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Pleiades said in a post earlier:

“This is like a bee saying ‘a UV wave passes by and there are only humans around, does it really exist?’ Just because we can’t tell its there, doesn’t mean a) it isn’t, b) it isn’t useful to something else perhaps in some other way.”

Haha, I really liked this post. I’d also like to add, in addition to a) and b) above: c) That it isn’t affecting us directly. After all, we do not perceive UV rays but they give us cancer so they do affect us.

So what is reality then? In class we said that color is not an intrinsic quality of objects. I disagree. Because what is color? Color is directly related to the wavelengths of light adsorbed by an object, which is directly related to the energy of bonding systems within the compounds that make up the object. These things are fundamental to the object, regardless of whether or not they are perceived. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to see it, its leaves still contain chlorophyll, and still adsorb green wavelengths of light, period. The fact that we call it “green” is merely so that a term can be used for the way the brain interprets the visual signal. It's for the sake of simplicity. I suppose one could, if one wanted to, say to their neighbor, "Oh my, I am perceiveing a wonderful 700 nm wavelength of light from your rose garden. However do you manage them so well?" If the argument is that the way our brain interprets the signal is not fundamental to the object, then that’s silly, because everything is interpreted by the brain, in which case nothing we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, whatever, is fundamental to the thing being sensed. Is that the point? If it is we may as well stop talking about this stuff, because OF COURSE, the only way that the world can be experienced by any creature is by way of a tool, and the brain (nervous system) is the tool we have to experience the natural world around us. “The brain is wider than the sky,” Emily Dickinson makes a cute point, but I just can’t see how that makes reality, i.e. the world outside the brain, any less “real.” Without brains walking/crawling/swimming about, the world would be exactly what our nervous systems know it is: a bunch of forces, elements, light waves, pressure changes, electrostatic forces, masses, and magnets that interact in an incredibly intricate manner. Our brain is a tool invented by billions of years of evolution because survival and reproduction/replication was aided by sensory systems that allowed organisms to react appropriately to inputs from these forces. Evolution, and the organisms for that matter, couldn’t give a hoot exactly HOW the signals are detected so long as they are detected.

So is color a construct of the brain?

Well, yes, if what you call “color” is the interpretation ONLY, and not the property of the object which is the signal being received and interpreted. But as I said before, this seems a bit silly because interpretation is exactly why brains evolved. The world didn’t evolve forces so that the brain would have something to interpret.

Just some thoughts.