We can't really confirm what colors look like. amirite?

Sounds like you just discovered the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Time for you to look up David Chalmers

by Madisenbarton 1 year ago

It's a deep rabbit hole

by Madisenbarton 1 year ago

I hope he's prepared for an unforgettable luncheon

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What does the hard problem of consciousness have to do with seeing colors? Certain wavelengths of light hit certain cells in your retina, this is interpreted by you brain and then you see the color.

by Even_Conflict5344 1 year ago

Cool, now prove that my blue is your blue.

by Madisenbarton 1 year ago

The hard problem of consciousness is concerned with why quaila arises from physical processes, not the variations in qualia itself…lol. I can't "prove" your blue is my blue because how your brain interprets and processes information is different than mine…

by Even_Conflict5344 1 year ago

concerned with why quaila arises from physical processes, not the variations in qualia itself There isn't even a point in talking about the variations of qualia when you can't understand qualia itself. It's as unreliable as any information can be.

by Madisenbarton 1 year ago

We can if we break things down to their wavelengths. Science doesn't care what your blue and my blue are lol.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Wow. Science hasn't done anything to explain this? We know about all the different components of the brain and what they do. They all do something, and together they end up giving rise to conscious experience. I really want to believe that there is more to this life, just like you do, but at the end of the day we are animals that are biologically wired to decode the universe around us to stay fit for survival. We were not biologically wired to question it.

by Even_Conflict5344 1 year ago

We are probably the only species biologically prone to questioning it.

by General-Edge 1 year ago

Not the point. Imagine all the colors you perceived where slightly color shifted compared to hoe I perceive them. Or fully inverted. Yes, we can prove which wavelengths of light we are seeing and we have a common name for them, but that doesn't mean we visualize them the same way.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Of course there's all that. But It's the part where the raw data becomes an actual experience, that's where it has entered consciousness.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

So what's your point?

by Even_Conflict5344 1 year ago

Is that Supernintendo Chalmers?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's like that for literally everything. Everyone could have a wildly different experience of the world and everything in it, but we can all (apparently) communicate and everything lines up fine. If "everyone experiences the world the same" and "everyone experiences the world differently" are interchangeable, we may as well assume everyone experiences the world the same.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah that's a good way of putting it. Also colors have a scientific basis in terms of the lightwaves that they reflect and absorb, so we don't need eyes to know colors exist, just how we define them. We kind of assume that colorblind people are wrong in how they view colors. So I don't think we are necessarily assuming everyone experiences the world the same, as much as we are taking the average person's perception into account.

by bayerkip 1 year ago

I'm not color blind but my color vision can change while spending time outside on a sunny day. If I keep one eye closed for a while, if I switch to the one that was closed the colors are shifted a bit. Also, while camping I've woken up after facing the sun as it rose and my color vision was washed out... one time it was nearly grayscale for a few seconds.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

As light levels decrease, we lose colour vision. So just before sunrise everything looks greyscale until there's enough light coming in.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

i guess it would be different if someone saw all colours different but still could tell a difference but in that case you wouldn't really be able to know if they're colour blind unless they developed it later in life

by Anonymous 1 year ago

That's what OP is saying. Every one of us could see colors different. The red I see may be the blue you see but we just learned to associate the colors we see with the names they are given. So I may look at a square and see a color and was told as a child that color is yellow, so whatever I see it as I will now call that yellow. You may see it as something totally different but still learn to call it yellow.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Do you see the sun as yellow and call it yellow, or see the sun as blue and call it yellow? 😂

by ComprehensiveLab 1 year ago

I was just taught that the color of the sun is called yellow. So whatever I see the sun as is what I will call yellow. Doesn't mean you see the same, but you just call it yellow no matter what it is you see. Before you had any concept of colors, your parents or whoever taught you which word corresponds with each color you see. They point at something and say a word. You see that item and associate whatever you see with that word. Your mom's yellow could be your blue but that doesn't matter because whatever she points to always look the same to you so whatever word she says is now the word you associate with it. I can teach my kid that the color purple is really called dookienuts. Doesn't matter. Every time he sees that color he will call it dookienuts. That doesn't mean that we see the same color though. We just learn to associate a certain word with whatever we are seeing. Remember, color doesn't physically exist. It's how our brains interpret light waves.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I think the difference is while they can't tell the difference between certain colors and others can because they don't have the ability to see that part of the spectrum very well, what they were trying to to explain is that while we can agree that certain wavelengths are called certain things, what people actually see for that wavelength may be different. They're consistent when that light or pigment combination is used in different places, but what that looks like to different people may be vastly different. Like what I see as a green object through someone else's eyes may be seeing what I would call purple but for their entire existence they've been told that's green so they call it green.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

You can extend that in the opposite direction too. Other animals can perceive colors we can't because they can see UV rays. A flower looks completely different to a bee than it does to us humans, the flower has specific markings leading a bee to the nectar that we can't see because the differences are in the UV band. To the bee, we are colorblind.

by Due_Appointment_1036 1 year ago

There are also tetrachromatic humans who, in theory, can see colours the rest of us can't fathom.

by Gretakeeling 1 year ago

They're missing the ability to perceive what exists. I don't know if it's a right or wrong thing, but we who aren't colourblind can't perceive the entire light spectrum either

by Anonymous 1 year ago

But that's something that we can compare and understand that there's a difference, as you've proven by talking about the differences just now. But what OOP is talking about is people having different colour vision even when not colour blind, and we just don't know about it because it all happens to line up. In that case, it may as well be the same.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I've seen that first hand with language barriers. Some things are called whatever in one language and when they try to translate to English or another language, they translate word for word if they don't know proper grammar which might cause problems in some cases.

by Alarmed-Figure 1 year ago

What's funny is how many kids ask that question. It's incredibly common, yet still a profound realization. It goes straight down to conscious experiences.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Me wondering if that's the same for taste now

by Glad-Plastic7980 1 year ago

People prefer different foods and flavors, so there's probably something to that

by Tabitha15 1 year ago

Your perception of taste changes over time. Does your perception of color?

by Realistic-Idea 1 year ago

In regard to colour, as we get older, that which we have a tendency to lose is contrast vision. For example, let's say that in our 20s we are able to tell apart 100 different shades of blue, with ageing we will see less and less different shades, this is a combination of several factors, one of them has to do with the two types of photosensitivity cells present in our retinas, with age those cells diminish in number, and therefore your will no longer be able to tell royal blue and navy blue apart. Aging aside, contrast vision can also diminish, due to certain types of corrective laser surgery. Which is why I never got it done, I work in fine arts, having the most acute contrast vision, is very important to me, so instead of having laser to correct my nearsightedness, I just stick with my glasses.

by SuspiciousSolution 1 year ago

Please elaborate What is love? ❤️

by dedrichessel 1 year ago

Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

They are pretty close to those who have all three working cones For colour blind people those colours actually look different from you (funny part about it we don't know it till we find out we are colour blind) But for most of you (tetrachromats out of the question) Colours do indeed look very similar

by Anonymous 1 year ago

With me, it's learning about other species, and realizing there's colors surrounding us that we're not seeing.

by Dspencer 1 year ago

I think there are some studies on this. But yea, I believe we are all able to categorize and recognise different colours across the spectrum, although not necessarily they will be exactly the same for all human beings.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Supposedly language effects how mmany (and which) colours people see. Languages like English that have different words for red and light red leads to folks having better differentiation for the colour red, while languages like Russian that have words for blue and light blue can see more blues. There's a theory that paint companies intentionally have tons of different shades with different names as a way to teach people to see more shades and thus they have an excuse to make more different shades.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Crayola 64 pack bro. Learned them as kids.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Languages like English that have different words for red and light red leads to folks having better differentiation for the colour red, while languages like Russian that have words for blue and light blue can see more blues. English has indigo as well (part of ROY G BIV) which is a dark blue, but nobody actually calls things indigo, we just call them blue/dark blue/light blue

by Stanton11 1 year ago

They are all numbers to me #AACCDD

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Do I really need to translate hexadecimal (base 16) values for you?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The #AACCDD is the hex code for a pretty light shade of blue. The hex number is comprised of three segments, each comprised of 2 digits. Each pair represents the primary colors of red, blue, and green. As a whole, they represent any given color from #000000 (white) to #FFFFFF (black). White is no color. Black is all of the colors. So #AACCDD is 170 204 221 in decimal (base 10). All the colors are simply numbers.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Got it backwards. #FFFFFF is white and #000000 is black.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Ack! You are correct. Thank you

by Anonymous 1 year ago

In case this helps anyone who might still be a little confused, 0-9 are 0-9, A = 10, B = 11, etc. until we end at F = 15.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Wow, thank you! Yes, now that you've explained I feel like I've seen this in graphic design platforms like Canva. I think the joke didn't make sense without understanding how it all worked, but maybe this is actually common knowledge and I'm just unfamiliar.

by Terrell50 1 year ago

I #CCCCCC what you did there. And it's kinda gray.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I don't really know maybe it's originally worded enough to qualify as an original one since my Phone auto-corrected colors to Colorado.

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

Colourado**

by Anonymous 1 year ago

My bad

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

The wild one is that colors of light are well known and well established. A frequency defines a particular color of light. As an aside - very few of those frequencies are actually visible light, the full 'electromagnetic spectrum' includes light with much lower frequencies (infrared, microwaves) and much, much higher (ultraviolet, X-rays, Gamma rays). However, what's wild is how our brains translate those frequencies of light into color.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Neat

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

Not only that, but colors are something our brains have totally made up. They're not even real. When your eyes get hit with photons that wiggle in a certain way, your brain creates an image with a color based on how wiggly it is. This helps to interpret things, make sense of the world, and survive. Physics can describe the properties of light that we perceive as different colors, but physics does not require that colors actually exist. It's only because we've evolved to see light in a certain spectrum that we have a concept of colors. You wouldn't say a magnetic field or a gamma ray or an echo has a color, but if it was evolutionarily advantageous for you to be highly attuned to those things, maybe your brain would assign a color and an "image" of those things.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I feel like this is evidence in favor that we don't all see the same colors

by General-Edge 1 year ago

Vsauce did a video on this

by BenefitSerious5903 1 year ago

God I used to love those vsauce videos back in the day

by Anonymous 1 year ago

There is one thing that always made me believe we all see similiar colors. It's that people can judge them. For example say "how this neon is bright, almost kills my eyes". Also if we saw different colors some will blend and gradients wouldn't work.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

We can confirm it is the same wavelength hitting your retina which activates photoreceptors called cones that come in shades of green red and blue to produce color. So color is not even real until it is generated by your body. It's like the old saying, does a tree falling over in the forest make a sound if there is nobody to hear it? No, it just produces sound waves, but you'd need a tympanic membrane to vibrate

by alexandra49 1 year ago

As somebody completely colorblind, I agree with this. My green is not your green.

by DependentRemove 1 year ago

My ears are sound blind. I'm legally deaf. I had perfect hearing up until 1987 when I was 18 in high school. 29 and the world got quiet on me. I wore all black too in 1990 when I was 21. I had a white cat too. That was fun. Lmao

by Mayersheila 1 year ago

Color isn't actually real anyways.

by Vitofay 1 year ago

My personal theory is that we all have the same favorite color we just don't know it

by Lueilwitzbranso 1 year ago

🔴 this is my red. I don't know what your red looks like but I know that this is my red 🔴

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's a nice red

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

We can't confirm what any experience feels like

by krismabelle 1 year ago

This reminds me of "kids describe color to a blind person"

by OldYogurt697 1 year ago

You all need to shut up. I bet you're not even partially colorblind. Posers.🤨

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I prefer The Hard Problem of Matter.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Honestly, everything you perceive is basically an internal hallucination. None of it is real. The vast majority is just inferred expectations based on previous experience. This is why surprising things are, well, kinda surprising. They break that internal heuristic. Every smell, touch, sound and sight you have ever experienced is just your brain rendering it all for you based on some pretty vague input data. We are inferring machines. You're also living slightly in the past. It takes a few moments for all this processing to happen.

by AdPuzzled1370 1 year ago

You can't confirm anything except something exists somewhere

by Queasy-Square 1 year ago

What if we all had the same favorite color, we just call it something different

by Zestyclose_Bet 1 year ago

I think everyone actually has the same favorite color

by barrett73 1 year ago

You actually can, because all the colors blend into each other smoothly. Red doesn't smoothly blend straight into green for example. Color is related to specific wave lengths, your brain translates them the same as everyone else's brain, just like all other sensory inputs. There's no 2 people eating the same food, where one thinks its extremely sour, and the other thinks it's extremely sweet.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

If you want to get all technical, we can't really confirm anything. So we can get pretty close.

by Erice 1 year ago

My hrt has actually made colours seem quite different to me as opposed to before medication it's fascinating ☺️

by yheathcote 1 year ago

My view of colors is the correct view. Yall just follow my lead.

by christiansenhay 1 year ago

That's fair

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

Pantone would disagree.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Don't know whom that is so it's irrelevant.

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

Pantone is a company whose entire business is proprietary standardized colors.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Neato daddy-o

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

All I know is that my reality is objectively correct and all of you weirdos are wrong. Green is green and I will have it no other way!

by Particular-Band 1 year ago

Or what sounds sound like

by fadelbrianne 1 year ago

Eh, you can actually mimic what It sounds to you. It's not the same thing, but you can roughly portray what It sounds and check If It do the same to other people

by Anonymous 1 year ago

You can mimic the sound waves, but that doesn't necessarily mean that somebody else's brain will interpret those sound waves the same way as yours.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I know where you're trying to get. But if It were that way, learning a song would be impossible without a music sheet, but we know some people can play a song just by hearing it.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

All of reality is mediated

by Eloise49 1 year ago

How do you know that your sense of smell isn't another's vision 🤔

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It shouldn't since it's not true. Colors are verifiable and measurable by wave length and frequency.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

My daughter said this to me yesterday. Your green could be my purple.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Actually, I can confirm that red looks red.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Light doesn't inherently "look" like anything, so there's really nothing to confirm. Colors are just concepts invented by our brains to assign meaning to light of certain wavelengths. It's like if I drew a picture of a fictional object and asked 2 people to name it separately. Their names will most likely be different, and there's no way to objectively "confirm" what the object should actually be called. But yes, it's possible that our brains have invented different colors for the same wavelengths. But it also goes further than that. You might perceive red the same way I perceive blue (the classic talking point). But you could also perceive light in the same way I perceive sound (or touch, smell, etc). Or you could perceive light with sensations that I can't even comprehend. We will never know.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The frequency of light doesnt change and the cones in your eyes arent that different so why should you see colours differently?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's crazy to think that some people see purple grass or a pink sky

by Anonymous 1 year ago

We can't really confirm anything except for our own consciousness. I think.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Therefore, I am.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Colors don't exist in the real world

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Sounds like a sad world

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

We agree on what matches. We agree which colors are "hot" or "cold". We agree on what colors mix to make what. Color theory is too robust for everyone's palettes to be scrambled.

by NoJob 1 year ago

I would love a good pondering session with some of y'all.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Here's another: Why is the minor key sad?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Because they're not old enough to buy alcohol.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah but that doesn't tell what blue looks like from an objective point of view since the same shade of blue could look vastly different between you and I.

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

Yeah i'm talking about observation

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

I agree.

by Majestic-Tip6787 1 year ago

Sure wwe can...this color looks just like that...and...that color looks just like this...and...wait...🤔...🤷‍♂️

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I just hope my colors look cooler than your colors

by SolidOrganic6539 1 year ago

White reflect all colors, Black absorbs all colors, Gray is in between, Yellow is unusually bright.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Not outside of red, blue, or green at least

by kuhickaley 1 year ago

They should google "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" while they're at it.

by Madisenbarton 1 year ago

I didn't think of this when i was 6 years old since i had other things to like playing with my friends and enjoying life.

by Matildabrakus 1 year ago

Same goes for taste and smell too

by No-Text 1 year ago

No, because we agree on what matches or are complimentary. We also agree on specific issues such as "hot" or "cool". Further, colorblind folks add to this.

by NoJob 1 year ago

Actually we can, in a way. If we say different colours differently, we would not agree on which colours look better with other colours. I can say white stands out on dark grey and you can too and this wouldn't have happened if we saw different colours differently. That said, our brains could have a pattern on interpreting colours so we are seeing different colours despite seeing them contrast and mix similarly.

by Anonymous 1 year ago