For instance, would what the color red looks like to me be the same for what the color red looks like to anyone else? And how would I know that we see the same red if I can’t see what they’re seeing.
For instance, would what the color red looks like to me be the same for what the color red looks like to anyone else? And how would I know that we see the same red if I can’t see what they’re seeing.
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This question has haunted me all my life, I’ve just come to the conclusion that there isn’t a good answer for it
It’s impossible for us to know that. It stands to reason that unless there are physical differences in the eyes or the visual processing centers of the brain, perceptions should be the same, but we have no way to test that.
Quite often thought about this.
Interesting thought right? I think about it all the time.
No, rods and cones in your eyes are a bit different than everyone else. Some colors only exist to some people, others see them a bit different. Some people see everything a bit less vibrant than everyone else, which also naturally happens with age.
i dont think theres any way to prove we all percieve the same way
Most people have 3 types of color receptors in their eyes.
Some women have 4 types of color receptors and can see more colors than people with 3 can.
Color blindness is a big spectrum that varies from person to person. Lots of people don’t know that they’re color blind unless they take a test. For most people, you just can’t tell apart as many shades of color as others can. Some of your color receptors are just less sensitive than they are for others, or they detect a slightly different range of light than most people’s do.
Look up the charts to test for color blindness. They show patterns made up of lots of different colors. You’re supposed to be able to see a number in them. You’ll see different numbers based on which color ranges you’re sensitive to.
There’s no way of knowing. The term that describes this is “qualia”, a subjective experience that is unverifiable.
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My own two eyes see color slightly differently.
Technically we have no way of knowing.
There’s no way to know for sure. We don’t know if foods taste the same to all people as well.
These guys made a skit about it.
https://youtu.be/f7q8f6KMcac?si=VpU0tej16-3_48yq
I read in a book about fotography that women and men see colours differently because of the different distribution of “Rod” and “cone” sensory cells. I am no native english speaker so I am not sure if the anatomy word is the official name.
No.
Some people see colours as numbers.
Source: David from “Love on the Spectrum” 🥰
My sister and I once had a 20 minute argument over whether a car was more red or orange, so I don’t think so.
(it was definitely red)
I mean probably not. I’m red green colourblind. And if medicine has taught me anything, it’s that most things are a spectrum, not binary. So colourblindness is probably the same. I can pick out a difference in streetlights and bold red and green under bright sunlight. But indoors, nah. They’re the same.
Fun fact, most colourblind people have great night vision. This is because we have fewer cones, but there’s still just as much space in there, so we have more rods, which work well under low light conditions. So it might not be a maladaptive mutation but a true evolution for people for whom low light vision was more important than colour vision.
I know my own eyes don’t see color the same as each other. One sees everything with a yellow hue, and the other a more blue/green hue. Only found out when I was trying to paint and one eye got tired so I closed it and noticed the difference in paint colors.
I was quite literally thinking about this yesterday. “I know we all (non-colorblind) know the sky is blue. We all look at the color of the sky, and see what we know as blue. But what if the color that other people perceive when they look at the sky and say ‘that’s blue’, looks like the color I perceive as red??” I hate it 🙁
No. Average women do in fact see more variations in colour shades than average men.
I used to trip on this thought often when I was younger. Certainly, most people agree that red is red, but do we all see red in the same way?? Although most people can agree on which color is which, I’ve come to the conclusion that no, we don’t all see color in the same way. Isn’t that cool?! My little brother is very slightly colorblind such that the US Air Force wouldn’t move him forward as a pilot. So WEIRD!
I recently learned that birds have more color receptors in their corneas than human beings do. In fact, they have color receptors such that they can actually SEE the Earths’ electromagnetic field. Far out!
Me and my husband argue about the color of things all the time, especially if it is close to grey, he sees grey only where as it will be green or whatever to me.
This question has been the subject of many discussions and it’s a bit of a philosophical quandary with no current answer.
I read a study where females could differentiate more shades of colors than males. They attributed it to back in the cave man days while the men were hunting the women were gathering fruits and berries and developed the ability to pick them at the best time. I figure that is why we have 200 shades of white paint today. 😃
I bet it’s true that women see more variations, and I associate with the love for flowers, i think they see them more beautiful then men do.
No. My eyes each see different colors. I don’t notice it normally, but if I close one eye then switch, the color changes slightly. I can only imagine it’s the same from person to person
Men see in the dark better than women. Women see color variations better than men. Rods and cones. Perhaps this goes back to the caveman days, where women could see if the fruit was ripe at a distance and men could see predators at night.
Vsauce has a video on this exact topic.
https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08
Ive loved this since I was a kid and I’m about to teach this in my neuroscience class next week 🙂
our brains construct color from different “opsin” proteins chillin in our retina. As some others have said, we (generally) have three general types of opsins in our cones that react when photons bump into them. the responsivity of each opsin type peaks at a certain wavelength (for what we perceive as red, green and blue), with a normal distribution like fall off around that average. Our perception of color is a construct the brain creates around the relative activation of these different opsins in our retina. It’s probably undeniable that there are some differences even in non color blind folks just due to different distributions of these opsins in the retina and so different downstream processing in visual cortex.
With only one type of opsin, selective for a specific wavelength, we wouldn’t see color. If the opsins were shifted along the electromagnetic spectrum, we’d see different colors. If we had four types of opsins, we’d see more colors. Pretty trippy
Probably not. My question is, wouldn’t it be funny if all of us had the same favorite color (the way we perceive it), but we each see it differently? I realize that is impossible, but a fun thought nonetheless
Former hairdresser here. When we colored someone’s hair we brought out swatches because people saw colors differently. That was especially true with reds and yellows.
I don’t even see the same colour comparing my left and right eyes.
I had cataract surgery in 2010, and they did spherical correction on my left eye making it my distance eye, while leaving that out of my right eye for normal distances. I need +2.0 readers to solder now.
What really threw me though was that one lens has a blue tint, and the other has a yellow tint. I don’t notice it day to day, but I can look at a white background and see it in 2 different tints by closing one eye. I need welding shade 5.0 sunglasses to not get a migraine outdoors, so I spend all day outside seeing EVERYTHING in shades of green.
No, my gf and I have a running joke about a previous car of hers because i see it as green and she sees it as blue.
Sometimes I’ve noticed that someone will say “orange” when something looks red to me, or “yellow” when something looks green to me. The common factor seems to be red, so maybe I have fewer red cones than most people, or maybe they have more red cones than most people do? I don’t know.
About 80% of humans have three types of retina color cells. A few, usually males, have just two making green and red appear similar. This is called color blindness. And some, usually females, have four types that let them see blue shades more vividly.
Short answer yeah, we mostly do. There’s some slight variation of course, but we’re pretty sure that my red isn’t your green. It’s impossible to just hit shuffle on the color wheel like that.
Long answer: You have a cone cell in your eye that only picks up light that has a wavelength of about 700 nanometers. That cone cell transmits signals to your brain, and your brain knows that the 700-nanometer-detector is talking. That’s what red IS. Red is literally your brain telling you that a certain wavelength of light is coming into your eye.
And we can test this in SO MANY ways. Like let’s say, for example, that my 700-nanometer-light-detector cell was calibrated incorrectly and instead detected 900-nanometer-light (which would be infrared). I would literally be able to see things that other people don’t. Infrared light is a form of heat energy, so hot objects would be a different color than cold objects. No human has this superpower, so we know that it’s not calibrated wrong. (We can do a similar test for ultraviolet light).
No one asks if one persons perception of F# is the same as another person’s, because we see sound as something that exists on a spectrum rather than a random arrangement of things. Color works the exact same way though— it’s a smooth gradient from red to violet.
There is, of course, a slight amount of variation. Some people are more sensitive to different shades, and some people might see certain colors a bit more intensely. But like I said, it’s broadly the same.
This reminds me of the dress color craze that went around the internet about 8-10 years ago. Some people saw the dress as white and gold and others saw it as blue and black.
Different cultures define colors differently. For instance, Russian has two words for blue, and there is an agreed-on point between lighter or darker blue which is the boundary between the two colors. And Japanese traffic lights are lots bluer than the green traffic lights everywhere else in the world because of their definition of green.
Nope. I literally saw a TikTok on STEM abut this today. Long answer short was no. We all see them slightly differently bc there are no duplicate brains.
I’m legally blind. I have optic nerve atrophy and rod and cone atrophy. The cone atrophy means I see colors differently from others and have to ask for clarification.
What I don’t understand about colour blind people is how they know.
For example if someone sees green and brown the wrong way round, when they were young and seeing green they would be told it was brown so why don’t they just think they’re seeing brown?
No we don’t perceive colors the same, and one of the mechanisms behind color blindness helps show why; one of the most common forms of color blindness is not from any part of the eye failing to work, but from two of the RGB “sensors” being most sensitive to wavelengths that are a lot closer to each other than normal.
Exactly what wavelength each of your sensors are most sensitive too, differs between people, sometimes by a lot. Usually the difference is not enough to matter, but it does mean the RGB signals the brain receives are a little bit different between people, and we just learn that a thing is orange, therefore those signals mean orange, meanwhile someone else is learning that their slightly different RGB signals mean orange, because each person’s RGB sensors are attuned to slightly different wavelengths of RGB
This is actually a philosophical question. Its not really possible to prove our perceptions are exactly the same even if we have the same anatomy. The brain might be creating its own version of a stimulus that varies slightly from person to person but ultimately be functionally the same.
Your red could be somebody else’s pink or green, even if we can measure the wavelength of light with technology we can’t really prove the conscious result is the same.
It might even go deeper than that. Our reality might be entirely different and all of our perceptions are made up by the brain. How can you truly prove you aren’t a brain in a jar being fed false information or even just hallucinating reality? How can I prove another sentient being is even reading these words? How can you prove these words were not created by your brain as you read them, purely figments of your sensory deprived mind trying to make sense of itself.
No. My friend sees things that are clearly blue to me as teal. I used to have a car that people said was blue when it was green. Its not color blindness its just seeing different shades.
Probably. But I was thinking about something recently that made me question it.
I LOVE onions. I love onions so much that I don’t understand how anybody could NOT love onions. But not everybody does. Some people HATE onions. That’s completely unfathomable to me, so obviously the way their brain and taste buds are interpreting onions is different from how mine are. Taste is just another sense, like sight. So if people’s brains are capable of having such different taste interpretations of specific flavors, who’s to say they can’t have different visual interpretations of specific light wavelengths as well?
I’m still not convinced, but I thought it was an interesting argument.
Hard to know, but I do know it wouldn’t happen at the eye, it would happen in the brain
I’m semi colour blind in one eye due to optic neuritis from MS. For a little while i was completely blind and then as the vision came back it was 100% colourless and then blues came back only extremely vividly and now most of my colour is back generally but I’m a bit red/green colourblind. My reds and greens are just dull and hard to see in my bad eye and i often dont see them unless i go back to my normal eye and then notice them in my bad eye when i look back at it.
I was obsessed with this question as a child, for a while!
Short answer: no because color-blindness and color-vision is a spectrum. Some people have exceptionally good color vision, but people who are colorblind often have some colors they can see and others they can’t.
Nobody can tell that for sure
Based on my experience, no. Generally pure prime colors, yes, but if at all down to more subtle shades, no. My daughter and I seem to see blue greens somewhat differently. One of us more blue, the other more green.
I also took a color theory class with exercises like grouping color swatches (all the blues, all the purples, etc.), and the students had very different answers.
Clearly not because when I hold a green shirt, my bf says “oh that’s a nice brown shirt” and I’m like wat. Or the “black and white” towel which is, in fact, brown with black stripes *face palm* xD I love him but I’m about to send him to get colour blindness tested.
OP, my son’s dad is monochromatic and I think about this question ALL.THE.TIME!
Not necessarily. They may not describe colors the same, that’s what I learned in linguistics. People from Africa, for instance, had (and perhaps some still still do) different ideas for what constitutes as blue or green. If my memory serves me right, at some point some languages of Africa didn’t really have “green” in their vocabulary, and what would be green to us still fell under the “blue” definition for them. It’s a matter of perception, I guess.
Solipsism
My BFF and I argue about red and purple things. I see more purple than red. Who’s wrong?
Things like this are called qualia, and we don’t have the means to know. We aren’t entirely certain what those things might even be.
https://youtu.be/evQsOFQju08?si=EazTyslAJO0Ux2th
I don’t think it’s possible to know. At some point someone pointed at a color and told you it was called blue. But how do we know your brain and my brain interpret the color the same? We just know someone told us whatever we were seeing was called blue and so it’s blue.
I doubt it. I was wearing an bright subtly pinkish orange sweatshirt and my bf said it was pink
I have this talk with my boyfriend because he is color blind and he can tell the difference between colors.
He says he sees mostly shades of pink and red. But if I ask what color an olive is, he knows it’s olive green. He says it’s because even though he sees it as a shade of red, that shade of red is what he knows as green.
He didn’t know he was color blind until a doctor said he was born with cataracts that made him only see shades of pink and red, greys are darker shades and he can see black.
So basically we could all see different colors but because we have learned that red is named red it wouldn’t really matter what color it actually is, we know that shade in that “color” is red because everyone says so.
Yeah. Whenever I look at an octarine starburst I wonder if it looks the same to everyone else. Wild.
Probably. We interpret the distributions the same way, just as people who are color blind interpret the distributions in similar ways. The gradients between colors make logical sense and the math for additive and subtractive color spaces work out. People also associate common moods and emotions with colors.
I think it’s also good to mention that cultures influences a lot on what we consider to be a color. Orange wasn’t really a thing before the occident discover the fruit. And despite the fruit coming from Asia, mandarin don’t have a word for this color. Doesn’t mean they didn’t see the color back then, they just don’t consider it to be a distinct one. The same way we don’t consider the color between blue-green to be a distinct color.
Before that we also used to name a color by where they came from instead of just the shade. Tyrian purple came in a whole shade or bright red of dark violet but doesn’t matter the color, if it came from sea snails and from the city of Tyr is Tyran purple.
Carmine is not just dark-red technically it’s the pigment you obtain by crushing cochineal not matter if you obtain dark-red or bright red.
That dress from a few years back that went viral should be enough to answer this.
Possible. But also, there is an artistic science behind colors, if everyone saw differently, I’m sure someone would have pointed it out that they don’t really seem to complement each other. Though there could be the possibility that we can see inverted color? Idk man.
Nope. My own eyes see colors differently. It’s not super different or super obvious but I can see a difference when I close one eye and look then close the other eye and look. Example being when I look at a tree, my right eye sees the green leaves a slightly brighter green then my left that sees a darker green. It’s not lime green to hunter green but more like forest green to emerald green.
Welcome to exitenlism my friend.
No. There is a community someplace, cant remeber where, that is very good at distinguishing between different shades of green, so much so that they haave differenr names for a multitude of shades. But they have no name for another colour (i think it was blue but I can’t remember for sure). So how you see color depends on where you live and what you are exposed to.
There’s an exhibit in the 9/11 museum that has a bunch of different blue tiles on the wall to represent the colour of the sky that people remember from the morning when it happened. They are all wildly different and it never occurred to me how anyone could see a different shade of blue
My own 2 eyes don’t even see colors the same way
Some people can see more shades of color than others
There’s probably a lot of subtle variation, and some people see extra colors.
However, even if I had a mutation where I saw all the colors inverted, I would have learned the names to match what you saw.
Yes, because yellow text is always the hardest to read on a white background; if we were seeing different colors, some people would have no problem reading “yellow“ text off a white background, because it would be a different hue to them, and therefore further from/less similar to white
You don’t even see colours the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Sen1HTu5o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz98JWgNwIQ
and the second one shows that you be just as easily fooled with certain techniques
Plot twist what if colors we think are different actually look the same so if I saw a color and I’m like oh that’s blue and it looks blue to me and you’re like no that’s Red but it also looks blue to you but you think blue is actually red Then what do we do?
I don’t really believe in the “your red could be my blue” stuff.
A lot of colour meaning is just culturally, but people seem to feel that red is an aggressive colour, while green is a calming colour regardless of where they were raised or life experience.
Also, people generally agree on what colours look good or bad together and which colours are complementary or supplementary to each other.
This indicates to me that in all ways that matter, everyone sees the same colours (unless you’re colourblind).
Not just colour, your brain “paints in” and “scrubs out” the peripherals, your own nose is a classic example.
So, basically,what you see in panoramic and recall later isn’t what the person beside you sees and remembers. A large proportion was just the brain fabricating what it considers a plausible vista.
We don’t know. Some scientists said they’ve proven it, but I looked at how they did it and I’m not convinced. Neither is the rest of the scientific community
I’ve heard it said that (some) women have a vaster pallet when it comes to colours. They see more distinctions between coloration.
No. That’s why people argue over colours and shades. Our brains interpret colours differently.
I don’t think so. My two eyes see colors slightly differently. And with my family we would often argue about whether something turquoise/cyan is more blue or green. Roughly half the family saw it as more blue and half as more green.
You should look into Synesthesia, it would be a fun rabbit hole to follow down.
I myself have tetrachromacy, my eyes register more shades of colors than most people. So “red” needs to be specified in my brain as to what shade of red it is exactly, because I dont often see the same color of red or blue etc. more than a few times in my life.
Congratulations! You’ve just stumbled upon a fundamental limit of the human experience which is that there is no way to communicate sensory experience to other people. For all we know every single person in the world may see red differently but we have no way to find out.
We ultimately don’t know.
But I would say it’s likely that we do see colors generally the same way. It’s ultimately a question of physics and evolution. The physical and chemical properties of the cones determine the properties of the electrical signal that travels from the optic nerve to the brain, where the physical and chemical properties of the neurons which process the signal, determine what your conscious experience is.
The evolutionary part of the argument is that there probably is a certain degree of variation, but I imagine only a very narrow range of variation is evolutionarily viable — if your visual perception falls too far outside the others of your species, you’re probably less well adapted to the environment than the others. Over millions of years, those more extreme variations are less likely to survive, procreate, and pass their genetic variations into the future. You end up with a species that should, in theory, perceive visual stimuli in a consistent manner from one individual to the next.
Furthermore, think of every physiological function that we can directly compare — barring certain medical conditions, my knees and elbows hinge just like yours, my heart beats just like yours, my kidneys filter my blood just like yours, etc. Unless there’s a specific reason to think that my color perception is different than yours, it seems more likely that they’re basically the same.
It’s imposible to test it.
This question is what philosophers and scientists called Non-Falsifiable. There is no experiment that can be performed to prove or disprove whether one person’s red is another person’s blue, for example. You could swap peoples’ eyes, but what if the perception of color is done in the brain? Or what if you just can’t tell the difference?
As a (mildly) colorblind person, the differences I see are due to flaws in the physical structure of my eyeballs. This can be measured and quantified and promptly ignored because it doesn’t really matter much to my day-to-day except in certain situations. How my body processes color can be calculated; but how I perceive it cannot.
Everyone feels everything differently. All our senses are unique, not just vision. And you will never know how others perceive the world. But you can be sure it is different from your perception.
Well, you have colorblindness and tetrachromats, so the color experience is definitely not universal.
In university we were given all colour shades and had to try organise them from light to dark. It was such an insightful task because at the end you could see how people got mixed up or couldn’t perceive the colours correctly. Would recommend everyone kind of somehow trying it one day
Based on personal experience, I’d say no.
My mother kept endlessly confusing me by mentioning a blue arm chair.
We didn’t have a blue arm chair, we had a grey one.
I don’t know why she called it blue.
And no, it wasn’t like The Infamous Dress situation, we had it in different houses and different lights, she still said it was blue and I only saw grey.
It IS possible for us to know this (theoretically)!
Near the end of Phantoms in the Brain, the author explains that this “Qualia” problem can be solved a certain way, but we haven’t gotten there yet technologically. It’s no longer a philosophical problem, just a technical one.
Here is a crude analogy
Person A (PA) looks at a strawberry and they say they see red. Person B looks at the same strawberry and they say they see red.
Now you temporarily disconnect the nerves that connect the thalamus to the higher conscious processing areas of the brain in PA. Connect the “Eyes to thalamus” nerves from PA to the higher conscious processing areas of the brain in PB.
“Look” at the strawberry with PA’s eyes. Ask what PB sees.
You’ll have your answer.
Lots of philosophical answers here but going by science, probably yes. Your eyes have these tiny little structures called cones which detect different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum and your brain converts these into a mental image. The only way that people could see colours differently is if everyones brain processed these waves differently which is pretty unlikely considering that the colours that electromagnetic variations produce are pretty set in physical terms too.
What if this applies to all subjective experiences? For example, if someone doesn’t like sweets but i do, maybe it’s not because they dislike the taste of sweets that i experience, but that they experience an entirely different taste which i would also dislike if i experienced it?
Short answer = no
Longer answer, maybe?
As you might know, we have receptors in our eyes that catch light and form it into what we see. Some catch green more, soms yellow etc. So, the more and wider Variety of receptors you have, the more and clearer you see the world.
But, we ofcourse look through our eyes, so eye shape also plays a role. Like a magnifying glass on a leaf, you need to get the correct spot to get the leaf to burn. Same is for your eyes and seeing things correctly. If you have flatter eyes, bigger chance you see less charp, but also a bit less colours, as less light hits those receptors.
Now are woman a bit more lucky in the colour departement than men, as they have more reseptors to start with. Hence why your wife might say ‘that is broke white, with a hint of green!’ while you just see… Well… White.
Also age plays a big role. Babies, for example, have weaker eyes and also don’t see that much colour yet. Everything is still in the ‘build up’ phase for them. Around your teens, the world looks so vibrant! Its because the receptors and all are working and new. Over time, like the rest of the body, your eyes become worser, including your receptors. This results in you seeing everything a bit more dimmend and giving you that feeling of ‘when i was young, everything was so colourfull!’
Fun fact around being colour blind. While the colours are not ‘correct’ they still follow the pattern of how your eyes work. So, green might be red for them, but they still see that red super fibarant at teen age, but later also have the feeling the world lost a bit of its colour
Another side note, some say that eye colour actually plays a fact in how much you see and how fibarant. Now have i never really looked into that, but as someone with green eyes, i do have more difficulty with bright light than my friend who has brown eyes, so i see it being possible
we cant know for certain
Since I’m colour blind I know I see it my own way. Get Gud scrubs and have issues with toilet vacancies and stop lights.
What I find interesting isn’t how we ‘physically’ see colours, but how we express that seeing. For example, some cultures don’t have words for some colours – blue is a good example. In Namibia, IIRC, the Himba language has the same word for blue and for green. So, do they see blue the same way as someone who speaks English? No way to tell
Think of it like a ruler (the spectrum). Some rulers are different and some come with different gauges
Fun fact: I don’t even see the exact same colors in both eyes!
We agree on labels but the internal quale of red could be different for everyone.
Current research suggests that no, we do not. It’s still within the same…… range?? (for lack of a better term) of colour, but just slightly different for everyone. Like: My sage green is different from your sage green, maybe mine is brighter and yours has slightly more of a blue tone to it, but it’s still recognisable as sage green.
The only example I have of this phenomenon causing people to se completely different colours is when it comes to neon green and yellow as they’re very similar. Neon green is my favourite colour, so I bought something (can’t remember what it was now) in that colour and showed it to my husband, only for him to tell me that it was in fact very clearly yellow
Idk about the brain, but I think there are slight variations in what wavelength the receptors for a certain color actually register. And that’s regardless of people who are colorblind.
No idea. I would LOVE to see how others see. Are we seeing the same colors? What does it look for you? I would love to see through the eyes of someone colored blind and see color like someone who can see more colors than the average person!
I will say there are slight differences in how we view color from person to person. I argue with my dad about the color of windows on a house. They’re maroon, not brown. My husband showed me a picture of a toy the other night complaining it was brown not orange. He showed me it, “is that orange?” I looked at it, “yes, that’s rust.”
I think the closet well know is to look at colors that are multiple colors in one. Then ask people, what color is this? Does someone say that the blue grayish green thing is green? Blue?
There are games where you sort color squares into the correct order. I think if you got people together there and watched them play you could learn a lot about how a person sees color and where their weaknesses are.
I don’t know if anything was proven scientifically, but my cousin had a Red ball. Everyone claimed it was pink-ish, I saw it red.
I am not color blind or anything.
There must be some small truth behind it.
heyyy, Vsauce, Michael here.
Most likely aye but there’s is zero way for us to ever know/figure out.
There are people that can see more of the visible spectrum than other people.
“Yes, a rare condition called tetrachromacy allows some individuals to see significantly more colors than the average person. These “tetrachromats” have a fourth type of cone cell in their eyes, providing a wider range of color perception, potentially seeing 100 million colors compared to the average person’s 1 million. “
Short answer: we don’t know. But there is strong evidence that suggests that colors are perceived in a similar way by most humans.
We already know people don’t see colours the same way, the white and gold dress that was actually blue. Every person I spoke to came up with some other completely different colour.
No, people see colours differently. Have you heard about “the dress”?
I have a friend who is a colour perception scientist and uni prof. They explained to me before that colour perception can vary depending on the rods and cones in your eyes. We don’t all have the same amount of each type.
I work at a pet store, and people will often ask for “the orange fish” and I’ll pick out an orange one but the one they wanted is red to me, and the one I picked out is yellow to them. It’s wild.
I don’t vn think “see colors the same way” makes sense in this context, but let’s assume you transplant the eyes of one individual into another one – as we can assume that neither the output data of those eyes nor the processing hardware and software are the same, the answer is no. and this is not even considering all the connections and associations the individuals make with certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.
What color is the dress?
Not really actually this is a very simplified example, but your culture can effect how you view the world around you as well. I watched a video on how language and it’s relation to focus on specific aspects on the world like color. one good example of what you’re asking for is this African ethnic groups who’s culture is big with the color yellow (can’t name it because it’s been years since ive seen the video). They have so many different words for different yellows that their brains are just better at identifying the differences between the hues than the average westerner.
Everyone is hung up on the “inverted qualia argument”, but fails to spot an obvious biological flaw.
You can’t actually just make a blanket “Besides colour blind people, of course”, because of the way colour vision inheritance works. If you are colour blind, your mother probably has exceptional colour vision by way of inheriting two different X chromosomes.
Me, with my measly single X chromosome, only has one red and one green colour receptor. But technically I don’t even have that. It’s one reddish-yellow receptor and one greenish-yellow receptor, the rest is guesswork by the brain.
I’ll say that again. We (XY carrying beings) do not have receptors for green and red, we have two for yellow which are to some degree peaking at different wavelengths. Those who have at least two X chromosomes, be they XX, XXY, XXX, XXYY, XXXX or whatever, have more than 2 yellow receptors. Some could have these yellow receptors spread out further towards red and green, some could have better ability to differentiate yellows etc.
But in all cases, the human eye is not made for RGB and all of us who see any colours at all are doing some guesswork into what colour something is, and for some people a TV or a printed picture gives a very unnatural look compared to reality.
Edit:
But you PROBABLY meant whether what you see as purple is what I see as green, and for that we simply cannot know, as it is subjective. The colour is made up in our brains so we cannot compare it to something objective.
If you include people with color blindness in “all” of us then the answer is no.
This thought haunts me everyday at least once
Yes they do
No. Can you imagine some people see this dress as white and gold and others as blue and black?
definitely not. my mother and i always disagree on blues and purples (i say it’s more green or red, she says its more blue or orange tinged) but neither of us are colorblind. We do have different eye colors, which may contribute, or we simply have slightly different color receptors.
Watch the video by vsauce: “is my red the same as your red?”
It asks this question and answers it in classic vsauce fashion. I haven’t watched it in years but I remember the answer to be “we don’t know, probably.”
After the blue & black vs white & gold dress debates I’m convinced they do not.
This is such a fun question. There’s actually so many philosophical debates about this. I’d like to think of it like colours being swapped. Colour blind people don’t see the colour at all, it’s all the same to them. But I’m wondering if someone’s blue is another person’s red, and someone’s red is another person’s blue. But you’d never know because you are technically right about the colour because that’s the name of it, and you can’t describe a colour to someone. If you saw fire trucks as the actual colour blue, but it’s called red, then you’d never know what most people see because it wouldn’t make a difference. You’d call it red, and everyone would agree. We just point to a colour, say “that’s red”, and then associate that colour to the word “red”. I know I went on a tangent but I love questions like this, it’s fun to think about and it really is fascinating.
Probably not. My left eye sees things a tiny bit darker. Like not that noticeable but enough to notice when I’m bored/thinking. I discovered this back in high school and idk how to explain it but it’s like a -5 brightness filter in my left eye.
No remember the stupid striped dress and other things like that. There’s no way we all see exactly the same thing. I’m sure it’s close. But it’s unrealistic to think it’s everyone even excluding color blind
My sister and I have perfect color vision, but see turquoise in different ways (hers is more green and mine is more blue). It can fall under individual or cultural understanding of colors as far as I understand.
Not necessarily exactly. I, for example, see certain greens (I’ve only noticed this while looking at trees) differently with my right eye compared to my left eye. The color is more bright with my other eye and more muted with the other. I have no idea which is the more correct one.
I’ve wondered this too. I still remember a purple colored cover sheet that all my male coworkers considered medium blue. So weird.
I’m not sure how much of this is differences in sight, or differences in labeling.
Depends. For example, you see this red heart the same way i see it, as red. 💙
But for you, the red may look like a different color. Some may see it as purple, some orange, some blue.