What if people see in different colors?

Question

ok, we all know the standard colors in teh rainbow, but what if people saw different colors, like my blue is really your red, and what i see as " yellow" is what you see as "green" if you get what im talking about...so we still call it the same thing cause we see it that way, but its different from what other people see..never know though

Answer 1

I've often wondered that myself, but what it comes down to is the wavelengths, and I don't think those could be different colors :)

Answer 2

People do see in different colors. Some people are color/blind, some people see in black and white and shades of grey.

Some peoples parse colors differently. I lived in Japan for some years and it fascinated me because they did not define colors they way we do. There were shades I thought were orange and they called red. There was a word for blue, but it also referred to certain shades of green, even though there was a word for other shades of green. So I once read in a pamphlet (tourist) about the emerald blue sea. It made sense to them, if you put into the Japanese scheme of colors. It hit the westerner in the face as a mistake. It wasn't from the writer's point of view. He saw the sea as "aoi" and that can be blue or green.

Answer 3

This observation -- called the "reverse spectrum" or "colorblind neurosurgeon" -- is a famous philosophical argument for existence of some immaterial component in a human.

The argument goes roughly like this:

All human feeling are completely internal and are not possible to describe. Two people might say that they feel pain in the left knee -- but how do we know that their pain is the same? This question is not resolvable by science. Even if one were to understand the brain perfectly -- on would still not experience what the owner of the brain experience.

Consider the case of color-blind neurosurgeon. He might know everything about perception of color -- he might know everything there is to know about color. YET, he will never know what it is like to perceive color.

So brain states are not the same as the state of MIND or perceptions. So if the perceptions are not the states of the brain -- what are they? we don't know what it is -- But i like to believe that the mind states come from immaterial soul -- whatever it is,.

Answer 4

I've had the same thought many times. If people see red and are taught that it is called blue. Then they call it blue. It's the same but different.

On a seperate thought, colors can also be distingushed with moods. If someone sees something and it looks blue but they learned it as red, they wouldn't associate it with anger... hmm... this is confusing.

Answer 5

We all know fire engines are red and oranges are orange.

We may see slight variations of colors, but due to the physics of light and the univeral biology of they eye, we all see the same basic colors. There is an exception with people who have color blindness, but it's not like the way you are asking.

Answer 6

I've often wondered that myself...but it's something that we can never truly know, since you can't see the world through anyone else's eyes but your own.

I think that's how we can each have a different truth, since we each have a different perception of of the world, through our own unique, human filters, based on our acquired and innate knowledge, beliefs and opinions.

Answer 7

It does happen, not everybody sees the same shades of the same colors, in the same brightness levels, in the same way that we don't all hear the same tones or frequencies of sound.

Answer 8

I've thought about that too. And what if it isn't just in sight, but in other sensations too? Like feeling, taste, hearing. I wonder if that's why some people have different favorites. It's soo possible.

Answer 9

The only way to know for sure is to look through my eyes and see what I see.

Answer 10

lol that's what my sister asks all the time. It's weird cuz everyone DOES see each shade differently.