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I love the implication that the therapist isn’t sure if the patient is talking about themselves or someone else

The last panel is a fantasy by the artist.

This might come as a surprise, but the whole comic is. If you read the first 3 panels as being historically accurate, I see where your confusion comes from.

Anyway, you have a very unimaginative and literal approach to all this and that’s just not the layer the comic communicates on. Maybe at least acknowledge that.

It is impossible to for a second party tell a first party that they have been unsuccessful in imagining something.

Looking at the last panel, I can say with certainty, that dude failed at the task.

It is inherently a counting problem because of how sight and color recognition functions.

It’s, again, no question of sight and color recognition but about imagination.

You’re still looking that the comic from a very wrong angle and say “it makes no sense”. Well, from my angle, it does.

It’s a thought experiment, reminds me of zen Buddhist koans. “What is the sound of one clapping hand?” or “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” don’t have an answer. You can tell me you know the answer and I can’t proof you wrong but that’s not the point. It’s about making people think. “Imagine a color you never saw” is the same. You can tell me you made it and maybe that would mean enlightenment for you but it’s beside the point. It’s a thought experiment obviously meant to have no answer (again, look at the last panel). The more you tell me that makes no sense and there is no answer, you’re proofing my point. The comic makes it explicit that there is no answer. You impose a very different meaning onto it that doesn’t lead to anything and say “the comic doesn’t lead to anything”.

I think you’re conflating creativity and imagination. The task isn’t about physically creating a color but about imaging it. About a mental image of a color you never saw before. Not about actualizing that color.

It’s not a counting problem.

You made it into a counting problem so I really don’t see your point here

“Give me a color that’s not a composite of primary colors” is an impossible task

Exactly. It’s even impossible to imagine. We can imagine shapes and form and stuff we never saw and will never see but for colors, this isn’t true. That’s the whole point.

Under your broader definition of color, we’ve already found the three or seven or I guess nine if you want to count black/white, existing colors

Which is the point of the meme and I agree with it

all we can creatively accomplish is proving we’ve exhausted the range of available colors.

There is a lot we can do creatively besides creating new colors from stretch. The meme is about how the human mind is creative but this one thing it can’t do.

Besides, how is your method creative? You said yourself it’s pure mathematics.

I meant spectrum as in it’s not a fixed value but, fine, I can call it range instead. Doesn’t change my argument.

What do you mean “hasn’t been produced before”? That comes with a huge burden of proof. People produce color gradients all the time. Pretty many colors in them.

And if you produce a shade of blue that by happenstance is either more or less saturated than anything else, what have you found there? It isn’t a new color by any meaningful definition. It won’t blow anyone’s mind, it’s just a shade of blue similar but not identical to other blue shades. It falls into the blue range. The observable light is devided into colors, each inhabiting a range. The exact way is different depending on language and other contexts but by no meaningful definition is a color just a single value.

Before you double down on your definition: the implication is that your definition doesn’t make much sense and to demonstrate it from a different angle: how precise are you going to measure these? Let’s say a common blue has the saturation of 63%, would 64% quality as a new color? What about 63.2%? Where do you draw the line? And if you have to draw lines anyway, why not choose a meaningful way as in defining “blue” as one color?

This doesn’t really work because colors are a spectrum. You can split and merge existing colors like using a single word for blue and green (like Japanese) or distinguish between light and dark blue (like Italian) but “light blue” isn’t a new color. It’s part of the blue spectrum

• yesn’t

That’s called “raw dogging”. Am I using it right?

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

Because 7 ate 9

Kim is short for Kames

Emacsimilian?

I use Ubuntu ever since 🤓 but don’t tell the arch nerds

XP was my last windows before I switched to Linux btw

This is a typical specicistic prejudice

This is outrageous! The US was not assigned great at birth

My condolence that you saw a meme that wasn’t funny for you. I hope this will never happen to you again. Why even pay for internet when there are unfunny memes there?

You could argue that it’s reasonable to assume that all pizzas are the same size but there are many pizza places that offer different sizes. You could as well argue that this is an attempt to make the kids think outside the box and come up with this explanation. How big a fraction is depends on how much the whole is is a good message you can’t learn too early. Understanding statistics is in large parts this. Many people will throw around percentages of pooling questions without ever questioning the pool of people asked.

Why would you ask “How is this possible” when you expect the answer to be “it’s not”?