This eye test says the boundary I use to define the difference between green and blue is between hues 174 and 168 (I took it a few times), but I’m not really sure what that tells me. I guess it’s just semantic— we could all see the same color but call it something different. I don’t think we have a way to actually prove if we see things the same way.
When I was a kid my friend and I had a recurring conversation about the idea that we could be perceiving the world differently and not know it. We wondered about a scenario where two people agreed on the name of every color they saw, even though their eyes were showing their brains two different shades. For them, all colors would be relatively the same (like a color wheel spun some number of degrees clockwise, with the labels staying stationary), while the real truth would be undiscoverable.
But also, maybe the language we use actually changes our understating and experience of the colors. Like Orwell’s idea that having a smaller vocabulary does not just limit your ability to describe the world, but limits your understanding too. Maybe turquoise isn’t green or blue. The ancient Greeks apparently did not have a regular word for “blue”. The Iliad describes “the wine dark sea.” But did they simply choose to group blue in with red/purple, or did they literally not see it as blue, either due to a biological difference in our eyes, or a psychological difference produced by language restrictions.
I don’t know, whatever. The blue I see is probably my favorite color.
Sep 4, 2024
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I kept pressing reset at the colours that I would not describe as blue or green but I now think that resets the whole thing cause I was doing that for ages with no result cause I’m an idiot haha. But those in the middle colours, if i saw them on a wall I’d be like ah yes that a nice blue/green or turquoise or aquamarine. Once again, I refuse the binary of online tests. i do wish it was better at figuring out where my turquoise boundary starts, that would be interesting to know. to me turquoise is neither blue or green (which is literally the definition of turquoise so I don’t really understand this test) but I am interested to see where blue ends and turquoise begins to my eyes.
Sep 4, 2024
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“I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium).
About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo now—now!” And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved—never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought—it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain.
For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum—but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen.
And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display—lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth—and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists!
During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce—no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again."
Jan 20, 2024
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