alt Hacker News> Your cone cells do not perceive anything whatsoever.
They most certainly do. Your brain may apply meaning to the signals the cone cells send, but it is the cone cells which send a signal for one color and a different signal for another. That's what perception is.
> Those who grew up with words (meaning) assigned to subtle variations in colors can tell those colors apart without a reference to compare it to better than, and much faster than those who haven't grown up with learning the distinction.
No they can't. There is no evidence at all of better color differentiation, and if they were able to better differentiate then they wouldn't be faster because those who were less capable would never be able to. The vocabulary makes labeling faster, and that is all that such tests are measuring.
> We know this to be obvious of sounds, musicians who can tell if a note is slightly out of tune when others who haven't learned how can't.
Knowing the names of notes doesn't make it any easier to tell if a note is out of tune. If you weren't aware before, middle C is 261.62 hz. Can you now tell if a note is .01 hz off middle C? No of course not. Musicians learn to differentiate notes because they spend tremendous amounts of time listening to sound and being corrected when the note they hit isn't the one they are going for. Similarly an orange farmer will know the difference between the color of a ripe orange and the color of a few days under ripened orange, despite not having a distinct word for either. If you're having a blind taste testing competition between someone who drinks lots of wine but has no formal education, and someone who is extremely learned in somellier vocabulary but has never actually had a glass of wine before, it's pretty obvious who is going to be better at distinguishing two vintages.
> You're not thinking in photons. Your brain is making up meaning from the stimulation your eye received from photons. The perceiving part is learned.
You are perceiving photons, or more accurately the firing of neurons triggered by those photons. The meaning your brain applies is a label for what you are perceiving - it's a categorization. You see the color of an apple, you learn that color is called red. You see another apple, and you ask why that one's a different color, and then you are told there are also green apples. But you did not need to be taught to differentiate red apples and green apples, you directly perceived it. The difference between cyan and azure exists even if you don't have the vocabulary to communicate that difference to someone else.
> That's what perception is.
No, it isn't. Perception is a process, and ingress only a part of the process.
Perception (from Latin perceptio 'gathering, receiving') is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information, in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.[2] All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.[3] Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.
Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention.[4][5] Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition).[5] The following process connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge) with restorative and selective mechanisms, such as attention, that influence perception.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
> No they can't. There is no evidence at all of better color differentiation
Yes, there is. Example: "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17470790/
> Knowing the names of notes doesn't make it any easier to tell if a note is out of tune.
I didn't say that. But having a deep familiarity with tones does.
> Musicians learn.
Yes, I know. I majored in Music and have 30 years experience.
> they spend tremendous amounts of time listening to sound and being corrected
I'm confused since you seems to have just switched sides of the argument completely and entirely here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are thinking that _having_ knowledge (knowing the words and vocabulary) is what I meant. But that is not what I meant. I meant to speak about the _understanding_ you have when you intimately familiar and experienced.
> The difference between cyan and azure exists even if you don't have the vocabulary to communicate that difference to someone else.
Those colors are pretty different and aren't that interesting to study, from a linguistic relativity point of view. Colors much closer together, like #187af7, #1b85f5 and #187af7 are.