REALLY hard philosophy question!?

Question

we are born with vision. ok to be 'correct', MOST of us are born with vision ok???

we learn that certain things are a certain color. like...THIS FONT IS BLACK. THIS BACKGROUND IS WHITE. etc. so we come to associate certain colors with their names.

but...maybe YOUR black is someone else's GREEN. see what i mean? we are taught names of colors, but no one can get in our brains and find out exactly WHAT wavelength of light we are perceiving.

well what if 'green' meant different things to us? it might, right?

Answer 1

I 've thought about that too.
Theoretically, since our eyes work in similar ways, we are supposed to receive the same wavelenghts from an object (which we have all agree to call with a certain name) and analyse it with similar ways in our -similar constructed- brains.
But, indeed, there is no proof for it. There is a possibility we interpret the same wavelenghts with totally different ways.
We will probably never know

Answer 2

Philosophy is a very hard major. Much philosophical writing involves nothing more than the syntactical manipulation of abstract vocabulary. Many philosophers really do not understand other philosophers very well, and that is one of the reasons that they frequently find the work of earlier philosophers to be in error. Current philosophical writings by deconstructionists and existentialists display a firm conviction of the ultimate futility of studying philosophy. So basically, you will be studying some vague and often ridiculous concepts and learning some special vocabulary for talking about them that can take a long time to master only to conclude eventually that all this stuff is utterly meaningless. If you can live with this, then go ahead and study philosophy. If not, I would suggest you study history. Harleigh Kyson Jr.

Answer 3

It is kind of like looking at an ink blot! That is a pretty deep question, but if it were true how could so many people agree on what colors match in clothes and interior designing? There could be some variations in how we perceive color. As for myself I am pretty sure that i see colors a little different because i don't have the ability coordinate colors at all. I would be glad to volunteer for a case study.

Answer 4

We know exactly what wavelength we are perceiving, we just don't know the qualitative experience of someone else's subjective consciousness.

It's complicated because we have a trichromatic structure to vision perception including hue, saturation and color. When someone has a defect such that they see green for blue and blue for green, it can be hard to diagnose (though not impossible given the accepted combinatorial relationship of green and blue to the rest of the spectrum)-- whereas non-systematic color-blindness is easy to spot.

It's possible we all have systematically different color perceptions while still referring to the correct wavelengths, but it isn't likely, and I mostly don't care.

I mean if your qualia for red wavelengths are the same as my qualia for green wavelengths, and we grow up in the environment with wildly different raw feels, I'd still find red to be a passionate color-- the color of blood, and etc with the rest because of their symbolic role. If I saw thatched etchings like XXXXXX every time I encountered your qulaia 'red' it would amount to the same reaction in me that you have. As long as we differentiate the same spectrum systematically, that's all that matters. Otherwise you're committed to some innate properties of the mind, such that seeing a blue sky would not have a soporific effect on all people, or whatever.

Answer 5

there are two types of knowledge: a priori and a posteriori

what youre describing is a posteriori knowledge.
a priori knowledge is something like this: an isoceles triangle has three congruent sides. It is the self-reflective nature of the sentence, and it is something only an intelligent being can do.

to say that i see something as green is not to say that all of those objects are that color, or even that my eyes are working correctly. Maybe someone else sees a different color!

I think this is immanuel kants thought system.

Answer 6

You're right. There's absolutely no way to know what another person is perceiving when they say something is "green", because we don't have access to other peoples' mental perceptions.
However, we know that we are consistently capable of agreeing on what's green and what's blue, red, etc... So that although we don't know precisely what other people see, we do know that there is a certain consistency in what is being seen. I.e. we can agree on what is green.

Answer 7

Your question is regarding communication. In order for communication to be successful we need to establish a "common knowledge" between us so when I say the grass is green you know I'm talking about the wavelength of light that reflects off the grass rather than talking about the grass' other characteristics such as texture,length, and so on. Know what I mean?

Answer 8

This is not so much a question as a description of the typically accepted limit of experience. To take your point further, I have no way to be sure that that what is red to me now was red to me yesterday. This part of Ludwig Wittgenstein's distinction between public and private language games.

Answer 9

Look in the crayola box.

Take out the crayon marked Black.

I can gaurentee that that is the same black I see.

Answer 10

Yep, I've thought about this a couple of times and it is so peculiar. I guess we can never tell..