Suppose I were to switch eyes with someone…(Or maybe brains…whatever works) would I see different colors than I used to see, that is , before I switched? This is hard to explain…it’s the type of thing that I can understand but not really put it into words. Anyway, what I mean is this: Right now, the background of this message looks gray to me; my brain registers the light as gray. Someone else looking at this same background will agree with me that it is gray, but really they will be seeing a different color than me. Their eyes pick up ‘my gray’ but really if I looked at it with their eyes or brain, I would see a different color than if I had my regular eyes and brain. I am not really sure how else to explain this. If you want me to try harder…email me at Mestupkid477@yahoo.com
I would imagine that switching eyes wouldn’t make any difference because the receptors on the retina respond in certain ways to certain wavelengths (effectively ‘colours’) of visible light, but switching brains (without actually becoming the other person) - there’s no way to tell - colour is an artifact of perception, perception may not develop the same way for everybody.
I understand what you are saying and have had this conversation before. Basically does ‘blue’ look the same to everyone or do people develop what they think is blue and assign (or are prergogramed to assign) a ‘mental’ interpertation of the color.
If we could switch the eyes and visual part of the brain would the sky look red (or whatever) after the switch?
The answer I heard is that there is no way to know.
I am used to blue appearing blue to me, perhaps your blue appears red to me, but blue to you.
It’s a classic question; not unrelated to the broader philosophical issue as to whether it would be possible to really know that a machine was truly sentient, or another human being, for that matter.
I know there’ve been threads about this in the past.
We’ve all been trained to call the color we see in the sky “blue”, but how do we know “my” blue is “your” blue"?
It seems there should be a way to determine this, based on color mixing. Say we both call one color of paint “red” and another color of paint “brown”. We mix them together for torm a third unique color, and we still have the same name for the third color.
To me, this says, that while there might be variations, they are very slight. I think that if we are actually perceiving different colors, that mixing them would produce different results for each of us that we call by different names.
I don’t think the mixing thing would work as a test, since nearly all perceived colours that we see everywhere are actually blends of multiple wavelengths; you are also trained to see a mixture of blue and red as magenta.
Suppose we have two light sources; one blue and the other red (or that’s how you see them); we project them together onto a white sheet of paper and you see a magenta patch of light.
I see the same thing; it doesn’t matter whether blue actually looks like[what you would call] green and red looks like[what you would call] blue; the result of the mixing is consistent and whatever colour you would actually call it (if you were able to use my vision system), I still call it ‘magenta’ because that’s what I’ve been taught to call it.
Of course, if someone could develop working telepathy (of a particular type that exchanged brain information at it’s lowest level, like a ‘mind meld’ on Star Trek), then we could possibly put this question to bed, but again it could be argued that even in that case, there was some kind of perceptual translation going on.
Remember those old “color-blindness” tests at grade school, or the optometrists? Sure, the ones where there are 1000+ spots all arranged randomly, and the only difference was their color values… but if you looked closely, you could make out hidden numbers. Some where harder than others (color values being ever more subtle), but my thinking would be that if my green where your yellow, then the contrast values between the two colors you were being tested for would be markedly different, therefore revealing the number with great ease to some, and much difficulty to others (making the test incompetent).
Nearly all, but not all. I think there would be enough for a test. You can get the color yellow either by just using yellow light (580 nm), or by combining red (660 nm) with green (555 nm). If we fine-tuned these wavelengths, we may be able to produce the same color in two ways, and we could determine who sees them as the same.
Although I have wondered this myself, and I’m surprised how many people have come up with it independently, I believe now that the answer is that there is very little difference between people. Certainly not enough for my own theory, that everyone’s favorite color is the same, to be feasible.
Perhaps from the color bline test we could tell something. Like I find 1 and 4 the easiest to make out wile 5 is the hardest but not by much.
counting
12
34
56
I’ve wondered this too, and the only satisfactory answer I can come up with is that we are all so closely related genetically that we more than likely percieve colors exactly the same.
I can’t see the same colors you can. Or rather, I can see them but differently than you. I’m partially colorblind.
I know I see different colors than others, because in certain hues of red, brown, and green, I actually see them in shades of gray only, and I disagree with other people as to the color. In other hues, I can see the color, but not like you do, or so I’m told. I see my colors with shades of brown in them. My blue looks different than your blue, even though I have no problem identifying my blue.
If you are trichromatic, and all three of your cones are “tuned” properly (mine are not), then you should see red, green, and blue exactly like everyone else.
I still don’t think this would prove anything; certainly it can be used to demonstrate that the photoreceptors in a video camera do not respond in exactly the same way as in a human eye, but (color blindness aside) the photoreceptors in the human eye generally work the same for everyone; you see a mixture of green and red as yellow because it stimulates your eye in the same way as mine - it’s the brain that associates a hue with the stimulus.
