Barbelith Underground > Laboratory > Stupid Science Questions 2

That sounds really hinky to me. I know colorblind people who weren't aware they were missing out on something until somebody pointed it out to them (some folks don't learn about it until they have to take a driving exam). But they manage to map red and green and things related to them in various ways. Not like seeing them, but conceptually.

The fact that it's a conceptual map and not a recognition of a color would probably be a big clue as to what your brain was doing.
Oliver Sacks in AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS devotes a chapter about an artist who suffered brain damage and, after he got out of the hospital, tried to paint like he had been. He knew something was wrong, but couldn't see what was different. Turned out that the color in his brain had been completely destroyed. His mind could no longer process color or even remember it. The artist knew something was wrong, but there was no way you could "point it out" to him and then he'd see the difference. Color had become an alien concept to him even though prior to his stroke he had worked with it closely his entire life.

I went to school with a designer who was born without that part of his brain, but he studied the "rules of color" in art so closely that he convinced everyone he could see color with his designs even though in reality he couldn't tell the difference between a black and white and color photograph.

I suspect that psychologically we are dealing with a closed system. That if you asked what is the color "infra" to red in the same way that red is "infra" to orange, using our artistic color systems as an ad-hoc guide, psychologically the mind would say that violet is the answer. The rainbow spectrum is actually a loop - blue is to violet as violet is to red as red is to orange as orange is to yellow as yellow is to green as green is to blue as blue is to violet and so on.

It may not be possible for there to be a function outside the perceptual system. In other words, all possible color in the mind must correspond to all possible perceivable colors. Our brain is hardwired based upon its environment and though we can conceive of impossible things - the conception is still limited by possible perception.

This may be the major hurdle when attempting to conceive of environments that do not correspond to our perceived one such as at the quantum level or multidimensional.