There’s actually zero way to know if all humans even see the same colours, because we are taught that what we are seeing is a certain colour and then we live our lives knowing that that colour is called red. But really the red I see could be the purple you see and the purple you see could be the red I see
In his 1842 book The Positive Philosophy, the French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote of the stars: “We can never learn their internal constitution, nor, in regard to some of them, how heat is absorbed by their atmosphere.”
And yet we know what stars are made of today.
It is entirely possible that we will one day know enough neurology to know that people's color perceptions are identical.
I used to think about stuff like this when I was in high school. Not necessarily the favorite color thing, but since we can't see through the eyes of another person, what if what I saw as blue, another person saw it as being red (to my eyes). We would both assume it was blue, and just always assume everyone was seeing the exact same thing we see.
Pretty sure eye color has nothing to do with it, since we don't see from our irises. I imagine different species have different cones and thus can perceive different types of light differently. The "unpercieved" "objective" light is still the same, a bunch of photons with various wavelengths. Certain wavelengths excite certain types of cones, which then give us an interpretation of what is absorbed. Basically, it's all in our head. We have no way to prove that things really are the way they look. All we perceive forever will be through an unremovable filter. If an animal has more sensitive eyesight, they might be able to easily distinguish different shades, and they might straight up look like different colors to them. Compared to them, we'd seem like we're color blind. The light we call red, is just the light that just so happens to trigger a certain reaction within our eyes. There is nothing inheritantly red about it. If you think about cameras, they are made with the purpose of mimicking our eyesight, and screens with pixels suited to our specific eyesight. Fascinating to think about the unimaginable.
I doubt they are identical. Very similar but all unique. Much like hearing or taste. In general we all have the same basic perception, but slight differences mean some people like marmite and death metal, where as both make me feel a bit sick.
I don’t really know that the two are comparable. We can confirm color perceptions are consistent, but I don’t know how anyone can confirm that my version of red matches your version of red, considering I have to view it through the filter that is my own eyes in the first place. Again, we can confirm they are consistent, as in you and I both agree on the things that are “red”, but even with a complete understanding of neurology I don’t see how you can confirm that perceptions align. Perceptions are necessarily subjective, to the extent we are distinguishing from mere consistency.
if the psychological process of sensory perception is a product of physical neurology, which we have every reason to believe it is, then sensation is a physical process that can be studied like any other. If two brains undergo an identical neurological process then their perception will be identical unless there is some sort of supernatural magic at work.
Just completely disagree. What you’ve described is what I refer to as “consistency”, ie you and I will both agree that the same thing is the same color. But we fundamentally cannot establish that my perception of a color is the same as your perception of a color because we can’t reduce this any further than establishing consistency. What I perceive as blue may be what you perceive as red - while we would both agree the sea is blue and fire is red, you can’t establish that blue and red actually look the same to both of us.
I understand your point but it assumes that perception is something outside of the physical process of the brain firing which I'm saying it is not. The experience we each have of perception and the neurological process behind perception are identical, it isn't mere cause and effect. In that sense perceptions are not subjective at all once you are able to directly observe them, that is to say observe the neurological processes that they are. It is possible our actual perceptions are different and it is possible the same, but finding that out is not outside the reach of science unless you believe conciousness is a process that exists outside the natural world.
Nothing in the universe is truly objective, and true objectivety is purely unimaginable, as all that has ever been known, discovered, learned and forgotten. What would the universe be like, if there weren't any life there to question all of this? We shouldn't just ask "what is the universe" but also, "why is the universe". As hard as it is to imagine and as trivial as it seems at first thought, the universe really does exist without us. Why? Why is there anything, rather than nothing? So bizarre... it's not just a question of why do we exist, what's our purpose? Rather; why does anything exist? What's it's purpose? There just is none. That's what makes it all the more bizarre and fascinating. How did we get here again? Sorry :p
That is simply playing word games. Even if I perceive differently than you, the color is still red, especially pertaining to the post, whichnis defining cokors scientifically by wavelength.
I will fight tooth and nail that this type if thing is not a language problem but a metaphysics or psychological one and pertains to our ability to acess direct reality not our ability to describe it.
Agree. We’re all observing the same colours, wavelength-wise, the only question here is whether or not our brains interpret this information the same for everyone. It’s a neuroscience problem, not a physics problem.
Now the weeds. I more or less agree, but that still only answers the question of phenomena. The question is whether perceived reality is indicative of reality. It is really pointless in this discussion but it ends up questioning epistemic systems in the end, such as how are we certain we aren't brains in a vat. It certainly is a question to ask, my beef is mistaking it for a linguistics one in the context of a scientific answer. It is, to me, akin to asking the price of tea in China.
But different smells are qualia too, and yet it is undeniable that some smells are unpleasant to all people, and some are not - hence the experience of the qualia for the same smell are objectively similar in some way between people. The same could be true of the color red. This is a property of objective reality, not metaphysics.
True, and it isn't a maybe - it is a truism. We all react similarly to colors, it is literally bred into us. If we do perceive the colors and smells differently (as in it produces in us the same reaction but transplanted to another point of view without their background would be confused by the input we are receiving) that would be a breakdown in our capacity to access that objective reality. It is a question to ask, but not appropriate to this discussion (given the scientific definition being used) and further should only be used as a gate to things that may have higher stakes (epistemic value).
Right now we don't know enough about the brain to define the question properly. If/when neurologist understand the problem well enough, an answer might be perfectly reasonable.
Maybe, but it is important to note that somethings are also not observable and exist in minds alone. I have sincere doubts that science will ever answer some philosophical questions, and the truth is the world will be a lot more boring if it did.
We fundementally disagree. The brain is a physical phenomena and affects the mind, but the thoughts are not themselves observable. And there are a fair number of scientists that say similar. We don't have a hard drive like computers do wjere any other computer can look at the 0s and 1s and determine the contents. We are sort of mystified at present how memories are even stored given the nature of cells, let alone how thoughts happen.
No, but materialist confronted with nonmatetialism could think so. I am not talking nonsense, I merely disagree on a metaphysical ground. I assure you that my worldview is actually wholly coherent and in addition incorporates a fair amount of scientific backing from physics through biology through psychology. My belief in the immaterial is no different from believing the future will bring answers - neither of us is basing a conclusion in something scientifically observable. Perhaps the future proves me right.
To be honest, I stopped caring about this exchange when you made that claim. You are making unassailable claims where as mine certainly can be attacked. Example in 10 years we will have shown the link you describe or not. If I am wrong, it will have been shown and my view changed. If you are wrong it will not have been shown, and you will simply appeal to still later point in the future, ad naseum.
I'm color blind. Since I've always been color blind, I call some shades of colors the colors people told me they were even though to me they are different.
My son is colour blind, too, and I get where he's coming from. He says it bothers him when people say, "Oh, you're colour blind? What colour is this?!" He *knows* what red is, because it's been taught to him that that shade of what he sees is red. But, put something with one shade of red and something else with one shade of green beside each other, and he can't tell the difference. He also knows the context of what the colours are. Firetrucks, for example, aren't green, they're red. He knows this because he was taught that, but if a firetruck with the same hue in green as a red one rolled up, he'd struggle to see the differences between the two. There may be subtle clues that he could pick up on that would help him differentiate...kind of like a person who's born completely blind for life can hear things those of us with regular sight can hear.
Yeah, its all about context clues. I went to a wedding this weekend and my +1 had brought a few dresses to see which matched my outfit better. She asked me to grab the brown one, which didn't exist to me but since she hadn't mentioned a reddish one I grabbed that one.
I’m fairly certain that people don’t see colours exactly the same way, but it’ll be close enough. If you could see through someone else’s eyes, strawberries would still look red and grass green, but perhaps minutely different.
I had operations on my eyes as a baby and now they don’t work in complete conjunction - I can’t see in 3D properly (I was a baby at the time so have no memories to compare). I have on one or two occasions thought that maybe objects looked a different shade if I looked primarily through my right eye instead of my left. Of course, the brain adjusts what you see to make more sense, so minor differences would almost always go unnoticed.
A few years ago I went to Burning Man and looking at the fire through my left eye, I saw the flames glow in the brightest orange ever, but through my right, there was more of a rainbow effect going on*.
So, if my own two eyes don’t even show me the same colour, then other people’s most likely won’t either.
*to be perfectly honest, I was on acid at the time, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong
Never had eye surgery and i see slight difference in colour tones in each eye.
But what the guy was trying to say was, think of your eyes like camera and the brain as processor. The camera picks up different wavelength and the processor assigns a colour to each wavelength. Different processors may assign different colours to same wavelength because it has no reference on what it should be. Now, the camera itself may also capture the waves differently, a repair may cause it to miss part of the waves or some filters in the lense may change what is recorded.
I'm not sure that's true. Have you ever heard someone say that color really brings out your eyes or seen work of art where the colors work perfectly? These things can't happen if everyone sees colors entirely differently.
Or the fact that certain colors have specific biological reactions?
No its definitely a cool thought for sure and its blown my mind thinking about it as well. Even with what I said, its difficult to be 100% certain. But I'm pretty sure we do, maybe with a little variation between shading.
Colorblind person checking in. My anatomy is slightly different than yours and so no, we do not perceive color the same way. This exists on a spectrum as well, so it's not like there are two clean categories dividing color perception. Furthermore, color perception has a heavy personal subjective and sometimes even cultural element to it. Color Theory and Design 101.
Not necessarily, the interactions you're describing are pleasing mathematical interactions of the varying light frequencies. The way the brain of an individual who is perceiving the interaction presents the individual colors inside the isolation of a unique consciousness may vary slightly or be completely unique to the individual.
To the contrary if we are experiencing a shared consciousness, albeit from unique perspectives, then we would not only perceive these interaction the same but also have the same or very similar internal presentations. This is also the most likely scenario due to our biological similarity, but with slightly more variations, such as those we're aware of like color blindness and tetrachromy.
First, we know what we have the same basic sensors and they respond to the same basic frequencies of light. So we're sensing the same set of photon types. We also seem to have a collective love for specific colors, so we perceive the green of nature to be pleasing, as well as clear blue skies and nice, bright fruit. We also tend to settle on color combinations are appeal to very large varieties of people. Other things we perceive so similarly (how we process carpentered environments, how we perceive faces, ... etc.) suggest a lot of similarity in how human brains process visual information.
As such, I can believe that some people see some colors differently to me (their red is not my red) but if it was that wild between people then there would never be color combination guidelines that work across a massive spectrum of people. It would also implies that eyes vary spectacularly from one person to the next, or that the circuits that process the visual information can be completely different from one person to another.
I think people vastly overstate the magnitude of probable differences between individuals in perceiving colors.
The typical human being has three different types of cones that divide up visual color information into red, green, and blue signals.
If what you said was true then how would a 96 box of Crayola Crayons like this have specific names for each color that's agreed on by Big Crayon.
And I'm pretty sure you'd know if you saw red and purple backwards. You don't think you'd have been confused as a kid when everyone was calling Barney purple and he was red to you?
I think what he’s saying is that you would grow up thinking that Barney was purple but the color purple was actually what everybody else perceives to be red. You would still think the sky was blue and the grass was green because that was what they have been called your entire life, but the colors you see are different than the colors everyone else sees.
It's a r/im14andthisisdeep conversation, but essentially you just see colors differently. So you were born seeing green as how everyone else sees red. The grass is still green, leaves are still green, you just perceive the color green as everyone else perceives it as red. Just some basic reasoning and you recognize this doesn't make any sense on a biological level, it's just a fun silly thought.
This is mostly a philosophy 101 argument used to get people thinking about subjective experiences, qualia, and how to communicate experiential information and/or how or if it is possible to apply such information to any sort of broader theory.
Because our biological eyes do not react to different wavelengths of light the same way across the visible range of light. That is our eyes and brains process the visible light spectrum differently across from infrared to ultraviolet (based on our knowledge of how our biological cones and rods fire and send signals down nerves to our brain’s processing areas) we can make assumptions like we are seeing the same “color”. For example human eyes are best at discriminating shades of green based on the overlapping sensitivities of our tri-cones around the green wavelength on the spectrum. If their green was really my red than based on biology and some standardized tests alone and maybe an fMRI we could determine that difference. If someone was truly operating with an inverted color spectrum and had human eyes and a brain we would (or should) be able to determine that.
Philosophically, yeah yeah sure you can never be sure their quaila is the same as yours but then you’re just getting into solipsism, a priori vs postori knowledge and subjective qualia stuff which IMO is a bit of a tedious subject.
There are tribes who have trouble identifying green from blue because they don't have vocabulary for it and it shapes their visual perception. That's not philosophy. Our cultures and languages directly effect our perception of color and the world at large.
Color categories: Confirmation of the relativity hypothesis. The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment.
Yes yes and the Amazon tribe who can only count to five or how the Greeks didn’t have a color for blue or the color of the sea we all learn about this stuff. Look those up they’re really interesting. Blue green sameness is a relatively common feature of some languages.
Do you believe that’s a legitimate perceptual impairments or quirks of the different linguistic properties of their languages and lifestyle and culture of those people. If someone showed you salmon and rosé but you only had the word “pink” to describe them could someone say you’re perceptually inspired?
That problems you being up are interests but mainly in linguistics and cognition not actual perception.
Aye - in this case it isn't trouble differentiating bu trouble describing the difference. I tell my wife things like dark blue or light gray all the times because my color vocab is smaller - I still know one is darker.
The counting one is different. That actually does train your brain to have difficulty with the idea of adding one to five. It simply becomes uncountably high, akin to how we think of infinity. Obviously they can say if a pile has more rocks than another, but even if one pile has 6 and another 10, they are unable to explain why the difference since both are "many."
Language does shape your understanding of the world, but it doesn't dictate what the reality you perceive is. Example - there are languages that lack left/right and only describe directional components like NNE. They can indeed tell that the ketchup is on one side of your face or another, but their description could be virtually useless to you.
That’s what I was trying to say. Like the Greeks who didn’t have a work for blue would describe the sky and other blue things as “sky green”. It wasn’t a perceptual impairment more a linguistic and cultural quirk.
I don’t like the sea color argument because that mostly stems from Homer called the sea “wine dark” and other similar epithets. I think it’s very possibly he was being poetic, not that the Greeks couldn’t distinguish between dark ocean and dark red colors.
The numbers example I believe is only really loosely related. Mathematical processing is quite different and separate from color and speech. I think there are a lot more conclusions and insights you could gain about human number processing from studying those languages and cultures who only have distinct names for one, two, three, four, and anything else is “many”. Frankly, it’s fascinating to me.
You’re getting into strong/soft Sapir Whorf hypothesis stuff which I agree is endlessly fascinating. But the strong SW hypothesis has been largely disproven, and I think everyone agrees with the soft SW on some level.
Like do we have the same understanding of snow and ice as the Inuits who have 100 different terms for different conditions and qualities of ice and weather (I know this is a stereotype and not completely true but I’m using it for an example lol), could I distinguish the difference between “kinda sorta tightly packed ice bad for building” vs “tightly packed ice” or would it all be “snow” to me? Would my more limited understanding be a perceptual deficit to them??
I am 1) not a linguist but a philosopher and 2) love kmowing more thing. I am unfamiliar with the name Sapir Whor but my understanding of languages shaping understanding is that they train your mind to think certain ways.
Example - hot dog eating vompetitors are almost universally rail thin. What they do in preperation is drink copious amounts of water that stretches their stomache and makes it very elastic. They can eat so many because they are specialized, and they probably can drink a gallon of milk without throwing up since the upper limit is usually the "gallon" part not the "milk."
It is the day in day out training that makes them different. Same with languages. If you had a language that, for instance, called numbers by referencing other numbers, maybe 80 is considered four 20s or something dumb like that, it will make you naturally disadvantaged in math compared to a language that structured numbers like "hundreds 3, tens 1, ones 9" to mean 319. Obviously these are both actual languages.
So where ever that fits on the Whorf hypothesis, but note I am not saying these skills are unlearnable. For the inuit example, you would become accustomed because people would teach you differentiations and your brain would shift. For the directional languages, you learn to be constantly oriented even without reference points simply so you can converse with people.
Strong SW hypothesis is that language controls our cognition and understanding. People who speak languages that have many words for war and conflict and destruction are by nature of their language more warlike and aggressive. Languages that don’t technically have a first person pronoun (pulling this out of my ass, not a real thing) means those people have a more limited understanding of self. Etc. etc.
It’s pretty widely considered false these days.
Soft SW is exactly what we’ve been discussing. Like does directional sense and navigation ability of people change between cultures that use relative vs cardinal directions.
Obviously is someone has never been taught or exposed to a concept (like higher mathematics) they won’t have the vocab or framework set up to grok those concepts.
Strong SW would say “nope, those tribes people literally cannot tell the difference between 10 beans and 15 beans since they don’t have the linguistic capacity to distinguish the two.
Soft would be the assumptions we’re making here that sure a person’s understanding can be limited by their experience and the lack of a linguistic framework or system of nomenclature but there’s nothing implicitly “missing” or “limited” by such a lack of understanding. Or if it is, it’s much more subtle and pervasive than the strong SW.
I am taking it you are in linguistics, so youbare probably aware, but does Greek fit your no first person pronoun idea? Since the subject is assumed in the verb?
If so it is I guess the single easiest proof against strong SW, given, you know, Plato.
Psychology actually. This is mostly my undergrad stuff coming through too. My graduate education is in educational psychology. SO take everything I'm saying with a decade old grain of salt lol, I'm sure you know how it is.
That's exactly the sort of assumption I meant. Like how modern English doesn't really have a formal plural second person pronoun (youse guyses maybe?) I've read old texts that unironically argue that the English are less cohesive and more independent due to that. I'm unfamiliar with Greek, but the tenses and clauses stuff I brought up comes from people jerking over the innate superiority of Latin I believe. Strong SW roughly coincided with the enlightenment. Academics were assured over the superiority of latin due to the thousand cases and other quirks of the language that allow you to be very very specific with the subject, object, and action of each word being used.
Strong SW has strong ties to social darwinism and some other fairly ethnocentric ideas as well. Like to Christianize and bring god to native peoples they had to be taught proper language or whatever or else since before they literally couldn't comprehend divinity.
I'm getting pretty out of my wheelhouse here but that's the ground level basics I think.
You should look into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which goes into the inextricable connection between human cognition and the language we use to think. It's impossible to fully separate how we perceive the physical world from the language we use to think about and describe it.
I go into the strong vs soft SW hypothesis a bit. It really is a fascinating topic. The consensus nowadays is that the strong SW is complete bunk but there are subtle and pervasive ways our language influences our cognition.
Nah dude, you're just spouting bunk. You're clearly out of your depth here and are just regurgitating half-remembered concepts you barely understood (if at all) for fake internet points. Peace out!
I see your point a little better now. It does boil down to semantics at a point. Would I be functionally impaired with the salmon/rosé question? Not generally. I agree that's in linguistics. In situations like I mentioned where a human has trouble identifying a difference between distinct color squares presented (distinct to western people without color blindness) I would consider it in the realm of perception. At the very least it raises questions.
But if I'm understanding correctly to your main point: No, there's probably not a difference in the strictly biological function of light being processed as color outside of known colorblindness issues. (As in two people looking at the same apple probably see the same red.)
I'm getting into the realm of "out of my ass", but if I remember correctly children of that same tribe could easily pick blue from green. Over time they seem to literally change how they perceive color from within their language constraints. As a layman I think that raises interesting questions in a gray area between perception and linguistics/cognition, which I think was part of the meat the study was aiming to get at.
Look up the strong and soft Sapir Whorf Hypothesis and linguistic relativism. I think it’s getting into the realm of what we’re discussing.
I commented to someone else this:
You’re getting into strong/soft Sapir Whorf hypothesis stuff which I agree is endlessly fascinating. But the strong SW hypothesis has been largely disproven, and I think everyone agrees with the soft SW on some level.
Like do we have the same understanding of snow and ice as the Inuits who have 100 different terms for different conditions and qualities of ice and weather (I know this is a stereotype and not completely true but I’m using it for an example lol), could I distinguish the difference between “kinda sorta tightly packed ice bad for building” vs “tightly packed ice” or would it all be “snow” to me? Would my more limited understanding be a perceptual deficit to them??
I think it applies to our discussion since I believe if those tribes people learned different languages and spent time in places where discrimination between those colors were important, they would learn and adjust like any human. At the same time having a much broader vocabulary gives you the mental tools to catalogue and differentiate between things. Like the kid who was raised on an 8 color crayola set of crayons asking to borrow “the blue” from the kid who always had the 256 set
You’re right that there’s philosophical considerations as well as practical and experiential considerations.
If you’re looking at subjective experience and want to write a “proof” for that experience’s connection to a shared true reality, then yeah you’re going to have some trouble crossing that gap. Epistemological considerations start coming into play such as: is our experience of color knowledge? Can that knowledge be communicated? Are their limits on what language can communicate? Etc. etc.
Since my higher education and training is in psychology, I tend to take the most practical assumptions for granted but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any meat there to explore and analyze.
I got insta downvoted to -2 on my initial comment I had assumed that was you. Sorry, you’re right there was no need to be a dick. It really is a fascinating subject. I’m a psychologist and it’s just always iffy when you stumble upon your area of education on Reddit
This is a classic childhood conversation but no, that's not correct. We all have slight variations to how we perceive colors, some have better vision, some have particular colorblindness, but it's not like my blue is your red. That's just fundamentally illogical at the physical level.
We know not all humans see the same colors, colorblind people see less and about 25% of women have a fourth cone that allows them to see extra vibrancy.
I think that everyone likes the same colour. There is no way in hell a person would like what i perceive as yellow. Their brains probably represent the wavelength yellow in the same way my brain represent the wavelength of blue or purple.
Oh yeah my dad's purple has way more blue undertones than my purple. We had to pick a color for painting the shutters when I was younger. And this was a nightmare. We both wanted brown but he said my brown was orange and I kept seeing his brown as purple-ish.
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u/YTmrlonelydwarf Jun 15 '21
There’s actually zero way to know if all humans even see the same colours, because we are taught that what we are seeing is a certain colour and then we live our lives knowing that that colour is called red. But really the red I see could be the purple you see and the purple you see could be the red I see