No it isn’t, for the reasons already given. You are merely contradicting me, without giving any reasons or arguments.
Brown is how dark orange looks *under certain (very common) circumstances * (in particular, when in proximity to other, lighter colors). If your “blackish orange” either completely fills your field of view, or alternatively, it forms the only visible patch of color in surrounding darkness, it will indeed appear to be a dull orange, something quite distinct from brown as we normally experience it. The appearance of brown depends upon contrast with other surrounding colored (including white) areas.
AFAIK this is not true of pink: that is, I believe that it is possible to experience a patch of pink surrounded by darkness, or pinkness filling the field of view. I do not know if there are any other colors that are like brown in this respect. Although contrast with surrounding context of colors can quite radically affect how we experience most colors, as far as I am aware, brown is the only commonly recognized color that simply cannot be experienced absent such a context.
Is it that they are the same color, or that when juxtaposed they appear to be the same color? I’d think that if they were “the same color”* what this would mean is that they’d behave the same color-perception-wise under similar conditions, such that even when not juxtaposed, they would still seem to be the same color to you.
In other words, the fact that when they are not juxtaposed, but still under similar lighting conditions, they look different to you, would seem to indicate they’re different colors, not the ssame color, wouldn’t it?
In MS Paint, I can make shades of brown which, when I put a single eye (other eye closed) right up to my computer screen, begin to appear very distinctly pink.
All colors exist only in so far as they’re how something looks under certain conditions. If you’re going to argue that there’s no such thing as “brown”, then by the same token, you have to argue that there’s no such thing as “red”.
That’s what I had thought, but it’s actually the other way around: whitish red is pink, but there are pinks that are not whitish-red. Magenta is a good example: it’s definitely in the “pink” family, but it’s not “whitish” anything (having zero green). Play with the color editor in any app that has one and you’ll see.
I wouldn’t agree with this argument.
First, he didn’t say there was no such thing as “brown”, just “brown light”. There’s a differece between “light” and “what we see on our monitor”. There are no “dark lights”, so no dark colors (that only exist as dark colors, like “navy blue”) exist as “light”. You can’t make a navy-blue light: it’s blue light that’s dim compared to the ambient light, with a black background.
Of course, brown can exist as a full frame color, so it’s not totally context-dependent. I think njtt went a bit overboard on that, and I agree that dark grayish-orange is what we call brown, and vice-versa.
Actually, it’s more burgundy on my laptop monitor and more yellow-brown on my external screen, but while it is constructed as dark grayish orange, that’s not how I would describe it. That’s a bit different than saying “brown light” exists, because when it’s bright (light is always bright) rather than dark, it doesn’t look brown.
Also, I believe njtt is right that brown is more contextually sensitive than other colors.
Here’s a good example of color constancy relevant to what you mention. All the marked spots are the same color in both sides, which can be verified in a photo editing program.
