Is it possible that when we all 'see' a color;our mind actually sees different color?

Pythagorean

Three different wavelengths of receptors (kind of; I mean it's more of a small distribution of wavelengths, but whatever)

But "infinitely" many color combinations because the intensity of the mixtures of these three "wavelengths" each produces a unique state.

Pythagorean

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...b-spectrum.svg

46&2

I think that we certainly do not see colors VASTLY different. For example, my blue would not look red to you. However, I could see a possibility that our brains might interpret the data just differently enough that colors do appear slightly different from person to person. But we are getting the same Hue and Intensity data, so I couldn't even begin to describe how the perception would differ.

However, I agree with others in the thread in that we probably all see color the same.

I have thought about this question ever since I was a kid, and am glad I found this thread. I also think it could be more of a philosophy question.

nitsuj

I hear ya, I've wondered it too at times.

But have come to believe that it is more "mechanical" in nature than an "interpretation" the brain makes.

From an evolution perspective, "flow through" inputs would be more reliable, and in turn more successful.

Philip Wood

It is indeed a philosophy question. We have no way of communicating to others exactly what we experience in our minds when, for example, we see something yellow. If we say, "well, I'm seeing something yellow", we're using a word we've learned for the thing that gave rise to the experience, and not describing the experience. This can be disputed, and indeed the whole topic was keenly debated by philosophers in the last century.

nitsuj

And am shocked the reasonable postulate that we all see colors the same hasn't put it to rest.

46&2's point was well said. We don't see colors VASTLY different.

To suggest seeing color is subjective seems odd to me now, how odd it would be that the brain "jumps in" and says "these colors must not be right, Ill make a change." Hard wiring is of course different, and a mutation of sorts.

zoobyshoe

It began as a philosophical consideration but the discovery of colorblindness by Dalton made it also part of medical science.

Colorblindness can be found to be caused in some cases by abnormalities of the sensing mechanism and in others by malfunction of the processing mechanism where the sensory input is somehow turned into a conscious experience, the brain. Medically( scientifically) we can classify the cause, therefore, to be either physiological or neurological. Normal color blindness would be the former and more rare forms the latter.

The word for the subjective experiences of a sense input is "qualia". Starting with the neutral objective fact of light in a certain frequency range we experience it subjectively, and surprisingly, as red or blue etc. There's no objective reason one range should be seen as anything but a different shade of the other: there's nothing inherent in light frequencies to account for this. The brain has evolved, though, to give us a very different experience of the three different ranges of frequency the chemicals in our eyes are sensitive to. It's a neurological phenomenon that our experience of the colors are separated this way. Indeed, that separation into distinct qualia can be lost by brain damage to the areas of the brain responsible for this, damage that turns people into the authentically colorblind: people who see the world in shades of grey only, no color at all. (That same condition can also be genetically produced, incidentally.) Qualia are always neurological: the exact subjective experience of a thing is dependent on how the brain processes the data.

Having realized this, that there's a kind of fictional embellishment being created here by the brain, how do we know everyone experiences the same fiction?

We can have a certain confidence they do based on the mechanisms being the same, nerves, neurons, etc, but it's easy to see there could be variations from normal to abnormal individuals and even from one healthy individual to the next.

nitsuj

Thanks for the write up zoobyshoe, I didn't know that stuff you mentioned.

I didn't think the brain would need to treat colors that way. But one thing seems to remain. And that is color specific sensing.

Maybe better said as a couple of colors are genetically "programed"; from that a seemingly infinite number of colors can been sensed with out any prior experience of seeing the particular color, or some genetic interpretation of the color.


my best guess is all but the few genetically "programed" colors are NOT open to interpretation.

If that where the case wouldn't the brain, specifically our genetics have to have coding for each visible color? As opposed to the simple genetically "programed" palette of only a few colors from which all other colors can be seen?

Ceteris paribus, I don't think the variance in experience from any of the colors is different enough to call it a "different" experience, and guess that's true for all of our senses in comparison.

I don't think the discussion is "do color blind people see colors differently than non-color blind people?". I suppose with this particular kind of question it's tough to avoid using a truism as a point, to hold the question in context.

As far as the "kind of fictional embellishment being created here by the brain" you mentioned I couldn't agree more. In particular with vision, because of all the data it provides or lack there of, the brain "does its best" at providing a "reality" or "experience". Note that generally speaking optical illusions are interpreted/experienced the same by people.

Pythagorean

I'm fairly certain most people are annoyed by yellow on a white background. Because it's the contrast between colors that is most significant... which is why we have a standard: white background, black text, but there are also reasonable alternatives... like green text with a black background. Yellow on white though. Horrible experience.

zoobyshoe

Oliver Sacks story, The Case of the Colorblind Painter, is a must read for anyone interested in qualia. Amazingly, I found the full text online:

http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/facult...indPainter.pdf

This is the first chapter from his book An Anthropologist on Mars. I recommend to anyone they actually get a copy of the book and read the whole thing. There are seven amazing case studies in it that explicate a fascinating range of brain functions.

zoobyshoe

What we have here is yellow on light grey, which is probably even worse than yellow on white for contrast.

edit: Haha! First time I realized the background grey in quotes is darker than the default grey! Your post is easier to read as a quote.

Pythagorean

Yeah, on my mobile, the yellow letters have a black outline, making them really easy to see.

Q_Goest

Thanks a million zoobyshoe. That's a fantastic reference. One thing that surprised me the most was that Mr. I couldn't even remember or generate in his mind the colors he once knew. He realized they existed and remembered a wealth of information about the colors but couldn't even generate them in his own mind. That to me is incredible.

It also seems incredible that so many people, knowing the standard paradigm of how the brain gives rise to qualia, might still insist that we should all see the same 'colors'. Each brain is slightly different and even a given brain changes over the decades. So given all these differences in how the "phantasms of color" as Newton called them, might still all appear the same to so many different brains that change in so many ways over the years strikes me as yet another paradox of mind. If the standard paradigm of mind is correct, then why shouldn't we all perceive colors differently? We don't have the same structure or interactions occurring in our brains. They may be very similar, and the similarity of our perceptions may parallel this similarity, but why should colors be the same to different individuals? We could take that another step and ask how other animals perceive colors and see that their brains are very different still, so why shouldn't a very different brain have a very different color experience? It seems to me that either we don't have the same color experiences, or the paradigm is incorrect.

zoobyshoe

I had forgotten all about this. The fact he couldn't perceive colors also prevented him from remembering them. This strongly support the theory that memory is a low grade "replay" of the original experience, that the neurons that fire in a certain sequence during perception fire weakly in the same sequence during memory. Sacks cite research that supports this in a different book, the memory in that case being the mental 'replay" of music.

I don't see any reason we should, necessarily all see colors the same. However, as an artist, I find a remarkable amount of agreement when talking to other artists about how colors work with each other. That agreement wouldn't be possible unless we were seeing them the same way, or close to it. Whatever neural activities result in color consciousness seem, against the odds, to be the same in most individuals and superceeds the differences.

In any event, whether or not your colors are the same as mine, the remarkable thing to me is that all qualia are fictional. The feeling of wetness, for example, or heat. At the same time it's specific, and is a reaction to an objective external stimulus, the exact experience is arbitrary and could have been any of a million other subjective experiences. Water feels "wet" on our skin, in the end, to separate it from the many other kinds of touch experiences we have. The point is for the experience to be specific and practical, but that specificity and practicality come with the error, it turns out, of supposing the exact feeling of wetness is an objective and inevitable property of water.

My suspicion is that the further any animal is from people in obvious ways the further their qualia are likely to be. I don't think birds and reptiles experience many things the way we do, and insects are probably vastly different.

46&2

This thread has turned out to be really fascinating. Thanks for the contributions. ;)

Pythagorean

I don't think anyone denies we see colors differently. Theres just the caveat that those differences supervene on physical differences in the neural system. And thus, normal humans (statistically normal) see colors more-or-less the same.

As for species differentiation, I think that's the scientific consensus zooby, which is why iacuc doesn't care what you do with insects, but vertebrae are subject to all kinds of paperwork, especially the more developed their cerebrum.

Most protocols I've seen require you to tranquilize the animal and remove its cerebrum before performing any experiments. The idea being that the you need a cerebrum to feel pain, thus insects are fair game.

Q_Goest

If we see 'more or less' the same colors, then we should have quantitatively similar brains. Shouldn't we be able to count the number of neurons, see how they are interconnected, count the number of connections in this area of the brain that the paper discusses (ie: V₁ through V₄), and verify those quantitative differences are within a few percent of each other when comparing one person to the next assuming we see very similar colors? That seems like a very simple task that could have been done long ago and documented in scientific journals.

Then what about other brains such as Einstein or Feynman, or people with autism such as Kim Peek or Daniel Tammet? How closely do those brains compare to anyone elses? My understanding is that Kim Peek's brain was found to be very different than 'normal' when he died in terms of how it was structured.* So should we assume his experiences of color differ greatly from ours?

What about chimps, orangutangs or gorillas? I would expect to find those areas in their brains (V₁ through V₄ or whatever areas are responsible for color interpretation) differ greatly from ours when it comes to numbers of neurons, numbers of connections, etc... despite the fact their DNA is almost identical to ours. Should their experience of color differ greatly from ours? Shouldn't we be able to test for that in some way?

We have numerous opportunities to examine these differences, so either there are studies that have looked at these differences in the brain and tried to quantify not only the differences in the brain but also the different experiences. Or if there are no studies, then scientific progress into this area is utterly desolate.

I would agree. The fact that qualia are not objectively observable and measurable makes them the most amazing phenomena out there as far as I'm concerned.

*I seem to remember seeing a documentary a year or so ago about Kim's autopsy. They showed computer generated images of his brain and compared those to 'normal' brains. They clearly looked very different. Unfortunately, I can't locate anything like that on the web right now. Though I've done some searches, nothing conclusive seems to come up.