Colour in the Minds Eye

Throughout the story of philosophy and psychology there has been a debate on whether or not people view color in the same way or not.

For example, a person viewing a field of grass sees the grass as he or she has always viewed it, green.

The question is, is one person’s green the same as everybody elses, or is one’s green someone else’s blue?

The reason why this debate has outlasted many others is that there is no way to prove this. Debating this can be compared to the task of trying to explain what the color blue looks like to a man who has been blind throughout his life.

The only possible way to prove such an argument would be through physics.

There are two types of colors we face everyday, white and black. When white light hits an object, the pigments, such as chlorophyll in most plants and cadmium in metals, absorb specific colors, and reflect others. These reflected colors are specific colors which the object cannot gather.

For example, a purple object absorbs photons with lower frequency, such as red and yellow, and reflects higher frequency photons, such as indigo and violet. This gives the object its appearance. If you look at the color spectrum, you will notice that the light with lower frequencies tend to be lighter, and color with higher frequencies are darker, and get closer and closer to black. This brings up the question about what color would wave frequencies be at higher or lower wave lengths than the ones we can already see – but that is a topic for another time.

What I am trying to point out is that the color perceived by a person is not created by the persons mind, but rather it is a process of constant information which is available in our environment, and is inputted into our view. If we can all agree that the higher frequency waves tend to a constant color, black, then we can therefore agree that the colors tend to a pattern, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and on to even darker colors.