/sci/ - Science & Math

That's interesting OP. But nahh don't think so, i've had conversations about "that thing's yellow" - "nah it's "orange" before, but in general you agree to what color something is.

tl;dr no.
It's physically possible to measure the inputs and reactions to certain wavelengths of light.

>>2637282
your missing the point, both would call it the same name.

no
but women see more colors than men

>>2637305
that is interesting like three fucks

>>2637306
[citation needed]

but it doesn't matter as long as they aren't colourblind.

It serves no practical difference.

You could probably make a hipster art film about it though (shot like a hipster scifag version of Peep Show) and people would gobble that shit up.

physical observation of the human eye and how it perceives light lead us to believe there is no reason the cones in your eye and my eye are any different in their response to any given wavelengths. hence when i see red, you also see red. due to individual cone densities etc it would be possible our brains are perceiving slightly different shades of said color, but in general terms we see the same.

>>2637315

Exactly my point. I made a quick illustration to demonstrate.

I get what you mean, I think its possible as well.
Though 2 people may call it the same name, they may perceive it differently. person A will see colour A as dark but person B will see colour A as light but both person A and B call it "Green" for (example), or - person B processing the input differently such that he sees it as a different colour but both have recognized it as "Green"

This could well in fact explain Favours in colours since people would see colours different as they actually are. Who knows im seeing green as your purple and you're seeing purple as my green. And that my favourite colour is green( equivalent to your purple) and your favourite colour is purple (equivalent to my green) which means we technically favour the same colour just that it has different names since we input it differently - therefore in which bring us that most people in this world could be having the same favourite colour just that they perceive it differently

If you get what I mean, its quite confusing if you..erm..Have a down syndrome mentality.

The gene expression responsible for the receptors in the human eye are for the most part very universal between individual people.

>>2637354

This makes sense only so long as we assume that qualia have an objective form beyond the mind that holds them.

The example of green as 'green' and green as 'purple' only makes sense so long as we imagine the brain has an existing palette of colors that it arbitrarily assigns wavelengths to as it perceives them. But this is not so.


My green, that is, my response to those things of wavelength green, may be different in some ways, but the image of green in my head is no different in basic terms. It is simply the response I have to the particular rods and cones in my eye being stimulated by incoming green light.


Compare this to the sensation of being touched on the toe to the sensation of being touched on the thumb. Now, does it make sense to say that my being touched on the toe could be your being touched on the thumb?

>>2637374

The toe thumb example is good, but as far as I understand the opptical nerves do not send light but just signals to the brain which has to process those signals, which leaves open the possibility of different processing for each individual. But i may be wrong.

I can prove that your example is impossible. Colors have relations to other colors. If you saw orange as what I call green, and vice-versa, and everything else were the same, then you would say that green is more like red than orange is, and I would say the opposite.

Also, there is very dark green, but there is no very dark orange. When orange gets very dark, it's just brown. So if you saw all shades of orange as I saw the corresponding shades of green (corresponding in terms of darkness, that is), then you would say that dark green is just brown. And I would say it isn't.

>>2637400

No, there is certainly different processing for individuals. I understand there have been cases where, following damage to the visual centres of the brain, whole other parts of the brain pick up the slack and sight is restored.

The point is that my green and your green are both based on light of wavelength green, they have a solid external reference, and talking about what colour they are inside our head doesn't make sense.

>>2637416
>>2637431

You have valid points, I guess my theory was not as good as I thought.

We don't even perceive what our eyes see , we see a sort of 3D image, a combination of what each eye sees and what else we know, heavily modified by the subconscious to make it easy for our conscious to interpret. The colours we perceive are not real things, they are abstract interpretations of the real world. I think it is meaningless to say we perceive them differently.

>>2637431
> fundamentally misunderstands consciousness
have a nice life of denial

i've had simillar thoughts, op, but mine are more along the lines of "is this color darker or lighter, or closer to one color or the other, than what someone else sees?"

>>2637487

In what way?

>>2637441
it could still make a good sci-fi peep show film though.

>>2637478
>The colours we perceive are not real things, they are abstract interpretations of the real world. I think it is meaningless to say we perceive them differently.

This. "Is my red your red?" questions has been around since forever. Everyone who has philosophized has asked this question, and the answer is that there is no possible answer, it is a meaningless question.

>>2637521

maybe a bit like "they live", there are only a few people who see secret messages on objects and everywhere. Hmm

>>2637262
> I have a little theory and I am interested what you think about it.
You have a conjecture. Arguably a philosophy.
I don't mix philosophy with science.
> Humans can perceive colors (not all of them but most of course)
Either you mean this to say colors are the visible spectrum which by tautology we can see all of, or you mean this to say the visible spectrum is a significant portion of the entire EM frequency range in he universe. Either way you're derpa wrong.
> and we have given the colors certain names.
Yes, and we also measured them and defined them objectively based on frequency and wavelength.
> I wonder if orange looks the same for me as for you.
How would you ever demonstrate this?
> I mean you see an Orange and peceive it as the color i know as green.
No. I see light of a certain wavelength and know by comparison to other things that have been called orange in my language that it is within the range of things called orange. Unless someone fucked up teaching you colors as a kid, you have pretty much the same objects called orange as I did.
> But you know it as the color Orange, because your brain processes the input differently.
No, I know it as orange because my brain processes it exactly the same. The retina picks up red and green in proportion, sends that proportion to the visual cortex where the image is colored that wavelength, then off to the language centers to see what word matched that wavelength. And surprise, orange-colored things are a color which is named orange. Kids don't KNOW colors, they have to be TAUGHT it.

>>2637786

yep, my theory is flawed :(

thanks for contributing

If colours look different to every person, how do we know which colours are complimentary and which colours look good when put together in terms of clothing and the like?

>>2638010
because everyone likes the same colors together

>>2637305
Who trolled this up?

wat if each individual organism experiences the world in its own unique way? ie the way your brain perceives light waves is the same way I percieve sound waves (just as an example it doesn't have to be sight and soundit could be some made up sense I can't even imagine which you call "sight")

>>2638108
Nope. Light's not some magical thing it's just a wavelength, red-violet.
If you look at colours there are always some which don't blend, not every person could see colours in a mixed up way since their version of the rainbow would fail to blend too. Or at least they'd know straightoff that something was wrong.

>>2637786
Don't listen to this douchebag. He's not distinguishing between subjective experiences and third-person characterizations. Take his points and replace "orange" with "pretty" (making appropriate adjustments) and then see how much sense he makes.


Now MY point, on the other hand, was good >>2637416. See also >>2638010. The ONLY way to confirm that color experiences are phenomenally similar intersubjectively is to examine their interrelationships. If you take experiences in isolation, there's no way to tell.

The only way this makes sense is that you are proposing that the electrical impulses which give the perception of "yellow" to you would instead give the perception of "orange" to me if I were to receive them instead. That involves so many complex things I'm not sure if it would even be testable.

tl;dr OP is a troll

>>2637416
Unless there was a uniform shift that each color took, say each color looks like it's 50 nm higher for you than for me. My green is your blue, my blue is your purple, you say "dark blue is just purple" and I agree wholeheartedly.

The whole thing is that it makes no sense to speak of "my green." I can't possibly tell you what I'm referring to there other than the physical reactions which stimulate it, which all look identical. Any hypothesis of a "difference" is forgetting that we aren't really talking about things which can be compared to each other.

>>2638010
>>2638025

actually colors don't look good together.
the idea of having complimentary colors (in fashion) is a social construct.

if everyone told you that red goes with pink and brown you'd think these colors look good together to.

>>2638260
It's not completely a social construct, can't remember where I read this but red and green do 'shift' the attention of the eyes. Or something like that..sorry part bullshitting but there's something behind it

>>2638260
That's a nice point, but empirically unfounded. There's not enough information either way (as far as I know, but if you had a source I'd be interested) to say either that some colors do look good together naturally or that it's all societal. I'd be willing to guess that some colors do look good together (for instance, brown and green) based on some kind of aesthetic in nature.

>>2638154

i dont think ur high enough to even BEGIN to understsand wat im talkin about

im talking about perception, like how the brain organizes and processes info and feeds it to the conscious

>>2638294

So science has understood how the exactly the brain works now? This is breaking news.

Everyone thinks of this one, OP. When we were fucking kids.

This isn't science, it's philosophy (psuedophilosophy even). It cannot be proven or disproven and either way it doesn't fucking matter at all. Also you're far from the first one to think of this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=do+we+percieve+colors+the+same+way

>>2638247
You're dead wrong, though what you said is not dumb. There is a lot of BS in this thread. So listen to MY science.

First, this idea that everyone has in this thread that "color is a wavelength of light" is a myth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_%28color%29.. The identity function on color (partition on the possibility space of retinal stimulations) is a function of the excitation of different color receptors on the retina. So long as blue and yellow light are balanced out, for example, the color won't look either blue or yellow, even if it has light of the "blue wavelength" and light of the "yellow wavelength" in it.

Second, you're ignoring the only point I made, which is that phenomenal colors (perceptual experiences of color) bear relationships to one another. For example, blue looks more like green than it does like orange. But green does not look like it contains blue (regardless of how pigments are mixed), while orange does look like it contains red.

Thus, since you know somewhat how colors are related to one another, you know that your phenomenal experience of red is not the same as my phenomenal experience of green, and vice versa. However, it wouldn't follow just from this that all of our phenomenal experiences have to be exactly the same.

This is not a bullshit question, but changing the subject to the properties of light and the properties of the nervous system cannot answer it. It has to do with the representational properties of the mind, and belongs to psychology and philosophy.

>>2638329
Pseudophilosophy = whatever you can't think of how to answer. Does this look pseudo to you:
http://mit.edu/abyrne/www/ColorRealism.html

>>2637262
I had a long think about this when I was about four, and my only solution to discovering the answer would be to place someone else's eyeball in your socket to then look at a sheet of color pre picked to prove or disprove this. (Alright thinking for a kinder-gardener)

I could tell a baby that what I see as "orange" is the color "blue" and he would refer to objects of that color indefinitely.

My thoughts at least.

>>2638378
Yes, I think it would be relatively trivial to show that we can imagine schemes in which color-relationships can be the same between the names we share while the "actual colors" are different (assuming we can have such a thing). The "phenomenological" approach can only have bearing when we apply ourselves to certain schemes, and if we're already deciding what to talk about, then we can throw the whole concept out the window, as human eyes are physically the same, and there's no room to postulate a difference. We don't need any philosophy, just science.

The real way to understand the problem relies on understanding why exactly qualia just makes no sense to speak of. Your approach cannot (in its current form) handle such things as "does it feel the same when I touch my hand as when you touch yours?" because you make a reliance on interrelationships of states. Additionally, we could imagine a race of mutants who only see one wavelength and one intensity of light. It follows that your idea is severely lacking in its explanatory power.

What it comes down to is that when we say "Yeah, but how do I know IN MY HEAD it looks the same as IN YOUR HEAD?" we aren't making any kind of linguistically meaningful statement. It's trying to take commonality of experience beyond the point that it makes sense. Does something look the same to me as it does to a bee? How about to a chair? I can't answer these questions, because there is no way I could even go about answering them. I can only analogize the way a bee might see to the way I see (imagine you had 500 separately pictures of the world, each focusing on a different point). From this perspective, it is only natural to assume that any analogy we make of color-experience of humans to other humans (e.g. your green to my green) must either be analogically identical, or it must have some basis in physical implications of some difference in our eye anatomy, of which we do not know any.

I would wager that they are very similar because of the emotions attached to colours. Especially red and anger, if your red was my light blue there would be no way that it could be considered an "angry" colour.

ITT: PIC RELATED

>>2638538
Improbable. Your brain either has wired-in reactions to certain wavelengths (in which case the wavelength for red is the same matter how you "see" it, so your light blue still is associated with anger) or it's based on a series of associations with events involving those colors, which would still make you feel the same way as someone who sees red as red.

>I wonder if orange looks the same for me as for you
We've done enough testing to know this is true, barring certain disorders

Proof line
1. Cell biologists tested the chemical receptors in the cell and found them ubiquitous
2. Neurologists tested sections of the brain lighting up for same colors
3. Psychologists determined there is a universal gradient of color

It is virtually impossible for this >>2637354 to be true, otherwise mixing two colors while painting would yield completely different results to different people (it doesn't)

Although different languages have different names for different colors, or sometimes have fifteen different words for what an English speaker might perceive as shades of one color
An Eskimo has three different words for white which roughly translate blue-white, gray-white, bright-white

But he still sees the same colors and an English person still sees the differences, just doesn't have specific words for them