Talk:Inverted spectrum

Anglocentric argument?

"Dark yellow is brown (qualitatively different from yellow), whereas dark blue is blue"

Is it true that "dark blue is blue" among speakers of languages other than English? Dark blue is Navy blue; light blue is azure. --Damian Yerrick (serious | business) 17:28, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

The existance of inverted spectrum

Does the existence of color blind people not convince us that "inverted spectrum" is possible? I think the article can be a little more explicit about how exactly the claim of its existence is contested.

Musically ut (talk) 06:39, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Not to mention tetяachromats. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 16:01, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

A counter-argument runs thus: Colour is not perceived in a one-dimensional spectrum, but in Munsell colour system. Moreover, it is known that this shape is not symmetric. We are able to make finer distinctions of shades of yellow, red and green than of blue. It is conceivable that this shape could be "rotated" to be an inversion, but it would necessarily be detectable, because a person with a "rotated" colour space would be abnormally good at differentiating hues of blue, whereas she would perceive colours that others call different shades of red as the same shade. Also, the boundaries between, say, blue and green, or yellow and brown, would then be in different places, because some colours have larger shares of the space than others. So she would not distinguish two totally different colours for white and yellow. This last bit is what was meant by the "dark yellow is brown" stuff. This experimental psychological assignment of colours to a 3D-space is supported by neurological findings, because the neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus receive stimuli from the cone cells, and react to them in a fashion which is exactly corresponding to the colour space. I won't go into it here (because I haven't got the book source here), but a plausible explanation of colour blindness and a range of other colour-associated visual sensory phenomena can be easily derived from this argument.

As an aside, the sense of "possible" required for the argument to work is a very weak one. Just because I can imagine that there i a place on the Earth where there is no gravity means (in this sense of possible) that it is possible. It does not mean that science has to seriously consider the possibility of such a place.

See Churchland, P. S. (2002) Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press;

Lehky, S. R. and Lejnowski, T. J. (1999) Seeing White: Qualia in the Context of Decoding Population Codes. Neuronal Computation 11, 1261-80; and

Palmer, S. E. (1999) Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hinakana (talk) 10:12, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Inverted spectrum arguments aren't particularly meant to be 'taken seriously by science'. Many philosophers believe that possibility conceivability is enought to establish their case. 1Z (talk) 17:18, 29 July 2008 (UTC)