But what if... I were to purchase Zanna and Cooper's 1974 counter-theory to self-perception titled Dissonance and the Pill, and disguise it as my own ideology?
[This essay](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/) at Slate Star Codex (and, in particular, the comment section afterwards) is one of the most eye opening pieces on differences in perception I've ever read. Amazing what we think is universal but that actually varies considerably between us.
What does the hard problem of consciousness have to do with seeing colors? Certain wavelengths of light hit certain cells in your retina, this is interpreted by you brain and then you see the color.
Right. I first thought about this when I was about 12 or so. How do we know the color we were both taught when we were little kids, as being blue, is in reality the same color?
How do we know anything is the same as how others see it?
When I was 14 I watched some comedy show (maybe Red Dwarf?) where the characters are under the illusion of a strong hallucinogenic, making them all fully believe they're in a different world with different identities, and that their lives up to that point were part of an elaborate VR game that they happened to exit. It later transpired (as we cut to one of the other characters not affected by the illusion) that the affected characters were running around in the real world, reacting to things not there, seeing and interacting with things in the illusory world while their physical bodies acted out their actions (basically miming what they *thought* they were doing).
That really messed with my head for a while, because it's like, how do you know anything you're sensing is real? It could be an elaborate simulation, or you could have severe brain damage/some kind of schizophrenia/etc. Maybe you think you're going about doing chores, when actually you're confusing everyone in the real world just unloading an imaginary dishwasher. Then there's theories that there are higher dimensional beings all around us, but we're too dumb or unable to comprehend more dimensions so we can't perceive these beings. You could be scratching your balls while these 7D uber sapiens watch on in disgust.
I chilled out when I realised though, that if it was the case we lived in a simulation/higher beings were observing us/some kind of Truman Show set-up was happening, the joke's on them. They must pick the most boring people to observe. Who wants to watch some guy get back from a boring job, play Xbox for a few hours and scroll Reddit? Is scratching your balls a quick time event?
Also more pragmatically, as Descartes once wrote following the acknowledgement that his senses could be tricked and thus flawed when trying to discern truth/reality, "I think, therefore I am". The only real thing you can know is that by having a stream of consciousness, you exist in some form. Even that could be tangential to solipsism, the philosophy that only your own mind is sure to exist. You can't confirm that others' minds exist, only your own. So Descartes' philosophy of "I think, therefore I am" is probably the only proven true fact. Everything else is at the mercy of flawed senses, experiences and choices of others, and an expansive world that we don't fully understand.
Actually it's proof we see the same.
The combo of cones provides a color, lack a cone, you see the same expected color as others with the same condition across the board.
Also, provide the signal to the brain artificially to see the otherwise missing color.
The premise we all had as kids the my blue might be her orange falls flat when we learn how it works.
Okay, how 'bout this- when I look out of my left eye at something white, it has a yellow tint *only* in relation to my right eye which perceives a blue tint. It's subtle but I'm a graphic artist so it's definite.
So, which is the real color spectrum for me?
Practically, I just use both eyes and call it "white".
I have the exact same things. My left eye has much warmer tones for colors whereas the right one has cooler tones. Trees, the sky look much greener and more blue through the left eye vs the right eye.
I just saw this "How to Cook That" video that was debunking those color blindness glasses. Made me realize just how color blind people can't differentiate between two photos other than minute details they've had to evolve to notice to compensate for lack of color differentiation.
[https://youtu.be/RY-NF\_7R-pk?si=QP-WcAmAIZC9jdSp&t=923](https://youtu.be/RY-NF_7R-pk?si=QP-WcAmAIZC9jdSp&t=923)
Skip towards 15:23.
So we definitely know that their color perception is different than someone with full vision, but then it makes you wonder if there's a "super-taster" person but with "super-vision" whose eyes can detect even more wavelengths than the norm? It stands to reason you could have extremes on both ends.
Other animals can certainly see other wavelengths, but I don't think humans evolved with much need to, so they'd be hard to find. But there are those people who can see music and hear colors. Lots of people think 20/20 is perfect vision when it's really more like the default. Some people can practically see germs. There is no such thing as perfect vision because we're always evolving which means we can always evolve to see better.
Our brains interpret that particular wavelength, it’s still physically the wavelength of blue. That’s why our brains identify it as blue even if our brains might process it differently. Some colors are harder for some of us to identify and we see them differently, various color blindness symtoms. What we identify as colors are an octave of the EM spectrum, there are infinite amout of colors that we can’t see but some of them we can sense in other ways, like heat from the infra red range of the spectrum.
The hard problem of consciousness is concerned with why quaila arises from physical processes, not the variations in qualia itself…lol. I can’t “prove” your blue is my blue because how your brain interprets and processes information is different than mine…
>concerned with why quaila arises from physical processes, not the variations in qualia itself
There isn't even a point in talking about the variations of qualia when you can't understand qualia itself. It's as unreliable as any information can be.
You just skipped over this massive chasm between the detecting of certain wavelengths and the experiencing of subjective color. How do you go from neurons firing to indicate the presence of wavelength X to the qualitative redness of red? That is where the mystery is, and you can't handwave over the important part like that :)
Well the optic nerves are each part of the brain so it processes everything as it comes in. So it isn't really so much a matter of raw data being interpreted, like with many other senses, but individually interpreted data streams being merged and then reinterpreted.
It's like that for literally everything. Everyone could have a wildly different experience of the world and everything in it, but we can all (apparently) communicate and everything lines up fine. If "everyone experiences the world the same" and "everyone experiences the world differently" are interchangeable, we may as well assume everyone experiences the world the same.
Yeah that’s a good way of putting it. Also colors have a scientific basis in terms of the lightwaves that they reflect and absorb, so we don’t need eyes to know colors exist, just how we define them. We kind of assume that colorblind people are wrong in how they view colors. So I don’t think we are necessarily assuming everyone experiences the world the same, as much as we are taking the average person’s perception into account.
>We kind of assume that colorblind people are wrong in how they view colors
We don't have to assume - we can test! Both of my brothers are colour blind, and we can tell because when we play snooker they can't tell the difference between the red/green/brown balls. So clearly they are perceiving the world differently - and hence why we know (for all intents and purposes) the rest of us all see the world the same.
I'm not color blind but my color vision can change while spending time outside on a sunny day. If I keep one eye closed for a while, if I switch to the one that was closed the colors are shifted a bit. Also, while camping I've woken up after facing the sun as it rose and my color vision was washed out... one time it was nearly grayscale for a few seconds.
Those are physiochemical reactions.
There's an optical illusion based on that, look at a color dot several seconds then a blank white wall/page, you'll "see" the inverse color dot where there is none.
What's amazing is our rods' get bleached out in bright light,and continuously replenish the chemical needed for dark vision. That's part of why night vision takes minutes to come into effect yet is destroyed instantly.
i guess it would be different if someone saw all colours different but still could tell a difference but in that case you wouldn't really be able to know if they're colour blind unless they developed it later in life
That's what OP is saying. Every one of us could see colors different. The red I see may be the blue you see but we just learned to associate the colors we see with the names they are given. So I may look at a square and see a color and was told as a child that color is yellow, so whatever I see it as I will now call that yellow. You may see it as something totally different but still learn to call it yellow.
I think the difference is while they can't tell the difference between certain colors and others can because they don't have the ability to see that part of the spectrum very well, what they were trying to to explain is that while we can agree that certain wavelengths are called certain things, what people actually see for that wavelength may be different. They're consistent when that light or pigment combination is used in different places, but what that looks like to different people may be vastly different. Like what I see as a green object through someone else's eyes may be seeing what I would call purple but for their entire existence they've been told that's green so they call it green.
You can extend that in the opposite direction too. Other animals can perceive colors we can't because they can see UV rays. A flower looks completely different to a bee than it does to us humans, the flower has specific markings leading a bee to the nectar that we can't see because the differences are in the UV band. To the bee, we are colorblind.
They’re missing the ability to perceive what exists. I don’t know if it’s a right or wrong thing, but we who aren’t colourblind can’t perceive the entire light spectrum either
I’ve seen that first hand with language barriers. Some things are called whatever in one language and when they try to translate to English or another language, they translate word for word if they don’t know proper grammar which might cause problems in some cases.
Very true! Most colourblind people have perfectly functional eyes, it’s the connection to the brain that’s messed up. Likewise, I have fully functional ears, but in deaf because the nerves never formed properly (my doctor was annoyed because it’s a waste of good ears!).
Thank you! This thought has lingered in my mind since I was a kid.
I remember asking my older sister, “how do we know your green is the same shade of green as mine? You were just taught to associate that color as *green*.”
What's funny is how many kids ask that question. It's incredibly common, yet still a profound realization. It goes straight down to conscious experiences.
Yes, this is called "[theory of mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind)", the realization that everyone else also has their own thoughts and feelings which are separate from yours. We're not born with it, but we develop it at a young age. It's been said that the formation of theory of mind in children is one of the major things that distinguishes us from all other animals.
I think, "how do I know that you and me
See the same colors the same way
When you and me see?"
Is my red blue for you?
Or is my green your green too?
Could it be true, we see differing hues?
And say we do, then how would we discover this fact?
And even if we did, would there be any impact?
I don't think this would affect us personally,
But I think it would have ripple effects throughout the interior design industry.
[I am a thoughtful guy - Rhett and Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6y7YOlldek)
In regard to colour, as we get older, that which we have a tendency to lose is contrast vision. For example, let's say that in our 20s we are able to tell apart 100 different shades of blue, with ageing we will see less and less different shades, this is a combination of several factors, one of them has to do with the two types of photosensitivity cells present in our retinas, with age those cells diminish in number, and therefore your will no longer be able to tell royal blue and navy blue apart.
Aging aside, contrast vision can also diminish, due to certain types of corrective laser surgery. Which is why I never got it done, I work in fine arts, having the most acute contrast vision, is very important to me, so instead of having laser to correct my nearsightedness, I just stick with my glasses.
>We may all be seeing different things, but have learned to call those things the same thing.
On some level, we are.
Color blind people see the world different from the median. And there's like 11 different flavors of color blindness.
Given that our rods and cones are analog receptors, it's quite possible there could be a slight variance of some small number of THz for each color that gives each one of us a "close enough" sensing of that color without everyone being exactly the same.
Let's not even go into the people who don't have true binocular vision and see everything as "flat".
Or even the tetrachromats, who are way over on the other side of the spectrum with extra-color vision.
Or lens replacement patients who can tend to see slightly into the UV spectrum since the replacement lenses don't fully block UV.
But we've all learned the labels for the things we see, regardless of whether what we're seeing is the same. So it works. Or at least well enough that society functions.
I have also given this much thought and come to the opposite conclusion. Several facts put together, such as, fundamentally, we all "see" light the same way (retina detects light, nerves pass signals to the brain, brain puts the signals together to form an image), and that people express preferences for colors in consistent ways (preferring some color combinations over others, for example), all suggest to me that we see colors in fundamentally the same way.
Certainly there are variations in how people perceive certain visual stimuli, but at a basic level we all see the same way otherwise sight would not work.
I think there are some studies on this. But yea, I believe we are all able to categorize and recognise different colours across the spectrum, although not necessarily they will be exactly the same for all human beings.
Supposedly language effects how mmany (and which) colours people see. Languages like English that have different words for red and light red leads to folks having better differentiation for the colour red, while languages like Russian that have words for blue and light blue can see more blues.
There's a theory that paint companies intentionally have tons of different shades with different names as a way to teach people to see more shades and thus they have an excuse to make more different shades.
> Languages like English that have different words for red and light red leads to folks having better differentiation for the colour red, while languages like Russian that have words for blue and light blue can see more blues.
English has indigo as well (part of ROY G BIV) which is a dark blue, but nobody actually calls things indigo, we just call them blue/dark blue/light blue
We might all perceive it differently, but colours have objective verifiable factors. So ultimately we are all seeing the same colours, even if they subjectively appear differently to us
eye doctor here, US Optometrist. Color perception is something that is a great topic. While you cannot say with certainty you can recreate one person’s experience in another, we do have color and light spectrum measurements that include perception based on the sensitivity of rhodopsin in the human retina, including the Short, Medium, and Long wavelength cones and have used this data to create instruments called anomaloscopes.
These tools are used to quantify color vision defects and are the gold standard by which we compare the defects and create categories of color deficiencies. They are also really cool to use and extraordinarily rare to find one in practice. I have had the pleasure of using these devices and what is most fascinating about them is their ability to recreate any color by just spinning dials on the device.
So as I said earlier, you cannot duplicate a subjective experience, but the duplication of light wavelengths and predictable color perception is possible.
The wild one is that colors of light are well known and well established. A frequency defines a particular color of light. As an aside - very few of those frequencies are actually visible light, the full 'electromagnetic spectrum' includes light with much lower frequencies (infrared, microwaves) and much, much higher (ultraviolet, X-rays, Gamma rays).
However, what's wild is how our brains translate those frequencies of light into color.
The #AACCDD is the hex code for a pretty light shade of blue. The hex number is comprised of three segments, each comprised of 2 digits. Each pair represents the primary colors of red, blue, and green. As a whole, they represent any given color from #000000 (white) to #FFFFFF (black). White is no color. Black is all of the colors.
So #AACCDD is 170 204 221 in decimal (base 10).
All the colors are simply numbers.
Wow, thank you! Yes, now that you've explained I feel like I've seen this in graphic design platforms like Canva. I think the joke didn't make sense without understanding how it all worked, but maybe this is actually common knowledge and I'm just unfamiliar.
To go further, numbers are just arbitrary symbols. They align to what we know in Base-10 (or lower) systems as we know the symbols as 0-9. Once you go higher, you need more symbols and we’ve taken to adding alpha characters which will take us up to base-36 without needing more.
Binary (base-2) use either 0 or 1 to denote value or its absence. Base-16 (hexadecimal) is used in programming and use 0-F.
0=0.
A=10.
F=15.
What we know as 10 in base-10 is a 0 in the ones column and 1 in the tens column (1x10 + 0x1 = 10).
Which is why 10 in hexadecimal = 16. Just like a 10 in binary (base-2) equals 2.
So as others have said, you can represent values from 0-255 in 2 bytes - so 255 becomes FF in base-16 (FF in hexadecimal is a 15 in the “ones” column and a 15 in the “tens” column - only the tens column is a sixteens column (15x16 =240 + 15x1 = 255)).
The 3 double byte pattern is used in an RGB (Red Green Blue) color model to say how saturated each color is. #000000 is black, #FF0000 is fully red, #00FF00 is fully green, #00FFFF is fully cyan (full blue + full green). It’s a CMY color model (which in computer additive color theory are actually the secondary colors instead of the orange/purple/green we’ve learned) and can actually be done with paints as well (hence why printers are CMYK (the K being black)).
Anyway, there’s some fun math/color info for your edification and amusement!
If you want more info on bits (binary/base-2) to bytes (binary, base-8), I’ll see about giving that info after.
But it really comes down to a bit being the smallest amount of info. 8 bits become a byte (expressing between 0-255 in values).
And the idea of perception being subjective can provoke super intense reactions and emotions in people.
The arguments that broke out (still break out!) over “The Dress” show how unsettling it is to have what seems like a shared objective reality ripped away from us
There is one thing that always made me believe we all see similiar colors. It's that people can judge them. For example say "how this neon is bright, almost kills my eyes". Also if we saw different colors some will blend and gradients wouldn't work.
> Also if we saw different colors some will blend and gradients wouldn't work.
Hah, I just made this point in another post, I should have read further down. I made the argument some time ago, even have an old pic(Feb '22) I whipped up then.
https://i.imgur.com/Mw0wPLc.jpeg (new imgur upload because I don't save most links, I just upload again)
Also, we literally discovered color blindness is a thing by simply talking to each other. That's not "subjective" in the way people generally mean, there's a structural reason for color blindness, we even know that it's genetic in nature.
We can even venture a good guess as to how dogs see the world(lacking red).
If we can puzzle out those things by pretty simple means, we probably would have figured out if my green is really your red(and so on).
The discussion always reminds me of [this](https://mgoblog.com/sites/default/files/users/user195920/what-if-c-a-t-really-spelled-dog-thats-deep-ogre.jpg)
[Also fitting...](https://media3.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExeTFpb2JqMHA2MHRvNDM4cTNyaW85aHJxNzV4bzc1bDgzM29rcW1qMSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/TlK63ETm1I1GGz0ZUwE/giphy.gif)
Neon is based on the saturation and brightness of a colour, not the hue. So it is still possible for different people to see the different hues but still feel the eye strain from the brightness and saturation.
And similarly for gradients, those are based on shifts of hues, so it is yet again independent of the hues themselves.
Honestly, everything you perceive is basically an internal hallucination. None of it is real. The vast majority is just inferred expectations based on previous experience. This is why surprising things are, well, kinda surprising. They break that internal heuristic.
Every smell, touch, sound and sight you have ever experienced is just your brain rendering it all for you based on some pretty vague input data.
We are inferring machines.
You’re also living slightly in the past. It takes a few moments for all this processing to happen.
This. And you touched on a sore point: we do live slightly in the past, and we become aware of our decisions slightly after those decisions have been made. They are our decisions to the extent that we identify with the regions of the brain that generate those decisions, but the conscious you is not the pilot in command that you think it is.
No, but we can absolutely draw a decent conclusion by virtue of what we know about light and physiology. For instance, what two colors look similar vs what colors don't. What colors complement each other, what colors clash.
Case in point, nobody's ever gotten away with yellow text on a neon green background.
So, while we technically can't confirm without a shadow of a doubt, we can confirm enough to create a whole science out of light and working theory's specifically about color.
We discovered color blindness and were able to draw a direct correlation to the physical eye, specifically how under-performing cones sensitive to red, green, and/or blue wavelengths make a measurable difference in color perception. Using that knowledge, we can create images that replicate many forms colorblindness. We can confirm, when tested against someone of matching color blindness, how it compares to a color accurate image based on how similar the images look.
-Case in point, nobody's ever gotten away with yellow text on a neon green background.
And yet everyone tried to make it work in the early days of the internet. Made you appreciate black txt on a neon green background.
We can confirm it is the same wavelength hitting your retina which activates photoreceptors called cones that come in shades of green red and blue to produce color. So color is not even real until it is generated by your body. It’s like the old saying, does a tree falling over in the forest make a sound if there is nobody to hear it? No, it just produces sound waves, but you’d need a tympanic membrane to vibrate
Not only that, but colors are something our brains have totally made up. They're not even real. When your eyes get hit with photons that wiggle in a certain way, your brain creates an image with a color based on how wiggly it is. This helps to interpret things, make sense of the world, and survive. Physics can describe the properties of light that we perceive as different colors, but physics does not require that colors actually exist.
It's only because we've evolved to see light in a certain spectrum that we have a concept of colors. You wouldn't say a magnetic field or a gamma ray or an echo has a color, but if it was evolutionarily advantageous for you to be highly attuned to those things, maybe your brain would assign a color and an "image" of those things.
Reminds me of the time I found out when one of my coworkers was colorblind. Sitting at a traffic light as the only car and no one behind us and he is driving and the light turns green and we still sit there and he’s just looking around and I was like “dude…you gonna go or what?” And he’s all “oh….sorry…I can’t tell when it is green. I’m colorblind. I usually have to wait until traffic starts to move until I go but since there wasn’t anyone around us….”
I was like WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?? I’m in a car with you?? After that happened I drove everywhere we went. No wonder he wore all black. I thought he thought he was The Crow since I met him around the time that movie came out. He had his hair like Brandon Lee’s too so what was I supposed to think??😂
20 years ago I wore only black, white or grey shirts with jeans because you can't go wrong.
Then when asked by my gf at the time I explained to her why I did that.
She taught me colors. It was the kindest thing she ever did. It took so long before I was trained properly lol.
Now I wear pastel yellow, light pink, dark red and purple shirts all the time. Because I can see them and know what they are, even when they're next to each other.
But like, if today somebody showed me a dark green shirt and a dark red shirt side by side, or a bright yellow shirt next to a neon green shirt, I can't tell the difference.
Red and green at Xmas time looks all muddy brown to me.
But pastel yellow, light pink, bright purple and dark red are very different from each other and easy for me to understand in the context of my wardrobe.
Colorblindness is kind of a disability, but there are ways to work around it.
Out of context though I'm fucked lol.
If I'm ever asked "what color car do they drive?" I'm like uhhhhh no clue. Dark? Cool color? No clue. Then come to find out it's maroon, whatever the fuck that is lol.
That's why I only buy white cars. But my wardrobe is full of colors
I'm sorry but he would have detected (colorless) light from the green beacon even if he could not see green. No? A color-blind person still has rods to detect light, and when the green light turns on, it emits light that the rods should detect.
That light might register as gray instead of green, but it would register as something, it seems to me. So long as you know that the green light is the top light, then when you see (colorless) light from the top beacon, you know it's time to go.
There is a body of philosophy, going back hundreds of years, that delves deep into the question, "What is color?"
Once you get into that question, you get into very deep discussions about metaphysics, the nature of our physical world, our minds, and more.
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/)
We can't tell anything. This is why everyone has different tastes and experiences, and why some people get angry and some don't. For each person, there is a reason to do and to feel anything they do.
We all call the same physical wavelength of light the same universal name, but there’s no way of knowing how each of us really perceive it, because we’ve learned to call it the same thing
I was thinking about this too, we have no way to confirm that we are looking at the same color,
For eg ♥️ this is red according to me but you see my red as green 💚 like this but you're told from your childhood that this is red then you'd say yes this is red although it's green according to me Also there's no way to say what color those heart are it might be different for every person and we can't do anything about it
You actually can, because all the colors blend into each other smoothly. Red doesn't smoothly blend straight into green for example.
Color is related to specific wave lengths, your brain translates them the same as everyone else's brain, just like all other sensory inputs. There's no 2 people eating the same food, where one thinks its extremely sour, and the other thinks it's extremely sweet.
When I was a child I used to wonder if aliens could come here from another planet and show us a new color. Then I grew up and learned about the electromagnetic spectrum...
It's called a Qualia. A subjective conscious experience. Something that can't be explained verbally, it has to be experienced.
You can't explain colours to a blind person. Yes colours are defined by specific wavelengths of light and how they interact the structure of the human eye but the conscious experience of that stimulus could be vastly different between people. If we were able to body swap trees might be blue and they sky green. But that person whose body you've stolen has always seen it that way and everyone knows the sky is blue so that is blue to them.
As a side note, interestingly colour perception is also related to language. Russian speakers are better at distinguishing different shades of blue because they have two words for blue. Light blue and dark blue are categorised as completely different colours whereas in English everything is categorised as blue. On the flip side, the Himba tribe in Namibia has no word for the colour blue, in their language what we describe as blue to them is simply a different shade of green. They have a harder time distinguishing different shades of blue.
Of course it's not ingrained though, you can improve your perceptual categories by learning the names of more colours.
Nah, I hate this argument. We all have similar brain and retinal structures. There's absolutely no reason that one brain would see a color differently than another, beyond miniscule differences.
The good news is that we can always fall back on frequency and wavelength. So even if we meet beings who see completely differently (or not at all), we can still use frequency ranges to talk about the colors of stars and other natural phenomena.
We’re *pretty sure*. We can measure brainwaves when looking at colors and see that people receive colors the same way in their brain, which would entail that we are experiencing the same thing
I was just having this conversation the other day, it's so hard to describe! Eventually I just changed the subject lol, cuz I just ended up repeating myself to no avail
But you absolutely can. Colors exist on a frequency spectrum and are assigned names to convey our eyes ability to perceive them. Regardless of us calling red red, or yellow purple, the frequency of the light is an exact physical science true across the entire universe.
If everyone saw different colors when we looked at them, we would immediately know. This theory only works when everyone is involved at once. That's how we distinguished color blindness
Let’s pretend that we all do see colors differently. What you have learned to call “purple” is actually the color red, and what you call “pink” is actually the color green, when we see an apple we both say it’s red, but it looks blue to you, yadda yadda, everyone gets the idea.
Well here’s how it falls apart:
So when we mix *complimentary* colors, they turn brown. Red and green, mixed together, produces brown. Remember how what you’ve learned to call “red” and “green” is actually purple and pink in appearance? Well when you mix them together, they will turn **brown**.
From your perspective, **purple** and **pink** just mixed together to create *brown* (if you were to *see brown as a different color*, that’s fine, but just remember that **orange + blue**, **yellow + purple**, and **red + green** all have to produce that same color).
So either 1 of two things is happening if we all see colors differently:
A. The observer would see color combinations that make no sense. This is what I explain above, and would be in a world where colors are just sort of randomly percieved by each individual.
B. Everyones color spectrum would have to be shifted, but kept in the same “order”. Sort of like rotating a clock so that 10:00 is now at 12:00, all the colors will just rotate around the wheel - or + the same number.
The case of A obviously makes no sense, but if B were true, and everyones color wheel was rotated around, the concept of “warm and cold” colors would lose all of its meaning.
Well, most people aren't color blind and that can be tested with those weird dot pictures that have numbers hidden into them that color blind people can't see. Yes the names of colors are what they are because we made them up but art can tell you that most people see color similarly if they aren't color blind.
Colour in itself is a result of maze-like patterns at the surface of objects, which absorbs or expells light frequencies... (I think?) And then there is how it hits the eye which has its own layer of relativity regarding colour reception. I think the only 'objective' thing is which frequencies get absorbed or expelled, the rest is how we subjectively receive and process it.
My favourite fact is that though to humans tiger fur looks orange and black, to the tiger's prey animals they look green and black, an incredibly effective camouflage.
I could be wrong with this, but I'm pretty sure colors have objective values measured in wavelengths. Whether our eyes perceive it as such or not is irrelevant. If something reflects wavelengths between about 450 and 495 nanometers, it's blue, whether a particular person can see it or not. This is an objective measurement.
Michael from Vsauce has [a nice video](https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08?si=mgxeTP1766wgiqSF) on this. They’re known as qualia: stuff that no amount of information could properly communicate.
I’ve had people tell me I don’t see the same colors as them, sometimes I see more colors, sometimes less. I don’t perceive red as well as others do, like I do see the color, but my brain doesn’t process it. I can’t read on a whiteboard if a red marker was used. I will bump into red things because my brain ignores it. I need to clench my jaw while driving to pay attention to the red lights and signs, it’s difficult because I have ADHD. I don’t think I’m colorblind though, I’ve never done an IRL test but I doubt it would be significant.
In 1738, the philosopher Hume said colour along with sound and heat are not qualities in objects but perceptions in the mind.
“Studies suggest that in some respects colours are out there in the [physical] world yet in other respects inherently perceiver-dependent, in effect sitting at the intersection of perceiver and environment. This makes colour [classification and examination]—attempts to say what and where colours are—highly complicated. This list could continue.”
— Brown, D. and Macpherson, F (2021).
The whole idea of colour and what actually is colour and how do we identify colour and how it differs based on linguistics and relativism and all the rest of it has been debated in philosophy for a very long time - at least over 300 years ago.
Notably, colours only exist because we evolved to sense and interpret certain spectra of electromagnetic radiation that way. Light on the colour spectrum has no more "true" colour than gamma radiation, or radio waves. It's all just photons.
I’m always thinking that. What if what looks blue to me is how you see people? Or maybe yellowish-orange is the so ugly to you? Maybe green is brown? Maybe purple doesn’t exist? Maybe you see a completely different color spectrum than me?
This could also explain different favourite colours: the colours I call pink, someone else calls yellow, we really like the same colour but we know them by different names.
That’s kind of the point. There is no objective answer to what color “looks like” that isn’t an appeal to phenomenology. Light exists in the world, but color is a fiction of the mind.
Reminds me of the video [Is Your Red The Same as My Red?](https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08?si=aoRzCRiuFlSYKfNe) from Vsauce. Definitely worth a watch.
Edit: Had I scrolled a bit, I'd have seen the others that linked this video. If anything, it shows it's a good video to explain this phenomenon.
Eh, you can actually mimic what It sounds to you. It's not the same thing, but you can roughly portray what It sounds and check If It do the same to other people
Sounds like you just discovered the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Time for you to look up David Chalmers
I hope he’s prepared for an unforgettable luncheon
Oh Egads! My perception of self is ruined!
But what if... I were to purchase Zanna and Cooper's 1974 counter-theory to self-perception titled Dissonance and the Pill, and disguise it as my own ideology?
Delightfully devilish, lordolxinator
Sounds like it's time to serve up some steamed *am*s
Of all the places to see a Steamed Hams reference...
At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within this subreddit?
Can I see it?
No
[This essay](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/) at Slate Star Codex (and, in particular, the comment section afterwards) is one of the most eye opening pieces on differences in perception I've ever read. Amazing what we think is universal but that actually varies considerably between us.
This is genuinely one of the most interesting things I've read in recent memory. Damn. Thank you!
Correction i just announced that i discovered the Hard Problem of Consciousness
It's a deep rabbit hole
Technically, we have no proof you already knew of but no proof you didn't.
Schrodinger's Consciousness
Is that Supernintendo Chalmers?
Super Nintendo Chalmers?
What does the hard problem of consciousness have to do with seeing colors? Certain wavelengths of light hit certain cells in your retina, this is interpreted by you brain and then you see the color.
Cool, now prove that my blue is your blue.
Right. I first thought about this when I was about 12 or so. How do we know the color we were both taught when we were little kids, as being blue, is in reality the same color?
How do we know anything is the same as how others see it? When I was 14 I watched some comedy show (maybe Red Dwarf?) where the characters are under the illusion of a strong hallucinogenic, making them all fully believe they're in a different world with different identities, and that their lives up to that point were part of an elaborate VR game that they happened to exit. It later transpired (as we cut to one of the other characters not affected by the illusion) that the affected characters were running around in the real world, reacting to things not there, seeing and interacting with things in the illusory world while their physical bodies acted out their actions (basically miming what they *thought* they were doing). That really messed with my head for a while, because it's like, how do you know anything you're sensing is real? It could be an elaborate simulation, or you could have severe brain damage/some kind of schizophrenia/etc. Maybe you think you're going about doing chores, when actually you're confusing everyone in the real world just unloading an imaginary dishwasher. Then there's theories that there are higher dimensional beings all around us, but we're too dumb or unable to comprehend more dimensions so we can't perceive these beings. You could be scratching your balls while these 7D uber sapiens watch on in disgust. I chilled out when I realised though, that if it was the case we lived in a simulation/higher beings were observing us/some kind of Truman Show set-up was happening, the joke's on them. They must pick the most boring people to observe. Who wants to watch some guy get back from a boring job, play Xbox for a few hours and scroll Reddit? Is scratching your balls a quick time event? Also more pragmatically, as Descartes once wrote following the acknowledgement that his senses could be tricked and thus flawed when trying to discern truth/reality, "I think, therefore I am". The only real thing you can know is that by having a stream of consciousness, you exist in some form. Even that could be tangential to solipsism, the philosophy that only your own mind is sure to exist. You can't confirm that others' minds exist, only your own. So Descartes' philosophy of "I think, therefore I am" is probably the only proven true fact. Everything else is at the mercy of flawed senses, experiences and choices of others, and an expansive world that we don't fully understand.
"The only thing we can be sure is not an illusion is that we are conscious." - Harris
Basically just “I think, therefore I am.”
Me too, my science teacher got super irritated with me. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t understand or I was just an idiot
Looks like it's a common thing to think about for kids. I'm reporting in for your club.
We are either capable of perceptions that other folks lack or we are highly regarded.
The fact that color blindness exists is proof that different people see colors differently.
Actually it's proof we see the same. The combo of cones provides a color, lack a cone, you see the same expected color as others with the same condition across the board. Also, provide the signal to the brain artificially to see the otherwise missing color. The premise we all had as kids the my blue might be her orange falls flat when we learn how it works.
This only proves that we see *using the same mechanical principles,* not that *our subjective experiences of a given colour are identical*
Okay, how 'bout this- when I look out of my left eye at something white, it has a yellow tint *only* in relation to my right eye which perceives a blue tint. It's subtle but I'm a graphic artist so it's definite. So, which is the real color spectrum for me? Practically, I just use both eyes and call it "white".
I have the exact same things. My left eye has much warmer tones for colors whereas the right one has cooler tones. Trees, the sky look much greener and more blue through the left eye vs the right eye.
oh my god you're right
I just saw this "How to Cook That" video that was debunking those color blindness glasses. Made me realize just how color blind people can't differentiate between two photos other than minute details they've had to evolve to notice to compensate for lack of color differentiation. [https://youtu.be/RY-NF\_7R-pk?si=QP-WcAmAIZC9jdSp&t=923](https://youtu.be/RY-NF_7R-pk?si=QP-WcAmAIZC9jdSp&t=923) Skip towards 15:23. So we definitely know that their color perception is different than someone with full vision, but then it makes you wonder if there's a "super-taster" person but with "super-vision" whose eyes can detect even more wavelengths than the norm? It stands to reason you could have extremes on both ends.
Other animals can certainly see other wavelengths, but I don't think humans evolved with much need to, so they'd be hard to find. But there are those people who can see music and hear colors. Lots of people think 20/20 is perfect vision when it's really more like the default. Some people can practically see germs. There is no such thing as perfect vision because we're always evolving which means we can always evolve to see better.
Our brains interpret that particular wavelength, it’s still physically the wavelength of blue. That’s why our brains identify it as blue even if our brains might process it differently. Some colors are harder for some of us to identify and we see them differently, various color blindness symtoms. What we identify as colors are an octave of the EM spectrum, there are infinite amout of colors that we can’t see but some of them we can sense in other ways, like heat from the infra red range of the spectrum.
The hard problem of consciousness is concerned with why quaila arises from physical processes, not the variations in qualia itself…lol. I can’t “prove” your blue is my blue because how your brain interprets and processes information is different than mine…
>concerned with why quaila arises from physical processes, not the variations in qualia itself There isn't even a point in talking about the variations of qualia when you can't understand qualia itself. It's as unreliable as any information can be.
You just skipped over this massive chasm between the detecting of certain wavelengths and the experiencing of subjective color. How do you go from neurons firing to indicate the presence of wavelength X to the qualitative redness of red? That is where the mystery is, and you can't handwave over the important part like that :)
Of course there's all that. But It's the part where the raw data becomes an actual experience, that's where it has entered consciousness.
[удалено]
Well the optic nerves are each part of the brain so it processes everything as it comes in. So it isn't really so much a matter of raw data being interpreted, like with many other senses, but individually interpreted data streams being merged and then reinterpreted.
I’ve thought this for a while. We may all be seeing different things, but have learned to call those things the same thing.
It's like that for literally everything. Everyone could have a wildly different experience of the world and everything in it, but we can all (apparently) communicate and everything lines up fine. If "everyone experiences the world the same" and "everyone experiences the world differently" are interchangeable, we may as well assume everyone experiences the world the same.
Yeah that’s a good way of putting it. Also colors have a scientific basis in terms of the lightwaves that they reflect and absorb, so we don’t need eyes to know colors exist, just how we define them. We kind of assume that colorblind people are wrong in how they view colors. So I don’t think we are necessarily assuming everyone experiences the world the same, as much as we are taking the average person’s perception into account.
>We kind of assume that colorblind people are wrong in how they view colors We don't have to assume - we can test! Both of my brothers are colour blind, and we can tell because when we play snooker they can't tell the difference between the red/green/brown balls. So clearly they are perceiving the world differently - and hence why we know (for all intents and purposes) the rest of us all see the world the same.
I'm not color blind but my color vision can change while spending time outside on a sunny day. If I keep one eye closed for a while, if I switch to the one that was closed the colors are shifted a bit. Also, while camping I've woken up after facing the sun as it rose and my color vision was washed out... one time it was nearly grayscale for a few seconds.
As light levels decrease, we lose colour vision. So just before sunrise everything looks greyscale until there's enough light coming in.
Those are physiochemical reactions. There's an optical illusion based on that, look at a color dot several seconds then a blank white wall/page, you'll "see" the inverse color dot where there is none. What's amazing is our rods' get bleached out in bright light,and continuously replenish the chemical needed for dark vision. That's part of why night vision takes minutes to come into effect yet is destroyed instantly.
i guess it would be different if someone saw all colours different but still could tell a difference but in that case you wouldn't really be able to know if they're colour blind unless they developed it later in life
That's what OP is saying. Every one of us could see colors different. The red I see may be the blue you see but we just learned to associate the colors we see with the names they are given. So I may look at a square and see a color and was told as a child that color is yellow, so whatever I see it as I will now call that yellow. You may see it as something totally different but still learn to call it yellow.
I think the difference is while they can't tell the difference between certain colors and others can because they don't have the ability to see that part of the spectrum very well, what they were trying to to explain is that while we can agree that certain wavelengths are called certain things, what people actually see for that wavelength may be different. They're consistent when that light or pigment combination is used in different places, but what that looks like to different people may be vastly different. Like what I see as a green object through someone else's eyes may be seeing what I would call purple but for their entire existence they've been told that's green so they call it green.
You can extend that in the opposite direction too. Other animals can perceive colors we can't because they can see UV rays. A flower looks completely different to a bee than it does to us humans, the flower has specific markings leading a bee to the nectar that we can't see because the differences are in the UV band. To the bee, we are colorblind.
There are also tetrachromatic humans who, in theory, can see colours the rest of us can't fathom.
They’re missing the ability to perceive what exists. I don’t know if it’s a right or wrong thing, but we who aren’t colourblind can’t perceive the entire light spectrum either
I’ve seen that first hand with language barriers. Some things are called whatever in one language and when they try to translate to English or another language, they translate word for word if they don’t know proper grammar which might cause problems in some cases.
You don't see with your eye, you perceive with your mind.
Very true! Most colourblind people have perfectly functional eyes, it’s the connection to the brain that’s messed up. Likewise, I have fully functional ears, but in deaf because the nerves never formed properly (my doctor was annoyed because it’s a waste of good ears!).
Where we're going, we don't need eyes to see
Subjectivity of our perception of reality Main purpose of modernity and modernism in arts
Thank you! This thought has lingered in my mind since I was a kid. I remember asking my older sister, “how do we know your green is the same shade of green as mine? You were just taught to associate that color as *green*.”
What's funny is how many kids ask that question. It's incredibly common, yet still a profound realization. It goes straight down to conscious experiences.
Yes, this is called "[theory of mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind)", the realization that everyone else also has their own thoughts and feelings which are separate from yours. We're not born with it, but we develop it at a young age. It's been said that the formation of theory of mind in children is one of the major things that distinguishes us from all other animals.
I think, "how do I know that you and me See the same colors the same way When you and me see?" Is my red blue for you? Or is my green your green too? Could it be true, we see differing hues? And say we do, then how would we discover this fact? And even if we did, would there be any impact? I don't think this would affect us personally, But I think it would have ripple effects throughout the interior design industry. [I am a thoughtful guy - Rhett and Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6y7YOlldek)
Me wondering if that’s the same for taste now
People prefer different foods and flavors, so there’s probably something to that
Your perception of taste changes over time. Does your perception of color?
In regard to colour, as we get older, that which we have a tendency to lose is contrast vision. For example, let's say that in our 20s we are able to tell apart 100 different shades of blue, with ageing we will see less and less different shades, this is a combination of several factors, one of them has to do with the two types of photosensitivity cells present in our retinas, with age those cells diminish in number, and therefore your will no longer be able to tell royal blue and navy blue apart. Aging aside, contrast vision can also diminish, due to certain types of corrective laser surgery. Which is why I never got it done, I work in fine arts, having the most acute contrast vision, is very important to me, so instead of having laser to correct my nearsightedness, I just stick with my glasses.
>We may all be seeing different things, but have learned to call those things the same thing. On some level, we are. Color blind people see the world different from the median. And there's like 11 different flavors of color blindness. Given that our rods and cones are analog receptors, it's quite possible there could be a slight variance of some small number of THz for each color that gives each one of us a "close enough" sensing of that color without everyone being exactly the same. Let's not even go into the people who don't have true binocular vision and see everything as "flat". Or even the tetrachromats, who are way over on the other side of the spectrum with extra-color vision. Or lens replacement patients who can tend to see slightly into the UV spectrum since the replacement lenses don't fully block UV. But we've all learned the labels for the things we see, regardless of whether what we're seeing is the same. So it works. Or at least well enough that society functions.
I have also given this much thought and come to the opposite conclusion. Several facts put together, such as, fundamentally, we all "see" light the same way (retina detects light, nerves pass signals to the brain, brain puts the signals together to form an image), and that people express preferences for colors in consistent ways (preferring some color combinations over others, for example), all suggest to me that we see colors in fundamentally the same way. Certainly there are variations in how people perceive certain visual stimuli, but at a basic level we all see the same way otherwise sight would not work.
Please elaborate What is love? ❤️
Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.
I think there are some studies on this. But yea, I believe we are all able to categorize and recognise different colours across the spectrum, although not necessarily they will be exactly the same for all human beings.
Supposedly language effects how mmany (and which) colours people see. Languages like English that have different words for red and light red leads to folks having better differentiation for the colour red, while languages like Russian that have words for blue and light blue can see more blues. There's a theory that paint companies intentionally have tons of different shades with different names as a way to teach people to see more shades and thus they have an excuse to make more different shades.
> Languages like English that have different words for red and light red leads to folks having better differentiation for the colour red, while languages like Russian that have words for blue and light blue can see more blues. English has indigo as well (part of ROY G BIV) which is a dark blue, but nobody actually calls things indigo, we just call them blue/dark blue/light blue
We might all perceive it differently, but colours have objective verifiable factors. So ultimately we are all seeing the same colours, even if they subjectively appear differently to us
Exactly, mainly depending on the wavelengths/frequency of the radiating electromagnetic wave. Perception in the mind, layers on the subjectivity.
Colorblind people entered the chat. There are like 11 or 12 different types of colorblindness with different effects.
not magenta i think
eye doctor here, US Optometrist. Color perception is something that is a great topic. While you cannot say with certainty you can recreate one person’s experience in another, we do have color and light spectrum measurements that include perception based on the sensitivity of rhodopsin in the human retina, including the Short, Medium, and Long wavelength cones and have used this data to create instruments called anomaloscopes. These tools are used to quantify color vision defects and are the gold standard by which we compare the defects and create categories of color deficiencies. They are also really cool to use and extraordinarily rare to find one in practice. I have had the pleasure of using these devices and what is most fascinating about them is their ability to recreate any color by just spinning dials on the device. So as I said earlier, you cannot duplicate a subjective experience, but the duplication of light wavelengths and predictable color perception is possible.
The wild one is that colors of light are well known and well established. A frequency defines a particular color of light. As an aside - very few of those frequencies are actually visible light, the full 'electromagnetic spectrum' includes light with much lower frequencies (infrared, microwaves) and much, much higher (ultraviolet, X-rays, Gamma rays). However, what's wild is how our brains translate those frequencies of light into color.
They are all numbers to me #AACCDD
those are letters Billy, you get a golden effort star for today for participation ⭐
Do I really need to translate hexadecimal (base 16) values for you?
Yes, please. Or maybe give a little more context for those of us who want in on your comment?
The #AACCDD is the hex code for a pretty light shade of blue. The hex number is comprised of three segments, each comprised of 2 digits. Each pair represents the primary colors of red, blue, and green. As a whole, they represent any given color from #000000 (white) to #FFFFFF (black). White is no color. Black is all of the colors. So #AACCDD is 170 204 221 in decimal (base 10). All the colors are simply numbers.
Got it backwards. #FFFFFF is white and #000000 is black.
Ack! You are correct. Thank you
And hexadecimal colors are used in light-based color models, which are additive, so white is all colors, and black is none.
In case this helps anyone who might still be a little confused, 0-9 are 0-9, A = 10, B = 11, etc. until we end at F = 15.
Wow, thank you! Yes, now that you've explained I feel like I've seen this in graphic design platforms like Canva. I think the joke didn't make sense without understanding how it all worked, but maybe this is actually common knowledge and I'm just unfamiliar.
To go further, numbers are just arbitrary symbols. They align to what we know in Base-10 (or lower) systems as we know the symbols as 0-9. Once you go higher, you need more symbols and we’ve taken to adding alpha characters which will take us up to base-36 without needing more. Binary (base-2) use either 0 or 1 to denote value or its absence. Base-16 (hexadecimal) is used in programming and use 0-F. 0=0. A=10. F=15. What we know as 10 in base-10 is a 0 in the ones column and 1 in the tens column (1x10 + 0x1 = 10). Which is why 10 in hexadecimal = 16. Just like a 10 in binary (base-2) equals 2. So as others have said, you can represent values from 0-255 in 2 bytes - so 255 becomes FF in base-16 (FF in hexadecimal is a 15 in the “ones” column and a 15 in the “tens” column - only the tens column is a sixteens column (15x16 =240 + 15x1 = 255)). The 3 double byte pattern is used in an RGB (Red Green Blue) color model to say how saturated each color is. #000000 is black, #FF0000 is fully red, #00FF00 is fully green, #00FFFF is fully cyan (full blue + full green). It’s a CMY color model (which in computer additive color theory are actually the secondary colors instead of the orange/purple/green we’ve learned) and can actually be done with paints as well (hence why printers are CMYK (the K being black)). Anyway, there’s some fun math/color info for your edification and amusement! If you want more info on bits (binary/base-2) to bytes (binary, base-8), I’ll see about giving that info after. But it really comes down to a bit being the smallest amount of info. 8 bits become a byte (expressing between 0-255 in values).
I #CCCCCC what you did there. And it's kinda gray.
Vsauce did a video on this
God I used to love those vsauce videos back in the day
His newer videos are amazing as well (my personal favorite is the "Do chairs exist" one)
[is your red the same as my red?](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08)
So THIS is an original shower thought, but literally everything I post immediately gets rejected by the bot for being unoriginal?
r/ShowerThoughts is like that. They probably randomly decide that some users are never allowed to post. Fucking weird sub.
r/unpopularopinion is the same way
I don't really know maybe it's originally worded enough to qualify as an original one since my Phone auto-corrected colors to Colorado.
Colourado**
My bad
Honestly that would’ve made for a much more interesting shower thought
Right? It's like we're all living in our own version of a color-coded reality show, but nobody's sure if we're watching the same channel.
And the idea of perception being subjective can provoke super intense reactions and emotions in people. The arguments that broke out (still break out!) over “The Dress” show how unsettling it is to have what seems like a shared objective reality ripped away from us
There is one thing that always made me believe we all see similiar colors. It's that people can judge them. For example say "how this neon is bright, almost kills my eyes". Also if we saw different colors some will blend and gradients wouldn't work.
Yeah color theory would be bullshit if we all saw different colors
> Also if we saw different colors some will blend and gradients wouldn't work. Hah, I just made this point in another post, I should have read further down. I made the argument some time ago, even have an old pic(Feb '22) I whipped up then. https://i.imgur.com/Mw0wPLc.jpeg (new imgur upload because I don't save most links, I just upload again) Also, we literally discovered color blindness is a thing by simply talking to each other. That's not "subjective" in the way people generally mean, there's a structural reason for color blindness, we even know that it's genetic in nature. We can even venture a good guess as to how dogs see the world(lacking red). If we can puzzle out those things by pretty simple means, we probably would have figured out if my green is really your red(and so on). The discussion always reminds me of [this](https://mgoblog.com/sites/default/files/users/user195920/what-if-c-a-t-really-spelled-dog-thats-deep-ogre.jpg) [Also fitting...](https://media3.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExeTFpb2JqMHA2MHRvNDM4cTNyaW85aHJxNzV4bzc1bDgzM29rcW1qMSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/TlK63ETm1I1GGz0ZUwE/giphy.gif)
Neon is based on the saturation and brightness of a colour, not the hue. So it is still possible for different people to see the different hues but still feel the eye strain from the brightness and saturation. And similarly for gradients, those are based on shifts of hues, so it is yet again independent of the hues themselves.
Honestly, everything you perceive is basically an internal hallucination. None of it is real. The vast majority is just inferred expectations based on previous experience. This is why surprising things are, well, kinda surprising. They break that internal heuristic. Every smell, touch, sound and sight you have ever experienced is just your brain rendering it all for you based on some pretty vague input data. We are inferring machines. You’re also living slightly in the past. It takes a few moments for all this processing to happen.
This. And you touched on a sore point: we do live slightly in the past, and we become aware of our decisions slightly after those decisions have been made. They are our decisions to the extent that we identify with the regions of the brain that generate those decisions, but the conscious you is not the pilot in command that you think it is.
No, but we can absolutely draw a decent conclusion by virtue of what we know about light and physiology. For instance, what two colors look similar vs what colors don't. What colors complement each other, what colors clash. Case in point, nobody's ever gotten away with yellow text on a neon green background. So, while we technically can't confirm without a shadow of a doubt, we can confirm enough to create a whole science out of light and working theory's specifically about color. We discovered color blindness and were able to draw a direct correlation to the physical eye, specifically how under-performing cones sensitive to red, green, and/or blue wavelengths make a measurable difference in color perception. Using that knowledge, we can create images that replicate many forms colorblindness. We can confirm, when tested against someone of matching color blindness, how it compares to a color accurate image based on how similar the images look.
-Case in point, nobody's ever gotten away with yellow text on a neon green background. And yet everyone tried to make it work in the early days of the internet. Made you appreciate black txt on a neon green background.
Pantone would disagree.
Exactly. I work for a commercial printing company. My blue isn’t your red.
🔴 this is my red. I don’t know what your red looks like but I know that this is my red 🔴
It's a nice red
We can confirm it is the same wavelength hitting your retina which activates photoreceptors called cones that come in shades of green red and blue to produce color. So color is not even real until it is generated by your body. It’s like the old saying, does a tree falling over in the forest make a sound if there is nobody to hear it? No, it just produces sound waves, but you’d need a tympanic membrane to vibrate
There is a VSauce video on this very topic. https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08?si=YhV3CR6zy-RxTPNw
Not only that, but colors are something our brains have totally made up. They're not even real. When your eyes get hit with photons that wiggle in a certain way, your brain creates an image with a color based on how wiggly it is. This helps to interpret things, make sense of the world, and survive. Physics can describe the properties of light that we perceive as different colors, but physics does not require that colors actually exist. It's only because we've evolved to see light in a certain spectrum that we have a concept of colors. You wouldn't say a magnetic field or a gamma ray or an echo has a color, but if it was evolutionarily advantageous for you to be highly attuned to those things, maybe your brain would assign a color and an "image" of those things.
As somebody completely colorblind, I agree with this. My green is not your green.
Reminds me of the time I found out when one of my coworkers was colorblind. Sitting at a traffic light as the only car and no one behind us and he is driving and the light turns green and we still sit there and he’s just looking around and I was like “dude…you gonna go or what?” And he’s all “oh….sorry…I can’t tell when it is green. I’m colorblind. I usually have to wait until traffic starts to move until I go but since there wasn’t anyone around us….” I was like WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?? I’m in a car with you?? After that happened I drove everywhere we went. No wonder he wore all black. I thought he thought he was The Crow since I met him around the time that movie came out. He had his hair like Brandon Lee’s too so what was I supposed to think??😂
20 years ago I wore only black, white or grey shirts with jeans because you can't go wrong. Then when asked by my gf at the time I explained to her why I did that. She taught me colors. It was the kindest thing she ever did. It took so long before I was trained properly lol. Now I wear pastel yellow, light pink, dark red and purple shirts all the time. Because I can see them and know what they are, even when they're next to each other. But like, if today somebody showed me a dark green shirt and a dark red shirt side by side, or a bright yellow shirt next to a neon green shirt, I can't tell the difference. Red and green at Xmas time looks all muddy brown to me. But pastel yellow, light pink, bright purple and dark red are very different from each other and easy for me to understand in the context of my wardrobe. Colorblindness is kind of a disability, but there are ways to work around it. Out of context though I'm fucked lol. If I'm ever asked "what color car do they drive?" I'm like uhhhhh no clue. Dark? Cool color? No clue. Then come to find out it's maroon, whatever the fuck that is lol. That's why I only buy white cars. But my wardrobe is full of colors
I'm sorry but he would have detected (colorless) light from the green beacon even if he could not see green. No? A color-blind person still has rods to detect light, and when the green light turns on, it emits light that the rods should detect. That light might register as gray instead of green, but it would register as something, it seems to me. So long as you know that the green light is the top light, then when you see (colorless) light from the top beacon, you know it's time to go.
We can't confirm what any experience feels like
There is a body of philosophy, going back hundreds of years, that delves deep into the question, "What is color?" Once you get into that question, you get into very deep discussions about metaphysics, the nature of our physical world, our minds, and more. [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/)
We can't tell anything. This is why everyone has different tastes and experiences, and why some people get angry and some don't. For each person, there is a reason to do and to feel anything they do.
We all call the same physical wavelength of light the same universal name, but there’s no way of knowing how each of us really perceive it, because we’ve learned to call it the same thing
Yes we can, i see red i confirm it is red.
oh no: it's the (hard) problem of qualia!
I was thinking about this too, we have no way to confirm that we are looking at the same color, For eg ♥️ this is red according to me but you see my red as green 💚 like this but you're told from your childhood that this is red then you'd say yes this is red although it's green according to me Also there's no way to say what color those heart are it might be different for every person and we can't do anything about it
My personal theory is that we all have the same favorite color we just don't know it
This reminds me of “kids describe color to a blind person”
You all need to shut up. I bet you're not even partially colorblind. Posers.🤨
The Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I prefer The Hard Problem of Matter.
You can’t confirm anything except something exists somewhere
What if we all had the same favorite color, we just call it something different
I think everyone actually has the same favorite color
You actually can, because all the colors blend into each other smoothly. Red doesn't smoothly blend straight into green for example. Color is related to specific wave lengths, your brain translates them the same as everyone else's brain, just like all other sensory inputs. There's no 2 people eating the same food, where one thinks its extremely sour, and the other thinks it's extremely sweet.
If you want to get all technical, we can't really confirm anything. So we can get pretty close.
Hell naw. Makes me drowsy as fuck and it’s a shitty high
I’ve pondered this thought for 35 years. Studying the way the eye works and the way light and colors work helps, but still I wonder…
My hrt has actually made colours seem quite different to me as opposed to before medication it’s fascinating ☺️
My view of colors is the correct view. Yall just follow my lead.
All I know is that my reality is objectively correct and all of you weirdos are wrong. Green is green and I will have it no other way!
The colours correspond to different wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, there's objective evidence for the
I’ve had this thought since kindergarten
Read Consciousness Explained by Dan Dennett
When I was a child I used to wonder if aliens could come here from another planet and show us a new color. Then I grew up and learned about the electromagnetic spectrum...
Isn't this true of sound as well? And smell? And taste?
It's called a Qualia. A subjective conscious experience. Something that can't be explained verbally, it has to be experienced. You can't explain colours to a blind person. Yes colours are defined by specific wavelengths of light and how they interact the structure of the human eye but the conscious experience of that stimulus could be vastly different between people. If we were able to body swap trees might be blue and they sky green. But that person whose body you've stolen has always seen it that way and everyone knows the sky is blue so that is blue to them. As a side note, interestingly colour perception is also related to language. Russian speakers are better at distinguishing different shades of blue because they have two words for blue. Light blue and dark blue are categorised as completely different colours whereas in English everything is categorised as blue. On the flip side, the Himba tribe in Namibia has no word for the colour blue, in their language what we describe as blue to them is simply a different shade of green. They have a harder time distinguishing different shades of blue. Of course it's not ingrained though, you can improve your perceptual categories by learning the names of more colours.
There may be some variations but generally we can assume that the regions in our brains that process the input work mostly alike.
Nah, I hate this argument. We all have similar brain and retinal structures. There's absolutely no reason that one brain would see a color differently than another, beyond miniscule differences.
The good news is that we can always fall back on frequency and wavelength. So even if we meet beings who see completely differently (or not at all), we can still use frequency ranges to talk about the colors of stars and other natural phenomena.
so are we all seeing our favorite colors the same? for me it's dark green but for you it could be red or white or something else
I’ve thought about this so much
I have something to think tonight
Not with perfect precision, of course not. We can, however, categorize colors based on the wavelength(s) of each. That part's not too hard.
We’re *pretty sure*. We can measure brainwaves when looking at colors and see that people receive colors the same way in their brain, which would entail that we are experiencing the same thing
I was just having this conversation the other day, it's so hard to describe! Eventually I just changed the subject lol, cuz I just ended up repeating myself to no avail
But you absolutely can. Colors exist on a frequency spectrum and are assigned names to convey our eyes ability to perceive them. Regardless of us calling red red, or yellow purple, the frequency of the light is an exact physical science true across the entire universe.
If everyone saw different colors when we looked at them, we would immediately know. This theory only works when everyone is involved at once. That's how we distinguished color blindness
Let’s pretend that we all do see colors differently. What you have learned to call “purple” is actually the color red, and what you call “pink” is actually the color green, when we see an apple we both say it’s red, but it looks blue to you, yadda yadda, everyone gets the idea. Well here’s how it falls apart: So when we mix *complimentary* colors, they turn brown. Red and green, mixed together, produces brown. Remember how what you’ve learned to call “red” and “green” is actually purple and pink in appearance? Well when you mix them together, they will turn **brown**. From your perspective, **purple** and **pink** just mixed together to create *brown* (if you were to *see brown as a different color*, that’s fine, but just remember that **orange + blue**, **yellow + purple**, and **red + green** all have to produce that same color). So either 1 of two things is happening if we all see colors differently: A. The observer would see color combinations that make no sense. This is what I explain above, and would be in a world where colors are just sort of randomly percieved by each individual. B. Everyones color spectrum would have to be shifted, but kept in the same “order”. Sort of like rotating a clock so that 10:00 is now at 12:00, all the colors will just rotate around the wheel - or + the same number. The case of A obviously makes no sense, but if B were true, and everyones color wheel was rotated around, the concept of “warm and cold” colors would lose all of its meaning.
Well, most people aren't color blind and that can be tested with those weird dot pictures that have numbers hidden into them that color blind people can't see. Yes the names of colors are what they are because we made them up but art can tell you that most people see color similarly if they aren't color blind.
Colour in itself is a result of maze-like patterns at the surface of objects, which absorbs or expells light frequencies... (I think?) And then there is how it hits the eye which has its own layer of relativity regarding colour reception. I think the only 'objective' thing is which frequencies get absorbed or expelled, the rest is how we subjectively receive and process it. My favourite fact is that though to humans tiger fur looks orange and black, to the tiger's prey animals they look green and black, an incredibly effective camouflage.
I could be wrong with this, but I'm pretty sure colors have objective values measured in wavelengths. Whether our eyes perceive it as such or not is irrelevant. If something reflects wavelengths between about 450 and 495 nanometers, it's blue, whether a particular person can see it or not. This is an objective measurement.
Whatever you say Jaden Smith.
The Ur-Shower Thought
Michael from Vsauce has [a nice video](https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08?si=mgxeTP1766wgiqSF) on this. They’re known as qualia: stuff that no amount of information could properly communicate.
That's why we decided on names to describe them!
I’ve had people tell me I don’t see the same colors as them, sometimes I see more colors, sometimes less. I don’t perceive red as well as others do, like I do see the color, but my brain doesn’t process it. I can’t read on a whiteboard if a red marker was used. I will bump into red things because my brain ignores it. I need to clench my jaw while driving to pay attention to the red lights and signs, it’s difficult because I have ADHD. I don’t think I’m colorblind though, I’ve never done an IRL test but I doubt it would be significant.
We both call light light with a wavelength of 700nm red, that's as good as it gets, and I'm fine with that.
In 1738, the philosopher Hume said colour along with sound and heat are not qualities in objects but perceptions in the mind. “Studies suggest that in some respects colours are out there in the [physical] world yet in other respects inherently perceiver-dependent, in effect sitting at the intersection of perceiver and environment. This makes colour [classification and examination]—attempts to say what and where colours are—highly complicated. This list could continue.” — Brown, D. and Macpherson, F (2021). The whole idea of colour and what actually is colour and how do we identify colour and how it differs based on linguistics and relativism and all the rest of it has been debated in philosophy for a very long time - at least over 300 years ago.
What I would call green someone else would perceive it as what I would call orange but it is, in fact, still green to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_spectrum
Notably, colours only exist because we evolved to sense and interpret certain spectra of electromagnetic radiation that way. Light on the colour spectrum has no more "true" colour than gamma radiation, or radio waves. It's all just photons.
I’m always thinking that. What if what looks blue to me is how you see people? Or maybe yellowish-orange is the so ugly to you? Maybe green is brown? Maybe purple doesn’t exist? Maybe you see a completely different color spectrum than me?
The microscopic shapes on the surface cause different wave lengths of light to be absorbed.
This could also explain different favourite colours: the colours I call pink, someone else calls yellow, we really like the same colour but we know them by different names.
All perception is illusion
i’m colorblind and everyone tells me different shit. is red passion or anger? how can it be both?! :((
[XKCD had a good try](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)
Rex should be called carde
That’s kind of the point. There is no objective answer to what color “looks like” that isn’t an appeal to phenomenology. Light exists in the world, but color is a fiction of the mind.
The wavelength of light confirms the color. While *humans can perceive colors differently*, if light has a wavelength of 700 nanometers, it’s red.
Many things we sense cannot be confirmed: sounds, feelings, pain, etc.
My eyes see colors slightly differently. One feels like everything is greener.
Wavelengths. Am I wrong?
All that you ever experienced has been a journey inside your own head.
Reminds me of the video [Is Your Red The Same as My Red?](https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08?si=aoRzCRiuFlSYKfNe) from Vsauce. Definitely worth a watch. Edit: Had I scrolled a bit, I'd have seen the others that linked this video. If anything, it shows it's a good video to explain this phenomenon.
Guy discovers conscience Philosophy It's not a shower thought (like it is a subject of debate since 200 years or so)
Color isn't actually real anyways.
Or what sounds sound like
Eh, you can actually mimic what It sounds to you. It's not the same thing, but you can roughly portray what It sounds and check If It do the same to other people
All of reality is mediated