[macspoofing]

Heh. I guess since I engaged in pedantry, I can't complain if others do as well.

I disagree though. Your argument is akin to complaining that we shouldn't use temperature because in the fundamental quantum field reality, there is no temperature. Or maybe you would complain about using various equation of fluid mechanics (all of which are at best approximations) instead of field equations to calculate behaviour of liquids. Or maybe complaining in programming that it is incorrect to reason about objects or monads because it's just bitshifts and logic gates underneath.

The notion in art that 'white is the absence of color, and black is a combination of colors' is a useful abstraction for that particular domain because the canvas is white, and black can be made by mixing paint colors. It is as real as anything else that we, as humans, engage in.

>the perception of color is still determined by the wavelengths of the photons reaching

Not quite right. Color is not a physical process. It is brain experience and does not exist independently. It is USEFUL to sometimes map physical wavelengths of light to colors but that is context dependent. Not only would different species experience color differently for some specific wavelength, but also different humans will experience them differently as well (color blindness is one example, another one is that you can train your brain to be more receptive to color variations)