Why Can't We Visualize Unknown Colors?

[Raza]

How come I can't philosophize about the unknown colours?
I can philosophize about anything except that, how come?

 

[Math Is Hard]

Can you clarify a bit? What do you mean by "unknown colors"? And by "philosophize" to you mean "imagine", "describe", "make logical inferences about" or something else?
Thanks.

 

[Raza]

How come I can't imagine how new colours look?
Suppose if someone said to you that there exists colours never seen before, how come I can't visualize them?

But if someone said to you that there exists cars never seen before, how come I can visualize them?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Can a person who has always been blind imagine color?

 

[Raza]

I don't think so.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Color is just our way to measure frequency, but how we percieve this as color is apparently not completely understood.

..."We were able to precisely image and count the color-receptive cones in a living human eye for the first time, and we were astonished at the results," says David Williams, Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and director of the Center for Visual Science. "We've shown that color perception goes far beyond the hardware of the eye, and that leads to a lot of interesting questions about how and why we perceive color." [continued]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051026082313.htm

 

[Raza]

Color is just our way to measure frequency, but how we percieve this as color is apparently not completely understood.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051026082313.htm

So no one really knows?

 

[jostpuur]

Each wave length stimulates the three different kind of cone cells with different weights, and different combinations of stimulations are interpreted as different colors. However, there exists combinations of stimulation weights, that cannot be obtained by some particular wave length, so I've been dreaming about the possibility of actually obtaining new color experiences through artificial stimulation of the cone cells.

Unfortunately, the Seeking's previous link seems to demolish my plan, because brains would probably just force any input to become interpreted as some normal color...

 

[out of whack]

Colors outside the range of our perceptions may be like inaudible sounds, undetectable tastes or smells, or touching something intangible like a magnetic field. What our senses cannot perceive is hard to imagine because we have no frame of reference for it. What would a completely new sense feel like? No idea, it could be anything, and we couldn't know until we got it. It would also be hard to describe to those who are not experiencing it.

 

[Rade]

How come I can't imagine how new colours look?
Suppose if someone said to you that there exists colours never seen before, how come I can't visualize them? But if someone said to you that there exists cars never seen before, how come I can visualize them?

Suppose you have in your imagination these two colors: ccc---ccc Now, I don't know how your imagination works, but I sure have no problem to imagine how a new color, that I have never seen before, might look that is intermediate between these two wavelengths. So, I have no idea what you are saying here.

 

[Moonbear]

I'll give this a stab here:

How come I can't imagine how new colours look?
Suppose if someone said to you that there exists colours never seen before, how come I can't visualize them?

Assuming you're not talking about something like Rade's example, but a color outside the usual visual spectrum, you can't visualize it because you have no experience to apply to your attempts.

But if someone said to you that there exists cars never seen before, how come I can visualize them?

Because what you are visualizing is something composed of parts that you do have experience with. The car you visualize is still composed of known shapes, textures, colors, materials. You are not coming up with new shapes and colors, but taking known ones and assembling them in different ways.