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As neuroscience advances, what is the likelihood of truly novel color experiences?

I don't mean discerning ever finer gradations in existing colors, but entirely new color qualia.

What would it be like? Would our brains be able to integrate this new phenomenal experience?

And most importantly, if color is a property of brains rather than something in the external world, does that imply the number of "possible colors" is infinite? I.e. seeing as biological brains "choose" how to internally represent a particular wavelength of EM radiation, is the seemingly Platonic realm from which these colors are plucked from inexhaustible?

We currently have aesthetic preferences over existing colors. I would want to know whether these possible colors can be enumerated, searched through, and have a utility function placed over them so that each human can find what is to them "the best possible color."

4 comments

> As neuroscience advances, what is the likelihood of truly novel color experiences?

No need for neurosciences, just some fancy spectral filters like those on IMAX 3D glasses. With some practice using these glasses you can experience a six-dimensional color space. When you remove your glasses, this six-dimensional space collapses into the common three-dimensional color space. But with the glasses, you can distinguish many different colors that look exactly the same to regular humans. That white wall? It looks a perfectly uniform white to most people, but you can see clearly that two very different kinds of white have been used here and there.

A similar effect can be obtained indoors by lighting objects with monochromatic lights, but it is not as dramatic as with glasses.

I used to work in highway paving, and I learned how to tell the temp of asphalt with polarized sunglasses. It's not the same as a truly novel color experience but its a neat party trick

You probably can create some novel color experiences, by gazing at color sequences animations.

Warning epileptic risk, experiment at your own risk.

You have some led or screen smoothly changing periodically.

Train your brain to discriminate between the two following sequences.

Going from red to green to blue to red. (Species A) Going from red to blue to green to red. (Species B)

You have to pick the right frequency (i.e. ~10-20hz) fast enough so that your brain sees it as a single unit without thinking about it, but slow enough that is still able to pick some differences.

You can gamify it for example on a screen you can watch color-changing moving balls. And you have to pick one subspecies only.

You can then extend this little game to train your brain to "see" various color rotations (aka rotating a color sphere). It's kind of like learning music. Construct some structure programmatically, then gaze at it until your brain intuitively grasp the underlying structure.

You can also play with the difference of temporal phase if you have some vr-headset you can have a 6D color space input, which you can use to train your brain to visualize 4d rotations, and rotations in higher dimensions spaces which will probably be useful for visualizing QCD intuitively.

If you have the time to train your brain for it you can construct a rotating color based language like you would with music. If you sync-it up to music it can help the learning process by doing some kind of joint training between audio and visual space.

See also: "Martian Colors: What Does A Colorblind Synesthete See?"

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/martian-colors

>We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as "Martian colors."

There is nothing truly infinite about human brains - while we don't know how to express it, unless you believe in non-physical minds, there will be physical limits to what the mind can do.

In fact, if the mind color space were actually infinite, it would be essentially impossible that any two organisms would share color perceptions, while in reality we share even the impossible colors.

the comment you're responding to is referring to qualia, and there is no evidence (Occam's razor doesn't count) that these are shared at all.