Last month a research group out of the UC Berkeley announced a remarkable discovery. They found a new color. Called olo, it is by all accounts – or at least to the five people who have seen it – startling.
“It was jaw dropping,” study co-author Ren Ng told The Guardian.
“Olo looks like a blue-green color that is just the most saturated blue-green or teal that I’ve ever seen,” he added in a separate interview with Popular Science.
The science and engineering that went into olo’s discovery is remarkable. So too its implications on the philosophy and science perception.
For millennia, subjective and objective perception has stymied thinkers. Plato famously distrusted sensory perception, arguing that what we see and hear represents mere shadows of true reality. Centuries later, Kant argued that while we can perceive things, we can never know them as they truly are. Meantime, Buddhist philosophers like Nagarjuna developed sophisticated arguments showing how both subjective perception and objective reality are empty of inherent existence.
The Taoist Zhuangzi questioned the entire reliability of subjective thought, wondering if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
The mere act of “seeing” something and confirming that that something is what others see as well is also perplexing. What do we mean when we say something is green, and is my green your green and vice versa?
Via The Atlantic:
Verifying that [the] participants had indeed seen a novel color was tricky. Only one person witnesses the experience of color: the person who sees it. Philosophers have fretted about color’s inescapable subjectivity since the late 18th century, when John Dalton discovered red-green color-blindness—his own. (Dalton noted that a pink geranium looked dramatically different when viewed in broad daylight than in evening candlelight, and was astonished when his friends told him that they experienced no such effect.) Zed Adams, a philosophy professor at the New School who specializes in the experience of color, told me that many 20th-century philosophers were haunted by the idea that we’re all trapped in our own perceptual world. Everyone wants to believe that they see the true rainbow, but no one can be sure that they do, Adams said.
The team that discovered olo developed a novel neurological machine called Oz (as in, and with props to, the Wizard of). Oz is capable of mapping a person’s retina and classifying every cell in it. The personalized map is then used to beam a laser at individual cells. There, a single wavelength of light selectively stimulates the cells to produce the perception of innumerable different colors.
Via Popular Science:
[A] computer has to detect and correct for the tiny, but unavoidable movements of a person’s eye in real-time. Stimulating just a single cone cell doesn’t create any perceivable color, so Oz goes a step further and rapidly moves its laser in a zig-zag pattern across a predetermined patch of cells. Oz only sends out its beam when it passes over a target cell. In the case of the newly published study, these target cells were cones classified as M photoreceptors in the mapping stage.
Normally, humans perceive color based on the particular wavelengths of light reaching our retinas and stimulating our photoreceptor cells in a particular ratio and pattern. But with the Oz Vision System, a single wavelength of light can be used to create the perception of innumerable different colors because cells can be so selectively stimulated.
Where researchers go from here is interesting. Besides treating vision impairments, the authors suggest a system such as theirs could simulate or allow humans to experience the world with more than the three photoreceptor cells most of us currently have.
Tetrachromats, such as birds, reptiles, and some types of fish, have four color receptors. This extends the visible spectrum beyond what humans can see. Mantis shrimp have an astounding 12-16 photoreceptor types allowing them to see things we can only hallucinate about.
The technology isn’t there, of course. Only one person can strap themselves into Oz at a time. But, perhaps, a cyborg future will give us visual prosthetics that allow us to see the world like our favorite creatures big and small.
Computers, after all, were once the size of refrigerators. We now slip much stronger ones in our pockets.
