This is called the inverted spectrum problem.
All that is necessary is that our perception of the outside world makes some sort of persistent and logical sense to us alone - that there is a consistent relationship between the world and the symbolic representation that the brain makes of it. That relationship doesn’t have to be the same for everyone.
Maybe he just wanted to get us thinking: Does he experience the act of eating quail in the same way that the quail experiences the act of being eaten?
(Admittedly intuitively, I suspect not.)
My quale tastes stale.
Whatever advantage we get from seeing colours must be the same for everyone, though. To benefit from that advantage, ISTM that everyone’s representation of reality would have to be the same (with minor variations of course, but not enough to negate the advantage or else they won’t last long). That’s how it works with adaptations, isn’t it? An opposable thumb was an advantage and now everyone has the same opposable thumb. If the ability to see the brown fur of a prey animal through green leaves is an advantage, I would think we’d all see it that way. I suppose it’s possible that one might see pink fur through blue leaves, and another might see green fur through brown leaves, but I don’t think that kind of wild deviation from the norm among individuals normally happens with evolution.
You’re just jealous because your species has one fewer cone than humans and can’t see as many colors. You have us beat on lake bottoms, though.
Re: your evolutionary argument, I think that that does suggest against the theory, at least based on parsimony/Occam’s razor.
The point is that you and your weird friend can look at a 460nm light and call it blue. We might not actually see the same thing (and indeed that is possible, although one probably won’t see what you’d call yellow but just small differences). We don’t physically see the same thing, but we both call it blue because it looks like every other thing we’ve seen that was given the name “blue.”
While we’re playing with the funny word that is “qualia,” Daniel Dennett wrote an important paper which he called “Quining Qualia” (pdf) about the subjective experience (one of the more readable philosophy papers, in my opinion). It’s a critical look. Quine means “denying” but you knew that :). He addresses this problem in “Intuition Pumps” #3 and #4, and non-visual stuff elsewhere.
It’s different when it comes to subjective experience however, as there is no right way to see colours.
The experience of colour is made in the brain as part of the response to detecting EM radiation of various wavelengths. We can’t know if the real world objectively has colour or even if that concept makes sense.
I see EM radiation with a wavelength of 650nm as red. But my friend sees 650nm as “schmed” (a colour I can’t even imagine).
Neither of us is “right”. And there’s no evolutionary advantage to either mapping, as long as my friend is also able to tell 650nm light apart from, say, 750nm light.
Yes, absolutely - fully-functional individuals of the same species ought to enjoy approximately the same discernment and ability to differentiate between various inputs. What we don’t (and can’t, really) know is how that works in terms of comparable experience in the mind.
Sure, If colour X contrasts sharply with colour Y for one individual, it should do so consistently for the whole species - and a blend of colour P and Q should result in the same effect every time, for everyone.
What I don’t and can’t know is: what it’s actually like for you to see things. If we had some hypothetical device that could record experiences and play them back to us, would a recording of your experience even make sense to my brain? Not just in terms of the colours of objects, but in general - would the way that your brain maps and represents reality make any sense to my brain?
A replay of you seeing a blue rectangle might, to me, seem like a jumble of completely irrelevant experiences - maybe not even sight-related experiences.
We are physiologically all built to approximately the same design, with approximately the same materials - so on the face of it, it seems obvious that things should work in approximately the same way - but the brain is a self-organising system - we are born with the ability to sense, but not the ability to perceive - we have to *learn *to see - the brain has to organise itself so as to make sense of the outside world - and I don’t think we can guarantee that every brain comes up with exactly the same solution to the problem.
Neural Network systems (in computing) attempt to crudely simulate the way a meat brain works - you can set two distinct (but functionally identical) neural networks a specific task and both of them might solve it, but it’s actually very unlikely they will build the same solution (in terms of their internal configuration).
In the human brain, we could argue that we know this bit deals with vision; this other bit deals with sound; and that bit handles the sense of touch - but what we can’t know, is what it feels like to an individual, in objective terms, when those bits of the brain are at work.
I’m with Esox Lusious on this one.
Red and green are two colors that look almost identical in B&W, but not so with yellow and violet. There are contrast issues that would become untenable across the subjective experience if colors were arbitrarily mixed up from person to person.
What’s more, these phenomenon don’t just exist in a vacuum. As noted already, our subjective perceptions are all profoundly entangled with every other one, and we all seem to respond more or less the same, no matter if I’m getting a shot in the arm or drinking lemonade.
Of course there are anomalies and variations about subjective experience, but I believe these (e.g. Cilantro soap-tasters) to be physiological and testable, and in that sense in the realm of science.
Keeping with the philosophical argument, to me, would be not if my blue looks like your yellow, but are the colors you see/experience novel colors to me, in that the contrasts and everything else lines up with the rest of life’s perceptual experiences, but your colors are absolutely alien to me; if I were able to see what you see, I wouldn’t even have names for the primaries.
This would go for all other perception as well.
I don’t see how that matters - as long as there is a consistent mapping between the external world and the internal perception of it. We think of our perception as ‘realistic’, but there’s no other way we possibly can judge it.
Consider the instructions for assembling a flat-pack bookcase - these could be presented as a single exploded diagram (Ikea-style), or they could be written as a verbose description of all the parts and how they fit together.
Both things would be a truthful representation of the reality of assembling the same bookcase, but they are quite different from one another - and each one might be incomprehensible to someone only familiar with the other kind.
The representation of the object is not the object - and for all we know, there could be many different, valid ways for our minds to internally symbolise and represent reality. We would naturally all think our own one is the most sensible, straightforward and realistic - because there’s no other choice.
Mangetout,
I get that it’s hard and maybe even impossible to determine how someone else sees colour. Philosophically, I guess that can mean that the question remains wide open, but under the real world conditions that the universe imposes on us, I think there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to consistency across the species in how we perceive colours, all of which can be wrapped up and explained in one word: evolution.
To the extent that the brain is self-organizing, it isn’t free to do whatever it wants. It still has to self-organize in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the survival of its host. And if it has the tools to improve survivability (which is determined by genetics?), like perceiving colours in a specific, advantageous way (to repeat cmyk’s point), so much the better.
Something that just occurred to me as I was typing this was camouflage in animals (and soldiers and hunters). Wouldn’t blending in with the surroundings work only if we all saw colours the same way?
Esox Lucius,
I think this is a talking past each other situation.
Say I see red and blue, and my friend sees “schmed” and “schmue”.
Now, you’re absolutely right that there are some constraints on schmed and schmue: they can’t be identical for one thing because my friend would be unable to discern all the objects that I can. But that constraint is insufficient to force red = schmed, blue = schmue.
Just imagine your subjective colour wheel is 30 degrees rotated from mine. It wouldn’t affect your visual acuity at all.
But, if you’re asking what my “gut-feeling” is, then sure, I suspect we see much the same colours. But that’s based on another point: I can’t imagine a dazzlingly-bright black.
To elaborate,
While black is not a colour it is still a quale, and it’s possible for black to be mapped differently. Imagine black and white are reversed, so I see a negative image. This would mean that very bright light sources, that hurt my eyes, would be the deepest black. Well, there’s something incongruous about that experience…I know this is not an actual argument, but it’s what gives me the gut-feeling. But that’s all it is.
Doesn’t synesthesia show that it is possible for stimuli to map differently? It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to believe eating a hot dog might feel like a walk in the park, for example.
Certainly all the stimuli we are exposed to would have to blend or contrast in ***equivalent ***ways to the perceiver, but equivalent doesn’t necessarily mean equal.
I still don’t see why this has to mean the process of perception* feels the same* to each individual.
If your internal experience of those things was different, you’d say exactly the same thing, because you’re talking about the external world using the same mappings by which you perceive it.
I would think that evolution would account for that, assuming that genetics is what determines how we interpret wavelengths of light. When the genetics to see a certain wavelength as red, instead of a shade of grey, appeared, that’s what would get passed on. The colour could have been blue or shmue, but for whatever reason, it happened to be red, and assuming it was an advantage, any organism that saw it radically differently wouldn’t gain any benefit from it and that line would die out. In the process of evolution, I can’t see the randomness that you suggest.
(ETA: After posting the point about camouflage, my son disabused me of the notion that it settled the debate. Damn kids.)
Genetically, how would that happen (again, assuming that our perception of colour is genetic)?
If you counted on eating hot dogs to get exercise and fresh air, I don’t know that your line would survive for long.
I have a blue-green color deficiency and found out in my twenties when I saw an isochromatic test plate. So I do see colors differently from everyone else, and for years no one knew.
Colorblindness (R-G like most colorblind people/mammals) sometimes makes you better at seeing through camouflage. On the other hand, when deer hunting, it is important to have a broken up pattern, whether it’s green or blaze orange. Orange stands out for birds though, and patterns that confuse normal humans (may) work.