It’s not just color, everything has a subjective experience only knowable by the haver. What does joy feel like? What does a feather on your finger feel like? What does the color blue look like?
These experiences are called Qualia. In the comic above, the smaller bear has a different quale of the color blue than the larger bear does.
Phenomenology, it’s a hell of a thing.
Also, ironically, shows why total subjectivity is BS. Even with different qualia, the bears all agree on the color (since the object being perceived is the same in either case).
are they really unknowable though? obviously we don’t have a deep enough understanding of neuroscience and consciousness to perfectly comprehend the full chain of physical phenomena all the way to subjective experience, but we understand a lot of it, and it mostly seems consistent from person to person afaik. like blue light interacts with a specific type of cone in the retina, producing specific neural responses, etc. etc.
Like you can argue maybe the inner mechanics of the mind mean we are experiencing the colors differently and just assign the same name to it like in the comic, but is there any evidence of that? or is it just mysticism trying to fill in the gaps of our limited understanding of how the mind works.
The concept is about the sort of abstract perception, like the actual final form that gets perceived by the mind, but the whole thing is just one of those pointless philosophical cognitohazards that are like the equivalent of XKCD’s “nerd sniping” bit, just shit that’s weird and pointless and unsolvable.
Like does the final processing step that is the mind’s perception consistently ascribe the exact same perceptive values to a given color or sound that other people do? Maybe, maybe not, because we don’t know what mechanically is happening to create that phenomenon, we don’t know how consistent the processing in the visual neurons is across individuals, we don’t even know what that perception is. So maybe for one person the color blue gets coded as a certain specific voltage or whatever when it transitions from the image processing bit to the consciousness bit (if that’s even a distinction that can be made at all), and for another it’s 1% different or a different frequency or whatever, but would that even change anything? It’s still remaining consistent before that, and it goes along with all the cultural stuff attached to the color, and it clearly works consistently, so it’s kind of just a nonsense question that’s trying to sound deep.
Like we’re talking about possible unknowable differences in systems that developed to sort of chaotically brute force their way into consistency and adaptability. So maybe “blue” gets stored and processed slightly differently between individuals, but we can also see that in every perceivable way it ends up with the same result. So the answer to the question is that it’s the wrong question to ask in the first place: blue is always blue because it will always have the properties and associations of blue and those are consistent across people because they’re the product of systems that plastically shape themselves to be consistent, and any differences are clearly not materially noticeable if they even exist at all.
I could just as easily ask “what if we all actually have the same favorite color internally, but due to differences in perception ascribe it to different frequencies of light?” and it would be just as valid a question, but even more nonsensical on its face.
blue is always blue because it will always have the properties and associations of blue and those are consistent across people because they’re the product of systems that plastically shape themselves to be consistent, and any differences are clearly not materially noticeable if they even exist at all.
Good points, though people do not perceive blue the same in the sense of same properties and associations. Humans are no idealized platonic digitalized humans. Being human is concrete materiality and that means that we are each different and bring our own upbringing and past with us.
It is the difference between subjective reality and objective reality. Subjective, by definition, means it depends on perspective (a subject). Objective is the opposite, it does not depend on perspective, it is true for all perspectives.
In a certain capacity it is possible to know something subjective. If you are looking at something — say, a bird — that I can’t see from where I’m standing, I can move to where you are standing, and be able to see the bird myself from where you were standing.
But location is only one level of abstraction from which we understand perspective. Time is also a factor. What if, in the time it took for me to move to your spot, the bird flies away, and I miss it? Then it becomes clear, I didn’t have the same perspective that allowed me to spot the bird.
This path of further specifying the extreme detail which makes up a subjective experience ultimately leads to impossible requirements like being in the same mental state, having had enough sleep the night before — in the last resort, having lived all the same experiences until that present moment, and having an identical physical body throughout the whole process. There can be no true knowledge of a subjective experience without experiencing the exact same thing, in all of the specificity that entails. In a word, without being the same subject.
We can know objective facts which are independent of perspective, such as empirical measurements like temperature and pressure, all the way up to more complex facts like “we live in a society of commodity production and exchange.” But those are objective because different observers can verify them empirically, like the color blue in the OP’s post.
An additional thought… the history of science is essentially the history of finding objective facts, facts which are true regardless of perspective. Even physics, being perhaps the most basic and immediate field of research, has struggled to find an end to the manifold perspectives which can overthrow what we had thought were objective facts.
One can of course point to the discovery of the round earth, or of heliocentrism. But it goes further.
We thought we were pretty smart when we figured out classical mechanics and thermodynamics. Lord Kelvin famously said,
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
This obviously turned out to be false because, when you look really closely at stuff, quantum mechanics starts to change everything. What we thought were particles with definite positions and moments, at last revealed themselves to be indeterminate wave-ish things.
For that matter, general relativity a few decades prior had upended our most basic notions of time and space. We thought we were safe saying the Sun is at such-and-such position 150 million kilometers in blah direction, and it is 5 billion years old, etc etc. But because the speed of light is constant regardless of your motion, this forces us to accept that other observers might observe the Sun somewhere else and perhaps a different age than what we perceive. Thus the name relativity; there is in fact no objective frame of reference. In science we use the inertial frame as the default, but it is arbitrary and not intrinsically more correct than the frame on the event horizon of a black hole.
Even in my previous comment, where I listed temperature and pressure as objective, to claim those as objective it is necessary to specify (implicitly in my case) some location and time which give validity to calling them objective.
So it is always the case, for any objective fact, that it depends on a set of assumptions about what is sufficient to call a perspective “the same” enough that it can be said that two subjects share a perspective. This abstract sense of shared perspective is what gives rise to “objective” facts, which may in fact not be objective for the whole universe. But as a practical matter it is usually only necessary to assume things which are common to all, such as being on Earth, living in 2023, being a human, etc.
Jesus christ, this site just goes completely downhill when anything philosophical is involved.
We aren’t talking about the physical stimulus itself! We are talking about subjective internal experience! Just because the same area of the brain correlates to a specific color or whatever doesn’t mean you experience the same thing. Hard problem of consciousness
Not even taking into consideration the STEMlord hurr-durr philosophy is useless takes.
Once again for emphasis:
THE STIMULUS IS NOT THE SAME THING AS YOUR EXPERIENCE OF IT
People may very well experience the same color differently, and we would have no way of knowing. There will always be a subjective gap that can’t be bridged. We see the same wavelength but we cannot know if we experience it the same way. Color theory and the physics of light is completely irrelevant here.
It’s not that you see red as blue; you see blue as blue, that’s not the argument here. Everyone sees blue as blue. We just might not have the same subjective experience of it. This is like baby level philosophy shit, I would have thought it would be quite simple to understand.
this site just goes completely downhill when anything philosophical is involved
sadly very true
I completely agree with you that the internal stuff matters. However so often people say that people might experience red as blue or something like that which is a bad thing to say (and I hear often, and it is bad for multiple reasons, but especially that it shines the spot light away from the interesting bit which you focused on rightfully and introduces some tackled web to uncurl).
That said the physiology of bodies means and how light interacts with them means that two colours couldn’t arbitrarily be switched in their internal mechanic. Cause they would be different experiences for the sensors our body got. Which sometimes gets ignored by some people engaging in philosophy who don’t care about physical bodies and are too idealist and non-materialist.
You pointed to the correct thing though.
i dont think you are engaging with the actual thinking going on and instead are being like “but what about the fact that we can never truly know anyone else!!!” it’s easy to understand. light is a phenomena that is pretty well explained in physics and with other “philosophical” or logical evidence. we’re not all seeing different shit even if it’s interesting to think about
I had a terrible night’s sleep so I’m gonna be grumpy here
Read my comment again. It is literally not possible to prove this either way, that’s the whole point.
Yes, you are seeing the exact same wavelength as everyone else. No, this has nothing to do with the argument. No amount of incessantly pointing to the physics of the stimulus is going to resolve the question.
I don’t think you understand that this has literally nothing to do with the physics of light. It’s honestly amazing that you point to this even after the countless clarifications that that is not the point of the discussion. No one is questioning the physics of light. We could perfectly well be seeing different shit. Consciousness and subjective experience, one of the greatest enigmas to this day, it’s anything but understood. Color is just a proxy for this discussion. You could make it about sound or pain or basically anything.the question is “do we have the same sensory experience for the same stimulus”? You can explain the physics of light every step of the way and it wouldn’t even touch on subjective experience.
In summary:
- Is the physics of light well understood?
Yes.
Are our eyes physically structured basically identically?
Yes.
Is the stimulus, physically speaking, a constant for both observers?
Yes.
Are the physical properties of the light hitting the retina the same for both?
Yes.
Is our internal sensory perception universal?
I don’t know, and if you do, you should get it published and live off the coattails of one of the greatest achievements in scientific history for the rest of your life.
da physics of the eye is also da same and our brains are all built roughly the same so whateva
I’ve wondered about this, but it’s the kind of completely non-falsifiable thing that isn’t relevant beyond a philosophy classroom.
yeah. And completely impenetrable to scientific explanation, because they’ll just go a level deeper. “how do we know we’re all seeing the same blue?” “Oh, well blue light has a certain wavelength.” “but we could be experiencing that wavelength differently!” “Well it doesn’t seem like we are, the same cones in our eyes respond in the same way to that wavelength of light.” “Well maybe its a difference in the brain then?” “It doesn’t seem like that’s true either, certain regions of the brain react in similar ways when shown the same light.” “Well maybe our consciousness just feels it differently?”
Completely useless discussion tbh.
Completely useless discussion tbh.
Questioning what facts are “objective”, and how, is far from useless. That is the central question of Marxism, the analysis of “objective” categories which in fact have concealed subjectivity, most notably the historical specificity of certain categories like value.
Questioning what facts are “objective”, and how, is far from useless.
well good thing I didn’t say that then. I’m talking about this pop philosophy tier bullshit that’s like “what if we all like, see colors different, maaan?”
Its not inherently a useless category of topics, though I think it gets navelgazey very frequently, just that the pop culture iterations of it that go around, like the OP, aren’t interesting or useful
Idk, man. Once you start getting into the physics of a thing, it becomes difficult to argue “Some people just perceive the light frequencies of blue and red as opposite”. These aren’t strict interchangeable experiences. If you actually did experience a different spectrum of light, we could absolutely recognize as much.
We’ve got the doppler effect to consider, wherein traveling at different speeds can change the perception of light, but in a recognizable and repeatable direction. I can red-shift by slowing down and blue-shift by speeding up. But I can’t do the reverse. Neither are we finding people who can just start perceiving ultra-violate or infra-red thanks to genetic drift.
We also have plenty of evidence that language informs ranges of color. As evidenced by a study done in Namibia whereas a tribe that does not discern between blues and green with different words, rather the English word for blue is often considered a variant of green through the tribe’s language, was given a color wheel of green squares and one blue square. Those in the study had a difficult time distinguishing which square was blue, however, were quick to differentiate another color wheel with all squares containing the same shade of green, except one shade that was slightly different. The English speakers in the video had a much more difficult time distinguishing the different variant of green.
So this sort of thing is falsifiable on several fronts. It just doesn’t hold up at the degree the artist is describing.
No more than someone saying “I experience traveling 15 mph as though I was traveling 5 mph”. Like, that’s just not how things work.
None of this is a refutation of the idea that someone could experience the color spectrum in an inverted fashion. Red- and blue-shifting would just have their warming/cooling reversed along with everything else.
Red- and blue-shifting would just have their warming/cooling reversed
No. Because these are magnitudes. A red-shift would not cause you to perceive things in reverse any more than someone with a handful of beans would be perceived as adding beans by taking them away.
I think it’s more fundamental than physics. There is no physical theory of human consciousness, experience, and perception. Only theories of how our physical bodies work, in mechanical terms. Of course most socialists are materialists and accept that matter forms the basis of reality, but that doesn’t make subjective experiences explicable in objective, abstract terms.
There is no physical theory of human consciousness, experience, and perception.
No, but the human brain is still a physical/chemical machine and it still needs to process a set of homogeneous information. At some point you have to identify the part of the body that’s doing the conversion from photon to information and say “Look! See! Brain X is doing this but Brain Y is doing that.”
In some of the experiments above, we absolutely can do that. In others, say - by recreating the structure of the eye and realizing the image we get is upside down - we can simply infer that the brain has to do some amount of work to correct for things universally.
But if you just assert, carte blanche, that where you see a “2” I see a “3”, and wave off any argument as a qualia… no. That’s just not how things work.
that doesn’t make subjective experiences explicable in objective, abstract terms.
We can engage in objective measurement of subjective participants and hunt for inconsistencies in experience. We can put a filter over each person’s eye, knowing that they’ll only experience X+1 and X-1, but not X, in order to factor down what each person does or doesn’t perceive.
But these artifacts of consciousness come from somewhere and are processed/stored by something. And these biological machines do all operate on the same physical principles.
So, baring some real evidence to the contrary, it doesn’t follow that one guy just sees a 400nm wave as a 700nm wave.
I don’t see what’s dunkworthy about this unless you think qualia as a concept is dunkworthy, which is fair.
As for the comic, when we say the sky is blue, what we are actually saying is that the sky share a certain optical property with the sea and other objects that we deem as blue. In other words, it’s more about the sky’s relations to certain objects rather than an intrinsic property of the sky itself or a person’s subjective experience of the sky. To hammer this point even further, orange the fruit entered the English language before orange the color, so when we say this crayon is orange, we are very explicitly saying the crayon has an optical property that’s similar to a citrus fruit. Likewise, the previous Old English word for orange was geoluread or yellow-red, and it’s easy to see why orange the color used to be called yellow-red. In this case, it’s the relations of the color orange being between the color yellow and red.
The actual qualia of blue is just a subjective experience with no real way of substantiating as objective truth. But it really isn’t that important because subjectivity by definition can’t become objective. You’ll never truly experience what I experience as an individual subject with my own unique physical makeup, psychological makeup, and personal history, but this shouldn’t be world-shattering because you’re not me lol. There are objective facts that can be gleamed from what I’m experience. For example, you could hook me up to some machine that monitors my heartbeat and notice my heartbeat going up when I get nervous about something, but you can never experience exactly what I’m experiencing. You’ll never be able to replicate my grief over a family member because my relationship between the family member and me which informs my grief isn’t something that can be replicated.
This is just the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity and how to navigate this contradiction. The comic slants towards subjectivity at the cost of objectivity in my opinion, which I guess is dunkworthy.
This is my favorite post in the thread. I don’t see how people could have vastly different perceptions of color unless those perceptions were shifted on a scale or something. Most people would say orange is a color between red and yellow, so those three colors are connected for most people.
At best you could say maybe people have a different perception of where the rainbow starts? Like mine starts at what I think is red, but what you think is green. Maybe orange to me is violet to you, so it still seems like a between color, just with purple and blue instead of red and yellow.
Also, camouflage works for most people, so clearly those colors are similar. Really wacky different perceptions probably don’t exist. The image shows the child seeing brown as purple and blue as red, which would mean he’d fail certain colorblind tests, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t camouflage still work? The color of the camouflage would still match the color of what it’s trying to blend in with if you switched the colors.
Colorblind tests measure your failure to distinguish the relation of multiple subjectivities. It can be said that this relation is objective. Color blindness is a dysfunction of the cells in your eye, something much more easily examined than internal experience.
If u don’t wanna read all the nerds talking about phenomenology and qualia just consider this:
Hummingbirds in North America all go to red flowers, that’s why the feeders use red molded plastic. Bees, flies, butterflies and bats all exhibit reproducible color preference when foraging for nectar.
Trees are green, the sky is blue, blood is red, the fruits of the vine are all manner of colors and our sun is yellow.
Rather than engage in a long philosophical endeavor to prove or disprove that we (might not) all see the same thing, why not simply look to every demarcation of brain and eye development and recognize that they are all able to consistently respond to colors without training. Then observe how we are able to differentiate those colors too (and which ones we cannot!) and accept that color perception does not require the neocortex or qualia or discussion to establish amongst sparrows which leaves are emerald or viridian.
Then turn our eye towards ourselves and notice that throughout human history there are only a handful of types of color perception disorders, all with very well understood mechanisms of action. We do not see the profusion of sightednesses that would be implied when we reach back into the record.
So don’t fuck with all that shit. The colors are the colors.
I think the idea being put forward is that the hue distribution could be different from brain to brain while brightness and saturation work the same. That’s how the color names and vision disorders could be consistent between people and cultures while individuals still could fundamentally be perceiving different hues than each other. Basically the idea being put forward is that hues are arbitrarily assigned by the brain after the color is perceived while light and vision still work the same. The color you and I call “magenta” regardless of what hue our brain assigns to “magenta” isn’t even part of the visible spectrum of wavelengths and is basically made up by the brain to “loop around” the highest wavelength colors with the lowest wavelength colors, and also to provide a contrast with green, which is useful for fruit foraging. But since the hues that we do see “loop around” in a color wheel, despite only encompassing a narrow band of all light wavelengths (700-nm -400nm) then the hues themselves (but not their specific brightness and saturation) are independent of the light wavelengths, and are fabricated by the brain to “make sense of” the light itself. So systematically as long as hues get assigned by the brain to certain wavelengths, and as long as the brain can detect saturation and brightness accurately independent of those hues, people could use the same words for the same colors despite seeing different hues. Colorblindness disorders could be a failure of the eyes to differentiate certain wavelengths of light, independent of what hues the brain would assign to those wavelengths. But yes, you are correct in that none of this matters or can really be proven without knowing more about how the brain assigns subjective qualia to real data coming in from the outside.
Hue = what gets assigned by the brain
Color = our common language for the hues after they’ve been assigned.
Notice how the square on the left is all different brightnesses and saturations of a given hue (magenta). This includes white and black. All hues can be so bright they become white or so dark they become black. All hues can become so desaturated that they become gray. So the hues are independent of the most important aspects, brightness and saturation. They seem to exist only to contrast wavelengths, and the wavelengths could independent of the hues themselves since some wavelengths don’t even get assigned hues (because we did not evolve to see them), and there is a color (magenta) not associated with any wavelength, but nevertheless existing in the mind. If we were able to see the entire spectrum of light, our existing hue distribution might just get “stretched” over the entire spectrum rather than there being “new colors,” like this:
Lol if you think I’m reading any of that.
I’m looking at some stuff that’s colors right now, wanna know which ones it is?
ok. I find this interesting but if you don’t that’s alright. Have a nice day!
If we were able to see the entire spectrum of light, our existing hue distribution might just get “stretched” over the entire spectrum rather than there being "new colors
You could test this by seeing if a parakeet has less color discrimination within the human-visible spectrum
I highly doubt it tho, there would almost definitely be “new colors”
