How do we know that your "red" looks the same as my "red"? For all we know, your "red" looks like my "blue." In fact, for all we know your "red" looks nothing like any of my colors at all! If colors are just internal labels, then as long as everything gets labeled, why should your brain and my brain use the same labels?
Richard Dawkins wrote a nice little piece on color, and along the way he asked these questions.
He also noted that not only can color labels differ in your and my brain, but perhaps the same color labels could be used in non-visual modalities of other animals. Bats, he notes, use audition for their spatial sense, and perhaps furry moths are heard as red, and leathery locusts as blue. Similarly, rhinoceroses may use olfaction for their spatial sense, and could perceive water as orange and rival male markings as gray.
However, I would suggest that most discussions of rearrangements of color qualia (a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person) severely underestimate how much structure comes along with our color perceptions. Once one more fully appreciates the degree to which color qualia are linked to one another and to non-color qualia, it becomes much less plausible to single color qualia out as especially permutable.
Few of us, for example, would find it plausible to imagine that others might perceive music differently, e.g., with pitch and loudness swapped, so that melody to them sounds like loudness modulations to me, and vice versa. Few of us would find it plausible to imagine that some other brain might perceive "up" (in one's visual field) and "down" as reversed. And it is not quite so compelling to imagine that one might perceive the depth of something as the timbre of an instrument, and vice versa. And so on.
Unlike color qualia, most alternative possible qualia rearrangements do not seem plausible. Why is that? Why is color the butt of nearly all the "inverted-spectra" arguments?
The difference is that these other qualia seem to be more than just mere labels that can be permuted willy nilly. Instead, these other qualia are deeply interconnected with hosts of other aspects of our perceptions. They are part of a complex structured network of qualia, and permuting just one small part of the network destroys the original shape and structure of the network -- and when the network's shape and structure is radically changed, the original meanings of the perceptions (and the qualia) within it are obliterated.
The reason other qualia seem to be more than mere labels is that most of them have clear meanings and functions. We know what they're for and how they plug in to the rest of our network of qualia. For color, on the other hand, we have historically been largely blind to what colors are for, and how they functionally integrate with the rest of our perception. In the absence of knowing how to plug colors in to the rest of our qualia, they do seem much more rearrangeable.
But we're beginning to know more about what colors are for, and as we learn more, color qualia are becoming more and more like other qualia in their non-permutability. Let's see why.
First, even before describing some of the new insights on color vision, I note that most conversations about color qualia don't seem to account for what has long been known about colors. Colors are not a set of distinct crayons with no connections to one another. Instead, colors are part of a three-dimensional space of colors, a space having certain well-known features. The space is spanned by a red-green axis, a yellow-blue axis and a black-white axis. These three axes have opponent colors at opposite ends, and these extreme ends of the axes are pure or primary (i.e., not being built via a combination of other colors). All the colors we know of are a perceptual combination of these three axes. For example, burnt orange is built from roughly equal parts yellow and red, and is on the darker side of the black-white dimension.
To perceive colors like I do requires, at a minimum, having the same color space as I do. To perceive "red" without having (its opposite) "green" also as part of one's color space is impossible, just as perceiving "light" would be impossible without also having "dark." And to perceive orange without having both red-green and yellow-blue axes is impossible, because orange is a perceptual mix of red and yellow.
And that's just the bare beginnings of the structure of colors. Colors are not only intricately connected to one another in a space but are linked to many other aspects of our mental life, including other sensory modalities (e.g., a "red-sounding trumpet") and emotions.
In fact, in my research I have provided evidence that our primate variety color vision evolved for seeing the color changes occurring on our faces and other naked spots. Our primate color vision is peculiar in its cone sensitivities (with the M and L cones having sensitivities that are uncomfortably close), but these peculiar cone sensitivities are just right for sensing the peculiar spectral modulations hemoglobin in the skin undergoes as the blood varies in oxygenation. Also, the naked-faced and naked-rumped primates are the ones with color vision; those primates without color vision have your typical mammalian furry face.
In essence, I have argued elsewhere that our color-vision eyes are oximeters like those found in hospital rooms, giving us the power to read off the emotions, moods and health of those around us.
On this new view of the origins of color vision, color is far from an arbitrary permutable labeling system. Our three-dimensional color space is steeped with links to emotions, moods and physiological states, as well as potentially to behaviors. For example, purple regions within color space are not merely a perceptual mix of blue and red, but are also steeped in physiological, emotional and behavioral implications -- in this case, perhaps of a livid male ready to punch you.
Furthermore, these associations are not arbitrary or learned. Rather, these links from color to our broader mental life are part of the very meanings of color -- they are what color vision evolved for.
The entirety of these links is, I submit, what determines the qualitative feel of the colors we see. If you and I largely share the same "perceptual network," then we'll have the same qualia. And if some other animal perceives some three-dimensional color space that differs radically in how it links to the other aspects of its mental life, then it won't be like our color space... its perceptions will be an orange of a different color.
Mark Changizi is Director of Human Cognition at 2AI, and the author of "Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man" (2011) and "The Vision Revolution."(2009) His next book is tentatively titled "HUMAN," an "anti-sci-fi" fictional portrayal of what the human future might actually look like.
This piece has been cross-posted at Psychology Today.
Follow Mark Changizi, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markchangizi
Does everyone perceive colors differently? - Yahoo! Answers
Do women perceive color differently from men? - ScienceBlogs
We don’t. Any more than Richard knows the ways in which his rendition of realty differs from anyone else’s rendition of reality. Even if questioned those differences might not become apparent. Since finding common terms in which to express them, might prove as difficult as describing blue to a person born blind. What might happen though, is that in expressing his notions concerning all things, Richard might stumble on some contradictions in his explanations. Something not noticed previously, because they had never before been laid out in front of him to view.
"that's just the bare beginnings"
It appears that different languages can dictate different patterns of thought too. Even to the extent that not having a name for a particular shade of a color prevents that hue from registering as a discrete entity in the brain.
"the power to read off the emotions, moods and health of those around us."
So contrary to Richard's conclusions. Even if he does not experience something, it may still exist? Therefore, the “reality” he references, isn’t necessarily the real one. Should we apply this realisation to all our data collecting senses, we’ll quickly appreciate the anomalies present. Then we can begin to incorporate corrections for those and other aberrations in our understandings.
The most profound aspect of color is that there is no color in the world. It is all in our heads.
years older than I did not like it. They would say, "That's not music. That's just noise. What the heck are you listening to?"
I still like rock so I guess its not an age thing. But most of the contemporary music sounds like tune-less noise and I wonder what the heck do they hear in that to like.
That explains how anyone can spend time listening to heavy metal.
Now those names have become one with the color in association, feel, emotion and sight.
In 7th grade in art class I found out I was colorblind.( It explained a lot towards why I dressed a lot like a n Xmas tree) People kept asking what color the grass was. Is my green that much different from other's green or red?
I
Crazy...But I get it. I've often wondered about that. Perhaps the angle or type of light in which they are looking at their hair, affects their perception. I have dark brown, almost black hair. (I'm African Amer.) However, relaxers and sunlight cause it to lighten a bit. You usually only see it in the sunshine. I had a co-worker accuse my of coloring my hair when she saw it in the sunshine. It just doesn't look like it does in the office. I usually think of my hair lightening towards red. I wonder if it's actually bleaching towards gold??? I suppose I'll have to ask my hair dresser for the truth the next time I see her, LOL.
My hair's naturally mousy mid-brown; I'd been doing it black for years, but when that started to look too harsh (I'm fair-skinned) I went for a burgundy shade a couple of years ago. But it turned very gingery after a bit of exposure to sun; reds are such fugitive colours, whether we're talking hair or fabric or photos or paints. Now my hairdresser uses a violet base for my hair, though it certainly doesn't look purple!
I have my man pick out the color I use for toes once a year. We live in the winter wonderland, so it's only a very few months that polish resides on my toes per year.
I also ask him for advice in colors when shopping for clothes.
Our consciousness has to interpret the wavelengths of photons that reached our eyes before anything resembling "red" comes into existence.
This is necessarily somewhat subjective because no two people ever receive identical data about red to their brains. We literally cannot see exactly the same thing because we cannot possibly receive exactly the same pattern of photons.
The only way to make an argument that we all see the same "red" is if you accept the idea of collective consciousness. That is to say, all of our consciousness is entangled with one another and we see "red" together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy
In addition to various theories, his experiments and demonstrations were amazing. In the 1980s, his favorite involved flicked a red laser over different objects. Depending on how fast it flickered, people (all people) reported seeing colors other than red. Everybody saw the same way.