When our senses provide the brain with stimuli, a certain neurological web is drawn in the brain, and can be considered a ‘reaction’ to that stimuli. Lets assume we can filter out all stimuli except light (and where conciousness - and any chemical - interferance can be ignored). Now, if several brains were to be given the same stimuli, where the stimuli were just random colours (not necessarily shown at once), and supposing measurement is not an obstacle, would there be any differences in the patterns generated by the stimuli in each of the brains?
NOTE: I am trying to create a separation between ‘emotion’ and its effect on the overall reaction. I realize that this is a mistake, but lets assume we have some ‘magical’ constant that can account for it.
And would this pattern be different to when that brain was ‘born’? I.E would it ‘learn something’ that will be used for future reference.
What I am getting at here is that if the patterns are not ‘exactly the same’, then are we each seeing different variations of the same thing when it comes to colour? So if I was to spend a day in the life of, say, Bill Gates, (I don’t know - my chi or something) then firstly, i’d like to confirm that I would spend his money as quickly as possible, but secondly, would the entire world look completely alien through his brain (all jokes aside)?
And does our individual interpretation of a colour ‘evolve’ withought us even noticing?
I know taste can be very broad, so why couldn’t sight?
I was just thinking about the same subject the other day, that is, whether everyone sees “the same thing”. I suppose we can say for certain that people have different visual capabilities (i.e. the quality of sight varies with each person). But lets suppose everyone is fitted for glasses so that we all have the same visual capabilities (as far as our eyes are concerned). Now for the part of vision that is in the brain, we can only speculate that everyone’s “back office” visual process works basically the same, but that could very well be an invalid assumption.
What I was thinking along these lines is, when we take a photograph of what we are looking at, doesn’t it seem that everyone basically “sees” the same things in the photo? For example, we could take a photo of a colorful garden, then have separate individuals examine the photo and classify the colors in the photo according to a standardized color chart. We could then evaluate their perception by comparing everyone’s choices for the colors. If their choices all “statistically” match, then shouldn’t we be able to conclude that they are all “seeing” the same thing?
I don’t see how using a photo would be any different from simply seeing reality. We might all agree that a given flower is “lavender,” but what my brain actually perceives as lavender might be equivalent of your brain’s perception of orange.
I’m not even sure that the brain pattern measurement in the OP would solve the problem either. It may or may not explain differences in the actual conscious perception of a given color.
I often contemplated this as a youngster, so may I re-phrase for clarity?
A person is brought up taught that a given visual stimilus created by physics that fires certain neurons in their brain equals the word “purple”, so they “know” that is purple. They can grab the purple crayon and color stuff purple all day long.
Then introduce person #2. They also have been taught that the same visual stimulus/physics/neuron series equals “purple”, and we can assume it is the same up until the stimulus hits the rods and cones. But after that, it is only conditioning that equates that stimulus to a given color, the actual perception, what a person sees, may be radically different.
What I call “red” appears a certain way to me. It may appear exactly the same in your mind, or it may appear entirely different. There’s simply no way of comparing the “inner” sensation without reference to the “external” stimulus: we both look at the fire engine, and agree that it’s red. It’s just not really meaningful to argue any further than that. Existentialist philosophy is fun for a while, but ultimately a waste of time in terms of describing how the world “is”.
I disagree. There is no entity in your brain separate from your senses to see red as blue, or blue as red;
what you see is what you get.
er…
unless you are colourblind.
or braindamaged…
oh dear.
if I start making exceptions to my initial sweeping statement it negates it somewhat.
However I don’t think there is any essential difference between the way individuals see the world; before many years are up, I imagine that there will be high bandwidth connections between electronic media and human neurones ;
such electronic input should be easily interpreted as colour, sounds, perhaps even other sensations, given a bit of training.
It might be that such ‘training’ will actually force the neurons to respond in a particular way- then we will all see things the same.
Consider this. If you add monochromatic red light and monochromatic green light, you get yellow. This is how televisions make yellow. However, it’s also possible to have monochromatic yellow light. As far as I can tell, there’s no physical reason why these two methods should produce the same color; it’s a peculiarity of human perception. And what’s more, it’s the same for all humans (with normal vision). It seems to me that if we all had our own personal peculiarities, you couldn’t count on red + green = yellow.
Sorry about that;
with UncleBill in particular; I don’t think we do all see things differently. Red is red, and it may soon be testable; and even if we don’t all experience the same qualia a bit of electronic training might change the situation.
Sure you could. Just like you can count on the fact that 100+100=200 no matter what base decimal system you use. The different perceptions (qualia concept) are represented as different base decimal systems. The external stimulus (color yellow) is the 200. Just because we both get 200, doesn’t mean that binary and hexadecimal are the same. Just because we both see yellow, doesn’t mean yellow looks the same to both of us.
All it means is that we can agree that yellow is different from the other colors.
We don’t even see a given color the same way all the time. Sit in a tent for a while and come out and everything looks blue. (I’m not getting that example right, but I think you see where I’m going.)
It all boils down to a matter of perception, which by definition is subjective, and therefore not absolute. The differences are more obvious and glaring when it comes to taste, but I see no reason why the other four senses should be any different.
I’m chiming in with agreement to Desmostylus’s view. There’s simply no way to determine if my blue is perceptually the same as your blue or not, though it has been a persistent childhood pondering for me as well.
Yes, but there are fundamental mathematical reasons outside of the way humans perceive things that say that 100+100=200. As I said, there are no fundamental physical reasons why red+green=yellow. If it was an issue of green+green = bright green, then I would agree with you, but as it is, the way we see seems so arbitrary.
It’s not a fundamental property of optical physics, Ellis Dee, it’s an artifact resulting from the way our eyes measure the frequency (i.e. color) of light.
The eye sees some red and some green, which gets transmitted to the brain as being half-way between red and green, i.e., yellow.
A spectroscope could represent it differently, e.g. as two separate peaks on a graph.
Our eyes, however, are set up to ascribe a single color to each point they resolve.
Our eyes have senstivity peaks to blue, green and yellow. So it’d be correct to say that out eyes operate on a blue-green-yellow mixing scheme. But other external color mixing schemes, such as red-gree-blue (e.g. TVs) and cyan-magenta-yellow (e.g. color printers) give the same end result when we look at them. There’s nothing really weird about the color mixing scheme adopted by the human eye and brain, it’s just an averaging system with wrap-around at the limits.
If you were to design a robot with color vision, and you built in sensitivity to only 2 colors (say yellow and blue), and you compared it to another robot with sensitivity to 7 colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), you’d find that the 7 color robot could tell the difference between similar colors much better than the 2 color robot could. They would not, however, have a fundamentally different perception of the world. One of them would simply have a greater resolving capability with respect to light frequency than the other.
I was actually going to ask someone to do this. In my original OP I was trying to account for any opposing factors, so I wouldn’t get people saying “Yea but, what about…”.
This concept has been bothering me for a long time. I tend to agree with Desmostylus on the matter. Consider the following. Colour blindness does not suggest that you cannot see colour, it just affects the hue in which it is viewed (red-deficiency and green-deficiency, etc). One of my cousins is green-deficient and I can tell you that eventhough he is aware of his problem, he assures me that he has no ‘concept’ of it. That is how he knows the world and thats that. There are certain points at which his ‘differences’ may be noticed by others, but to his brain everything is normal. Taking this into account, I have often looked at this as follows: Imagine you have a colour-in book. You give it to a child and that child will place colours in between the lines. In this example, think of the child as a brain. The colours that he/she put in place (‘emotional responses’) are like the responses a young brain gets to different frequencies of light. Now, because not every child would place the same colours at the same places, then neither wll the brain.
OK there are many concept missing here such as ‘natural selection’ and genetics. Perhaps the way we see ‘red’ has been dicided for us by mother nature over a long period of time, just like most birds will be able to recite theire call withought ever hearing it, i.e a kind of ‘brain-reflex’ reaction. This is exactly what I am trying to find out. My view is that the answer may lay somewhere in-between. However, just to add to the dilema (sorry), if natural selection has had a role (which i’m sure it has) then it would be on the bassis of locating ‘active’ neurons for more ‘dangerous’ colours. For instance, say hot colours relate to ‘danger’ (blood, fire, etc), while cool colours are more soothing. This still does not mean that the ‘blanket’ the brain has placed over that frequency is still the same in all brains - eventhough it has the same meaning.
Desmostylus, I do not agree you this. Fun and educational I don’t consider a waste of time. Eventhough it may seem like topics such as this one are merely drawing circles in the sand, I feel there is alot to learn on the matter. Not much is understood about what happens in the connection between the rods and the brain - is ‘colour’ translated in the optical nerve or the brain? Why does green-deficiency also affect the brightness? And many other things. Why search for a Grand Unified Theory (without accounting for its finincial implications - as thats not the reason most individuals would be searching for it)? - Retorical question.
You can recreate this experience in humans as well. When you’re on DMT, users experience colorshifting. The whole world is seen in red, green and gold filters.
Just to add to my cousins story… His ‘condition’ has improved over time (or so say all of us - his friends and family), but it is genetic, so it could not have improved. This hints at an ‘evolving’ framework… as if his brain knows, and has placed some ‘blanket’ over, what he knows as red on a fire-engine, and orange for sirens. So his brain has ‘self-developed’ its own differences - not to frequency, but to ‘objects’.
The minute details of what happens with the rods and cones still might be completely independent of the experience of colors by different individuals. That’s the kicker. We can’t flip a switch in order to experience with someone else’s eyes and brain in order to test it.
It is difficult to think about color without the deeply engrained strappings that we all keep bringing up. Lettuce being “green”, “red” being considered a “warm” color, the subtle differences between hues or measured lightwave frequencies…are all conditioned and moot when it comes to our individual experiences of light.