!lemmysilver
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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So are any animals actually capable of seeing the invisible spectrums of light? Because humans technically can see them, since we make tools that allow us to. Suck on that, other animals. ๐ค
Like infrared and ultraviolet? Yeah, there are animals that see those.
And all the other stuff we yse to see celestial objects and communicate long distance. Our phones are able to see colours we can't!
I've been thinking about how a species with a metal horn could evolve to use it as a radio and even a hive mind.
Really wish talking about what shrimp see didn't remind me that in farming them females have one eye removed to promote breeding
I am eternally gratefull the practice is forbidden in Europe in organic cultivation. It's one of the small wins that fly under the radar. It's still a long way to people choosing for organic, awareness is the start of every change.
Technically, all the colors are fake. They're just the halucinations of a brain trying to understand the input from sensory organs.
That doesn't make them fake, in the same way that x can mean 2. You are merely representing a given value (in this case light within a certain electromagnetic spectrum) in a useful way.
But is my red the same as your red? Hmmm?
if two people can both point to red and agree that it's red, that's close enough. anything beyond that is just pointless esoteric debate.
Some people see numbers instead/along with colors, and different people see different numbers, so I guess the colors might be different between people too
I disagree that it's pointless. I think it may be beneficial to humanity (eventually) to establish whether or not there is an objective reality which we all experience.
i agree, but that's a job for neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and psychology; not a pack of dorks on the fediverse.
it's more in the philosophy ballpark, which shapes the interpretration of methodology and the consequences, in my humble opinion.
But what if the dorks on the fediverse are scientists?
then by all means
But I want to contribute to humanity in a meaningful way!
-me, a dork on the Fediverse nearly incapable of contributing to humanity in a meaninful way
buy guns
Working on it.
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I hadn't thought about it that way.
No, colors are real. And you see them.
Pink isn't real. There is no wavelength of light that is pink.
Imagine how OP their colour perception would be if they did have that mental processing power
I don't think of it as drama so much as docucomedy.
But compared with human eyesight, they could still see more 'colors' - As we see (almost) the same white in incandescent bulbs as LEDs and fluorescents, they might actually see the component colors and their intensities.
Not unlike how we may hear a combination tone when multiple other tones are played, and hear the difference (or sum) of them.
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I hate that it invalidates this episode of radiolab, which is, without a doubt, a masterpiece of podcasting:
https://youtu.be/jibvu9BHV_k?t=795
i saved the video at the 13 minute mark where they do the audio representation of the vivid colors. still worth a watch/listen
I need to use wherewithal more in my daily life
Every lunar month, when there is a full moon, i try quitting caffeine
werewithdrawal
(I initially misread you comment)
I wish I had the wherewithal to use it more often.
The way mantis shrimp see is nonetheless super cool and interesting. They likely have no conception of 2D color at all, and can only sense the 12 different colors in general. Furthermore, only the midband of their eyes see color, when the eyes are moving and scanning for prey, they don't see color at all, which probably helps offload mental load for their small brains. Once they do see something, they then stop moving their eyes to determine the color of what they're looking at.
Also, mantis shrimp have 6 more photoreceptors in addition to the 12 colored ones, to detect polarized light. They likely see them the same way that they see color, so they probably don't consider them anything different than wavelength which is what we interpret as color.
Ed Yong's An Immense World has a section on this and I'd highly recommend it. The ways animals sense and perceive the world are often so different for ours and it's so fascinating.
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How did they test if they could see color? Did they make little shrimp dioramas or something?
They asked them politely
The easiest way is to use the principles of conditioning. Pair a stimulus with a certain color light, then start flashing up different colored lights. If the organism is cued to the stimulus by multiple colors of lights, it means that they can't really distinguish between them.
That's how we tested when kids lose the ability to distinguish certain phonemes.
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