A common thought experiment is "imagine a new colour", i.e. a colour that no one has ever seen before.
But that must have been a thing that has happened in human history.
On an individual level, there's the fact that there's a first time for every life experience, including the first time you see each colour. If there isn't any orange within your immediate field of vision when you're born, you will one day see orange for the first time. You probably won't realize that you're seeing a new colour, because you're experiencing all kinds of new weirdness, like eating and peeing and breathing and air and light, but the fact is you did, at some point, see orange for the first time.
But it might also have happened on a societal level. Within the full scope of human history, people have lived (and still do live) in some pretty desolate environments. In the past, where people didn't travel very long distances and didn't have access to dyes, maybe there have been societies living in the Arctic or the Sahara who went years without seeing a particular colour, because it simply wasn't present in their environment.
Then, one day, someone goes on a journey, sees a new flower, and OMG, what is that colour???
2 comments:
Oh man, I think about this all the time! The first time people saw a tiger. Or a parrot. Or an orchid or a rose. Nature is full of the most amazing colours.
This line of thought always leads me to think of many firsts of human contact with other cultures -- which can be an incredibly depressing exercise.
Imagine the first person to figure out that a parrot can be taught to "talk"! (Or the first person to tame/train an animal at all)
Or encountering a Venus flytrap when you've never even heard of such a thing!
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