[ExI] Red

[Adrian Tymes]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 6:54 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Orange is also a bit of a puzzle. Is that a colour in itself, a variety of red, or a variety of yellow?

Technically, each color is a wavelength of light - or, in practice,
usually a cluster centered around a given wavelength.  Orange is such
a cluster that is between what we call "red" and what we call "green".

The subjective experience of perceiving the color orange is caused by
stimulation of our eyes' red-sensing and green-sensing cones in a
certain proportion.

> > ... the strawbery still has the red quality, which is different from the different type of light that is reflected.  i.e. the light isn't what has the red quality, it is the strawberry.
>
>
> I don't understand this at all. You seem to be saying that strawberries are red regardless of what they look like? If they reflected yellow light they'd still really be red? (I think that if you put a strawberry under a yellow lamp, without any red light shining on it, it would look yellow, but I haven't done this experiment).

I think he's saying "a quality that is labelled 'red'", but his
phrasing is incorrect.  By definition, the light has a "red" quality.
Whatever quality the strawberry possesses that might also be labeled
"red", it is only in relation to its ability to reflect light.  In
other words, "red" has two distinct meanings: a property of the light
reflected by the strawberry, and a property of the strawberry that
allows it to reflect light that is red.  This second property exists
whether or not the strawberry is currently reflecting any light: a
"red" strawberry remains that sort of "red" even in pitch blackness.

So what he appears to be trying to say is, this second form of "red"
isn't possessed by the light itself.  But phrasing it as "the light
isn't what has the red quality" incorrectly implies there is only one
sort of quality that is labeled "red".

I am not sure if he means that "redness" is this second type of
quality - which, if so, would be utterly physically measurable and
objective, making all his goings-on about subjective perception
irrelevant - or if "redness" is the subjective experience of
perceiving red, which would seem to be definitionally not a property
of the strawberry itself, but instead of the perceiving entity.