We don't even know how little we may know

>>18722597
Eat a cock.

>>18722589
I too am tripped out by this train of thought, OP and I too wonder about what magnificent rainbows might be beheld by those shramps

>>18722614
I find it funny that such an extraordinary sensory ability is only experienced by a lowly crustacean which probably has extremely poor intelligence.

>>18722589
You can eat different kinds vitamin A and see slightly different colours. The most researched is vitamin A2. Some ""biohackers"" copied a regime from a military experiment a couple of years ago and started to get some sensitivity in the near IR region (950 nm iirc) and by the description of the subject it seemed to effect rods first and then cones as the later effects were about weird afterimages.

Having a different vitamin a on some receptors will give you the equivalent of 8 receptors (two low light rods and 6 cone) because it should downshift all. Some people are also natural tetrachromats expressing two different variations of the green cone receptor (mostly women but a few men too. Van Gogh has been suggested to have this. I think I may have since I have awesome colour discrimination). So a tetrachromat would get 10. If vitamin a3 does something similar in the body it could up shift too potentially giving 12 to 15 different kinds of receptor and a significantly wider band of colour perception.

Biggest problem is getting in enough of alternative vitamin As. They're not as bioactive in humans as some animals so you either have to cut out vitamin A1 consumption and take in small amounts of A2 and some metabolites like retinoic acid, or you find a way to purify it or synthesize it within your budget that allows you to megadose it.

>>18722589
The colour red I see could be different to the colour red you see.

>>18724783
This. I had this thought as a child and it still creeps me out, because there is no way to proof or describe it.

"Maybe my blue is your green."

>>18722589
You say yourself - we adapted to what helps us survive. The things we aren't experienced are literally irrelevant to humanity as a species.

As for mantis shrimp:
http://www.nature.com/news/mantis-shrimp-s-super-colour-vision-debunked-1.14578
>Researchers found that the mantis shrimp’s colour vision relies on a simple, efficient and previously unknown mechanism that operates at the level of individual photoreceptors. The results upend scientists' suspicions that the shrimp, with 12 different types of colour photoreceptors, could see hues that humans, with just 3, could not, says study co-author Justin Marshall, a marine neuroscientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
>To test whether the mantis shrimp, with its 12 receptors, can distinguish many more, Marshall's team trained shrimp of the species Haptosquilla trispinosa to recognize one of ten specific colour wavelengths, ranging from 400 to 650 nanometres, by showing them two colours and giving them a frozen prawn or mussel when they picked the right one. In subsequent testing, the shrimp could discriminate between their trained wavelengths and another colour 50–100 nanometres up or down the spectrum. But when the difference between the trained and test wavelengths was reduced to 12–25 nanometres, the shrimp could no longer tell them apart.
>If the shrimp eye compared adjacent spectra, like the human eye does, it would have allowed the animals to discriminate between wavelengths as close as 1–5 nanometres, the authors say. Instead, each type of photoreceptor seems to pick up a specific colour, identifying it in a way that is less sensitive than the human eye but does not require brain-power-heavy comparisons. That probably gives the predatory shrimp a speed advantage in distinguishing between different-coloured prey, says Roy Caldwell, a behavioural ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

>>18725592
In other words 3 receptors that can tell the difference between 1-5 nanometers wavelength are better than 12 receptors that can differentiate between 50-100 nanometers.

>>18722589
At best we only see what the body (brain) translates into experiencable data.
Colours aren't colours, its probably a sorting mechanism.
same with differentiations in sound,
sensations,
etc.
So if we declare experience as truth its almost a shame.

>>18722644
>I find it funny that such an extraordinary sensory ability is only experienced by a lowly crustacean which probably has extremely poor intelligence.

As a transcrustacean, I resent that remark.

>>18724783
>>18724814
This is an interesting thought, but I'm skeptical about whether people do see colours differently, unless of course they actually have something different about their eyes. Colour is essentially just information. It's data that helps us survive in the world. "Yellow" is just the way our brain processes a certain wavelength of light as information. As hunter gatherers, we would associate it with stinging insects, sickness, flowers, fruit... whatever. Depending on the context, it can mean a whole host of different things, but importantly all it is is information, and I can't see why one brain would process that information differently to another, as I imagine we have all evolved to experience colours in the same way.

>>18725592
>You say yourself - we adapted to what helps us survive. The things we aren't experienced are literally irrelevant to humanity as a species.

Well, they're irrelevant to the survival of the hunter gatherers we come from, but we may find knowledge of the things beyond our perception very fascinating.

>>18725751
>but we may find knowledge of the things beyond our perception very fascinating
Anything that can fascinate us can be perceived.

>>18722644
Now you're contradicting OP post, maybe we appear very stupid to these shrimps and they're actually having the time of their life in their minds.

>>18725823
But the knowledge itself that there may be a lot of stuff going on which is beyond our perception would be fascinating itself.

File: light-spectrum.png (579KB, 758x253px) Image search: [Google]

579KB, 758x253px

>>18724814
>>18724783
Not quite no since color is quantifiable. A color usually refers to a particular wavelength of light. Now what can happen is how your concept of a precise wavelength might differ from another person. For instance some tribes in the Pacific have been reported to "see" no difference between the sky and the sea because they made no difference between the "green" of the ocean and the "blue" of the sky. It doesn't mean they didn't perceive two quantifiably different colors, it just means they didn't attribute different, separate qualities to them.

Where my girlfriend sees fuschia or magenta or violet I just see pink and darker pink. When I tell her THERE IS a difference between #FF0000 and #FF0001, she will argue that both are just "red".