Is the world the same for you as it is for me? Can you describe the colour red to me?

Our retina is not a camera device, but a system of neurons, like the rest of the human mind. We learn how to see both through evolution, and through experience. Languages in pre-industrial societies have fewer words for blueish colours, since those colours are unlikely to be to be seen in the objects, people or animals they encounter. The ‘colour naming debate’ then discusses whether people with different languages have different experiences of colour, whether your use of language changes the way you see the world.

If every colour is only defined in its relationship to other colours, then they come into existence through those relationships. Every colour is therefore made of every other. Every individual experience is affected by the whole. And what we often call ‘white light’ is better described as ‘every colour’, in that it is made of every other.