[JumpCrisscross]

> in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding"

Sure. That's the point. These studies are a study of language per se. Not how language influences perception to a meanigful degree. Sapir-Whorf is a cool hypothesis. But it isn't true for humans.

(Out of curiosity, what is "embedding" doing that "word" does not?)

[wongarsu]

Word would imply that this only happens when I translate my thoughts to a chosen human language (or articulate thoughts in a language). I chose embedding because I think this happens much earlier in the pipeline: the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning. I see this as something happening at the interface of the vision system, not the speech center.

Which is kind of Sapir-Whorf, just not the extreme version of "we literally can't see or reason about the difference", more "differences we don't care about get lost in processing". Which you can kind of conceptualize as the brain choosing a different encoding, or embedding space (even though obviously such a thing does not exist in the literal sense in our brains)

Edit: in a way, I would claim Sapir-Whorf is mistaking correlation for causation: it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

[JumpCrisscross]

> the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning

I'm curious if we have any evidence for this. A lot of visual processing happens in the retina. To my knowledge, the retina has no awareness of words. I'd also assume that the visual cortex comes before anything to do with language, though that's just an assumption.

> it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

This is fair. Though for something like colour, a far-older system in our brains than language, I'd be sceptical of the latter controlling the former.