Thanks for the link, here’s a excerpt for the interested:

In other words, is color “out in the world” or “in the brain”? On one side of the debate stand the Objectivists or Realists who hold that colors have objective essences and are properties of physical objects. On the other side stand the proponents of the Illusion theory of color which holds that colors are virtual properties and our perceptions of color are illusory, in that physical objects are not colored, they just appear to be. In this paper we propose taking the philosophy of color realism at face value and using it to develop a scientific theory of color perception. Our approach is based on the ideas of a prominent group of color realist philosophers who identify color with surface spectral reflectances. Influential representatives of this community are Byrne and Hilbert [2] and Tye [3]. We modify their ideas slightly to posit that the physiological, and thence psychological, quantity known as color is the particular model of spectra provided by the sensory apparatus of the human body. We claim then, that all statements about color can be derived from the physical laws underlying spectra and of the structure of the human sensory apparatus.

Noted philosopher of color Christopher Hardin commented in [4] that: “It is a curious sociological fact that many philosophers, but very few visual scientists, are color realists.”

Any one interested in that subject could read the 54 pages long paper which argues that colors are real.

What I like is that your article refers to the brain’s perception of colour. The interpretation of how our brains’ processing of the light that enters our eyes is based on how we come to understand the world around us. I have also often wondered how the world would look through another person’s brain – deconstructed and compared.

Each of our biologically constructed systems are far cries from being replications. Even identical twins have dissimilar neural connections with dissimilar personalities and propensities. Each of us interprets the world around us via a set of inputs of physical stimuli, but how our brains interpret the data received depends on the construction of our brains and how we have grown to understand our “realities,” and throughout our developmental years of our lives, most of our time is spent trying to make sense of our senses.

This certainly was an interesting article, and I’m glad there are other people in the world who think about these things as much as I do.

For example if you mix two (idealized) light sources, one at 560and one at 700nm, you’ll see the same colour as if you were looking at light coming off a single source at about 590nm. But in the first case the light that is incident on your eye is equally made up of 560nm and 700nm photons and in the other the light you see is made up of all 590nm photons.

So saying that only colours that you can generate with a monochromatic source are “real” is fairly silly, because you can generate most of those same colours with a distribution of wavelengths as well.

I would say either all colours exist only in our brains, or are all colours are “real” depending on you define these concepts.

Colour we see have a one to many mapping with the distributions of light that are incident on our eyes. In other words, if you see a certain colour there’s no way to know exactly what the distribution of wavelengths in that light is. However, if you are given the spectrum for a certain light source you can work out what colour it will appear as.