Heye Sophia's List: Colors/Communication

• It seems impossible for me to imagine a colour that I have never seen. I don’t mean some subtle shade in a paint catalogue, intermediate between colours that I know well. I mean a completely new colour, as different from the familiar as red is from blue.
• subjective hues are constructions manufactured in the brain as convenient internal labels for light of different wavelengths.
• The bat’s brain constructs a detailed picture of the world using echoes instead of light. A bat, when echolocating an insect, might use the subjective sensation that we call ‘red’ as a convenient label for the furry texture of a moth, and might use ‘blue’ as an internal label for the leathery texture of a locust.
• the mammalian brain has the capacity to construct the qualia that we call hues, and use them as internal labels to facilitate sensory distinctions
• Isn’t it possible that, if the right spot in the brain could be discovered, the patient might suddenly experience an entirely new colour, never before seen by him: as different from anything he had ever encountered as red, for me, is different from blue. This would mean that a colour-blind person might be privileged to know what it is like suddenly to enjoy an entirely new sensation.

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• However, I would suggest that most discussions of rearrangements of color qualia severely underestimate how much structure comes along with our color perceptions.
• colors are part of a three dimensional space of colors, a space having certain well-known features. The space is spanned by a red-green axis, a yellow-blue axis, and a black-white axis. These three axes have opponent colors at opposite ends, and these extreme ends of the axes are pure or primary (i.e., not being built via a combination of other colors). All the colors we know of are a perceptual combination of these three axes.
• Colors are not only intricately connected to one another in a space, but are linked to many other aspects of our mental life, including other sensory modalities (e.g., a "red sounding trumpet") and emotions.
• I have argued elsewhere that our color-vision eyes are oximeters like those found in hospital rooms, giving us the power to read off the emotions, moods and health of those around us.

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