It gets worse than that 2 click twiddle flare. The experience you get when you look at something blue, I get that same sensation when I taste something salty. And when you listen to Mozart, it’s exactly the same as when I have a good masseuse attend to my back.
Of course there is no way of proving this, but I guarantee that my head is wired quite differently from yours. (Unless you too are missing a temporal lobe.)
Well presuming that the hardware (our eyes, brain, etc) isn’t damaged or just different then there are only 2 ways of not seeing the same color that I am aware of.
1, we simply aren’t sharing the same vocabulary to describe what is seen.
2, we give different attention to colors. Someone keenly interested and aware of colors will see more within a green that someone who is apathetic and distracted with something else will see.
I think everyone would agree that it’s possible that our internal experiences may be quite different, but that it’s unlikely. However, I can’t see any rational basis to assign a likelihood to the possibility.
What about a person’s two eyes each perceiving color differently? I’m not color-blind, but colors are just a little different between my eyes. Looking at a “neon pink” pad of Post-Its right now, it’s a raging bright pink through my right eye and a less wild and just slighty more purple rather than pink through my left eye.
Ask and you shall recieve.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5788238#post5788238
Let it not be said that I’m unwilling. Uninteresting? Maybe.
It’s my very first “ask the” thread…please be nice
Isn’t there a famous physics experiment that suggest that all people experience colors the same way, suggesting that all experience the same consciousness? Or am I thinking of an interpretation of quantum theory?
I would certainly be interested in this experiment. Remember anything?
This is me! I have some trouble with shading, especially with blues and greens. I can certainly tell the sky is (what I call) blue, and the traffic light is (what I call, again, what I’m assuming everyone calls) green, but if you give me shades of turquoise (OK, they contain both blue and green!), I’m often very hard pressed to tell you whether it’s more blue or more green. It’s my understanding most people do not have quite this amount of trouble.
When red stops being red and starts being brown, for instance, is another one. Certain shades of grey have almost a purplish tint to me. I’m sure there are others, but those are the most glaring. And yet I’m definitely not color blind.
I guess I’m just weird. ::shrug::
Though, i wonder, if in as with Andy’s Case: Is the problem w/ the eyes? or w/ the Brain? Cuz, if it’s the brain, then possessing someone’s (Andy’s) body would only result in: “His eyes are normal”.
Where as if it’s the brain, doing the Vulcan Mind-Meld would result in: “This guy is either insane or brain damaged” :eek:
I have a vague recollection of reading about people (usually women) who have even more colour perception than normal people - has anyone else heard of this, or am I just mis-remembering?
You are asking two different questions in one here, actually:
and
Several people above have gone into the issue of “color blindness” (I believe there’s a technical term for this, but don’t know or recall it). In addition, there is a large degree of difference in perception of color at the indigo-violet end of the spectrum. Some people distinguish indigo as a distinct color; for others, it’s a deep blue, or I guess for a few a blue-violet.
Some people see quite a bit deeper into the violet range than others. And people who have had surgical replacement of the lens of their eye (by an artificial lens) see color for a significant range into the near ultraviolet. (AFAIK it’s not perceived as “a new color” à la Terry Pratchett’s eighth color, but rather as varying shades of violet.)
On the other hand, what is perceived as “a greenish blue” or “a bluish green” or red vs. red-orange vs. orange vs. yellow-orange vs. yellow are cultural artifacts, not perceptual differences. There were a few studies performed regarding “primitive cultures” with languages with only a few color words, and it was found that distinguishing different hues was (except for color-blindness) not particularly different across humanity, but that how colors were classified varied greatly. In other words, what we term chartreuse would be seen as that color by people from every culture – but whether they’d term it “chartreuse,” “yellow-green,” “greenish yellow,” or “yellowish green” or strict “green” or “yellow” depends on the cultural “set” in which they think. The perception is the same; the cataloguing of it differs.
A while ago, a friend and I were arguing over what to call a particular shade diplayed on my computer monitor. I said that it was blue, he claimed it was green. To settle the issue, I fired up my handy color picker application and clicked the color. It turns out we were both right - it was cyan, with equal proportions of blue and green.
Well - as long as it’s possible to discuss questions like “what’s your favorite color ?”, and to debate which colors can be pleasingly paired and which can’t, It’s safe to say that subjective experience of colors varies from person to person.
Not sure if this is really relevant to the OP.
Some art crtics have written that Vincent Van Gogh saw colors differently…his later paintings show brassy tones of orange, yellow, and red. supposedly, thjis was due toVan gogh’sheavy useof absinth, and his advancing mental illness.
Has ths been disproven?
I didn’t read all the threads (sorry), but doesn’t the fact that there are different shades, and pastels and such pretty much eliminate this way of thinking? Pink is usually seen as a “girly” color… could it be someone else out there is seeing what I would call green and thinks that is a girly color? Nah. I thought about this when I was a child as well, and thought it was mind blowing. Then I learned about the visible light spectrem and though, “probably not.”
There’s nothing intrinsically “girly” about the color pink, it’s an identification made through association–we associate girls with the color pink for…well…for various (some obvious) reasons. If you spend your entire life perceiving pink as the color green, then you will associate the color green with that identification of “girliness”.
This would only really be a meaningful question if human perception were a lot simpler than it actually is. The lines between our different senses and between perception and interpretation aren’t nearly as clear as we might naively think.
This absolutely fascinating article suggests that the visual imagination of once-sighted people who have become blind can come to differ in fundamental ways from that of sighted people and between one another.
I think it possesses enough coherence to be a meaningful question. Let it be phrased thus: Do the observed similarities in structure and behaviour among individual humans indicate (gross) similarities in the subjective phenomenon experienced? and equally Can any consistent correlations be established between the nervous system and subjective experience?. This should take care of your objections. The objection then left is, that if qualia are epiphenomenal, all that an affirmative answer to the above questions demonstrates is internal consistency, not external. Without falsifying solipsism, these questions are unanswerable, but meaningful.
This isn’t really talking about what this thread is about, but it’s relevant I believe. And it settles it for me. I just don’t think that different people can observe the visible light spectrem differently than others. I think we’re wired to attach a certain color with a certain wavelength, and I doubt it’s random.
This is what I was talking about -
(Thanks for the link, RitzyRae.)
Women apparently can have one or two red opsins, which are on the X chromosome - men can therefore only have one at most.