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tzachquiel comments on Open thread, Feb. 16 - Feb. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (125)
The core question here is: For how many colors do you have something like "redness" or "blueness" and what does it take to get that for a new color.
Particularly it takes a name. The name is metadata. It's makes the thing a primitive. An important step from going from vague feelings of difference to things with metadata is to give it a name. At least that's what I happen to believe at the moment.
Though there are many specific shades that I would group under the category "red", each one is it's own separate experience and I can distinguish colors very finely (I get a perfect score on this color sorting test) and remember them later. I do not believe naming the categories is the cause of qualia, because I also name sounds (C, E-flat, oboe, violin, etc.) and I don't experience the same thing with sound as I do with color.
That still opens the door to find colors for which you don't have a separate experience at the moment and develop a separate experience.
The proliferation of incommunicable experiences doesn't seem like a good way to solve this problem :) But on a related note, that's actually a good idea for some Anki cards; learn a bunch of more fine-grained color names and become able to better remember them. Of course, the fidelity of the screen will become important at that point...
The interesting thing is studying the process of what happens when you build more of them. It might be possible to systematize the process and then find out something interesting through quantitative analysis.
If you want I can send you the deck. My deck has all CSS color names and also finer distinction via hex numbers.
Otherwise I have thought a bit about the issue. Redness is not only a single color but also a dimension. If you take any two colors you can compare them in their redness. You can't compare to notes by how much "C" they are. A note is either C or it isn't.