This question has always brought up fascinating implications about the seemingly private nature of our consciousness. Such a thorough understanding of the mechanics of perception really seems to undermine the idea that your conscious perception is completely personal and ineffable. It can be broken down piece-by-piece and examined — compared against the larger backdrop of human mental experience.
And, as you say, this ought to grant us quite a bit of empathy, knowing that so much of our experience is shared and explainable. Something that feels so personal and private and indescribable is actually quite universal.
I think the details of how my brain processes sensations is a little different from yours. We probably don't see red and green differently but I have a brain tumour and I do smell scents that you don't smell and vice versa. Ronaldo and Messi are able to track a football in ways that I am not able. Da Vinci sees the world a little differently too. There's probably no one that sees the world exactly the way that I do but there's also no one that sees it completely differently. It's a spectrum.
Bats too.
Most bats have sight that is worse than ours. Some a little, some a lot. None are completely blind though. It's a spectrum. This American Life has an episode about a blind man, Daniel Kish, who has learned to echolocate by clicking. He's blind like a bat but he echolocates like a bat too. Is he completely the same as a bat? Or completely different? Or are they both on the same spectrum that we are on?
I think we're not so different from bats and we could all learn to echolocate if we practiced a bit more. It's a mistake to say that we are completely unlike bats. I don't know exactly what it's like to be a bat but I don't know exactly what it's like to be you either.
Perhaps it’s not possible for me to see your red when you see green given that this difference would be reflected in the external structural relations between colours. But I think it is possible that our phenomenal colours share the same external structural relations while differing in their internal structural characteristics. Maybe when you see red, I see red* and maybe your red relates to your other colour perceptions in the same way that my red* relates to my other colour* perceptions.
At the level of the brain, this might be reflected by us using different brain states to represent colours, with these different brain states acting as placeholders in a broadly similar higher level neural network. We know that human brains are quite similar at the level of morphology and high level neural activation patterns (e.g. processes you can detect on an EEG), but also individually variant at the level of lower level structure like neural weights and small scale neural networks.
This is an empirical question, but I find it entirely plausible that the neural realizers for colour might exist at the lower level of scale which is individually variant, in which case different people might actually have different experiences of colour.
Brain states aside, we have plenty of behavioral evidence that we have differences in how we represent color--some people can discriminate more colors than others, and there are situations where people will disagree about color classifications. So it's absolutely true that there are differences in their internal structural characteristics in that sense!
Holeeee shiiiiit. I thought it was only me ever in the history of all humanity that had wondered if everyone saw the “same colors as me”. Have wondered this since I was a kid. And I’m not even stoned.
Same here. My father was color blind. He can't see red. Red to him, he says, is Grey. He had no problem with traffic lights. In fact, if he had not told me he was colorblind, I would not have known.
I went through the article twice and found no reference to the electromagnetic spectrum and the spectrometer that can look into deep space and determine elements based on uniform color wave lengths. Could you comment on the scientific determination of colors, based on wave length, from the visible light spectrum?
You're right that I don't explicitly mention it, but the x-axis in the plot of the absorption of the different cones is light frequency wavelengths.
Obviously our perception of color is very closely tied to the wave lengths in the visual spectrum, but the story of what we perceive is more complex than that--it seems to depend on the environment in which we see things as well, for example with color constancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy
Tommy, I was just thinking like a Forensic Scientist giving testimony in a Civil or Criminal Courtroom. If a jury was told by a defense attorney who made a claim that any color/hue is a toss-up - and no expert was presented to counter that testimony- then injustice would occur. Expert testimony and scientific instrumentation can precisely determine colors, in the visible spectrum, that would be uniform around the globe & on celestial bodies. My Japanese wife sometimes calls me “shikimo” (Japanese for color-blind) when she and I do not agree on color, I have told her that there are instruments that can precisely settle our differences. Blessings.
I like the statement: "I think there's something to this tension."
I think so too!
Similar to that color perception thought experiment, thinking about and experiencing illusions (like visual or cognitive) evokes the same tension in me. I notice, that there is some reality 'out there' and there is a perception of that reality is not in line with that reality 'out there', noticed by my own reasoning mind. This creates the tension for me between experience and reality. Sometimes my mind flips like in a figure ground reversal between two states of paying attention to reality and then to experience and in optical illusions you can often actually see the flipping.
Another subject that evokes similar tension is contemplating death for me. There is an asymmetry between me dying as observed from the outside and me dying as observed from the insight.
@Tommy Blanchard, do you see the notion of tension that you mentioned in my descriptions as well? And I wonder if there is a larger theory (of consciousness) behind this notion of tension, if anybodies knows I would be highly interested.
Yeah, I definitely get what you're saying with those "tensions". I think this is related to a lot of the intuitions at the heart of many of the arguments about consciousness--the idea that consciousness can't be explained because any objective third-party explanation wouldn't seem to speak to the first-person nature. I think this is one of those "sort of right but also sort of wrong" ideas. I think it's hard to wrap our heads around what it would mean to explain consciousness, but that that doesn't imply it isn't possible.
A bit more sober of a question: why is it that people group colors into different categories? For instance, if I showed 10 people a chatrtruese shirt and asked each whether it was more yellow or more green, I would likely get conflicting answers (often very opinionated answers, from experience).
Some cultures categorize colors differently (e.g. cultures that have the same label for blue and green), but why do individuals in the same culture categorize ambiguous colors differently?
Good question! If I had to hazard a guess, it would be a combination of three factors: 1) There are individual differences in our visual systems--some people have better ability to discriminate colors, etc, so some of the difference might come down to a difference between people in what they are able to detect; 2) We aren't exposed a lot to colors "on the edge" and asked to categorize them. It might simply be we have slightly different experiences with what we've seen labeled as yellow or green at the edges, and that leads to us giving different labels when asked; or 3) asking people in slightly different lumination conditions. Color can change a lot depending on the light!
These are just guesses though (and I had to look up chartreuse, which is definitely green)
This is a question that’s fascinated me since I was very young, probably in my early teens. Really interesting to read about the neuroscience involved!
On a lighter note, this is what’s been behind the fascinating, if sometimes interminable, discussions about paint, wallpaper and general decor choice I have had with my family over some forty or so years now. Who knew?
You sort of speed by the fact that colours are not out there in the world but I think that this fact would blow most people’s minds if they really absorbed it. I’d hazard that most people have a strong sense of naive realism and that that’s the source of much of our impatience when it comes to active empathy and understanding our many differences with others.
I have this theory that if we adopted a Many Worlds Approach to Interpersonal Conflict that started with the (correct) assumption that we all occupy different psychosocial worlds (albeit overlapping to large but varying extents) we would put more effort and patience into building bridges of mutual understanding. I’d love to see psychologists put this to the test.
The asymmetric shape of this Munsell color solid is really interesting stuff. I’ve got to see if I understand here. So if I wanted to try to argue that it is possible to perceive different colors, I would need to find a smooth one-to-one map of the color solid onto itself that doesn’t radically change local gradients? With the latter imposed to ensure that no one is surprised by colors appearing so abruptly. Would that be enough? It don’t have strong intuition that this is impossible, although maybe I am missing some constraints on the map here?
One constraint you might be missing is the mapping needs to be a transform along the hue-dimension. A change that some people perceive as a change of hue but you see as a change in saturation would be deeply weird and, again, noticeable behaviorally when you describe the color change.
To preserve the relationships between hues, you're left with rotating or flipping the hue dimension, but those aren't possible because of the asymmetries in the three-dimensional space.
This question has always brought up fascinating implications about the seemingly private nature of our consciousness. Such a thorough understanding of the mechanics of perception really seems to undermine the idea that your conscious perception is completely personal and ineffable. It can be broken down piece-by-piece and examined — compared against the larger backdrop of human mental experience.
And, as you say, this ought to grant us quite a bit of empathy, knowing that so much of our experience is shared and explainable. Something that feels so personal and private and indescribable is actually quite universal.
Fascinating piece!
Thank you!
I think the details of how my brain processes sensations is a little different from yours. We probably don't see red and green differently but I have a brain tumour and I do smell scents that you don't smell and vice versa. Ronaldo and Messi are able to track a football in ways that I am not able. Da Vinci sees the world a little differently too. There's probably no one that sees the world exactly the way that I do but there's also no one that sees it completely differently. It's a spectrum.
Bats too.
Most bats have sight that is worse than ours. Some a little, some a lot. None are completely blind though. It's a spectrum. This American Life has an episode about a blind man, Daniel Kish, who has learned to echolocate by clicking. He's blind like a bat but he echolocates like a bat too. Is he completely the same as a bat? Or completely different? Or are they both on the same spectrum that we are on?
I think we're not so different from bats and we could all learn to echolocate if we practiced a bit more. It's a mistake to say that we are completely unlike bats. I don't know exactly what it's like to be a bat but I don't know exactly what it's like to be you either.
I agree with all that!
Perhaps it’s not possible for me to see your red when you see green given that this difference would be reflected in the external structural relations between colours. But I think it is possible that our phenomenal colours share the same external structural relations while differing in their internal structural characteristics. Maybe when you see red, I see red* and maybe your red relates to your other colour perceptions in the same way that my red* relates to my other colour* perceptions.
At the level of the brain, this might be reflected by us using different brain states to represent colours, with these different brain states acting as placeholders in a broadly similar higher level neural network. We know that human brains are quite similar at the level of morphology and high level neural activation patterns (e.g. processes you can detect on an EEG), but also individually variant at the level of lower level structure like neural weights and small scale neural networks.
This is an empirical question, but I find it entirely plausible that the neural realizers for colour might exist at the lower level of scale which is individually variant, in which case different people might actually have different experiences of colour.
Brain states aside, we have plenty of behavioral evidence that we have differences in how we represent color--some people can discriminate more colors than others, and there are situations where people will disagree about color classifications. So it's absolutely true that there are differences in their internal structural characteristics in that sense!
Holeeee shiiiiit. I thought it was only me ever in the history of all humanity that had wondered if everyone saw the “same colors as me”. Have wondered this since I was a kid. And I’m not even stoned.
Same here. My father was color blind. He can't see red. Red to him, he says, is Grey. He had no problem with traffic lights. In fact, if he had not told me he was colorblind, I would not have known.
I went through the article twice and found no reference to the electromagnetic spectrum and the spectrometer that can look into deep space and determine elements based on uniform color wave lengths. Could you comment on the scientific determination of colors, based on wave length, from the visible light spectrum?
You're right that I don't explicitly mention it, but the x-axis in the plot of the absorption of the different cones is light frequency wavelengths.
Obviously our perception of color is very closely tied to the wave lengths in the visual spectrum, but the story of what we perceive is more complex than that--it seems to depend on the environment in which we see things as well, for example with color constancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy
Tommy, I was just thinking like a Forensic Scientist giving testimony in a Civil or Criminal Courtroom. If a jury was told by a defense attorney who made a claim that any color/hue is a toss-up - and no expert was presented to counter that testimony- then injustice would occur. Expert testimony and scientific instrumentation can precisely determine colors, in the visible spectrum, that would be uniform around the globe & on celestial bodies. My Japanese wife sometimes calls me “shikimo” (Japanese for color-blind) when she and I do not agree on color, I have told her that there are instruments that can precisely settle our differences. Blessings.
Very interesting and something I have also wondered about for years after someone posed the question in school.
I like the statement: "I think there's something to this tension."
I think so too!
Similar to that color perception thought experiment, thinking about and experiencing illusions (like visual or cognitive) evokes the same tension in me. I notice, that there is some reality 'out there' and there is a perception of that reality is not in line with that reality 'out there', noticed by my own reasoning mind. This creates the tension for me between experience and reality. Sometimes my mind flips like in a figure ground reversal between two states of paying attention to reality and then to experience and in optical illusions you can often actually see the flipping.
Another subject that evokes similar tension is contemplating death for me. There is an asymmetry between me dying as observed from the outside and me dying as observed from the insight.
@Tommy Blanchard, do you see the notion of tension that you mentioned in my descriptions as well? And I wonder if there is a larger theory (of consciousness) behind this notion of tension, if anybodies knows I would be highly interested.
Yeah, I definitely get what you're saying with those "tensions". I think this is related to a lot of the intuitions at the heart of many of the arguments about consciousness--the idea that consciousness can't be explained because any objective third-party explanation wouldn't seem to speak to the first-person nature. I think this is one of those "sort of right but also sort of wrong" ideas. I think it's hard to wrap our heads around what it would mean to explain consciousness, but that that doesn't imply it isn't possible.
So interesting!
A bit more sober of a question: why is it that people group colors into different categories? For instance, if I showed 10 people a chatrtruese shirt and asked each whether it was more yellow or more green, I would likely get conflicting answers (often very opinionated answers, from experience).
Some cultures categorize colors differently (e.g. cultures that have the same label for blue and green), but why do individuals in the same culture categorize ambiguous colors differently?
Good question! If I had to hazard a guess, it would be a combination of three factors: 1) There are individual differences in our visual systems--some people have better ability to discriminate colors, etc, so some of the difference might come down to a difference between people in what they are able to detect; 2) We aren't exposed a lot to colors "on the edge" and asked to categorize them. It might simply be we have slightly different experiences with what we've seen labeled as yellow or green at the edges, and that leads to us giving different labels when asked; or 3) asking people in slightly different lumination conditions. Color can change a lot depending on the light!
These are just guesses though (and I had to look up chartreuse, which is definitely green)
Agreed!
This is a question that’s fascinated me since I was very young, probably in my early teens. Really interesting to read about the neuroscience involved!
Lovely article. I find your writing very lucid. Thank you.
On a lighter note, this is what’s been behind the fascinating, if sometimes interminable, discussions about paint, wallpaper and general decor choice I have had with my family over some forty or so years now. Who knew?
You sort of speed by the fact that colours are not out there in the world but I think that this fact would blow most people’s minds if they really absorbed it. I’d hazard that most people have a strong sense of naive realism and that that’s the source of much of our impatience when it comes to active empathy and understanding our many differences with others.
I have this theory that if we adopted a Many Worlds Approach to Interpersonal Conflict that started with the (correct) assumption that we all occupy different psychosocial worlds (albeit overlapping to large but varying extents) we would put more effort and patience into building bridges of mutual understanding. I’d love to see psychologists put this to the test.
The asymmetric shape of this Munsell color solid is really interesting stuff. I’ve got to see if I understand here. So if I wanted to try to argue that it is possible to perceive different colors, I would need to find a smooth one-to-one map of the color solid onto itself that doesn’t radically change local gradients? With the latter imposed to ensure that no one is surprised by colors appearing so abruptly. Would that be enough? It don’t have strong intuition that this is impossible, although maybe I am missing some constraints on the map here?
One constraint you might be missing is the mapping needs to be a transform along the hue-dimension. A change that some people perceive as a change of hue but you see as a change in saturation would be deeply weird and, again, noticeable behaviorally when you describe the color change.
To preserve the relationships between hues, you're left with rotating or flipping the hue dimension, but those aren't possible because of the asymmetries in the three-dimensional space.
If you're interested in reading about other transforms philosophers have tried, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy goes much further in depth: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/#InvQuaSce
Ahh, very interesting! Thanks.
I will take it a step further. Colors don’t exist. I’ll leave you with this question - how does color change through time?