The human fascination with color never ceases to amaze me. Our perceptual experience is filled with shapes and pitches and textures and timbres and depths and on and on, yet color seems to get the lion share of our excitement and philosophical attention. Color seems somehow more artistic than our other perceptual dimensions; it’s simply wonderful to behold, as evinced by the double rainbow guy; and we can’t resist wondering what it would be like to see dimensions of color beyond our own. In fact, RadioLab recently put out a great show on color that nicely conveys the romance we all have toward it.
The significance of the colors of things, on the other hand, is much less obvious, and so scientists and philosophers have long wondered whether inverting or otherwise warping or messing with the spectrum might not really matter. These are the “inverted spectra” thought experiments. Maybe green to you is red to me, but the difference leads to no other cognitive or behavioral differences. If colors are arbitrary labels placed over the world, then inversions and warps shouldn’t matter.
Colors can’t be inverted any more than the other dimensions of perceptual experience. Therefore, colors shouldn’t be mucked with. Not in philosophical thought experiments. And not via “color-enhancement” for everyday eyewear, like in sunglasses. After all, that’s what color-enhancement often does: Having been designed without an appreciation for the meanings found within our color experience, color-enhancement has been much like “enhancing” music by blindly fiddling with the mixer knobs.
If the thrill of color were entirely due to the mistaken intuition that colors are arbitrarily splashed onto the world, then, with that intuition dispelled (as I’ve tried to do) color’s beauty would dissipate.
But I don’t believe that the fundamental appeal of color is due to this arbitrary-splashes basis at all. Instead, it seems more likely that our love of color comes from the meaning of color, namely, that color vision for us primates is a deeply human and emotional sense. Color is evocative and aesthetic because its subject-matter concerns the most evocative states of the most important objects in our lives: other people.
That’s why we find color so captivating. It’s not because color floats above the world ungrounded, but, rather, because it is so deeply rooted in our psyche.