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I'd have to agree with you, Jessica. I cannot believe - cannot even conceive of the idea - that no actual "color" exits in the outside world. So...I don't even try to see it that way! I find it helpful to think of those magic eye illusion puzzles, you know the ones at the mall with weird geometric shapes that are supposed to go 3-D and jump out at you in dolphins or faces or something? If you think of the world as the magic eye poster and you suddenly "see" the illusion, that is akin to seeing "color." When you don't see it as clearly, many other living organisms don't, it doesn't mean it isn't there to begin with. It just means it's an effect, a neurological bi-product of the way we see. Does that metaphor make sense? I know where you're going with the tree in the forest line of thought and that's my optical version of it. Once you see color, you can't UNSEE it and that means we think in color, even if it's just a construct (which doesn't make it any less real/tangible.)

I found it interesting to think of the implications of the brain creating non-spectral colors as the brain creates platonic ideals - magenta and teal are just two examples of colors that do not exists in the physical world yet there they are, named and present in our minds. Why do we operate in this manner? Is it a way of ordering our world to be able to name things, categorize our own constructs? What does it mean to have such a vivid array of colors that will never ever be experienced in a physical way?