Do chimps see color even though they don't have a word for it? Did homo-sapiens see color before inventing language? (obviously yes, many animals see color, or plants wouldn't evolve to be so colorful as an example)
It's cool to think language somehow creates color, but I suspect it only gives us the tools to talk about them. It's not that ancient Greeks couldn't see certain colors, but that they didn't have color theory like we do, they didn't organize all the colors into a wheel and had a whole industry that played around with colors for mass consumption.
The simple explanation I think is just that ancient peoples had a very rudimentary understanding of color and that just means they didn't have the tools to talk about them. This creates a feedback loop, because without talking about them, you will not get a request from someone to paint their house in that color, and thus the culture develops a blind spot for those colors.
It's not that the brain is creating colors, but rather it associates labels with visible spectrum frequencies, and having labels allows discussion, which allows real world application of it, which feeds back into the culture. It might seem that a member of said culture can't "see" a color, but really it's that they never learned to have a "pointer" in their brain for it.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 13.1 ms ] threadIt's cool to think language somehow creates color, but I suspect it only gives us the tools to talk about them. It's not that ancient Greeks couldn't see certain colors, but that they didn't have color theory like we do, they didn't organize all the colors into a wheel and had a whole industry that played around with colors for mass consumption.
The simple explanation I think is just that ancient peoples had a very rudimentary understanding of color and that just means they didn't have the tools to talk about them. This creates a feedback loop, because without talking about them, you will not get a request from someone to paint their house in that color, and thus the culture develops a blind spot for those colors.
It's not that the brain is creating colors, but rather it associates labels with visible spectrum frequencies, and having labels allows discussion, which allows real world application of it, which feeds back into the culture. It might seem that a member of said culture can't "see" a color, but really it's that they never learned to have a "pointer" in their brain for it.