The Mystery of Color

Delicious, delicious color.

[zepto]

Videos like this made me turn on notifications for this channel lol

[mikzin]

On the topic of colourblindness, apparently the guy who discovered how genes alleles work did so by breeding fruit flies together and observing the change in their eye colours, though he was colourblind. While nobody except him would have been able to see the subtle changes in shade (as to most observers these eyes all just looked similarly red, ) he was able to see a wholly new gradient of shades, which let him notice differences no one else would have seen, and to successfully deduce the mechanism of heredity. I just thought it was an interesting anecdote, and one which proves that one way of experiencing reality isn't just not less valid, but even necessarily less advantageous than another (evidenced by the fact that he won a Nobel prize for this work).

[Shannaya]

If you keep doing these kind of videos I'll end up fat, Mr. Zapata.

[berika]

Just before I watched this video I was looking through a recent sketchbook and on a page with some paint swatches was written "NO COLOR IN YOUR BRAIN?" (In capital letters for some reason) .. What does it mean??

[contralines]

Maybe the true color of the banana🍌 is actually…☝️




black🖤 and blue💙 😮👗

[snodge]

I have a friend who is colour blind, yet they think ‘blindness’ is very misleading - they say they wish it was called ‘colour dyslexia’. To them the experience is more that they can ‘see’ all colours, it’s just that processing the colours they see into the ‘correct’ labels / names is difficult. ?

Like they may point at a shirt and say that it’s grey, and someone else will say it’s purple, then they’ll stare at the shirt for a while and think ‘well, I guess I can see purple, and blue…. But also red and yellow….’ And pretty much any other colour. Like they just intuitively don't look at an object and make the connection to any singular colour. Crazy stuff.

[alinktoana]

not me being a fifth grader and thinking about dwayne the rock johnson when steven starts talking about rocks lol
tysm for these <3 listening to you and other artists going on meditative tangents about art makes me feel less insane. ive legit had meltdowns when clients want stuff to look bland (bc corporate) when they could be colored in fun and interesting ways

[fallandrix]

welp, i'm a red-green colorblind artist. I'm pretty sure that your experience of green is way more different from my experience of green. But we tend to "equalize" on the notion of green based on the theory of how we study it. And it's weird to think about it. What if in actuality (if i could ever experince truly see what your green is) my green is way more vibrant or saturated than your green. But whenever you say that my green on my painting is less vibrant. I do "understand" what you mean because i understand your notion based on our "collective" study of color. And i'll happily and "academically" adjust the saturation of it. But you never ever ever know how much of level of saturation i am seeing, based on your own perception of levels of saturation. And this thought fascinates me.

btw, i'm always teased by my friends because of that. They point random objects to me and ask me what color it is. and because of tricky lighting situation, specially when that object vibrates from red-to green, i always says the "wrong" color. But instead of being insulted, i always laugh with them. I never see myself of having a "sickness" or what. Or "blind" in some ways. It's just that, even in a very figurative way of seeing things through perception, "you will never understand what i am seeing". And this is my "ground" reality. If you put it in that perspective. Then they are the one "who is color blind"! LMAO! And again, that notion fascinates me.

[thesunthrone]

I am deeply enjoying these meditations on art and what lies deeper beneath the concepts we employ in our daily work. Looking forward to each new video!

And oh man, just a couple minutes in and I was not at all surprised that academics of philosophy weren't concerned with actually practicing what they are considering. This is sadly a problem in philosophy studies, as it's far too detached from the things they discuss. It is considered academic to work with the sources - so long as the sources are texts. But sitting down with something practical? Both hands are raised, they back off - that's not their turf anymore. It's my unfortunate disappointment in the field, having earned a BA in philosophy - the field just isn't interested in actually living the philosophy of any kind, merely discussing it from the safety of a glass screen. Perhaps that's why I'm here and now, coloring a drawing as I listen to this.

[neotheta]

In my worldview, the existence of a colour on something requires both the object and the observer, it's an exchange of information, but information is also dependent on who/what the parties are - so there's not really some ultimate truth. It's hard to think there should be a battle between "what is really the truth" when many aspects play a crucial part in what happens. Also interesting thought that without the existence of time, there could not be any observing. But also there are so many ways how a thing could be observed. And there are so many aspects we can't observe as humans. Could there be observing parties that are completely impossible for us to even describe?

Also the way you explained becoming aware of ones colourblindness is a very similar experience to being asexual (lack of sexual attraction, but not lack of romantic love feelings), you just think other people are weird until you realize you're very alone with the experience and it's hard to comprehend that others cannot grasp what it even is to experience social dynamics as yourself, nor can you experience it their way, it just doesn't make sense. Though later in my life (around 30) that suddenly changed and the difference to my perception of human relationships is completely different - quite crazy even. That now gives me the understanding that a person that does not have that experience really cannot comprehend what it's like to be different in that sense, or perhaps via mediation and imagination it could be grasped? But it did not feel like a defect from my point of view, even now that it has changed - there were many benefits to it as there were also flaws (the biggest flaw was not being understood/believed/accepted by other people).

[pedramtajeddini]

Hi Steven, big fan of yours, i know you're busy and you don't know me but i emailed you my drawing but I'm not sure if you emailed me back because my email storage is full. It's the ant drawing. It would mean a lot to hear your thoughts on how to improve the drawing.

[dreadwinter]

As an artist, a former physics student and a casual enjoyer of philosophy, i dont think this philosophy of colour is that interesting of a topic. Whether the "colour" of an object is the thing that you perceive (is reflected) of an object or what was absorbed by it is just a matter of definition. Just recognize that both exist. Give them different names if you want.

Similarly, eyes take in light, light has a wavelength or a "colour" and that is separate from your perception of "colour", because perception happens in the brain separate from the eyes. The eye is just a relay for toggling on the perception. If other people's/animals'/aliens' relays are wired at all differently, theyll likely perceive those same wavelengths differently.

It's mostly a game of definitions.

That said, I do think that most people's perceptions of colour are mostly similar with each other, because we tend to like similar combinations of colours. I dont think blue and orange would be so universally liked if perceptions varied greatly.

[LuchaDodo]

I might be missing the point, but here goes. I think color and vision is kind of like art style; your art style is pretty much the result of what you know and what you don't know. Our ability to see is just the result of what biological instruments our bodies have evolved to, and color is the further specification to discern fluctuations between the visible light spectrum (somewhere between 400 and 700 nanometers? or something like that). We are bombarded with radio waves all day, but we have no way of even noticing them without a proper radio, and even then it has to be set to receive the appropriate frequencies. We are ignorant to seeing outside (to what we have labeled) the visible light spectrum, just as we are ignorant to so many smells that dogs are aware of.

There is a joke in physics, where if you speed up fast enough, a red light becomes a green light (I think this is in reference to the Doppler effect, but with visible light instead of sound). We are biased to living in a near-zero speed world (compared to the speed of light), so all of our vision is in context of our "zero" speed living experience. If we move fast enough (some sizeable fraction of the speed of light) towards a green apple, it will blueshiftt; however, the moment we pass it and look back, it will redshift. What about in between, where some of the apple is ahead, and the rest is behind us? It may as well look like a rainbow, with only a sliver in the middle looking the "original" green. If we were some being that can ONLY move at near-light speeds, then we can't even perceive the apple that us "zero" speed people can; the only way we can do that is if we slow all the way down to zero, but by slowing down so much we also affect our fundamental experience with time. (tangent here: maybe that's why aliens will never meet us, as they will have to slow down to our level of speed, and by doing so, essentially ostracize themselves to the rest of their own community due to the effects of time dilation they'll experience)

I guess my point is, color is HIGHLY subjective, and is only a result of our limitations in perceiving electromagnetic waves. What if our sense of touch and/or sound was heightened? Heightened to the point where, if we tap on something, the vibrations that we feel will tell us exactly what kind of material we have just tapped, how big it is, etc. What if our eyes were to evolve into some absurd telescope/microscope hybrid, where when we shift our focus, we can either choose to see the microorganisms in front of us, or some planet far away, and everything else in between? And of course the speed example; if we can freely move between zero-speed and near light-speed, and do it frequently, no object will have a consistent color; the green apple will only be green at the zero-speed tier. By constantly starting and stopping between zero and light speed, all objects will be all sorts of rainbows.

[suzuuato]

I kind of feel like the greenes or the missing leap is a bit like with the soul or the human self you perceive but can never be found anywere. It's not in the Quantum world nor anywere else but it is perceived (at least for some) but can't quite be expaind.
Really thought provoking Video it was quite fun to listen to!

[xabeke.]

i had too many thoughts across this hour to really form it into a productive comment. but i do think an interesting addition to this discussion is how being bound to one language or five, affects how you see colour. some languages having no name from “turquoise” for instance.

at some point i feel this is a question that has more to do with how human societies develop within the context of their world than “the world” itself.

[charliehnatiuk]

maybe there's a little Blue Alien version of 'You', asking big human you; how does it feel living with this lack!?
🌎🙏

[don.]

If Steve is drawing in the woods and no one is around to see it, does he draw a cute anime girl?

[DazzlingAction]

yall just ever stare at the ground and say oo pretty when your looking at dirt.... hehe

[thesunthrone]

On a much more silly note, this very same mystery of color reveals itself when you look at the same image on several different monitors that are calibrated slightly differently. Trying to figure out which of them is the "real" color is a true pain, because really, which of these versions of image is the "real" one, how will everyone else see my image? Does it change fundamentally because of these differences? There is no answer and I have to trust in my iPad screen and pray it's the real one...

[sketchtesting]

These are the kinds of thoughts I have in my head just before I put my slippers in the fridge.

What really baked my noodle was when Oliver Sacks wrote about the colour blind synaesthete, whose eyes couldn't detect red light for genetic reasons, but the areas of their brain that could experience redness were working fine. So they'd have a synaesthetic experience of a colour they could never see in the real world, which they described as 'alien'.

And then I put my slippers in the fridge.