Does color mixing happen in the phenomenal mind or in the noumenal mind?

Question

Context:

I have been thinking about Qualia (in terms of "color") and the inverted color spectrum, and trying to figure out what mathematical functions are possible for shuffling the color spectrum. The key thing to realize here is that any random shuffling function for color spectrum wouldn't work. It should map each color uniquely to another color so that the quintessential qualia question still remains unanswered: "Is my Red your Red?"

So, e.g. if we invert the spectrum entirely for a person so that he starts seeing:

• Red for Violet
• Blue for Orange
• Green for Yellow
• and so on...

Then, this achieves a perfect "shuffling" and that person would never be able to know that his Red is different from the Red of everyone else.

So, now I ask the question: what other shuffling functions are possible apart from this the inversion function? At first, it seems like all isomorphisms should be good for our case (such that the person can never know that a shuffling happened). An isomorphism, in this context, refers to a one-to-one correspondence between the colors in the spectrum, meaning each color is uniquely mapped to another color

The Constraint of Color Mixing

However, colors have a color mixing property, which dictates how colors combine to produce new colors. For instance, mixing red and blue typically results in the perception of purple. This property could (possibly) impose constraints on how colors can be shuffled while still producing recognizable combinations.

Now, if color mixing is happening inside the phenomenal mind, that would impose a constraint on what functions would be possible (not all isomorphisms would satisfy the color mixing property). But if color mixing is happening in the noumenal mind/world (the objective reality independent of our perception), then there would be no such constraint on our shuffling functions (since they are phenomenal).

Question

So, my question is simply this: Where does the color mixing happen? Does it happen out there in the noumenal world/mind, or does it happen inside our phenomenal mind where our subjective experiences reside?

Answer 1

This phenomenon is called metamerism and has been extensively investigated by workers in the the physiological optics field.

It is the brain that interprets a mixture of red, green, and blue light to be white.

This process occurs without conscious control.

Answer 2

niels nielsen addressed the physical basis of color mixing. As regards your question about color inversions, I think any partition of the electromagnetic spectrum into compact intervals, represents a valid color scheme. Physics and neurology take care of the rest.

There is a fascinating theory on the algebra of color. A good intro is here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/schwartz/files/lecture17-color.pdf

Answer 3

The question has assumptions that are not complex enough about world and mind

This question has too simple a set of assumptions about the nature of our world, and of our minds.

For color, everything in the world reflects a distribution pattern of frequencies. There are basically never pure frequencies in the world. There are distribution patterns of reflected photons with peaks at different frequencies, and our color sensors have only three different color ranges they respond to, plus the overall intensity black/white sensors. All our color palette come from three different color responses, plus the black/white sensors.

However, this coarse sensing is not straightforward either. Nearby rods and cones can deaden or amplify the response of other rods and cones.

Binning into categories of color occurs in our unconscious neural net processing. Where more suppressions/skewing can also occur, such as background level shifting, local clustering, shape recognition, and amplification of some shapes and colors over others.

Sorting/binning of this muddled data from our eyes is adaptively guided by our conscious mind. Eskimos famously have 20 different words for snow, because the details of snow properties matter a LOT to them, and they have trained their neural nets to sort/bin snow into more different categories than a typical tropical region resident would have. Similarly, a color painting artist, or color scientist, would almost certainly have more internal bins that their brains sorts colors into than those of us who do not specialize in this field. Likewise for gourmets, or wine experts, and taste bins.

The EXPERIENCE of these colors, or these tastes, is also not straightforward. There seems to be a handoff of only the most highly prioritized info from our binning unconscious, to our conscious mind. The neuroscientist David Eagleman describes this as a grand illusion, where the unconscious creates the illusion of a "Cartesian theatre" that represents the world and our visual field, and populates it with a limited number of objects that it has selected for us to pay attention to. In many cases, this population isn't with qualia, but with logic categories. When the consciousness finds a particular logic category of greater interest, and focusses on it, the unconscious fills that part of the stage in with qualia and more logic details. This process of our unconscious filtering limited info, and to a degree deluding our consciousness about what we are seeing, is described by the neuroscientist David Eagleman in his book "Incognito".

SO which aspects of this process are noumena, noumenal mind, and phenomenal mind? I don't think you can draw a clean line around any of these three categories when it comes to color perception.

But the question can lead you into a lot of interesting science work being done around color, color perception, and both conscious and unconscious processing.