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"without a word for the color, there is evidence that they may not have seen it at all."

That's a stupid sentence by the authors of the article. Of course they could see blue light. They had the same photoreceptors that we have. It's just that the boundaries between colors are somewhat arbitrary and culturally defined. Which is also an interesting topic, so no need to make of this something it's not.
 
"without a word for the color, there is evidence that they may not have seen it at all."

That's a stupid sentence by the authors of the article. Of course they could see blue light.

Sight is not just photoreceptors, it's also interpretation between those receptors and the final image. If you have no concept of blue, does the brain put blue into the image?
 
Sight is not just photoreceptors, it's also interpretation between those receptors and the final image. If you have no concept of blue, does the brain put blue into the image?

You have a a concept of blue? It's just something you see. If you had no word for it, you'd make up one. Just like a baby doesn't need to know the concept of hunger to feel hungry.
 
You have a a concept of blue? It's just something you see. If you had no word for it, you'd make up one. Just like a baby doesn't need to know the concept of hunger to feel hungry.

And yet ancient peoples didn't have a word for it. So did they see it?
 
And yet ancient peoples didn't have a word for it. So did they see it?

Of course everyone has always had words for blue. Some cultures have different words for different blues. Like calling navy blue "deep wine" or **** like that. But nobody ever failed to notice one of the most prominent colors in nature. They just classified it into different colors (sky blue, ocean blue, etc all having different names, without a general name for "blue").
 
Of course everyone has always had words for blue. Some cultures have different words for different blues. Like calling navy blue "deep wine" or **** like that. But nobody ever failed to notice one of the most prominent colors in nature. They just classified it into different colors (sky blue, ocean blue, etc all having different names, without a general name for "blue").
Or they might have lumped blue and green together into the same color. That type of thing happens a lot. The boundaries between colors are pretty arbitrary and culturally set.
 
Today I learned several things about Julius Caeser. I'll put them in two categories.

1) Julius was not his first name. It was his family name. His first name was Gaius. And Caeser was not a title, it was a suffix to his family name used to distinguish between different branches of the Julius family. So his full last name was Julius Caeser. And for what it's worth, his father's name was also Gaius Julius Caesar.

2) I had always thought that Julius Caeser had been delivered by Caesarian section, and that was why the operation was called a Caesarian section--named after him. But that's not the case. Caeser comes from the Latin word meaning "to cut", and it's possible that Julius Caeser had an ancestor that was born that way and that's why they were given Caeser as the suffix to their family name. But it's also possible or maybe even probable that that didn't happen. The family and the operation could have just been coincidentally the same because they both stemmed from "to cut". He himself indicated the name Caeser had something to do with elephants, of all things. Either an ancestor had killed an elephant in battle (cutting it with a sword?) or elephants themselves may have been called by some people a name that was similar to Caesar (because of their ability to cut with their tusks?), or something along those lines.

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