Octochromatic Crossroads

I wrote a post earlier this year called “Tetrachromatic Crossroads."  Presented as a riddle, one intended path through it would essentially provide color vision to an entity that does not possess the trait “naturally,” through cones in the eye, by utilizing a self constructed database of greyscale shading and mapping. While I was picturing AI interpreting light/darkness and corresponding and storing these differences into different words for color, just last night I watched this documentary about the octopus, and the narrator said that they are color blind. What they mean is that octopuses do not have color vision as we understand it, due to lacking cones in the eye and using an entirely different type of visual reception mechanism. It seems obvious that octopuses understand what we and other organisms call "color," with how they can match the color and even texture of their surroundings. It would be an odd thing to say, for comparison, that a human who did not speak your language was colorblind if they could consistently match one color with its counterpart, even if you knew that they lacked the typical cones needed to see color; it would be more accurate to say that how they see color is a mystery, one that might be resolved if communication were established. 

Just today, I made the connection of how perfectly this mysterious trait applies to Tetrachromatic Crossroads. Within the riddle is intended a way of establishing a mutual language regarding color, despite receiving and compiling information regarding color entirely differently. It feels like an octopus does exactly what I intended in my post- catalogues slight differences in visual information as distinct (and also stores it for future camouflage purposes)- and could likely accurately identify and communicate all colors, in an entirely different way than humans (and most life on earth), and likely with more precision, if the corresponding words were known. While I love the various octopuses in the world, I can say with certainty that I do not consciously remember ever hearing that they were colorblind before. I find it fascinating that I would have written that riddle, with my inspiration for it virtually unknown (I just woke up with it in mind one day), without knowing of the corresponding species/trait in nature that could be called directly inspiring for the concept.

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