Your language defines your perception of reality

[_honorentheos]

One word: chartreuse.

an obscure comment.

Honorentheos, I could proceed to argue against my post.
Color is not a subjective distinction it is a scientifically measurable difference. A prism shows the colors to be different specific wavelengths. On the other hand light reflecting off a blue tarp is not all blue light. It will be light of all colors but the proportion of blue lightwaves has been increased considerably from normal by the tarp absorbing more of the other colors and reflecting more blue. Sorry to go over this basic but it does remind me that when we see a colored object our mind is making a categorical assessment of the mix of light waves being reflected from that area of our field of vision. That is of course why we see such a broad range of variations in color not just yellow green blue etc. Because it is an assessment our mind makes the relationship to colors around what ever color is in question influence our color perception. There also could be at least a bit of area wherein culture might sneak in to color the minds decision.

huckleberry,

I offered up chartreuse as a simple example of a culturally defined color difference that is often referenced as jokingly overly nuanced among those who don't care to think of colors beyond green, yellow, yellow-green...fewer crayons in the box.

But I think there is a significant argument that needs made that our minds don't operate as transmitters of objective information. Instead, our minds create reality out of inputs. What we perceive involves our brains making sense of the inputs, whether those inputs are visual, audible, sensual, oral, or whatever. It's not just interpreting relationships it's authorship relying on the catalog of symbols it can draw from to compose the storyboard we view as our reality.

[_honorentheos]

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue.

I seem to remember that Julian Jaynes (of bicameral mind fame) used this to argue that the ancients couldn't even see the color blue.

That came up in the RadioLab episode. The short snippet of history they covered seemed to imply that it was proposed, soundly rejected, but the linguistic studies started to suggest it was more of a case that colors that lack distinct language identifiers sit below the level of conscious differentiation. That makes sense to me given that most of the analog world we live in gets sorted in our minds to keep things usefully categorized as I understand it.

[_honorentheos]

I should note that this conversation has me thinking about the A.I. thread. Perhaps the people working in A.I. should start encouraging A.I. to form an evolving language that they use to perform inner speech as it seems that our own path to cognition probably involved the continuous evolution of language.