A theory about Colors

M

mgwisni

Registered Member
My friends and I always discuss different theories we come up with and recently I came up with this one: How can we ever prove that we are seeing the same colors? My purple could look like your red but we would never know it. The only glitch that I have found is the blaze orange of hunting. Blaze orange has to be bright to the person seeing it and so it is unlikely that color could look different to everyone.

Discuss.
 
To put it simply, we have words that represent a certain color. So when you and I see orange, we say orange because we are TAUGHT that this color is represented by the words orange....
 
Right but that wasn't the point. What I'm saying is maybe the color that I see as orange, you see as purple. We would still call it Orange but it would look different to each of us, but we would have been brought up to know it as Orange.
 
colors have different propertys

value is how bright or dark somethingis

saturation is how vivid or muted the color is

hue is what we think of as color, like green and blue are different hues

so the bright orange vest could be noticealbe by people because of its value but we could still be perceving different hues.

although ill also add that this is a pretty silly and pointless concept.
 
Now objectively speaking, for the most part our eyes all work the same (there are two different kinds of color blindness, as well as various other problems with some people's eyes, but the fact that we can recognize these as being aberrations from normal eye functioning shows clearly that there is a standard that we have to work from). Colors themselves are also objective, Orange light, for instance is always the same wavelength, and always the same in relation to say the wavelength of green or purple or red, and all of these wavelengths are also constants.

So if we have the exact same thing going into the exact same organ and being translated through the exact same process, then why should you have reason to believe that some people perceive different hues when they look at something?

Furthermore, there are experiments that can show that people see colors in the same way. For instance, if you take a red apple, gather people around it, and then shine a green light on this apple, it will appear to become black. This works only because Red and Green are complimentary colors, If they were not, then the apple would not appear to become black, and no one would be able to agree what color the apple had become when the green light is turned on. Now, either the variation in hue that people possibly experience shifts colors equally across the spectrum of viewable light, such that when people view two complementary colors, though they may not be seeing the same hue, they will be seeing colors that have equally distant wavelengths as to be complimentary.

Finally studies have been preformed which show that placing a person into a blue room will have a calming effect on most people, and putting them in a red room will make them more admitted. If the hues that they were perceiving were different then you would not get these results.

This is a question that should have been asked on one of the science boards, not in the philosophy section. There's nothing terribly philosophical about it.
 
You're correct Mgwisni! It would be very hard to prove that we are seeing different colours because each person is taught that the colour they are looking at has been given a name. So one person might see the colour purple but they have been taught that it has the name 'orange', so if they were asked what colour 'orange' is, they would point it out correctly (even though they see it as purple), and vice-versa (if they were asked what the name of the colour they were being pointed to ('orange') is, then they would say "orange".)

These types of tests do actually reveal colour blindness though: http://www.liquidgeneration.com/sabotage/vision_sabotage.asp
 
This question could be asked about any idea shared by language- say love, hate , peace, serenity, anger, fear etc. In a way these are more interesting examples because the outside referent by which we learn what they are is the behaviour of others and the situations in which they use the words to express their feelings.

I guess with words like orange, or tree, we are lucky enought o be able to see someone else touch the tree or rtake the orange block if we aske them to so that kind of verifies we are meaning somethinga t least approximately the same as it appears tom have the same referent to both parties.

That is, if they dont think they are jumping over the moon when they are reaching for the orange block because that is what they thought we asked. :)
 
Philosophy of Mind & Cognition: Qualia

The question posed is the easiest question for introducing the concept of "QUALIA". Even though people appear to percieve objects (more or less) the same, we have no clue whatsoever on how others experience the world.
Thus, qualia can be described as the content of our consciousness. The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Front/topic_index.html)
writes:

The terms quale and qualia (pl.) are most commonly used to characterize the qualitative, experiential, or felt properties of mental states.
Click to expand...

Many philosophers of mind & cognition think that it is in priniple an unanswerable question, since describing qualia makes them part of non-qualitative (or non-mental) world. This they cannot be communicated. Thus, sometimes this issue is referred to as the gap between the first-person and the third-person description of experiences. E.g. one can say "my finger hurts" but these words do not convey the actual experience of the pain. Also the brain activity associated with the pain is not the experience- that is also part of the non-mental/ third person description of the world.

Concluding: I see orange does mean the same thing for me as it does for you (unless you're incapable of seeing the colour), but nobody knows in what ways our experiences are different.

Maybe I experince orange more or less the same way you experience the feeling of a soft carpet.... who knows?

I would really recommend reading "The Mind's I" by D.R.Hofstadter & D.C. Dennett. Really entertaining and insightfull. Part VI "the Inner Eye" of the book especially deals with these issues.
"What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel is a must-read.
 
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I guess it's time to dust off the ol' keyboard and hop back into debate. Two years I suppose is long enough of an absence.

The fact is that you can't prove that you are experiencing the same color as I am. Just like you can't prove that you are experienceing the same sensation that anyone else does when exposed to the same stimuli. In fact, I have very poor color vision, so I will not see the infinite shades of colors that other people are capable of seeing.

That is why philosophers in the modern era separated items properties into two kinds.

The primary properties are such things as mass, volume, charge, wavelength, spin number, composition and depending on who you ask, shape, function and spatial location. Note that these are all measurable quantities. You can discuss with a blind person all of these things, or with someone who has never experienced a certain thing by these methods. You can eved discuss red light with a blind man, and though he does not experience the light, he is able to discuss the wavelength that it is emitted, and what those things mean.

Secondary properties are things as taste, touch, smell, color, and other purely sensual qualities. They are capable of changing from person to person and do not inherently affect the nature of the object itself.

Descartes writes (and this is the only time I think he's on to anything) that he may hold a piece of beeswax in his hand. It is colored, is sweet smelling, tastes of honey, is hard when he raps his hand against it, and yet when he holds it close to a flame, the scent leaves, it is pliable, and hot, and is texturally different. When he takes the oozing wax away from the flame, it is hard again, has no smell, taste or color to speak of, and is once again hard. These can change because they are not inherent properties of the wax itself.
 
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