Drugs

[Orruar]

Originally Posted by pharmakos [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

you know whats trippy? for the most part the spectrum makes sense in order. combine red and yellow and you get orange, the color right between red and yellow. combine yellow and blue and you get green, the color right between yellow and blue.

but to get purple you combine red and blue, and purple is way the fuck at the opposite end of the spectrum from red.

the fuck?

would almost make sense if it were cyclical, but its not -- higher frequencies than purple do not look red. (at least not to humans)

i suppose color itself is a qualia, though, and not actually a property of matter itself.

Color is a property of light. Qualia are the way we perceive the color. No matter what qualia you or I ascribe to particular colors of light, combining paint with the color at ~700nm (red) with paint with the color at ~580nm (yellow) will produce paint with color at ~600nm (orange). That is an actual physical property and perception doesn't change that fact. Everyone who isn't colorblind sees the same red + yellow = orange, irrespective of the qualia they perceive when looking at these colors.

Also note that combining colors of light is different than combining paint of a certain color. If you combine red and yellow light, you get white light.