Black and white are too colors!
Everything has to be a color! 
Black and white are both just either high or low energy levels of the REAL colors. 
But that is scientifically speaking of course. 
Well, I’ve been reading this forum off and on now, but I like this topic so I think I’ll post in it.
I’ve thought about this a bit myself, and the idea of the human brain precieving different colours is entirely possible, but due to the limitations of the human eye which can only detect photons/EM waves of a small range of energy levels/frequencies, the brain only percives within that small range. In reply to this:
Light is now considered to be both a particle and a wave, and the energy levels of the photons tell the brain what colour to show. The subtle point is this - colour doesn’t exist. Out there is a bunch of energy bundles floating around, banging into electrons which absorb and then emit the energy bundles at the energy level that depends on the object, which then hit our eyes. Colour isn’t ingrained into the real world, and is just made up by our brains. Just like sound - it’s just a bunch of vibrating particles, not really the low sound of a gong or the vibrato of a soprano singer - our brain makes the actual sound and colour up based on the information it recieves.
The point of this is to illustrate that because our brain is making the colour up, it is would be perfectly plausible for our brain to make up a different colour too if we had eyes, for example, that could also percieve the near-infrared spectrum. Because we are not restricted by sensory input in a dream, you should be able to make colours up there.
HOWEVER.
The matter of experience is a large one, and not just because one lacks the imagination to percieve a new colour. Firstly, the leap required for the to imagine a new colour is enormous. It isn’t like a new smell at all. A new smell can easily be identified using our real life nose - it can really exist in our real-life perceptions. However, a new colour certainly could never be identified by our eyes. It is a much larger leap. There is a stronger point however…
As a baby, if you had infrared detecting eyes, you would be able to see in infrared with the human brain. In fact, our brains could almost shift the entire spectrum anywhere it wanted, because it’s just assigning colours to energy values. However, as you grow older, your brain starts losing its ability to link up active neurons. Someone blind from birth, who doesn’t even know what the concept of light is - in effect, he sees neither white nor black but what you see behind you - may be able to gain the ability to see at one year old due to the ability of the brain to make connections fast, but past a certain age the brain simply cannot comprehend an unknown sense. The person who is blind from birth would simply mess up his brain if he tried to acquire a new sense at an older age (and older means teens at the oldest).
So do I think it’s possible? Yes, but I think it’s very unlikely. Our brain cannot adapt to entirely new sensory perceptions when one gets older.
Now just to clear up a few things…
Hardly. Quantum physics deals with the quantisation of light (energy is discrete and cannot be divided in half forever), which leads to a partice-wave dualty of light. This particle-wave dualty then found itself to apply to all partciles, which led to the uncertainty principles that underlies quantum mechanics. The part where QM gets into issues with our consciousness is why a wavefunction collapses when we observe it. Got nothing to do with alternate realities in our brain however - even the quantum chromodynamics idea of all matter around us arising through vacuum fluctuations is a far cry from that.
I guess quantum physics gets a lot of attention in the mystical world is because of this ‘two places at once’ weird quantum jumpiness stuff, even though it’s exaggurated way too far.
This doesn’t actually work, because infinite energy sources requires infinite energy, and infinite energy is an open system which breaks the law of conservation in thermodynamics - energy/mass cannot be created nor destroyed, yet if there’s infinite energy and x energy is created from nowhere, infinite plus x is still infinite and total energy remains the same, so conservation laws are broken because energy is created from nowhere.
Anyway, this is an interesting topic. And just quickly about remembering the colour - if you dreamt a new colour, you would almost certainly remember it on waking, because whether in dream or not it’s still your brain making the colour up. Only way is if new colours are restricted to subconscious thought, which is silly.
I hate to be the critical one… but if your argument is that our eyes limit us from seeing other colors, then shouldn’t one be able to imagine a new color rather than dreaming of it? And even if one were to accomplish this task, he/she would not be able to explain the new color, since it would only exist to that person.
What i’m trying to get at is that you shouldn’t have to dream of a new color. you should just be able to think it up. Of course this is based on your theory that our eyes limit what we can see…
I did touch on this - I said that in our dream it would require a vast imagination leap to conjure up a new colour, and that even in our dream, we still have to actually consciously visualise the new colour the same as you would in waking life. You can’t well just say ‘new colour!’, you actually have to think what the new colour would be like before it appears in your dreams.
The main difference is that our waking visualisation skills tend to be quite inferior to those in our dreams, but I hardly think this makes any difference. So I don’t think it would be possible to dream up a new colour.
And it isn’t ‘my thoery’ that our eyes limit this. It’s physical fact. Just like older people have their smallest hairs crippled in their corona so they can’t hear the high notes, people detect slightly different ranges of energy compared to others. No two eyes are the same.
Actually, I think the idea of dreaming up a new colour would be similiar to the idea of dreaming up a 100 kHz sound. Start from a low pitch sound in your dream, then imagine higher and higher pitched sounds, and see if you can break your hearing limit. Your brain has never before comprehended a 100 kHz sound, so if you can do that, you could see a new colour - maybe by doing the same thing, starting at one end of the spectrum and go to the other, and see if you can make it go further than you can see.
trophycase summarized it well enough…
You can dream about anything you can imagine.
The thing is obviously not what your eyes can see but what you have experienced.
Like they say that the native americans didn´t see Columbus ships when they came as they simply were´nt aware of such thing existing.
We can see what we believe we can see.
Yes, light is particle and wave, actually, everything is just pure energy, but that all doesn´t matter, it´s more of a philosophical question than a scientific one.
Well yeah, except I doubt that was true. 
That would require them to be able to actually see through the ship. 
You can see whatever reflects EM waves in the visible light spectrum, and if your eyes refuse to see it, you will just see a big black patch. 
Well, it’s a very scientific question considering it deals with the nature of the universe which science strives to understand, and while there’s a possibility that it will be found that all matter is a ZPE fluctuation, it certainly isn’t anywhere near truth yet.
Though this doesn’t have much to do with colour.
Now, I still think that I think the main reason that you won’t be able to understand a new colour is because with age you lose the ability to learn - and the ability to learn and percieve new senses is one of the greatest things to overcome, and so you simply cannot see a new colour anymore.
Well I completed my first task. Seeing a color that appears to me as a new one. Indeed a hard subject to explain, but I actually saw something that was not a color. It was sort of just, there. Not any color but just something that existed there. Eh, you probably don’t understand. I feel that I am closer to being able to understand whatever “that” was, and maybe learning to create a color to go in hand with it. It could have been just an ordinary object, but since I wanted to perceive it that way, my brain made me experience what it would be like to see a new color.
Binny, try not to be so negative, its crampin’ up the joint. Or at least that is my point of view concerning dreams. If you think it is possible, then it will be. If we hold reality to be what we perceive, or can touch, taste, smell, feel, and see, then aren’t our dreams to be considered such? The human mind has a funny way of being able to convince us that something is real.
I looked up the ZPE fluctuation, I found it pretty interesting
If your into those sort of theories, then check this out. It is off-topic though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD1LhIm5ncI
Ha, this is shaping up to be quite an entertaining conversation.
I think that this can be done. I’m skeptical, but i would love to prove myself wrong.
After reading over this topic more, I’ve realized that it’s possible that it would take virtually no stretch of your imagination. Just like in an LD when you imagine a person behind a door, and they are there all of a sudden. I think that somebody mentioned this, and I would think it’s my best shot at cracking this… In your LD, just summon a piece of paper that has the color spectrum on it and expect that it will go farther than the visual realm.
Now, on a more literal note, I asked my science teacher about this… Her response was that no other color exists. She stated that other wave lengths and frequencies most certainly exist, but if they are not visible, then they technically cannot be classified as a color… If we can’t see the color, then it simply is not a color. It is just a different wave length/frequency that exists in space.
So, do i think it’s possible to see a new color? No. I don’t.
But do i think it’s possible to see different wave lengths that a person may interpret as a color? Most definately.
Now i’ve probably made myself sound like a babbling fool… but that’s ok. Somebody has to sound stupid in order for somebody else to sound smart. right?
80 years ago we didn’t even know of any other that galaxies existed, and now we are beginning to believe that we are in an endless system of these. Nowadays we are even starting to prove that PARALLEL universes exist. Science is smacking itself in the face constantly. Who knows what will come up next.
My friend once said that in a dream he saw something that was more sound than colour, and he couldn’t explain it using English simply because our language is based upon what we experience.
I don’t think I was being negative at all. I don’t think having a differing viewpoint is negativity…I mean, I could say that someone is being negative for thinking that current science is wrong with their ‘dreams tell the future’ beliefs.
The difference is that you know exactly what someone coming from behind a door is like based on experience, but you don’t know what octarine looks like based on experience.
But yes, I agree that the best way to go about it would be to visualise a colour spectrum that extends further than normal, just like listening to a sound that gets higher and higher until it is both past the highest you have ever experienced and higher than your ears could ever let you experience.
Well, technically a colour is something within the visible light spectrum, but that is semantical rather than physical - in other words, we could extend the definition to the entire (probably infinite) EM spectrum length and it wouldn’t make a difference to our physical theories because that idea is just categorical, much like the difference between a planet and a dwarf planet isn’t a physical difference, but just a linguistic difference we made up so we could organise them.
So the argument that an infrared colour isn’t a colour is not based on actual physical reality, but rather just what we decide to be a colour…another culture could have decided that the term ‘colour’ meant near-IR as well as visible light…even the categories ‘visible light’ and ‘UV’ are just categories and don’t mean anything physically.
But as a different colour?
Actually, I can’t see why not the red you see might be utterly different to the red I see. After all, the colours are just meant to provide us with a way to interpret the frequencies. So for you, your brain might use ‘red’ for a 700nm light wavelength, but for me my brain might use ‘blue’, ‘high-pitched sound’ or some completely unknown thing to you for a 700nm light wavelength.
The idea of a new colour is far from impossible (as said above, what you percieve to be ‘colour’ may be what I percieve to be ‘sound’ or ‘taste’ or ‘_’), it’s just whether or not someone’s brain can actually make that new colour, especially as one grows older. To percieve something new is a hard task, but there are obviously plenty of other things to be percived (to a jellyfish, sight is a ridiculous concept - and to us, the idea of bats and sonar is equally ridiculous). So the question is whether our brain is up to the task of percieving something new, like a new colour, or sonar, or the energy value of a Higgs field, and the question is not whether extra colours actually exist. Obviously they do, because our brain is the thing that makes them up in the first place! Science doesn’t say that it’s utterly impossible, it just requires a certain amount of imagination.
(a bit off-topic in reply to your second paragraph) Science does come up with some crazy things…that are all of course based on sound principles and mathematical descriptions. This is why I like science - or more specifically physics (and partly chemistry). It encompasses such a huge amount of tantalisingly awesome ideas, and yet doesn’t resort to relying on unexplainable phenomena and unrepeatable experiments that only a select few can seem to perform. Who knew that invisbility cloaks were possible, that we can teleport or that we could some day take wormholes to far away galaxies? Yet these things can all be explained mathematically without any ‘oogey-boogedness’ - and interestingly enough, even when these were widely deemed to be impossible, there was nothing explicitly saying that they were impossible. Negative refractive indices, a requirement for an invisibility cloak, was always thought to be impossible…but there was no law saying it couldn’t exist, it’s just that there were none already existing in nature.
Many say science is boring, unimaginative and restrictive, especially those associated with the paranormal, yet science has far less bounds than the paranormal - where the paranormal is not mass producable, seem to apply to only a select few (mediums, alien abductions etc.) and requires some sort of special and exceptionally vague training (a lot of ‘your inner being’ sort of talk), science can apply to the masses, can actually give results when anyone asks for it and takes up none of your time trying to do something that is inexplicably meaningless and vague (try follow some levitation instructions, see where that gets you). It’s also far more awe-inspiring to actually realise with utter certainty that they have photographed other planets outside our Solar System and seeing them for yourself than listening to someone go on about how they were taken to Alpha Centauri. Not only that, but science can do everything and more that the paranormal can do, and far, FAR more efficiently.
Well, except future-telling and free energy which it really does explicitly forbid, but that’s for another day.
I’m getting a headache thinking what a new color might look like
A note on this, the definition of a color is what we compare it to, so perhaps creating a substance/object that we can correlate with a new color with would be a proactive way of accomplishing this.
well, you might be able to see a new colour in a dream but you wouldnt be able to describe it
still no success on this one
I don’t actually think this is possible. Our eyes just receive information, but it is our brain that creates the colour, the quale. Electromagnetic waves with a wavelength of 400 nm aren’t inherently “blue”, it’s just what our brain tells us. Other species, or even other people, might perceive it differently. And as such, I don’t think we would be able to create or see new colours in our dreams, because our brain simply isn’t programmed to know any different colours.
I always thought of it in the sense that you can only see colors that your mind “knows,” i.e. the colors we currently perceive with our eyes. I’m not certain, though! it could be possible, who knows? 
I don’t think it’s possible to dream of a new colour. As far as I know, the brain is not capable of dreaming of something like that if it has not experienced it. For instance, it’s actually impossible to dream of a person whom you’ve never seen. It could just be someone you saw on the street, or on TV, or even a brief face in a crowd of people. You don’t have to acknowledge them for their face to appear in your dream, but you have to have seen them at one point or another. My best guess is that colours works the same way. If you haven’t seen it, you can’t dream about it.
Personally I believe you can dream of a person whom you’ve never seen, because the brain knows what faces should look like and can construct one based on what it knows. However, with colors, the brain doesn’t know what another color looks like so it can’t do so.
But you could create something with interesting color properties, like a wall that cycles through the rainbow or something!
This post articulated a lot of what I have been thinking about lately. Interesting enough It is unrelated to the color spectrum but about shared dreams. Whenever I read about shared dreaming experiments something doesn’t sit right. Because they are all formed around physical locations. In waking life if you want to meet someone, you choose a time. And a physical location. It is my understanding that in a dream that won’t get you anywhere. Visualizing dream crossroads and locations like that won’t take you anywhere objective in a non physical reality. There needs to be some other way to merge your realities to perceive the same thing. Maybe a feeling or something. Or maybe it’s something we haven’t figured out yet. But we won’t be a able to figure it out or even test anything about it until we come to a basic understanding of how that reality works. If it’s indeed a reality.
Anyhow sorry for taking this off topic. I liked how you explained the perception.
And as an aside. Ive figured out the city you live in.