Don’t Trust Your Eyes

See the blue and green spirals? No, you don’t. You’re perceiving the blue and green but they’re both the same color. People like to think they’re eyes are like video cameras, but things go through a bit of interpretation before reaching your conscious mind.

Trust nothing!

21 Comments

  1. Thank God its only colors! I thought for a moment that it might be another one of those blasted “magic eye” things! Since I am blind in one eye, I can see those damn things no matter how hard I try!

  2. Color is not “real” anyway–no matter how your brain fills the spatial data in your mind, there is no actual sense of orange and purple in the innate physics of the things, and having red green and blue receptors and having them in such and such proportions is arbitrary and even varies from person to person. Color is not even a cultural norm–for example, the reason people with orange hair are called redheads is because red used to encompass that entire part of the spectrum. And if you want to be technical the magenta you see in that picture does not exist at all–there is no frequency of light which corresponds to magenta, it is a mixture of red and blue.

    As such, I don’t know if we can say that the fictional portrayal of color our mind gives us in this case is “incorrect” any more than it is in any other case. The purpose of color is not to be able to discern the component values of red green and blue, but to make physical distinctions. As there is a physical distinction between the two spiral arms, we can hardly affront our brain for relaying the fact rather than giving us something very hard to tell apart.

  3. In best “Awesome-O” voice Frank J is the best blogger in the history of the universe and there shall never be another like him and he shall be worshiped as a God forever and ever…

  4. The fact that you can tell us that there is no such thing as color proves that there is such a thing. We even have a word for it: color.
    Socrates, we also have a word for unicorn. Does your logic apply to unicorns as well as color?

    A philosopher should learn the distinction between the sense and the reference of a word.

    Although I don’t think you were grasping the gist of what I was trying to say anyway.

  5. I could never even get Magic Eyes to work by crossing your eyes. They say that if you totally suck at doing it the way you’re supposed to do it you can cross your eyes and see almost the same thing, but that never worked for me either. Stupid eyes.

  6. @THE BOMB!!!

    Your sooooooooooooooooooooo wrong. You say there is no such thing as magenta, but only a mix of red and blue, but is that not the definition of magenta? Color is not fictional, your very perception of it is proof that it is real. That which makes red red, or magenta magenta is fundamental to the color itself, our minds do make judgments using other information to interpret the information, which explains the optical illusion, but it does not prove that what we see is somehow false, at most it proves we do not understand our own minds, more likely it proves that some do not understand what makes a color a color, I would suggest that it appears to be two different colors because it is, and your quantity based understanding is flawed. The idea that perception is flawed is one of the fundamental beliefs of nihilists, and ends in questioning the perception of ones own thoughts, which is a retarded exercise.
    I suggest you read Aristotle’s “Categories”, it does not explicitly deal with the issue, (actually it might, haven’t devoted it to memory or anything) but does address the nature of color

    Socrates’ point, if I understand him, is also true. You can talk about color, which proves it is real in a sense. I think his argument is that Color is understood only as an abstract, something which many people would agree with. Since any abstract you can think of is inherently real, the unicorn is real as an abstract, but unlike color, the abstract of the unicorn is based on a concrete that does not exist, color is not based on a concrete. At least that is what I got from Socrates’ point.

    PHILOSOPHY!

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