Colours!

I'm pondering on a question I've had for over 10 years now. The question is:
does what we see, appear the same to everyone, with respect to colours.

I'm thinking whether there is a way to test this out.

Do all of us 'see' the colours the same way. I mean it's possible that the
stimulus x gets on seeing green is what y gets on seeing blue. I mean, what
appears to x as green, appears to y as what appears to x to be blue.

Get it? Its a weird and scary concept.

But the concept is not much of an issue (after all these years). Whats
bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be any way of testing this out.
This has directly got to do with the interpretation of signal from the eye by
the brain. What do you mean by 'appear'? After all, the whole visual world is
nothing but an abstract model that the brain has made for itself using
electrical signals given by the eye in order to consistently and quickly
interpret the future signals that the eye would give.

The world that we see is a heuristic approximation of the world that is. It is
just a rough guess based solely on the outcome of a best fit adaptive
algorithm whose input is a small interpretable part of one physical entity of
the universe that we call electromagnetic radiation.

This whole thing needs a lot of thought. There must be a way of testing this
colour thingy though ...

Comments

Solzaire said…
this argument is not restricted to colour - general perception has these meta-problems too. similarly try and construct a test for sound. what i hear = what you hear? etc.
7:00 pm
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