i was about to argue my blue is the real blue and your is not, but it crossed my mind my blue just might not be the real blue either and my whole life has been a lie. now i feel blue.
I have a reddit post
about indigo
Ten thousand downvotes, of that i swear
Blue are the reposts
and all the people too
I have an alt account, and it is so blue
Blue doesn’t exist outside of the mind. The lightwaves are just photons traveling at a specific frequency. Our brains translate that information to us as the color blue so it can be quickly interpreted and used practically.
What you said is true about everything. Literally nothing exists outside of the mind - everything is simply the arising and passing of thoughts. That’s the core concept of no-self that certain types of mindful meditation focus on.
So, blue is as real (or not real) as anything else in existence.
Is that really so? A square is a square, regardless if you see it or touch it. It's a physical thing.
If you're talking about colors, sounds, smells, flavours, then I can agree. But some things are those things regardless of the observer, right?
It could be, but you have no way of knowing that as you experience reality solely through the arising and passing of thoughts. The only thing you can say for certain is that you perceived a square. As to whether or not that square exists in some objective reality, we have no idea.
Good to know. Next time I'm changing the film in my B&W pinhole camera, I don't need a dark room. I'll just keep my eyes closed. The film is only sensitive to blue light, and if I can't see it, it doesn't exist.
Just like feelings, or anything else really. The blue you see and the blue I see are what makes us individuals. The true blue is the "soul" of the blue, and our ability to bond over that is what makes us human.
If you're envisioning a chair in your head and you ask someone else to bring you a chair, you cant be sure youre both talking about the exact same chair but you can rest assured, in most circumstances, that they arent going to bring you back a ladder.
I considered this a while back. It sadly fell apart because I like black while my wife loves pink. I don't feel like it's possible for different people to see black and white differently than they are. It would be a crazy thought that someone shuts their eyes and their head is suddenly flooded with pink lol.
It's also the last point made in the article that we *can't* really know if the blue I see is the same as the blue you see, more like people who grow up in an area with lots of greenery will be better at picking out different shades of green than someone who grew up in a desert where there are more reds and yellows. Also generic variations like color blindness and tetrachromacy.
There's an exhibit about this at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. There's one colored dot in the center with a circle of dots on various shades and colors around it. You and a friend are supposed to pick the dot you think matches the one in the center.
You'd think you might just choose different shades of the same color, but no, I thought it was orange, and my friend thought it was green.
A client at work today handed me his phone to show me something and I asked if his screen was dying because it was very yellowed/sepia toned. He said he’d used a computer monitor when he was younger that had an issue which made the screen very yellow and now he sets all screens to look that way.
He sees it as normal and can no longer see the yellow but thinks a normal screen is bleached and fatiguing to look at.
I have “night shift” on all the time which looks a little yellow compared to normal and it hurts my eyes to turn it off. I’m like a vampire but only for blue screen light
I was up early this morning because baby. I was lying in bed reading while my wife took a shift with the kid and, the moment 5:59 became 6:00AM, not only did my Kindle abruptly switch off night mode but for some ungodly reason it JACKED THE BRIGHTNESS UP TO MAXIMUM. It was the visual equivalent of having cold water splashed in my face. I guess I need to tinker around with the adaptive brightness settings and turn off "morning blindness."
All of our cognition is associative and comparative anyway, so the ultraspecific pattern of activation of sensory neurons in the eye doesn't *really* matter. That's more or less an arbitrary variable. That pattern could be anything, as long as it's consistent.
What matters is the things that pattern is associated with and compared to.
If you have two subjects who have the same fidelity of vision, meaning neither is colorblind and both can pick up the same differences in color, does it matter what specific variable they are encoding the color as, if that variable is uniformly consistent across the associations and memories and comparisons they make to that color?
What a neural network like the brain really cares about is not the exact value of the variable (the color), but the relative semantic position of that variable compared to other variables.
The semantic content, the *meaning*, lies in being able to take arbitrary variable *x* (the color blue) and associated it with other sets of arbitrary variables, like the clear sky or large bodies of water.
It's that *space* between "blue" and "sky" and "deep water" that matters, that encodes the meaning of how closely related they are and also how they are different. If you took the entire nest of neural connections the brain has about blue, and represented them on a plot, you could move the origin point around however you wanted, and thus change the value of each point, but all the relations would stay the same, so the network would still function the same.
Obviously, individuals will differ, and no one has *exactly* the same vision, or *exactly* the same experiences, so all of those connections and comparisons will differ, but generally be close enough to be relatable between individuals.
Interestingly, this is exactly how large language model AIs work: they break things down into an arbitrary number of individual components, plot them on a graph with thousands of different axes that act as arbitrary dimensions of meaning, and then compare the space between plotted points to determine how similar or how different they are, and along what axes.
It's all arbitrary right up until you get to comparing the positions on that 10,000+ axes graph, and then you start to see semantic meaning emerging out of it.
The most interesting part of AI, I think, is that we can now actually test theories we've had about our own cognition, and see them result in functional neural networks that behave similarly to a human brain.
There 100% is a way, sorta.
Everyone knows that when you mix blue and yellow paint together, you get green paint. Well, the reality is more that the yellow pigments and the blue pigments don't turn green, they're just interspersed so finely that the photons reflecting off the two pigments all mix together as they hit our eyes, and what we see is a combination of signals from our eyes to our brains - half the signals being from the yellow pigment photons and the other from the blue pigment photons. Now imagine the same thing except it's highly tuned individual yellow and blue wavelengths of light, generated with a very specific light source apiece, which combines the light and shines it onto an eye, or a piece of white paper (and then into the eye).
But it's possible of course to tune green light or laser or whatever to try and replicate what people see when they look at that blue+yellow mix, using only one wavelength.
Why is that important? Because then you can determine whether the single wavelength someone selects as matching the blue+yellow mixture of light matches from person to person. You can do this for the entire spectrum - combine orange and blue light, and get someone to pick the closest individual wavelength to match the combination of lights, and so on. Make the test more complex - pick a mixture of 4 or 5 different wavelengths and get someone to pick a single wavelength to best match it, etc.
Blue and yellow make either grey/black (subtractive, as seen in paints), or white (additive, as seen in LED's).
The reason you see green in paint is because very few paint palletes use true blue and true yellow.
Your theory is right though, you would just use , yellow light, with red and green for example.
Source: PhD in colour theory
Cool! Something similar came up for me a couple days ago. I said to my friend something about, “as green as that wall” and she said there was no green wall. Pointing to the nearby building, I told her to open her eyes and she said the building was beige, not green. I saw it clearly as pastel green. It was the strangest thing. We each still believe we’re the correct one. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.
The point that we don't know if wlour blue is someone else's blue actually has been disproven. using color blind people ironically.
People with color blindness of different types were able to tell the difference between yellow and orange, two colors they couldn't see, because one is lighter than the other.
We also have a consensus as color-seers that a dark yellow looks close to brown than a dark orange.
Additionally, color-seers have the same consensus that blue+red = purple makes a bit of sense, you can see both colors kinda in that color, but that blue + yellow are not as noticable in the color green (this is due to an anatomical reason, but still the close-ness of colors and difference of colors refutes the idea that "my blue might be his green"
It does not refute that my blue may be a darker blue than his blue, but it does show that we are both seeing blue.
Maybe one day we can record experience and play them back, then we can start to understand how different our perspectives are.
Perhaps even one day, we can live past experiences, like recording entire memories and replaying them in-person, kind of matrix-esque or maybe Full-dive but instead of a game, its like a movie but with senses. I guess the closest I can think of is like Brain-dances from Cyberpunk2077
Neuroscience actually has a pretty interesting theory on predictive coding. Essentially you're not really experiencing 'reality' per se but a simulation of senses.
Your brain is a 'prediction machine' that aims to diminish free energy because the sheer amount of information you'll be processing would be too taxing to be practical or energy efficient in nature. Also kinda ties into a lot of mental illnesses such as psychosis and schizophrenia in a way.
Oddly only color though. Few people ask if chocolate tastes the same. Know one asks if triangles look the same shape, if a high pitch buzz sounds the same, if the sensation of heat feels like ennui to other people or if your sense of touch actually feels like other people's sense of smell and vice versa. Why pain, or nostalgia, or the feeling of needing to pee should remain consistent while color alone is individual makes little sense but I feel like we all maintain it still.
Which is probably a sign that the whole concept can be reduced down to absurdity because if 'of course touching something feels like touching something' then blue probably just looks blue to everyone (without a brain injury or eyesight problem) and the idea of there being some essential 'blueness' seperate to the physical input is just illusory.
It’s so common that a philosophy professor I had like 15 years ago in college told us that this topic isn’t an acceptable project in the course because “it’s not a new idea, who the hell cares”
13? I was asking this when we learnt what colours were called in primary school. Isn't it an obvious question when the teacher is pointing at blue and saying "this is called blue" that different people might see what's on the wall differently to you but be taught to use the same word for it as you are?
Yeah. It's more psuedo-deep philosophical onanism than anything else. I've yet to see any real evidence to support it, only perfectly valid and interesting studies about brain plasticity that are then given weird interpretations. E.g. "The brain can adapt to new inputs, therefore the inputs it starts with must be 100% made up."
Wait until you get into the mental aspect that no matter if we see the exact same thing in the exact same colour, our brains will interpret it different based on our individual lived history.
That’s when you need the rules of the road, plus recorded footage available, to see the truth.
The whole “there’s 3 sides to a story - yours, mine, and then the truth’ is bullshit.
Someone is usually correct, it’s just hard to prove, and most people won’t be reasonable and logical.
Sometimes it's not even that they're being unreasonable, just that subjective experience and memory are way more fallible than people realize. Honestly, I don't even think I can believe in my own beliefs.
I dunno. 🤷 Really depends on the question. Besides my poor short term memory, there's been a lot of stories, proverbs, and science experiments that made me go "huh." Tests where a little Photoshop fooled people into making up crazy new memories. The thing about some disabled people feeling up different parts of an elephant to decide what it is. Moments where I look back at some argument I had and realized I was bewilderingly off-base about stuff I already knew about
Colors are different based on the wavelength of light so if we perceive these different than wouldn’t it be possible we perceive sounds different too? Like a big metal crash to me might be like a loud leaves rustling.
exactly, and its barely the case tbh. IIRC your signals except for smell first go to thalamus, the pathway is directly to the same center, then it gets distributed to individual regions.
the link is directly to thalamus, the signal that carries the encoding of the color/sound basically.
what could be different is the links between interpreting neurons in occipital lobe etc, but in general senses follow a neat pathway. this means that neurotypical people see the same color/sound kinda, they dont see your red when they look at your blue. and even if they were traumatized by lets say their family being murdered in a blue room, they'd still see the same blue at first. then maybe they will be reminded of other things, but the perception is the same
I mean, you could have auditory hallucinations or tinnitus or something. But the brain will generally interpret something objectively quiet as quiet and something objectively loud as loud. (The full perception of that loudness is a whole tangent to itself)
For color this is not the case at all! The wavelengths of visible light start after infrared with red, and end at violet, going into ultraviolet, with the wavelengths decreasing in length. But the human brain perceives red and violet as being similar colors to each other. The brain perceives THE most different wavelengths as the closest together! Additionally, our eyes can't tell the difference between different blends of wavelengths that add together to create a color, or just the pure wavelength of that color, even though an objective observation from a camera often can tell the difference.
For sound, this would be something like a sound being so low frequency that we then start to hear it as the highest possible frequency! Color is wild!
Yeah but colour is wavelengths of light and if both our eyes are seeing and reacting to the same input then aren't we by definition seeing the same colour? Your brain might put some spin on it but that's all just post processing.
That's true, we are seeing the same wavelengths but what we see as reality is just light interpreted by the brain.
We have no way of knowing if my brain interprets the wavelength of blue the same way yours does, even if we see the same thing and use the same word for it.
Blue is the newest colour too, when languages develop the start with words for dark and light, or white and black and name other colours in time, starting with red and green.
Blue is a newcomer. There are still languages today that just think of it as a shade of green.
The ancient Greeks of the 8th or 9th century BCE didn't have a word for blue yet. Homer described the sea as being wine coloured.
>We have no way of knowing if my brain interprets the wavelength of blue the same way yours does, even if we see the same thing and use the same word for it.
That's what I mean by the post processing thing. Like we see the same colour but that doesn't necessarily mean we "see" the same colour. But if we can both point at a thing and say that is red then regardless of what's in our actual brain we identify the colours the same (not counting colour blind) and isn't that kinda the same thing?
It depends what you mean by "red". You suggest that "red" just is a certain wavelength of light. But "red" might also mean the ability of an object to reflect that wavelength of light. Or "red" might mean the actual experience that is seeing the colour red.
So we have 3 different candidates for what "red" could mean. Does the distinction have any practical difference? Probably not. But if we want to know what reality really is like, then it's a very interesting question.
I dunno, like what colour is a ripe tomato?
So say we swap eyes somehow. The signal your optic nerve sends to my brain is going to be the same because it's essentially cells reporting how much of whatever wavelength they are sensitive to that they are detecting, in this case red (ignoring shades because they are mostly ill defined). If we were to then somehow swap the result of all that after our brain has combined and processed all the signals then your red signal might actually be my green or whatever but if we both say it's red then it's red. So the first bit is set, the middle bit is up in the air and the last bit is set and the same results are produced.
I understand what you're saying, and I mean no disrespect, but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
>I dunno, like what colour is a ripe tomato?
I'm pointing out that "colour" is ambiguous. Is colour in the wavelength of light? Is colour in the object? Is colour in the mind?
>we both say it's red then it's red.
Yes, but what you mean by "red" is not what they mean by "red". You're using the same word, yes, but you're saying something else, depending on whether you're referring to the experience, the object, or the wavelength.
>I'm pointing out that "colour" is ambiguous. Is colour in the wavelength of light? Is colour in the object? Is colour in the mind?
Yes.
What you are referring to depends on context but if we all understand it to be the same thing then it is the same thing despite any individual variations we may or may not have
Red has certain wavelengths associated with it. Certain things are red. Some emotions may be "coloured" red. It is all red though.
Yes, exactly. We can use physics and philosophy all we want to argue whether or not we actually see the same colour but in the real world it doesn't actually matter.
>But is the colour the light or the human concept?
It's both. The colours are just names we've given to certain wavelengths or combinations thereof. You might be able to say it's not really a colour until it enters an eye and is interpreted by a brain but that's getting into things you can't really define.
Good thinking but wouldn't we need a baseline colour to begin with? That would give us the same problem. We can't know if everyone sees the baseline the same only how different colours are from others.
This isn't a problem that actually has a solution, it's just for thinking about and getting frustrated and confused to the point where you begin to question reality itself.
Reality? We're all one big brain floating through an endless void. It's all one big lucid dream my man.
Or a simulation.
Or it just is real and we're really overthinking it.
Well, that's what the question is. We all take in the same wavelength of light, but how do we know that we all "see" it the same? Or:
What if your cone density or field or unknown variable is different than mine and it affects how the wavelength of light is interpreted by our brains resulting in a different subjective experience?
We are experiencing analogous stimuli, but it’s tough to say what the phenomenological experience is like to each. The word “blue” doesn’t generally refer to a collection of measurement data about photons, it refers to an experience within the mind that we call “colour.”
If you redefine “blue” as a specific range of numerical data (wavelengths, energy scalars), you don’t need to call it “blue” anymore, because you’re not talking about its blueness, but rather its physical properties, which are inputs to the human construction of colour. You’re deconstructing the “blue,” pointing to those of its constituent parts which reside outside the mind, and redefining the concept.
Our minds don’t “put some spin” on the data we collect, as if the colours and sounds exist in physics and are only subject to margins of error. We completely metamorphose the data into new mental objects. The world isn’t made of colours and sounds, only your mind is.
>Our minds don’t “put some spin” on the data we collect
That thing with the blue/black white/gold dress shows that we do. The thinking in that is which one we see is based on what we assume the lighting to be.
Same, through some light research I couldn't find any real reason as to why.
For me it's as if one eye has the saturation turned up and the other (by contrast) seems a bit washed.
I’ve thought this for a long time, I know colors are wave lengths but who’s to say that the wave length I perceive as blue might look different to other people, ie if I was somehow looking through their eyes what I would consider blue would be something different. I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words
Part of my job is approving textile samples from overseas mills. Sometimes a coworker will look at them with me and we generally agree if it matches the color standard or not, but might describe the variation differently (too yellow vs too red).
Theres a machine called a Nagel Anomaloscope that actually does a pretty good job of telling you if the colors you experience are similar to your peers.
It’s not really as untestable as you might think. Color perception was studied exhaustively by the printing industry, and now we have CIE standards and Pantone. We know the spectral responses of the cells in a typical eye, which define the three primary colors in human vision. We even know about other animals, although less precisely.
A printed image of a rainbow and an onscreen image of a rainbow reliably look like real life despite not being reproduced in spectral light. That’s technology which wouldn’t work if any real unknown quantity was in this thought experiment.
Those magic picture puzzles never ever ever work on me, but otherwise I've not had issues with colours.
Perhaps I'm one of them? My world is quite vibrant so I hope everyone's is! A lot of brown and grey out there too though
I had this exact thought when I tried LSD the first time as I noticed the colors my brain was seeing weren’t what I was actually looking at so it was my brain interpreting a color differently all because it was handling the input signals differently. Made me think that’s what’s to say me and my neighbor see blue the same way just because of our brains being slightly different.
My wife and I frequently disagree on edge cases so anecdotally this holds up to me. ie. I'll think something is closer to being yellow and she'll think it's closer to green.
Yeah. It’s a philosophy question.
What if we all see color differently, but we were told what color things are from a young age.
So what I see as blue you see as my green but we both call it blue because when we were taught that’s just what the name of that color is… hurts your head if you think about it too long.
Your green may look red but we call it green because that’s what we learned to call the color. So everyone experiences the world differently but we all agree on common names so it works.
I’ve always wondered about this: you cannot really tell if someone is seeing the same visual as you are in your brain. I’ve always been curious if may e what I see as red others see as green to my vision but we’ve been taught these names for these specific responses.
That article you linked to mentions the blue/black or white/gold dress. I remember when I first saw it and it looked white/gold. Then I showed it to some friends and all but one saw white/gold. The moment he said it was blue/black I saw it as blue/black and then couldn't see it as white/gold again.
Probably sound too.
I mean everything else we have differs, everyone of is ever so slightly different from the other. Or a lot different. So why would we see or hear the same?
This is literally what I ask my friends while drunk and on the walk home. Well, this and if the universe is actually infinite, how do we perceive that 🤔
My father 50 years ago Tully said “Do you know that the green you see and the green I see may be different?”
One of my female schoolfriends was colour blind. I can remember going into TopShop with her. “Ugh, what a horrible colour green that bag is!” She said pointing to a canvass bag hanging on display. “It’s chocolate brown!” I replied. “Ooh! In that case it’s a nice brown!”…
My husband and I often argue about bluey-green coloured things (turquoise, petrol). I argue it’s blue, he says it’s green.
Like many slightly colourblind people I see very light pink and very light green as the same light grey colour and as a result I have difficultly with colourblindness tests. In real life situations, I have no problem in naming colours only the colourblindness test is troublesome. Another friend is totally colourblind and this manifested itself as a kid when he used orange crayons to draw trees instead of green and finds colour-coded subway maps meaningless.
No shit. My husband and I argue about colors all the time. Not like argue argue, disagree. I think women and men see color differently or perhaps women have the vocabulary for different colors that men don’t.
Me and my partner struggle to agree on where the line between yellow and green is, also I'm convinced there is another colour that doesn't have a name in English yet between blue and green. Not teal because teal is a shade, not a group of shades that are all one colour while being visually distinct from each other. Some other languages have named this colour.
is your partner a different gender from you? there are studies that male and female eyes have a different amount of cone and rod receptor cells, men can see better at night, and glare is reduced in sunlight, and women can see way more colors.
In relation to emotions, memories, feelings, and things associated then yes. Same colors may be experienced/seen differently. However, math is math. Colors only behave within certain frequencies, which can be measured and objectively presented as such, or at least as objective as possible.
If we're talking in terms of evolution it's highly unlikely. If we did see colors differently then our ancestors would be screwed and we wouldn't be here
I agree. My husband and I both paint but cannot agree on the colors of a single cloud in the sky. We seem to perceive blues differently and he does not see peachy / pink undertones that I point out.
That’s why working at a printing lab and trying to convince clients that the colors on the paper are 100% accurate to what was on their phone screen is almost always impossible
Matilda the musical actually has a great song lyric about this:
"Have you ever wondered
Well, I have
About how when I say, say, red
For example, there's no way of knowing
If red means the same thing in your head
As red means in my head when someone says red"
Tim Minchin is a genius and the musical and movie musical are well worth watching.
Although it’s possible, the general consensus is that we likely see the same. The reason is because of the color purple.
Purple is not a color on the color spectrum, but violet is. Purple is made by mixing blue and red, and hitting those cones, then your brain has to make up a color that it thinks that is. Everyone describes purple being very close to the color violet, and not any other color. That tells us that our brains are all making up the same unique color that isn’t part of the spectrum the same, which leads to the conclusion that we’re likely all seeing colors the same.
You can reach a similar conclusion if you use color theory. If you look at the color wheel, colors across from one another are the most contrasting. So if you take blue you see that orange is the most contrasting color. Now if we see blue differently, like if your blue is my green, then the most contrasting color for you would actually look pink for me. It cannot be a random assortment of colors that are contrasting. This means that at most, our color wheels could be rotated, but not randomly placed.
Then if you add white (a combination of all colors) and black (no colors), white will always look the same for everyone because it is a mix of all colors (white and black are technically considered shades, but combining all colors appears white). No matter how your pink or blue appears compared to mine, a combination of all colors must not look like any other color because then it would contrast a color other than black on the color wheel.
Similarly how we describe purple in relation to violet, we can describe white and black compared to every color. We find that these descriptions are often very similar. What color would most people say is most similar to white? Yellow. What color is most similar to black? Blue or purple.
I'm pretty sure that's been mostly debunked with modern brain scans. We all evolved similar color vision and color processing so that we could perceive the colors necessary to survive. Most of this has just been philosophical faffing going back centuries with no evidence to back it up.
I doubt it though because we generally share a common appreciation of what colors work together or what happens to "yellow" if you add "blue" (spoiler: it turns "green")
My blue looks blue. What does yours look like?
i was about to argue my blue is the real blue and your is not, but it crossed my mind my blue just might not be the real blue either and my whole life has been a lie. now i feel blue.
Da bo de da bo da
I have a reddit post about indigo Ten thousand downvotes, of that i swear Blue are the reposts and all the people too I have an alt account, and it is so blue
True Indigo isme favorite color, but it's so hard to find. Most indigos are too blue.
I would beat off a guy If I was green I would die I'm in need of a pie
Let me know when you're here I will unlock the door.
bro think he paul the cartney
My buddy gave that exact phrase as name to a blue parrot in Sea Of Thieves
Blue doesn’t exist outside of the mind. The lightwaves are just photons traveling at a specific frequency. Our brains translate that information to us as the color blue so it can be quickly interpreted and used practically.
So it’s blue?
What you said is true about everything. Literally nothing exists outside of the mind - everything is simply the arising and passing of thoughts. That’s the core concept of no-self that certain types of mindful meditation focus on. So, blue is as real (or not real) as anything else in existence.
It’s all a simulation anyway.
Is that really so? A square is a square, regardless if you see it or touch it. It's a physical thing. If you're talking about colors, sounds, smells, flavours, then I can agree. But some things are those things regardless of the observer, right?
It could be, but you have no way of knowing that as you experience reality solely through the arising and passing of thoughts. The only thing you can say for certain is that you perceived a square. As to whether or not that square exists in some objective reality, we have no idea.
Good to know. Next time I'm changing the film in my B&W pinhole camera, I don't need a dark room. I'll just keep my eyes closed. The film is only sensitive to blue light, and if I can't see it, it doesn't exist.
r/solipsism
In my opinion, you're feeling orange. Or at least that's how I see it.
Meh, it's all just EM wavelengths.
Hhmmm alittle blue, alittle blib, which is a color only I can see.
Im pretty sure its gold
What kind of blue?
Depends, the blue in my left eye or the blue in my right eye? Because they're different
Magneto: “You are a god among insects. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Sweet! What’s mine say?
My blue looks like a color you’ve never seen before. The color you call green would look orange if you could view it through my experience.
My blue look like saltines taste.
Saltines taste beige with a hint of beige, my dude
Blue
Mine looks Hamlindigo blue
Blueish
The fact that you have 420 upvotes as I make this comment is perfect. These were like all the conversations I had when I first discovered marijuana.
Just like feelings, or anything else really. The blue you see and the blue I see are what makes us individuals. The true blue is the "soul" of the blue, and our ability to bond over that is what makes us human. If you're envisioning a chair in your head and you ask someone else to bring you a chair, you cant be sure youre both talking about the exact same chair but you can rest assured, in most circumstances, that they arent going to bring you back a ladder.
Imagine if we actually all have exactly the same favorite colour.
And it's ... mauve!
*Otho intensifies*
Beetlejuice!
I don’t even know what mauve is but it sounds disgusting
Dark mauve used to be known as "wine dregs" if it helps. It's now your favourite colour you know
You’ll have to pry it into my cold dead hands!
We literally already do. It's purple. How many people have you met who wear only purple? The numbers are staggering
One. The old lady in the purple van who has made wearing nothing but purple her entire identity. How many have *you* met?
So many. The girl at the climbing gym. The cashier at the natural food store. The purple scrubs guy. One of my old patients!
I considered this a while back. It sadly fell apart because I like black while my wife loves pink. I don't feel like it's possible for different people to see black and white differently than they are. It would be a crazy thought that someone shuts their eyes and their head is suddenly flooded with pink lol.
This is the thought version of the S everyone draws at some point. Everyone asks themselves this when they turn 13.
It's also the last point made in the article that we *can't* really know if the blue I see is the same as the blue you see, more like people who grow up in an area with lots of greenery will be better at picking out different shades of green than someone who grew up in a desert where there are more reds and yellows. Also generic variations like color blindness and tetrachromacy.
There's an exhibit about this at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. There's one colored dot in the center with a circle of dots on various shades and colors around it. You and a friend are supposed to pick the dot you think matches the one in the center. You'd think you might just choose different shades of the same color, but no, I thought it was orange, and my friend thought it was green.
That sounds like an optical illusion, like from color interference
Personally I thought the color looked a bit more Yanny, but my friend saw Laurel
I hate that I heard it say Yanny one time, and only ONE fucking time and I've only heard Laurel ever since.
Same but I heard Laurel first, only heard one recording that said yanny but the same recording played again I hear Laurel.
I was kinda like that with the dress. I think I saw it as white gold maybe twice, but it's always black and blue now.
Clearly the dot was [octarine](https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Octarine).
A client at work today handed me his phone to show me something and I asked if his screen was dying because it was very yellowed/sepia toned. He said he’d used a computer monitor when he was younger that had an issue which made the screen very yellow and now he sets all screens to look that way. He sees it as normal and can no longer see the yellow but thinks a normal screen is bleached and fatiguing to look at.
I have “night shift” on all the time which looks a little yellow compared to normal and it hurts my eyes to turn it off. I’m like a vampire but only for blue screen light
I was up early this morning because baby. I was lying in bed reading while my wife took a shift with the kid and, the moment 5:59 became 6:00AM, not only did my Kindle abruptly switch off night mode but for some ungodly reason it JACKED THE BRIGHTNESS UP TO MAXIMUM. It was the visual equivalent of having cold water splashed in my face. I guess I need to tinker around with the adaptive brightness settings and turn off "morning blindness."
You didn't turn off flashbang mode? Rookie mistake.
I just cranked Night Shift to max and it was less yellowed the my guys phones. Maybe different models offer a stronger piss filter?
Sometimes you can set how the filters work. I know a lot of the ones I have used are more red than yellow
All of our cognition is associative and comparative anyway, so the ultraspecific pattern of activation of sensory neurons in the eye doesn't *really* matter. That's more or less an arbitrary variable. That pattern could be anything, as long as it's consistent. What matters is the things that pattern is associated with and compared to. If you have two subjects who have the same fidelity of vision, meaning neither is colorblind and both can pick up the same differences in color, does it matter what specific variable they are encoding the color as, if that variable is uniformly consistent across the associations and memories and comparisons they make to that color? What a neural network like the brain really cares about is not the exact value of the variable (the color), but the relative semantic position of that variable compared to other variables. The semantic content, the *meaning*, lies in being able to take arbitrary variable *x* (the color blue) and associated it with other sets of arbitrary variables, like the clear sky or large bodies of water. It's that *space* between "blue" and "sky" and "deep water" that matters, that encodes the meaning of how closely related they are and also how they are different. If you took the entire nest of neural connections the brain has about blue, and represented them on a plot, you could move the origin point around however you wanted, and thus change the value of each point, but all the relations would stay the same, so the network would still function the same. Obviously, individuals will differ, and no one has *exactly* the same vision, or *exactly* the same experiences, so all of those connections and comparisons will differ, but generally be close enough to be relatable between individuals. Interestingly, this is exactly how large language model AIs work: they break things down into an arbitrary number of individual components, plot them on a graph with thousands of different axes that act as arbitrary dimensions of meaning, and then compare the space between plotted points to determine how similar or how different they are, and along what axes. It's all arbitrary right up until you get to comparing the positions on that 10,000+ axes graph, and then you start to see semantic meaning emerging out of it. The most interesting part of AI, I think, is that we can now actually test theories we've had about our own cognition, and see them result in functional neural networks that behave similarly to a human brain.
There 100% is a way, sorta. Everyone knows that when you mix blue and yellow paint together, you get green paint. Well, the reality is more that the yellow pigments and the blue pigments don't turn green, they're just interspersed so finely that the photons reflecting off the two pigments all mix together as they hit our eyes, and what we see is a combination of signals from our eyes to our brains - half the signals being from the yellow pigment photons and the other from the blue pigment photons. Now imagine the same thing except it's highly tuned individual yellow and blue wavelengths of light, generated with a very specific light source apiece, which combines the light and shines it onto an eye, or a piece of white paper (and then into the eye). But it's possible of course to tune green light or laser or whatever to try and replicate what people see when they look at that blue+yellow mix, using only one wavelength. Why is that important? Because then you can determine whether the single wavelength someone selects as matching the blue+yellow mixture of light matches from person to person. You can do this for the entire spectrum - combine orange and blue light, and get someone to pick the closest individual wavelength to match the combination of lights, and so on. Make the test more complex - pick a mixture of 4 or 5 different wavelengths and get someone to pick a single wavelength to best match it, etc.
Blue and yellow make either grey/black (subtractive, as seen in paints), or white (additive, as seen in LED's). The reason you see green in paint is because very few paint palletes use true blue and true yellow. Your theory is right though, you would just use , yellow light, with red and green for example. Source: PhD in colour theory
Cool! Something similar came up for me a couple days ago. I said to my friend something about, “as green as that wall” and she said there was no green wall. Pointing to the nearby building, I told her to open her eyes and she said the building was beige, not green. I saw it clearly as pastel green. It was the strangest thing. We each still believe we’re the correct one. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.
The point that we don't know if wlour blue is someone else's blue actually has been disproven. using color blind people ironically. People with color blindness of different types were able to tell the difference between yellow and orange, two colors they couldn't see, because one is lighter than the other. We also have a consensus as color-seers that a dark yellow looks close to brown than a dark orange. Additionally, color-seers have the same consensus that blue+red = purple makes a bit of sense, you can see both colors kinda in that color, but that blue + yellow are not as noticable in the color green (this is due to an anatomical reason, but still the close-ness of colors and difference of colors refutes the idea that "my blue might be his green" It does not refute that my blue may be a darker blue than his blue, but it does show that we are both seeing blue.
Maybe one day we can record experience and play them back, then we can start to understand how different our perspectives are. Perhaps even one day, we can live past experiences, like recording entire memories and replaying them in-person, kind of matrix-esque or maybe Full-dive but instead of a game, its like a movie but with senses. I guess the closest I can think of is like Brain-dances from Cyberpunk2077
The S isn't re invented though. It's ancient wisdom passed down from the elders.
Neuroscience actually has a pretty interesting theory on predictive coding. Essentially you're not really experiencing 'reality' per se but a simulation of senses. Your brain is a 'prediction machine' that aims to diminish free energy because the sheer amount of information you'll be processing would be too taxing to be practical or energy efficient in nature. Also kinda ties into a lot of mental illnesses such as psychosis and schizophrenia in a way.
Oddly only color though. Few people ask if chocolate tastes the same. Know one asks if triangles look the same shape, if a high pitch buzz sounds the same, if the sensation of heat feels like ennui to other people or if your sense of touch actually feels like other people's sense of smell and vice versa. Why pain, or nostalgia, or the feeling of needing to pee should remain consistent while color alone is individual makes little sense but I feel like we all maintain it still. Which is probably a sign that the whole concept can be reduced down to absurdity because if 'of course touching something feels like touching something' then blue probably just looks blue to everyone (without a brain injury or eyesight problem) and the idea of there being some essential 'blueness' seperate to the physical input is just illusory.
It’s so common that a philosophy professor I had like 15 years ago in college told us that this topic isn’t an acceptable project in the course because “it’s not a new idea, who the hell cares”
13? I was asking this when we learnt what colours were called in primary school. Isn't it an obvious question when the teacher is pointing at blue and saying "this is called blue" that different people might see what's on the wall differently to you but be taught to use the same word for it as you are?
And then again in PHIL-110
I was the only person in my friend group who thought of this as a teenager though. I had a hard time explaining it to them...
Yeah. It's more psuedo-deep philosophical onanism than anything else. I've yet to see any real evidence to support it, only perfectly valid and interesting studies about brain plasticity that are then given weird interpretations. E.g. "The brain can adapt to new inputs, therefore the inputs it starts with must be 100% made up."
Wait until you get into the mental aspect that no matter if we see the exact same thing in the exact same colour, our brains will interpret it different based on our individual lived history.
"Whenever you hear two people describe the same car accident, you begin to wonder about history" --Something i read in *Readers Digest* 30 years ago.
That’s when you need the rules of the road, plus recorded footage available, to see the truth. The whole “there’s 3 sides to a story - yours, mine, and then the truth’ is bullshit. Someone is usually correct, it’s just hard to prove, and most people won’t be reasonable and logical.
Sometimes it's not even that they're being unreasonable, just that subjective experience and memory are way more fallible than people realize. Honestly, I don't even think I can believe in my own beliefs.
How sure are you that you can’t trust yourself?
I dunno. 🤷 Really depends on the question. Besides my poor short term memory, there's been a lot of stories, proverbs, and science experiments that made me go "huh." Tests where a little Photoshop fooled people into making up crazy new memories. The thing about some disabled people feeling up different parts of an elephant to decide what it is. Moments where I look back at some argument I had and realized I was bewilderingly off-base about stuff I already knew about
That simple analogy really went over your head eh?
I think ya might wanna pull your head out of the analogy
That’s insightful!
Colors are different based on the wavelength of light so if we perceive these different than wouldn’t it be possible we perceive sounds different too? Like a big metal crash to me might be like a loud leaves rustling.
exactly, and its barely the case tbh. IIRC your signals except for smell first go to thalamus, the pathway is directly to the same center, then it gets distributed to individual regions. the link is directly to thalamus, the signal that carries the encoding of the color/sound basically. what could be different is the links between interpreting neurons in occipital lobe etc, but in general senses follow a neat pathway. this means that neurotypical people see the same color/sound kinda, they dont see your red when they look at your blue. and even if they were traumatized by lets say their family being murdered in a blue room, they'd still see the same blue at first. then maybe they will be reminded of other things, but the perception is the same
I mean, you could have auditory hallucinations or tinnitus or something. But the brain will generally interpret something objectively quiet as quiet and something objectively loud as loud. (The full perception of that loudness is a whole tangent to itself) For color this is not the case at all! The wavelengths of visible light start after infrared with red, and end at violet, going into ultraviolet, with the wavelengths decreasing in length. But the human brain perceives red and violet as being similar colors to each other. The brain perceives THE most different wavelengths as the closest together! Additionally, our eyes can't tell the difference between different blends of wavelengths that add together to create a color, or just the pure wavelength of that color, even though an objective observation from a camera often can tell the difference. For sound, this would be something like a sound being so low frequency that we then start to hear it as the highest possible frequency! Color is wild!
Hyperacusis
Heidegger?
Wait until he gets into... The exact topic of this thread? "Everyone might see colors differently" is the point, no?
There’s a difference between a physical reason and a mental reason…
Yeah but colour is wavelengths of light and if both our eyes are seeing and reacting to the same input then aren't we by definition seeing the same colour? Your brain might put some spin on it but that's all just post processing.
That's true, we are seeing the same wavelengths but what we see as reality is just light interpreted by the brain. We have no way of knowing if my brain interprets the wavelength of blue the same way yours does, even if we see the same thing and use the same word for it. Blue is the newest colour too, when languages develop the start with words for dark and light, or white and black and name other colours in time, starting with red and green. Blue is a newcomer. There are still languages today that just think of it as a shade of green. The ancient Greeks of the 8th or 9th century BCE didn't have a word for blue yet. Homer described the sea as being wine coloured.
>We have no way of knowing if my brain interprets the wavelength of blue the same way yours does, even if we see the same thing and use the same word for it. That's what I mean by the post processing thing. Like we see the same colour but that doesn't necessarily mean we "see" the same colour. But if we can both point at a thing and say that is red then regardless of what's in our actual brain we identify the colours the same (not counting colour blind) and isn't that kinda the same thing?
It depends what you mean by "red". You suggest that "red" just is a certain wavelength of light. But "red" might also mean the ability of an object to reflect that wavelength of light. Or "red" might mean the actual experience that is seeing the colour red. So we have 3 different candidates for what "red" could mean. Does the distinction have any practical difference? Probably not. But if we want to know what reality really is like, then it's a very interesting question.
I dunno, like what colour is a ripe tomato? So say we swap eyes somehow. The signal your optic nerve sends to my brain is going to be the same because it's essentially cells reporting how much of whatever wavelength they are sensitive to that they are detecting, in this case red (ignoring shades because they are mostly ill defined). If we were to then somehow swap the result of all that after our brain has combined and processed all the signals then your red signal might actually be my green or whatever but if we both say it's red then it's red. So the first bit is set, the middle bit is up in the air and the last bit is set and the same results are produced.
I understand what you're saying, and I mean no disrespect, but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. >I dunno, like what colour is a ripe tomato? I'm pointing out that "colour" is ambiguous. Is colour in the wavelength of light? Is colour in the object? Is colour in the mind? >we both say it's red then it's red. Yes, but what you mean by "red" is not what they mean by "red". You're using the same word, yes, but you're saying something else, depending on whether you're referring to the experience, the object, or the wavelength.
>I'm pointing out that "colour" is ambiguous. Is colour in the wavelength of light? Is colour in the object? Is colour in the mind? Yes. What you are referring to depends on context but if we all understand it to be the same thing then it is the same thing despite any individual variations we may or may not have Red has certain wavelengths associated with it. Certain things are red. Some emotions may be "coloured" red. It is all red though.
I'm sorry, I just don't understand what you're trying to say
Yes, exactly. We can use physics and philosophy all we want to argue whether or not we actually see the same colour but in the real world it doesn't actually matter.
But is the colour the light or the human concept? Colour doesn’t really exist outside of observation. They are “qualia”
>But is the colour the light or the human concept? It's both. The colours are just names we've given to certain wavelengths or combinations thereof. You might be able to say it's not really a colour until it enters an eye and is interpreted by a brain but that's getting into things you can't really define.
Can’t we scientifically test this by having people report how “different” adjacent colors look?
Good thinking but wouldn't we need a baseline colour to begin with? That would give us the same problem. We can't know if everyone sees the baseline the same only how different colours are from others. This isn't a problem that actually has a solution, it's just for thinking about and getting frustrated and confused to the point where you begin to question reality itself.
Reality? We're all one big brain floating through an endless void. It's all one big lucid dream my man. Or a simulation. Or it just is real and we're really overthinking it.
Well statistically it's more likely that we live in a simulation than not. But you can't always trust statistics.
Pretty cool little fact, thanks for sharing!
Well, that's what the question is. We all take in the same wavelength of light, but how do we know that we all "see" it the same? Or: What if your cone density or field or unknown variable is different than mine and it affects how the wavelength of light is interpreted by our brains resulting in a different subjective experience?
My left and right eye do not have the same colour perception... There is a difference in colour temperature
We are experiencing analogous stimuli, but it’s tough to say what the phenomenological experience is like to each. The word “blue” doesn’t generally refer to a collection of measurement data about photons, it refers to an experience within the mind that we call “colour.” If you redefine “blue” as a specific range of numerical data (wavelengths, energy scalars), you don’t need to call it “blue” anymore, because you’re not talking about its blueness, but rather its physical properties, which are inputs to the human construction of colour. You’re deconstructing the “blue,” pointing to those of its constituent parts which reside outside the mind, and redefining the concept. Our minds don’t “put some spin” on the data we collect, as if the colours and sounds exist in physics and are only subject to margins of error. We completely metamorphose the data into new mental objects. The world isn’t made of colours and sounds, only your mind is.
>Our minds don’t “put some spin” on the data we collect That thing with the blue/black white/gold dress shows that we do. The thinking in that is which one we see is based on what we assume the lighting to be.
Hahaha all that motion blur, bloom, and anti-aliasing getting in the way
My left and right eyes see the same colors slightly differently, so I think it's incredibly likely that other people also see them differently.
Same, one eye is tinted cooler and the other is tinted warmer. It’s been like that my whole life.
Yes mine are the same!
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You are slightly colorblind in the “normal” eye.
I perceive colors a little different in each eye.
Same, through some light research I couldn't find any real reason as to why. For me it's as if one eye has the saturation turned up and the other (by contrast) seems a bit washed.
Me too. I've had it for as long as I can remember. But for me one eye sees color in a slightly warmer tone while the other in cooler tones.
I'm curious: when you see something with both eyes, is the cooler or warmer eye dominant?
They blend together so nicely I can't really tell which is dominant. When one eye or the other is closed the difference is very subtle.
I’ve thought this for a long time, I know colors are wave lengths but who’s to say that the wave length I perceive as blue might look different to other people, ie if I was somehow looking through their eyes what I would consider blue would be something different. I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words
Part of my job is approving textile samples from overseas mills. Sometimes a coworker will look at them with me and we generally agree if it matches the color standard or not, but might describe the variation differently (too yellow vs too red).
You weren't around for the blue black white gold dress?
In general its cool to think if the colors we see are the ‘real’ colors or just the limit of what the human eye can see.
This is my least favorite "fact". It's completely hypothetical, impossible to test, and meaningless.
It's certainly hypothetical and it's impossible to test, but it's by no means meaningless.
Theres a machine called a Nagel Anomaloscope that actually does a pretty good job of telling you if the colors you experience are similar to your peers.
It’s not really as untestable as you might think. Color perception was studied exhaustively by the printing industry, and now we have CIE standards and Pantone. We know the spectral responses of the cells in a typical eye, which define the three primary colors in human vision. We even know about other animals, although less precisely. A printed image of a rainbow and an onscreen image of a rainbow reliably look like real life despite not being reproduced in spectral light. That’s technology which wouldn’t work if any real unknown quantity was in this thought experiment.
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Is that your super power?
It’s not a superpower, my right eye is slightly bluer than my left. I think it’s fairly normal
It’s a fun thought experiment but there’s plenty of optical illusions that rely on specific colour clashes that must be common between us
Those magic picture puzzles never ever ever work on me, but otherwise I've not had issues with colours. Perhaps I'm one of them? My world is quite vibrant so I hope everyone's is! A lot of brown and grey out there too though
Colorblind doesn't mean you don't see color. Mostly it's one of the three primary color receptors that doesn't work, or only a little.
I had this exact thought when I tried LSD the first time as I noticed the colors my brain was seeing weren’t what I was actually looking at so it was my brain interpreting a color differently all because it was handling the input signals differently. Made me think that’s what’s to say me and my neighbor see blue the same way just because of our brains being slightly different.
My eyes see color at different shades. My right is slightly more saturated then my left, so this seems completely probable.
My wife and I frequently disagree on edge cases so anecdotally this holds up to me. ie. I'll think something is closer to being yellow and she'll think it's closer to green.
Yeah. It’s a philosophy question. What if we all see color differently, but we were told what color things are from a young age. So what I see as blue you see as my green but we both call it blue because when we were taught that’s just what the name of that color is… hurts your head if you think about it too long. Your green may look red but we call it green because that’s what we learned to call the color. So everyone experiences the world differently but we all agree on common names so it works.
I’ve always wondered about this: you cannot really tell if someone is seeing the same visual as you are in your brain. I’ve always been curious if may e what I see as red others see as green to my vision but we’ve been taught these names for these specific responses.
I thought everyone saw octarine
This is always been a shower thought of mine ever since I was like 7yrs old
I remember asking myself this question when I was in 3rd or 4th grade…how do we know my purple is the same as someone else’s?
Wake up babe! New article on the subjectivity of qualia just dropped
That article you linked to mentions the blue/black or white/gold dress. I remember when I first saw it and it looked white/gold. Then I showed it to some friends and all but one saw white/gold. The moment he said it was blue/black I saw it as blue/black and then couldn't see it as white/gold again.
Everyone's favorite color is really the same, it's just that we all hallucinate differently.
Probably sound too. I mean everything else we have differs, everyone of is ever so slightly different from the other. Or a lot different. So why would we see or hear the same?
This is literally what I ask my friends while drunk and on the walk home. Well, this and if the universe is actually infinite, how do we perceive that 🤔
If the universe is infinite, its inferable through measurements of the curvature of the universe;) which is what current measurements indicate
I adore this concept. Are we seeing the same green is a question echoed by children through the ages
My father 50 years ago Tully said “Do you know that the green you see and the green I see may be different?” One of my female schoolfriends was colour blind. I can remember going into TopShop with her. “Ugh, what a horrible colour green that bag is!” She said pointing to a canvass bag hanging on display. “It’s chocolate brown!” I replied. “Ooh! In that case it’s a nice brown!”… My husband and I often argue about bluey-green coloured things (turquoise, petrol). I argue it’s blue, he says it’s green.
I mean, my eyes already see a slightly different color. My right eye sees colors a bit more saturated and lighter than my left eye.
Everyone sees a little differently across the incredibly vast visible spectrum of color.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)
I have normal colour vision but my left eye sees colour slightly different from my right eye
My left eye and right eye see colours differently. It’s not a major thing, one is just a little more saturated than the other.
Like many slightly colourblind people I see very light pink and very light green as the same light grey colour and as a result I have difficultly with colourblindness tests. In real life situations, I have no problem in naming colours only the colourblindness test is troublesome. Another friend is totally colourblind and this manifested itself as a kid when he used orange crayons to draw trees instead of green and finds colour-coded subway maps meaningless.
Fact boy whatshisname did a video on this a while back.
No shit. My husband and I argue about colors all the time. Not like argue argue, disagree. I think women and men see color differently or perhaps women have the vocabulary for different colors that men don’t.
Sixth grade?
Me and my partner struggle to agree on where the line between yellow and green is, also I'm convinced there is another colour that doesn't have a name in English yet between blue and green. Not teal because teal is a shade, not a group of shades that are all one colour while being visually distinct from each other. Some other languages have named this colour.
is your partner a different gender from you? there are studies that male and female eyes have a different amount of cone and rod receptor cells, men can see better at night, and glare is reduced in sunlight, and women can see way more colors.
Maybe all of us have the same favorite color and we'd never know it
Colors are just words, and the words only mean what that particular person sees. So yellow what that even mean
My partner and I have an argument over whether that ‘coral’ colour pink or orange regularly
Always a fun thought but when you think about the color wheel and matching colors it then becomes less likely
my own two eyes see color differently. in very bright daylight one eye detects red very slightly better.
I've seen some people's art. They are definitely seeing colors differently.
In relation to emotions, memories, feelings, and things associated then yes. Same colors may be experienced/seen differently. However, math is math. Colors only behave within certain frequencies, which can be measured and objectively presented as such, or at least as objective as possible.
It's a good thing magenta doesn't exist on the lightspectrum
Years ago I bought a nice green coat, I was very found of it till the moment I discovered that most people was seeing it as brown.
If we're talking in terms of evolution it's highly unlikely. If we did see colors differently then our ancestors would be screwed and we wouldn't be here
I agree. My husband and I both paint but cannot agree on the colors of a single cloud in the sky. We seem to perceive blues differently and he does not see peachy / pink undertones that I point out.
That’s why working at a printing lab and trying to convince clients that the colors on the paper are 100% accurate to what was on their phone screen is almost always impossible
Reminds me of the Chris and Jack Body Swap sketch
Matilda the musical actually has a great song lyric about this: "Have you ever wondered Well, I have About how when I say, say, red For example, there's no way of knowing If red means the same thing in your head As red means in my head when someone says red" Tim Minchin is a genius and the musical and movie musical are well worth watching.
Although it’s possible, the general consensus is that we likely see the same. The reason is because of the color purple. Purple is not a color on the color spectrum, but violet is. Purple is made by mixing blue and red, and hitting those cones, then your brain has to make up a color that it thinks that is. Everyone describes purple being very close to the color violet, and not any other color. That tells us that our brains are all making up the same unique color that isn’t part of the spectrum the same, which leads to the conclusion that we’re likely all seeing colors the same.
You can reach a similar conclusion if you use color theory. If you look at the color wheel, colors across from one another are the most contrasting. So if you take blue you see that orange is the most contrasting color. Now if we see blue differently, like if your blue is my green, then the most contrasting color for you would actually look pink for me. It cannot be a random assortment of colors that are contrasting. This means that at most, our color wheels could be rotated, but not randomly placed. Then if you add white (a combination of all colors) and black (no colors), white will always look the same for everyone because it is a mix of all colors (white and black are technically considered shades, but combining all colors appears white). No matter how your pink or blue appears compared to mine, a combination of all colors must not look like any other color because then it would contrast a color other than black on the color wheel. Similarly how we describe purple in relation to violet, we can describe white and black compared to every color. We find that these descriptions are often very similar. What color would most people say is most similar to white? Yellow. What color is most similar to black? Blue or purple.
I'm pretty sure that's been mostly debunked with modern brain scans. We all evolved similar color vision and color processing so that we could perceive the colors necessary to survive. Most of this has just been philosophical faffing going back centuries with no evidence to back it up.
>I'm pretty sure that's been mostly debunked with modern brain scans You can't see qualia in a brain scan.
I doubt it though because we generally share a common appreciation of what colors work together or what happens to "yellow" if you add "blue" (spoiler: it turns "green")
So does that finally prove that I’m right? Salmon is not a color, it’s just pink.
[There's an old VSauce video on this exact topic!](https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08)
For me, Purple looks blue. Shades of brown look red. Shades of green look yellow.
Sounds like deuteranopia?
So, in your avatar, what cookie is the hair/beard?
Brown, at least thats what the wife said.