From Dust to Descartes by M. E. Tson

Author:M. E. Tson
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Smashword
Published: 2009-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

IV. The View From Here

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The Subjective Experience of

Color

There are several interacting aspects to the subjective experience of color.

Detection

Insects, plants, and many unicellular creatures, all have the ability to detect light. Other animals are able to distinguish not only light from darkness but also light of varying wavelengths and energies. When we see orange what we are as importantly seeing is something that is not green, red, yellow, blue, purple… Colors represent different ratios of cone firings.344 We perceive orange as something between red and yellow because an intermediate combination of photoreceptors fire.345 Because unique cone combinations fire for each color, they are in fact distinct sensations, and the difference between them is as obvious and immediate to us as the difference between night and day. So, the experience of color is first and foremost a change in the organism not the external world. Remember that the mind forms categories. It doesn’t discover them. The blueness of the sky, ocean, sapphire, or lapis lazuli each arises from extremely different physical phenomena,346 but phenomena that excite a similar ratio of cones will be perceived as alike regardless of how dissimilar they actually are. Nevertheless, a video camera can detect light of varying wavelengths and energies, but no one would say that it actually sees color.

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