Now we all know that grass is green right? It is ‘green’ not because of chlorophyll but because we were told by our parents/Barney/Teletubbies what ‘green’ is.
Now, how do I know that my wife doesn’t actually sees grass as red. Since Sesame Street told her it is green she calls it green but to me it would be red. However I am looking at the grass and it IS green. Since she calls it green and to me it is green, I suspect nothing.
And so on.
Could every individual see colors totally differently, not just various hues of ‘green’ but a totally different color.
Is there a test to disprove this theory. I would imagine something with light and prisms and doppler shifts but I can’t figure out a foolproof test.
There is no test for this, but I know the answer with great certainty because my two eyes see colors a bit differently. Not as different as “red” and “green”, but get into oranges and purples and they’re quite different shades - different enough to be different paint chips. Things are “warmer”, with more red and yellow tones in one eye than the other. The color I see with both eyes is in-between the shades I see with each eye independantly. I also can see better in the dark with one eye than the other, but I don’t know if that’s relevant.
If my two eyes see different colors, than your eyes and my eyes undoubtedly do as well.
Not a foolproof test, but you could ask people to look at a simplified photograph of a scene and ask them to fill in the colours on something with the colour outlines pre-drawn. Give them a choice of colours for each portion of the photo, only one of which exactly matches the colour found in the photo, and see how close they get.
But this only means that what the person sees here is the same as what they see there: two parts red, one part cyan, or whatever. It doesn’t mean that the color orange they perceive is the same as the color orange I percieve.
I used to spend WAY to much time thinking about this until I noticed my own eyesight. I do wonder if it’s something that happened as I got older, 'cause I don’t remember any difference at all when I was a kid.
It’s my personal opinion, but I think that most of us see greens, reds, blues, etc., as the same color. Why? Clothing. I’m no good at it, but I know lots of people who can instantly “tell” that certain colors and shades go with each other. Other colors “clash.” I think that lends anecdotal proof to the idea that we all see “green” the same way.
And to address WhyNot’s eye issue — I don’t think that necessarily seeing different shades / tones means that we don’t basically see “green” the same way. It’s just that when we look at one shade of “green” you may see it as lighter, darker, warmer, etc. But I think the basic color (for most people) is probably the same.
All you could ever prove is inconsistency. If you not only agree with me that the third square is green, but also that the fifteenth square is almost exactly midway between the green of the third square and the chartreuse of the forty-ninth square, it seems like we’re seeing the same things. If we put electrodes in and watch what nerves fire when we look at the third square, and both our brains do the same different thing instead when we look at the fifteenth, again we have reason to believe we’re probably seeing the same thing.
But it could still be untrue.
Similarly, I have no idea if a nice salty lime tastes to you as it does to me, or if the cello inversions before the trumpet-finale fanfare in Scheherazadeis experienced in your sound-receptors the way it comes through to mine.
My wife and I have had this discussion before, but it got a little too deep to go too far. I understand what the OP is saying and think it makes perfect sense. When we are children, Mommy points at the sky and says “blue”. So we are trained on what blue is. She points at the grass and says “green”. So we are trained on what green is. And the color training goes on.
But what if my eyes/brain sees your blue the same way you see green, your brown the same why you seem yellow, and so on. But we are all universally trained that it is green, well because that is what we were told. But is it possible that we ALL see each color in a different way, but equally recognize it as the ‘named’ color?
But colors that “clash” in one time or culture don’t clash in others: see, green and purple. When I was a kid, I was told emphatically that green and purple don’t belong together EVAH! Then sometime in the '90s, it became okay. OTOH, I just won’t accept that this isn’t butt ugly.
But a lot of that is based on what we call colors. If I look at a color like, say: this which looks like this with the other eye, I’m seeing two different colors. Sure, we call them both “blue”, but once upon a time, we’d have called this and this both “red”.
Do different people see things very radically differently? Depends on who you ask. A painter will see a whole lot of difference between those blues, where other people may not. I don’t think we can ever know how far apart we see things, but we do see them differently.
Whynot, I think we’re really arguing different things.
You’re arguing that people see colors different ways — for example, you see different shades in different eyes when looking at the same color. You argue that a painter can better differentiate between shades of blue.
That’s all fine and good — I don’t disagree with you.
What I’m arguing is take a big step back and look at the basic colors: blue, red, green, etc. If the two of us compared a blue wall to color samples, we might argue over whether it’s closer to #46 ocean or #42 skylight. But we’d be in general agreement that the color is blue.
Now from there — not arguing over whether we see the color slightly different — this question is really asking over whether the umbrella color that you call “blue” is the same as what I call “blue.” How would we ever know?
My argument is that people possess an almost instinctive ability to notice colors that don’t go well together — that clash. As I’ve noted, this ability seems to be stronger in some people than in others.
Using that ability, we can see that certain colors complement each other. If what you called “purple” and what you called “green” didn’t look the same as what I call “purple” and “green” then we would be confused when one of us said they didn’t go together. It’s similar to the problem that colorblind people have when matching up outfits. When they wear something that appears to be grey but doesn’t match - it’s apparent that they are seeing things differently. I think the same principle applies with respect to this question.
I was kind of thinking of that one artist who got his eyes corrected. Before that, he had a ‘blue period’ (or some other colour. Isn’t that a helpful description? ) because that was what he was seeing. If I found an artist who had the ability to near-perfectly replicate what he or she perceived and pointed that artist at an early autumnal landscape, would the picture on the canvas look the same as what you’d see if you were there at the some time? What if I also found an artist with the same skill as the first, but red-green colourblind, and invited them both to paint that same landscape?
To put this into another context, imagine all colors being described by a unique point in three dimensional space. Each axis corresponds to one type of cone cell - either red, green or blue. We know that any point which can be described by the set of coordinates can be accurately described in another reference frame (or the guy down the street’s coordinates) through a fairly simple transformation. So my “red” (1,0,0) and any of the surrounding space which I would also describe as red but not as pink or yellow, both of which are nearby, neatly corresponds to some area on everyone else’s color space. We’ve all learned to call certain regions of color space by the name red, and certain things which are not red but similar to red get other names, like magenta. In this context, the question becomes: did we all draw our axis system the same way?
We internally represent each point in this three dimensional space with a unique color. And pretty clearly, light of a certain wavelength stimulates the majority of our cone cells in a similar fashion, at least up to the point of normal human variation. But our minds have a reason to assign the same unique color to the same pattern of cone stimulation. As an example, we need to be able to pick out an orange hat in a field of green and brown, or a lot more hunters would be shot by accident every year. If my orange and green are at least as far apart in my internal representation as in the imaginary color space, then that hunter is probably safe, because the orange will stand out. But if I’ve assigned green to something that you’ve internalized as my red, assuming orange is the same for both of us, then there’s little to call my attention to the orange cap against a field of red. I might be shooting with reckless abandon. This doesn’t seem to be happening.
On another note, pea green, yellow, orange and brown clash garishly. This didn’t stop my grandmother from using all four in her kitchen 30 years ago.
From a biological perspective, it turns out that there is variation between individuals in the color receptors in our eyes. It’s usually very slight (except when talking about color blindness), but it’s enough to slightly muck up color reproduction on things like computer displays for some people, or lead two people to disagree on which paint chip matches an object best. For example, where the “blue” light receptors in my eye might have a peak response to 419 nm light, your receptors might respond best to 422 nm light.
And then all sorts of weird things might happen with the parts of the brain that receive and interpret visual input. There are extreme cases where someone has lost the ability to consciously perceive color (seeing the world in a sort of “dirty” black and white), even though their eyes respond normally. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more mundane sorts neurobiological variation, causing different perceptions for the same phenomenon in different people, but that starts getting back to the philosophical debate.
I’d broaden it - it’s possible that your internal experience of seeing a red brick is similar to my internal experience of having my back scratched while trumpets play, and that my internal experience of seeing a red brick is similar to your internal experience of smelling burnt toast while walking ankle deep in iced water. There really isn’t any way to tell - as long as the internal experience is consistent across time for any given stimulus for any given person, it’s something the brain can use to assemble a usable map of the outside world.
This is something I’ve wondered since I was a small child.
My theory is that most people probably see colors the same, or at least close, but some people are way off the scale. This would explain why that one oddball kid would ride his bike around the neighborhood in a purple shirt and green pants.
At some point, some guy with a really skewed vision of color became a fashion designer and said it was ok to wear a purple shirt and green pants. The artsy-fartsy people said “Hey, he has such a radical sense of style, we’ll follow him…we won’t be able to look into a mirror without going blind, but we’ll be cool.” Meanwhile, this poor fashion designer who seems so warped in the mind becomes a recluse from society and designs more outlandish combinations of colors while all he’s really seeing is what we would consider to be tan and blue.
This would explain that gawd-awful pink house down the street from me about 10 years ago (our property values are just beginning to recover from that).
And those loudly colored Dodge wing cars back in the early 70s and the Chevy Berettas of the late-80s.
And hundreds of other things that one person thought looked good. It wasn’t just someone with extremely bad taste picking out the color scheme, it was someone with an extreme tilt in the sense of color.
What difference does it make. If someone points to something and says, “That’s red.” and I see what is “red” to me it matters not at all that when he sees “red” for him he sees what I see as blue.
As long as we look at a rainbow and both identify the same color bands who cares if we are seeing the same thing?
From a scientific (hell, even just a practical) perspective, you are of course right. But I think this is more about the human psyche than it is about practicality. As individuals of this species we love to “belong”. If there were some way of proving that there is a “proper” way of seeing what we are told is ‘green’, then I’d wager most people would want to know about it, and wouldn’t accept the answer, ‘but your ‘green’ works fine for you in an applied sense, so why sweat it?’ We want to sweat it.
My personal view though, is that we will NEVER determine this. I don’t know for sure I’m not the centre of the world either - I can just assume I’m not, much as I assumed I was when I was three.
but I can’t figure out a foolproof test.
) because that was what he was seeing. If I found an artist who had the ability to near-perfectly replicate what he or she perceived and pointed that artist at an early autumnal landscape, would the picture on the canvas look the same as what you’d see if you were there at the some time? What if I also found an artist with the same skill as the first, but red-green colourblind, and invited them both to paint that same landscape?
