’s just a perception that happens to map to an intrensic property.
Well, it isn’t. Wavelength is. Frequency is. Color isn’t. You can say that a given wavelength of light corresponds to a given color only because you’ve perceived that color with your brain.