Does your RED look the same as my RED?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- Functionalism: • Functionalism
This is a lecture video about the inverted experience thought experiment, as well as about the scientific evidence that some percentage of men are, in reality, red-green color inverted. This is part of an introductory level philosophy course.
You have single handedly helped me pass my Philosophy of the Mind module. Thank you so much for your channel!
I don't think it was single handedly. You also had a hand in it. But glad I could help!
While that is true I definitely had no clue about what my teacher was trying to explain until I watched your videos.
it's four handedly unless
I remember thinking about the possibility of inverted qualia when I was about 11/12 years old, imagining about people seeing other people thoughts.
In the end I assumed it was true and irrelevant and went on with my life, never thinking that I had accidentally bumped into a real philosophical doubt
Yeah. I was ten. I remember having read a book, ‘Spooky Kids’ and one of the children had grown up seeing the world in a different way… I believe the child saw auras or something and it allowed him/her to see cancer… the concept was interesting for me and I began wondering about the way people see the world. I was fascinated by the thought for a while but…
When I was a kid, I liked to talk to adults and sometimes my mom got annoyed and said: "You are talking too much, you are too young to interrupt our conversations", and I replied: "Yeah, but I just want to say what I think", and she said: "Then don't think so much" and I replied: "But I cannot exist without thinking". However, René Descartes was earlier than me to come to this idea 😀
Anything can be a philosophical doubt, all you need is curiosity.
thought the same when I was younger too
Sometimes keeping our child questions might lead to interesting scientific or philosophic quests. We should tell that to kids more often.
Regarding the warm / cool part of the talk, because this is a psychological experience, those that see red as green would still say that it was a warm colour, because to them, a fire would look green and feel warm. Also there would be some conditioning involved where people would be saying or teaching that their perceived 'green' was a warm colour. (Imagine an art teacher teaching which colours were warm and cool.)
Also, purple is only a unique colour because of language and there is no way it can be regarded as a pure colour in colour science. There are 4 primary psychological colours, red, green, yellow and blue. All other colours are considered mixtures. And there are only 3 in additive light which are red, green and blue, which roughly correspond to the L, M, S cones in the retina, with all other colours being mixtures.
So I think the purple, yellow/green argument is fallacious.
If I'm not mistaken, there are languages that don't even have a unique name for purple and/or orange. English itself didn't have a unique name for orange until oranges started to be more widely imported into Europe around the Middle Ages.
Yeah.. Seriously. Until we can transfer consciousness to other body we'll never know. I'll never know how things look like from your perspective.
Well, violet is essentially a synonym for purple, and it is part of the color spectrum at about 400nm wavelength. It doesn't get any more objectively real than that.
However, I appreciate the other points you made. Our color perception derives from the response by receptors in the cones of our retina, and those have peak sensitivity at specific wavelengths due to properties of photochemical activation that happened to have been available to natural selection.
They're not perfect linear instruments by any means, and yet they were good enough to favor the survival of our ancestors. Really it's quite impressive. Our sensitivity to dynamic range in the blue part of the spectrum is relatively low, for example, presumably because we encounter a lot of bright blue sky which rarely contains objects of interest to omnivores preoccupied with foraging and hunting.
Like the "hard problem" of consciousness, we can't know what color vision is like for anyone but ourselves. (I don't really think it's a hard problem either, it's just conceptually ill posed.) But as you point out, we do know for ourselves what a given color is like. It literally bears a likeness with various objects in our experience. Whatever color we perceive for blood will be the same on one day as it is on the next. If we want to agree to call that "red" then people who are asked about the color of blood are bound to report that it's red.
Only they know what their internal experience of it is, in essence, but because of our shared biochemistry we expect that most of our sensorium is structured similarly. The red of blood and roses and fire isn't spectrally identical either, but it's close enough to produce similar retinal photochemistry, and so we form associations between these perceived objects.
The associations may be learned or instinctual, that's perhaps an unrelated matter. But I do want to report something interesting about that. The experience of color isn't as deeply hardwired as we might assume. I recall in university days riding my bike across town one summer night while moderately high on LSD. I perceived the lawns in particular as a shade of magenta, not green. Well, it was night, and so my vision would have been driven more by rods than cones, so we could say that the magenta color was synthetic rather than perceived, but even so it was "like" the remembered experience of seeing a genuinely magenta object. It would be interesting to know what was going on in the optic nerves at the time.
At any rate, lawns were magenta, whereas the trees overhead were more or less grayscale. I could "push" myself to perceive them as magenta also, but the effect was vague and transient, whereas the color of the lawns persisted for a couple of hours without effort. I didn't recognize anything during the ride that would have been a true magenta color, so I couldn't do much calibration. Parked cars and stop signs and house paint were not obviously false colored, but I took for granted that my color perception wasn't trustworthy. To put it another way, the stop sign was stop-sign-colored, whatever that might have been. So there was some blurring of the lines between labelling (high level cognition) and perception (low level cognition) going on there, which suggests that these are not quite as distinct subsystems as we might imagine.
"essentially" a synonym isn't a synonym; they clearly meant magenta and they'd be right. There's no single wavelength of light you can make to produce the effect.
It's 100% fallacious - what's a true "color" and what's mixed are entirely cultural. For much of human history all colors were considered variations of black, white, and red.
Everyone could have the same favorite color qualia-wise.
Unbelievable! I just stumbled into your channel. I've contemplated this quandary since I was a teenager. I had a color blind friend and we had some really deep conversations over it. I realize that being color blind is not the exact same thing but it was the segway to the inverted qualia idea. I have brought this idea up to so many people and it seemed that I was the only one that ever questioned it. I've absolutely explained my theory almost verbatim using fire engines and tomatoes compared to grass and trees. However, I could never really get anyone to agree with me or to even show much interest so I actually thought that I was the only one that ever explored this possibility, let alone did I know it actually has a name! Inverted qualia. I feel like I just found another human being on what I presumed to be a deserted island. Thank You! By the way, I've just became a subscriber.
I'm colorblind, and totally went down the same rabbit whole and have loved the idea since I was a kid. It was nice to find a video that made me realize I'm not the only one thinking about it, but even nicer to find this comment, that nearly perfectly matches my experience. More kids should be having deep philosophical discussions like we did.
I too have wondered about this possibility since forever, and I've always known that it is impossible to know either way. I've recently used this possiblity discussing with an atheist to show him that actually God exists. Because the knowledge is there and "someone" has it. (I.e the knoweldge that two people see two colours exactly the same or slightly in different shades or have completely inverted expeirences of the colours for example, while the two people can in no way know the other person's experience).
@@amma814 There are so many things people take for granted and may never realize the truth. Inverted qualia is a really good example. Another example would be the sunrise and sunset. When you see the sunrise, you're actually seeing something that literally hasn't happened yet but when you see the sunset, you're seeing something that actually happened about five minutes ago! I don't understand how someone can not believe in God to at least some degree. People always want proof of something as seeing is believing but seeing is far from factual. You can not trust what you see so why trust something you can't see? It's a conundrum. You can see the gentle calming breeze rustling through the trees or you can see the devastating results of high winds, so you know wind exists, but you can not see wind. There's so many facts that elude the very mankind as a whole. The very same mankind that think they have all the answers. I love science, philosophy and God. They're all intertwined. You just simply can't have one without the other.
So my question is this.... in videos where color blind people get those special glasses, how can they all of a sudden assign the word red to the red balloon if they never knew what red really looked like?
@@chriskopeck8575 They've always known what red looks like. What the colorblind correcting glasses do is filter out excess light from certain parts of the spectrum to cause colors to stand out more strongly and contrast better than they typically do for those that are colorblind. It doesn't actually fix colorblindness, but it does a decent job of making the world feel a little more colorful. There are apps you can download to get a colorblind experience, and to even see, (sorta) what the world looks like through those glasses.
I just discovered your channel. I'm a technician and a bit of a nerd and, while philosophy has always held some fascination for me, it has never really appealed all that much to me. The two presentations by you that I have watched have given the subject new meaning for me. Thank you. Shalom.
You could say the functionalist is describing the function for each individual not every person who ever lived. Had there been 2 identical persons with identical brains in identical situations, there is no reason to think their experiences would be different.
The problem is we can't ever be sure of it.
@@kbee225 "The problem is we can't ever be sure of it." That's correct, but I don't need surety. Do you? There is no good reason to think the other twin would experience a different red, then why doubt it very much? It is theist that look for surety.
This blew my frickin mind wow
Okay I'm looking this up because I found out I'm color blind. But I thought that meant I can't see colors. No, I swear to you my greens are blues, certain yellows and oranges are pink, I thought my parents taught me wrong. One day i changed my shirt to a shirt I thought was pink. I don't like the color. My fiance during game night said he liked it, I said " I'd like it more if it wasn't pink" everyone stopped and stared at me and was like...thats yellow. Then we later went over flash cards and to me I was like no was these cards have to be wrong...
You are likely tetrachromat, or have a differently tuned cone receptor than other people. The fact that you can easily tell something is wrong shows you that the thought experiment in this video is coming to false conclusions. This is why philosophizing without experiment is dangerous.
That's similar to my son who is blind to blue. A blue light will be grey. but, other colors that come from mixed pigmants he just sees weird. For example, purple becomes pink for a shirt but not for a purple piece of plastic.
Musically speaking, how do I know that the note that sounds like middle C to me
sounds a note or to higher or lower to everyone else?
And that the colors i experience aren’t bent like a guitar note
compared to the “pure” note that anyone or everyone else experiences?
And what what about my experiences of pain, love, sorrow, and various emotion?
Are they different for you?
How different?
Have you tried Enchroma glasses?
Essentially, most people have
Blue: 10
Red: 10
Yellow: 10
But color blind people have something like
Blue: 8
Red: 7
Yellow: 10
Essentially, Enchroma glasses block some of the excess color leaving you with something like
Blue: 8
Red: 7
Yellow: 8
Which lets you see red and colors with red.
They are expensive ($400ish?) but there is a red/green kind that is less expensive ($200ish?) .
Lots of videos about people with colorblindness having strong emotional reactions to finally seeing vivid reds and objects that seemed the same color to them finally looking different.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 you must appreciate that thought experiment is pretty useful. A molested child can't actually express their experience as bad just as that child can't express their green is red. It's useful for adults to use thought experiment to realise molestation is wrong. It's immoral to validate that molestation is wrong by replication, and standardized molesting for scientific rigour isn't realisable.
Protanopia and Deuteranopia are types of Anopia.
Greek: An - meaning un, without. Opia - meaning vision
Protanopia. Prot - from proto greek meaning first of a pair. Green looks more red.
Deutranopia. Deuter - from deutero latin meaning second of a pair. Red looks more green.
Protanope - a protanoptic person with protanopia who has the condition of protanomaly.
Deuteranope - a deuteranoptic person with deuteranopia who has the condition of deuteranomaly.
(Optal - visionary, about vision.
Optic - from French short from Greek opticus,
which comes from Greek: opto - visible and ikus - adjective suffix)
prosopagnosia - face blindness.
(Brad Pitt has it.
So why does he never “take one for team”
and go for an ugly one?)
In college, I was diagnosed with red-green color blindness. I did not know. I could identify reds and greens, but one time I was told I got it wrong. I would have kept my functional state had I not been told. Now I have a practical difference. The difference I experience for red and green would not create a different quality experience. I just believe what I was told. I would not even know if it wasn't for the eye diagnosis and the feedback.
Probably cause you red green color blindness is not malignant enough to profoundly hinder your daily experiences. It’s important to distinguish color inversion and color blindness.
I am an electronics engineer who spent the last seven years of my life as a color scientist. Working with laser based and LCD color proofing systems. The three types of cones are long, medium, and short wavelength photo pigment sensitive areas. Long is what you refer to as red, medium is green, and short is blue. I can get a colormetric match in a normal humans by stimulating both the long (red) and medium (green) cones. The person will perceive yellow. I can do this with a single wavelength of light (yellow) or I can get the same perception by mixing red and green light from an LCD screen.
If I mix blue and red light the person will perceive magenta. There is no single wavelength of light that produce this same perception. Now if the person has the red and green reversed connections it would be able to produce this same perception with a single wave length of light that overlaps blue and green. This is an objective way to detect if these people exist. I am a functionalist. Talk with a color scientist if you want to know more...BTW I am an anomolus trichromat. A person who sees all wave length of light, but sees luminance differences stronger than color differences that "normal" people see. This can be discovered with a series of tests. I found this out when I applied to get a commercial pilots license. I was able to get that license by using the 100 hue Farnsworth test instead of the Ishihara dot test.
That's really interesting! Thanks for sharing this info. I remember reading something about how electronic cameras have a hard time recording purple, and I think it relates to this. It explains why purple objects often look blue on TV. I think it's related, but a different effect.
So... If there's a way to test it, we can figure out who has the green and red switched, right?
@@eliyagabriele3875 YES
@@ray3maxwell Huh! Interesting. I wonder how the reaction would be if you told the person with inverted colour that what they see is the opposite of what others see. It would definitely be interesting to see
Hi there. I think there is a problem with the example. If you provide red and blue he would still reply magenta. Because that's what he learnt. And you would still not get the same reply with any single wavelength color. He may have swapped the cone pigments or the optical nerves or the exact brain processing center, however his brain developed with those inputs and the same environment feedback. Thus ending with the correct input/output correlation. At least in theory. The practical flaw may instead come from the assumption that all cones act as transducers with an identical transfer function giving an identical perceived intensity, and we know that's not the case in reality. Different cones have different transfers regardless of the pigment. That may lead to different dynamic ranges for the channels leading to subtle detectable differences in turn leading to the color inverted being detected without a dissection ;) . Although much more difficult than a magenta test. In any case that does not hamper functionalism, as this is more of a thought experiment assuming identical inverted inputs, not a biochemistry test design.
I once had some medication that suppressed my green receptors under strong light conditions. It's not qualia inversion, but it's amazing how quickly you get used to grass being a dull greyish orange!
which medication was that?
@@drsaikiranc An antihistamine, when I used to have bad hay-fever. Possibly Danerall, but it was a long time ago! I think I exceeded the recommended dose.
The fly in this ointment: color blindness.
My relative is color blind to red hues, I was surprised when I was told this. The first question I had was, how do you know to stop at a red light, their answer was when the top lights bright I Stop.
Sounds like they simply _lack_ the pigment in their red cones. 🤔
@@serversurfer6169
I don't recall exactly, but it's more like they have less red cones or none at all.
I remember seeing a movie back in the day, probably sometime in the 80s, where there was a guy falling in love with a girl who had been blind since birth, and he was trying to explain things he could see to her. She was having trouble with the concept of color. He asked her to come over the next day so he could try to explain color. He put a stone in the freezer overnight. When she arrived the next day, he boiled a pot of water and put another stone in the pot of water. He took the stone from the freezer and placed it in her hand. “This is BLUE,” he said. Then he took the stone from the boiling water and, after letting it cool off just a bit, placed it in her hand and said, “This is RED.”
I can’t remember the movie, but it obviously had an impact on me. Anyone know the movie I’m talking about?
EDIT: I think the guy may have also had a room temperature stone that he identified as “GREEN.” Not sure about this part, though…
I remember this too! Could it have been....Mask? The one with Cher.
@@JasonJBrunet I do believe you are right! I had to think about it for a minute, but I’m seeing the characters in that scene now! Thank you!!
A "mixed color" is just a color which hasn't been named. Purple is a mixed color (and is described as such in the video) of blue and read. it's opposite is a mixed yellowish green. A common name for yellowish green is chartreuse. So what if Rita said the color was "pure purple" and Sid said the color was "pure chartreuse"?
That’s what I thought too
Yeah, the responses to this critique are dumber than the critique. Unfortunately he didn’t go over the fact that if we had fine enough tools and instruments to measure the goop with we could very likely be able to figure out who is inverted. The scientists arrived at the conclusion that there are inverted people precisely because the brain creates the mind.
But the reaction to a fire truck is also learned, so the person with inverted qualia just has an equivalent reaction to what he perceives, as someone with non-inverted qualia to his perception.
It's rather strange to first argue, that the person born with inverted qualia would just build all its associations to match just that, effectively "wire" the input so green associates with gras and red with a fire truck, but then argue, that the functional states are fundamentally different, when they're just equivalent with a rather primitve mapping (exchanging red for green).
Also functionalism doesn't care which lanes of nerves transport a green signal and which ones transport red, or even if it's nerves at all, it's completely sufficient, that someone who learned what gras looks like in his sensory system, inverted or not, remembers that association e.g. when describing something else as "gras green".
Perfectly explained. The neuron paths might be different but the inner state in the sense of attributed meaning is the same. Hence there isn't a real problem for functionalism.
@@JavierAlbinarrate The inner state isn't the same. They have different subjective experiences.
@mike not if they think the same for the same experience. Both identify the same concept for the same inputs. Even if processed differently within the brain. After all we all process the information differently.
As long as there is a qualifier that is independent from the individual's experience (a.k.a non-subjective), for an experience, it can be very easily told if a person is experiencing inverted qualia or not. For example if you show the person the color red written the wavelength of the color under it, and the same with green and ask them to write down the number of the wavelength of the color that resembles a tomato, you will know if the person is color inverted or not. (If they write down the wavelength of green, they are color inverted) Am I missing something?
yeah i think what he's saying is that whatever the color you see as 550nm wavelength is, we call it green but we won't know if the green that _you're_ experiencing is the same green that _everyone else_ is.
@@_ranko This is why I trust machines and not people. My spectrometer and oscilloscope don't have these issues or vested interests that motivate them to lie, steal, or cheat on me with my former best friend one week before our wedding.
1. Purple definitely looks like a "mixed" color to me. Also note that people raised using different languages that use different color palettes see colors the way they are raised to. For example in Gaelic blue and light blue are two different colors with different names and Gaelic speakers don't psychologically think of them as shades of one color the way English speakers do. This implies that the color identification is socially learned.
2. Color is inextricably linked to the wavelength of the light received, which must affect the nerve-receptors in a specific way, so it's probable that * eventually* we will advance neuroscience to the point where the color question can be objectively answered.
3. Speaking of other "qualia", it's interesting to wonder just how much our experience is translated by the brain into something different from the actual perception. It has been shown in experiments that if a person wears glasses that invert all images for a time (not sure if the exact time needed, but multiple days at the minimum) then the brain reorients the images and begins translating them so that the person now sees the inverted images as "normal". And unlike the color question, these are people who have experienced normal vision and can report that what they are seeing is different from what they saw before. This has weird and unexplored implications concerning qualia and the relationship between the brain and the "self" (or the part of the brain that we think of as the self and other parts of the brain).
I also have always seen purple as a mix of blue and red, I have no memory of me realizing it was a mix.
Came here to mention exactly what you did: color categories are culturally learned! Looking at a digital color picker, you can really see that colors blend into each other fluidly along axes of hue, saturation, and brightness. What we see as "pure" colors is based on what we grow up recognizing as a common color.
As you mentioned, not all languages have words for every color. Most languages (maybe all?) at least have a word for light/white and dark/black, and if they only have one other color name, it's almost always "red" before anything else. Super interesting!
There's no way to know if any two people experience color the same way. Maybe the colors we experience are as unique as we are.
..
There kind of is, for certain colors.
There is a known medical condition (I cannot recall the name), that results in a hyper-distinguishing color palate.
They see far more colors than the average human.
The test sets out like 20 cards that are green, but one is a very slight different shade of green.
The hyper color vision people can very easily pick out the different shade card. But the rest of us just say they are all the same green.... because that is what they look to us.
@@drebk Interesting but you totally missed the point. Your green and my green, the experience of them, the exact same wavelength might be totally different experiences and there's no way to know if we all experience the same color when we see green or if the experience is totally unique to each individual.
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@MrDavePed no... it appears that you have missed the point of my comment, which is not just a reemphasis or restatement of key point in the video.
We know via repeatable experiment that even though a group of people are experiencing 11 exact same wavelength greens, and one slightly different wavelength green, the vast majority will not be able to tell any difference.
A very small percentage of the population can differentiate the colors.
It is actually quite interesting, as the ability to distinguish the difference changes color with different cultures, but I digress.
The point that you missed (and yet assumed I missed), is that it doesn't matter what color each participant is individually experiencing.
So, while my example uses "green", yes there is no guarantee that you are experiencing the same "green" as me, and not say "red".
But my entire point is that we know we can send subtly different wavelengths to a group of people and only a select few see in hyper color.
How you missed that point I don't know.
...
@@MrDavePed perhaps re-read my comment...
I said nothing about whether we experience the same experience of green...
You're right - that would have missed the entire point of the video.
This is why my comment introduces a new concept. Again, why you assumed I missed the main point of the video is a bit strange.
@@drebk You should post your own comment rather than starting a new topic by disagreeing with my point. If you're lucky, someone will respond to what you have said rather than use your comment as a vehicle to say something entirely unrelated, couched as a disagreement.
But only if you're very fortunate.
..
This video was posted 2 years ago so, I'm probably to late with this comment, but... it seems to me that when white light is passed through a prism a sequential pattern of spectral color emerges, in other words there is an order to the sequence of how light is divided into color bands by frequency, that is independent of experience, for example if we use 6 letters to symbolize the 6 colors of the spectrum R- O - Y - G - B - V to mean red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Where Red, Yellow and Blue are primary colors, and green, orange, and violet are the secondary colors... we have a very specific repeatable sequence that appears... . If a color inverted person had red and green color inversion, then they may have a normal experience by their own account when moving through life looking at things, but the order they see color in a spectrum would be different than that which everyone else sees. They would look at a prismatic spectrum and see Green Orange Yellow, Red Blue and Violet. While the color inversion may seem normal to them, if you asked them to lay out 6 crayons of corresponding color to the spectrum on the table in the order they perceive a prismatic light spectrum, their order would not correspond to everyone else experience. We could ask them to draw something with crayons, but suppose they drew an apple, apples in nature come in both red and green. While it is true that without the assistance of another person who had normal color vision to make a comparison, a person would have no reference points within their experience to know that they have color inversion, it would only be a verifiable condition through testing against a labeled spectrum that does not change from one experiment to the next. Our perception of experience, measurement, and the language we use to describe those, seem to all be of relative importance.
Perception becomes even more interesting when we examine people who have had traumatic brain injury or stroke that results in hemi-neglect ( a condition where only one half of the brain is functioning normally), and only one half of the world is perceived by the individuals with this condition. if asked to dress their self they will only put clothing on half of their body, they brush the teeth on one side of their mouth and leave the side corresponding to the brain injury un-brushed, they shave half their face, and if you show them a picture of a flower or a shape like a square or a circle and ask them to draw it for you on piece of paper, they will only draw one half of the image. When you question them about why they didn't draw the other side of the image, they respond with complete astonishment, and often anger, they think you are crazy... because one half of the world you perceive does not even exist to them, including half of their own body, yet their conscious mind see everything as whole and complete, they can not detect anything missing. The self is not a good tool to use to use to measure the self, especially if the self is damaged in some way. Our inability to see absence in our perception leads to a lot of questions about just how limited our conscious experience really is, even if it is functioning at its optimum potential.
Without reference points, or relative experience shared. by another's experience, we could ask does it even matter how we perceive the world.
Than we have synesthesia and several other perceptual qualities or anomalies that you can not determine in ordinary interaction with people. So if we take all of that together, it is quite clear that there is very little chance that common experience is truly common. While we all share many similarities, there are really no two people who are really having the same experience even if they are having all of the same sensory input... and it can be argued that even that is unique in every case, because if two people sit together na watch a sunset, they photons striking one person's eyes are not the same photons that are striking the other person's eyes. The best we can hope for is similarity of experience, because even in repeatable experiments that yield the same data, there is an element of uniqueness that provably exists, and though our perception of those differences may fail, they can be measured. If common experience can be described with common language and two people can agree on a definition of some or other experience, it can never be proven that they are truly having the same experience, but by measurement, the opposite is in fact the case, that no two people are having the same experience... statistical approximations are the best we can ever hope for... we are similar enough to build societies and to have relationships and form families... but from the quarks that make up the atomic particles, to the compounds, and cells and tissue we are developed from, to how we see, think and feel... every person is a unique entity.
I find it fascinating that virtually everything I've ever wondered has been deeply studied before. I've never dared to go further than "maybe I see green and this other person sees red, but we both call it green. How can either of us be possibly wrong?" And I stop there.
My childhood was kind of funny, in a way. I always got in trouble for being rebellious, as both my mom and my middle school teachers would agree that I always talked back trying to prove them wrong. I did have a few great teachers that would engage and even welcome my questions. I remember second grade, my science teacher said the floor tiles couldn't catch fire. I was like "yes, they can if you pour gasoline on them" and he was like "that's the gasoline burning, not the floor". I thought to myself "oh, that makes sense, this guy knows so much!". I was so happy because he didn't say in an attempt to shut me down or embarrass me. Kudos to Mr Fajardo!
I used to pester my mother about this when I was a child. Only I talked about orange, because my toy was orange. I'd tell her that maybe I see orange as green, but you taught me that it's called 'orange', so now we use the same word to signify two different colors! And if so, we'll never even know! In response she kept repeating, as if I was confused: IT'S ORANGE!!!
color is completely culturally subjective though. take azzuro and blu in italian. both describe colors that an english speaker would describe as blue, but to any italian they are distinct and pure colors.
It seems many people have pondered this, not to my surprise. And, this does prove that no qualia is universal or determinable.
On the contrary to proving functionalism wrong, it seems that the argument of inverted qualia only reinforces the arbitrary and fickle nature of experience. There is no such thing as 'redness', there is only literal wavelengths of light. What looks red or green to some individual is completely meaningless beyond the accuracy of identifying the frequency of the light reflected by an object.
The experience of 'redness' is simply an application of abstraction upon something that is inapplicable.
Thank you for attending my Ted Talk
Two months later, I have more to elaborate.
Qualia isn't comparable. When someone asks, "what is it like to see red?" One can only ever answer, "it's like seeing red." or "it's like nothing else." An honest answer is 'it's like nothing.'
That is to say, qualia is a nothing and is relative to nothing.
What is it like to be a bat? It is like nothing.
What is it like to experience pain? It is like nothing.
Is your experience of red the same as mine? Effectively, yes.
According to functionalism, all qualia is a result of the functions of the brain. I specify: What the functions of any system -represent-.
It has the same properties as running a computer using electrons in binary or running the exact same computer mechanically with dominoes. You can run a functionally identical computer on any hardware, even in trinary code or qubits. Ok not sure about qubits, I don't understand quantum mechanics.
So, it would seem the biological computer is the same. --If what the processes represent and the outputs of said processes are the same, then you get the same representation of "qualia".--
You change the input into the brain, you get different qualia.
Obviously you can go from no pain to painful, or colorblind to color-vision, but can you go red-green to green-red?
Well yeah. If you change the input or the functions of the brain.
Can someone experience different qualia without changing their eyes, or what light enters them, or what computations their brain is performing? Well, one's experience is separate from another's; two peoples subjective abstract experience is not a literal thing to compare. Thus, try and see if -You- can change your conscious experience without changing sensory input or your brain's function.
But, certainly you can't. Even if you literally blind yourself, is that the inverse qualia of seeing anything at all? Even if you genetically modify your nerves to cease all pain signals, or add a new part to your brain to create artificial never felt before qualia, what's the conclusion?
If your eyes send your brain the signals it interprets as the color red, your brain interprets it as the color red. If your eyes send your brain any signal that it has previously interpreted and has functionally memorized that interpretation, it will functionally give you the same interpretation, irrelevant of the actual wavelength of light. Input or function can be swapped, but only then is experience changed.
I don't know whether you agree yet that furthering this line of inquiry is utterly frivolous.
This is weird. I am red/green colorblind. I didn't KNOW this until I joined the U.S.Navy at 18 years old. When you join the military, you have to take a physical. I was in line, to take this test. I was about 3 people away from a nurse, showing this book of "bubbles" to the guys in front of me. The guys were looking at the pages and reading out numbers, I thought they were reading the page number or something, because I saw NO NUMBERS. Apparently, this is a "color blindness" test. For 18 years I never knew I was color blind, until I was tested. I guess your point is VERY sound, if I had never been tested, I would of never known. All I can tell you how it affects my life, I find it near impossible to "match" dark brown and black socks, both look the same. Most "dark" colors blend to my eyes and look the same. Red lights for driving look red, green lights look green. But start to mix those colors and I am really lost. Hope that helps someone.. BTW.. There are tests in the Internet for color blindness, if your a male, you should get tested. Just search for Bubble Color Test, then it will seem clear (or unclear).
They're also call Ishihara color tests, or Ishihara plates. There are several plates to diagnose several different types of color blindness. One really awesome aspect of the tests is that there are some Ishihara plates that people with certain forms of color blindness can read, but that people with "normal" vision cannot. In some ways, you and other colorblind people kind of have a strange little superpower.
Also, it's a lot more common among males, but some nontrivial percentage of female humans also have color blindness. Therefore, everyone should get tested.
Thank you for describing your subjective color experience!
Would have.
I'm astonished of how many people in this comment section don't get the difference between phenomena and qualia. The number of people who say "just show them the colors and let them name them, and you will know who is inverted" leaves me speechless...
Welcome to YT. But yeah, you're right. Most likely because it somehow relates to color blindness hence lots of people just ended up here by chance (algo) instead of being actually following the lectures.
This actually can be done with havinf people just name colours. Here is how you do it. You show a prism or something that makes a rainbow.
You get R>O>G and so on
The person would see green instead od red and red instead of green ( lets use this as example ).
This will make it OBVIOUS that the person sees green instead of red. How? Very simple.
The transitions of colours have a specific form, which is not being kept if you are colorblind.
So RED > Orange > Green will have more of a “linear” transition, because the red slowly transforms into orange and the orange into green. If you have Green > Orange > Red, the person seeing green > orange > red will NOT see this smooth transition, and they will think you’re referring to the sequence in this way Green < Orange. < Red. But, you are a smart guy, and you make sure that you point from left to right Green > Orange. > Red. Problem solved. Just point out the color transition change, and for a red / green colorblind person, R>O>G aill be G
The argument around 15:00 about 'pure' and 'mixed' colors presumes that these are a universally percieved. I doubt the validity of that argument.
Being a phonetician, just playing around, I once asked some Dutch and Hungarians which of two sounds sounded more complex to them.
These sounds would be represented in English by 1./s/ and 2./sh/, in Dutch by 1./s/ and 2/sj/, and in Hungarian by 1./sz/ and 2./s/ respectively.
All of the Dutch judged sound 2. to be the more complex, but all of the Hungarians chose sound 1.
Clearly, a seemlingly objective quality like simple/complex may be influenced by the complexity of the writing or labeling that is associated with it culturally.
Similarly, using separate names for certain colors, could contribute to perceiving those colors as more 'pure'.
It's important to point out that color inversion cannot objectively be found if it's not caused by anything about their cones, thus the input data, but how these data are processed.
If it is caused by their cones, as in the 14 of 10,000, would their experience actually be any different from the majority? I mean, wouldn't their mental state and functional state actually be like the majority?
At first, on the face of it, it may seem as if the mental state should be obviously different, as a different "goop" is functionality processing the information, but that doesn't nessisarily make it that the experience or data is any different.
"Goop" can be differentiated, but that wouldn't nessisarily mean the information would be different or that the data or the experience would be any different.
While the idea of these 14 in 10,000 may seem to be a strong argument against functionalism, I don't think it is at all.
If I built to different widgets to measure temperature using 2 different types of "goop", and both had the same level of accuracy, granularity, etc., the fact that different "goop" was used could be observed, but the data (the function and experience) would me the same. The differences in "goop" used wouldn't impact the experience or data whatsoever. So would it be within those 14 of 10,000, right?
Does the "how" actually matter in argument against functionalism? I'm I'm not saying functionalism would disregard the "how". I'm just wondering if functionalism requires different "hows" to mean different mental states.
I`ve heard that we actually see upside down when we are born but the brain flips the vision after some time, there has been experiment when they have flipped the vision with a eyelens and the brain has flipped it again.
So the question is if the brain does the same when it comes the case you mention at the end of the video.
Another question is if it is the brain that does it or is the mind/soul?
You can also ask if for example the colour red is a intrinsic property to reality. That would suggest that the building blocks of our minds represent a greater reality.
When I was young, one of my first deep thoughts was to wonder why we do anything that is fun or joyful or loving because the minute it's over, its gone. It is temporary. We have only a memory.
I thought about it in high school because I was on a workout program that was geared toward foods I didnt like. But I justified it to myself because the temporary joy I experienced by breaking the diet would be in the past nearly immediately, and it eould impact my life negatively after that.
This thought can be a good motivational tool, but it can also be deeply depressing. Why do we do anything? Its all temporary.
Damn these videos are enjoyable
Talking about not knowing the difference between internal experiences, I'd recommend looking up aphantasia.
Those with Aphantasia do not have sensory recall of one or more senses. Some lack visual imagination, others lack multisensory imagery. They only get live sensory input and cannot imagine their loved ones' faces, replay a song in their heads, some even lack internal monologues.
For those that discovered they had it in adulthood, they lived their whole lives thinking that "picturing" something, counting sheep, or a song stuck in your head were just turns of phrase or plot devices.
The variety of internal lived experiences is under-researched, and mind boggling
Unless someone taps a logic analyzer into the optical nerves, this poses absolutely no problem for functionalism...
Great work, glad you are so enthusiastic. You are a great teacher
I feel like there are some limited tests we can perform. One would be optical illusions, for example how people's brains think red + blue = violet. Violet is its own separate color past indigo, and yet people's brains see red + blue as real similar to violet. That optical illusion seems to be rooted in funky brain wiring, so if people share that illusion, they've got similar wiring. That doesn't prove IDENTICAL wiring, of course.
Another possibility is the ability to recognize color similarities. If everyone sees red and orange as more similar than red and blue, and green as more similar to blue than yellow is to purple, then perhaps people are seeing colors the same.
Still another possibility is linguistic, but I'm not sure this is germane. There is a pattern among languages, with how many color words they have. Languages that have the most limited set of color words, always have black vs white. Languages with just one more color have a word for red. And so on, with pretty much the same "order" of words emerging in a language. That suggests a need to express concepts that are commonly perceived, maybe. Black is dark; white is bright; red is vibrant.
Ahhh this is interesting. I think a problem with the language one depends on what percent of people have inverted qualia. If it's a minority, then I think you run into the same issue of the society they live in mostly seeing it one way and being raised to call it that same word. The distribution of inverted qualia would have to be where some societies have a minority and others have a majority. That'd be the only way to compare two different societies.
For the second test you mentioned, I'm trying to think through this though: would the fact that red and green are primary light colors impact light colors that they combine to make? So since orange light is a combination of red and yellow, would someone with inverted qualia see orange as the combination of green and yellow (bright chartreuse) and just call it orange? So to them orange (what they see as bright chartreuse) is still more similar to red (what they see as green). And combining green (their red) with yellow to make bright chartreuse would appear what we call orange to them. So they would also say that the bright chartreuse (their orange) is more similar to green (their red) despite internally "seeing" it differently. Maybe it could work with non primary colors? Idk it took me too long to think about it and I'm tired lol
It’s highly likely we all perceive color the same way (except for colorblind people or some genetics issue) because the according wavelengths of colors stimulate the same receptors in the human eye. Everything else is just definitions we agree on, like different languages.
Exactly, as if the same sound waves produce a C sharp in one person and a D flat in another.
Right! When someone says "table" some other person would not hear "chair" agreeing on the meaning "table" for "chair" and vice versa...
on the note of the example with the person seeing everything twice as big as everyone else.
well, if you ever used a VR headset this might actually sound familiar.
in VR, if the game's camera settings and your VR headset's lens/eye distance isn't calibrated correctly, everything will look either super small or super big to you.
because you are used to how far apart your own eye are. you are used to how the scale of the world around you is, based on the position of your eyes.
move your eyes closer together and everything will look larger to you, move them farther apart and the world around you will look too small.
I bet you could achieve the same effect by using mirrors arranged in a certain way in a glasses like thing you put on.
so in a way, we indeed kinda see a different scale, but because we are used to it since it's the only way we ever saw the world, everything looks normally scaled to us. change the position of the eyes tho and everything will look off.
I think it is simpler than described in this lecture. Irrespective of the “gloop” in the eyeball, there is no way of knowing whether the sensation I experience as a colour is the same as the sensation someone else experiences as a colour. We call the experiences we both have as red or green or blue or whatever, but there is no knowing whether we have the same experience. Maybe that is one of the reasons why some people think that certain colours “go together“ and other people think they do not.
And the same principle apllies to taste. Some people love tomatoes, some hate them. Are they experiencing the same thing while eating tomatoes? We just don't know.
I think red and green look awful together even tho color theory says they're complementary. I do love orange and cyan tho
@@stickman5613we know with some vegetables they aren't because people with a certain gene are more likely to perceive their taste as bitter.
Isaac Newton, and every designer worth their salt would disagree. Look up the colour wheel and have fun investigating why colours do or do not go together. That the colour inversion picked is a pair on the colour wheel is not an accident.
@@benmarr352 disagree with what?
I may be misremembering my philosophy days, but isn't the point supposed to be that there is no test that we could run to figure out if you see the same green I see? But, in your example, we actually could run a test. We could cut out someone's eyes and dissect their red and green cones and see if they have the correct color goop in there. Right?
How do you determine whether a cone is supposed to have red or green in it?
A Functionalist might point out that there is a confusion going on, a misunderstanding of functionalism and between what is a brain state and mental state. One of the arguments for functionalism vs mind brain identity theory is that different brain states can (possibly) give rise to the same mental state.
The possibility that creatures with completely different brain systems might still experience pain or other mental states. Mental sates are thus not uniquely realized, but are (can be) multiply realized in many different ways. Therefore, brain state=/=mental state.
The whole inverted Qualia/Senses argument is for the functionalist not different mental states, but simply different brain sates leading to the same experience. If the idea is true that such a person would "experience" the switched Qualia/Senses by also switching the assorted experiences, for example with color also switching the experience "hot"/"cold" or "warm", then this would actually be a strong argument for this view. Functionally, the mental states of inverted senses are (completely) the same, so by definition of functionalism they are the same mental states. For the functionalist, they are just running on different brain states.
You: "How do you know that you don't experience red the way others experience green?
Me: I'm colorblind, and I know for a fact that I perceive way too much green light, so, yeah, I do see red like most people see green.
But seriously, as someone that really does see colors drastically differently, I can vouch for the fact that the mixed/pure color rebuttal is rubbish. Even though I see red as a mixed color (red and green) I perceive it as a pure color, because I was taught my red is a pure color. My red still looks warm, because the warm things are my red. I remember learning I was colorblind. I'd been alive for over a decade, passed kindergarten with flying colors, identifying all my colors well enough to not raise any suspicions, grown up enough to be able to have favorite colors and talk about colors and what they represent and how they feel and more. Then I was playing with a red bow and arrow toy. I shot a red arrow into a green bush and couldn't find it when I was looking nearly right at it. I didn't believe that everyone else could see it easily, and thought everyone was pulling a prank. It took months before I was really convinced I was colorblind. It was weird, and baffling, and disorienting, but I'm a teacher now, and I really enjoy teaching my students about how I experience qualia differently, and use this thought experiment to help my students grasp the concept. Glad to see someone else thought of it as well.
Do you have protanope type color blindness? His explanation of the reversed cone goop material seems to end up normal if you label the brain connections as 1&2 instead of R&G. I still don't understand how you or my father experience red and green but it sounds like you can differentiate red from green but not well, so your experience can be considered inverted qualia, or altered qualia.
@@jeringjering So, as I understand it, I have Deuteranomaly, which means I receive too much green light, and, therefore, struggle to discriminate between a variety of colors, but most notably red, green, and brown have little contrast. I, therefore, do not have inverted qualia (if I did, I wouldn't be considered color blind), just atypical qualia.
I think qualia are like variables used in programming - it doesn’t matter as long as they stay consistent for the individual. Everyone’s are probably entirely different, so “switching” makes no sense.
heh, every stoner I've ever met has had this thought at some point in time. I tend to think we likely all have the same (or similar) sensory experiences. I think this because it has been shown experimentally that certain colors invoke certain feelings in people. You could argue that these feelings/emotions that are felt in response to color are learned responses, but I don't think that argument holds water. For most of our evolution, we as a species had no capacity for language, and would therefore not learn what colors meant by being told what they were by others, instead, we would just inherit instinctually that certain colors meant certain things, and would therefore invoke certain feelings in us.
Think about it this way. If a bird that only feeds on the nectar from a purple flower was color inverted, they wouldn't be able to just ask their fellow birds what "purple" is. As a result of this, theyd die because they'd be unable to get the nutrients they'd been evolutionarily programmed to need, and they'd never be able to pass on these inverted color genes.
We just haven't had language as part of our evolutionary process long enough to overwrite this quality in ourselves.
Nope... The bird would just have a different experience of the type of flower that it is drawn to feed on and would continue feeding just fine.
I also used to think about this as a kid. I remember trying to explain it by asking, if I could see the world through your eyes would the colours I see look different? Alas no philosophers around at that time to provide an explanation 😂
Same and it got brushed off as if I was just being dumb lol
I think the functionalism response would be to re-imagine their idea of mental state = functional state would not mean that the mental states were exactly equivalent between individuals but the concept of differentials would be equivalent .
That is to say that the mental state is not a definitive quantity or quality, but rather is merely a contrasting perception of differentiation .
There is book called "Fribble." It is about kid who wants to call an ink pen a Fribble. This book is exactly what you are talking about. It is amazing what we "Title" things is in line with majority convention.
This is only consistent when we are talking about opposite colors on the color wheel, the rest is collor blindnes.
Then if every color were swapped (including black and white), in theory, people who see white as black should be tired because black makes you want to sleep and white makes you wake up.
Assuming that the brain reacts only this way to given visible light wavelength.
----
if only two colors are changed or shifed (where there is a second such combination to be balanced), and is not black and white, we will never know if someone has a different vision than we do.
The answer Kaplan is - Occam’s Razor! Constant reaffirmation and education would lead that person to know what they have been see was red was actually green. And vice versa. They would live with this idea and adapt.
How we perceive color is done in the brain, and because of that, we have absolutely no way of knowing how any person perceives "red" or any other color. Color is just a word that defines a "mental confirmation" that our brain creates when it demodulates the visual signals that it receives via the optic nerves. We can safely assume that my "red" is the same, or at least very similar, to the "red" that most or all other humans perceive in their brains because of the fact that we are all humans. The same cannot be assumed between humans and animals. In my opinion, we can not, and probably never will, be able to determine exactly what a person perceives as "red" or "green". Anyhow, "WHO CARES?"! If my brain sees what you would say is a green fire truck, and your brain sees what I would say is a blue fire truck, it really doesn't matter because we will both call it a red fire truck!
Wait a minute you are writing on that board in a reverse manner right...?
Probably flipped the video to correct that
You can see he prints with his “left” hand. It’s more likely that he is right handed and the video is flipped than he is left handed and an expert at printing backwards.
Yeah, I've wondered the same. Haha
The shirt buttons are flipped as compared to regular men’s shirts… so flipped in editing it is 😊
unless he is left right inverted, but has never questioned it before… and is wearing a woman’s shirt
What part of "inverted qualia" did you not understand?
I thought about this very thing when I was growing up because my left eye saw red less saturated or more subdued than my right. I have heterochromia or whatever its called and I wondered if having different eye colors might affect what peoples favorite colors were because of how they perceived colors.
Surely observing colours (and in particular there placements in relations to other colours) on a colour wheel or the order of them in a rainbow would help identify people who saw things differently?
Also, technically the colour of any object is the opposite of what we perceive. For example a red object only appears red to the observer as that is the frequency of light that bounces off of that object. The object is actually absorbing all the other colours of the spectrum. So, you could argue that any object is all of the other colours other than the colour we observe them to be.
A better counter-argument for the Functionalist might be that the inversion or even specifics of qualia don't even matter, just ignore the brain's experience of "color", call the color experience a generated illusion if you will, and that the actual mental state is the perception of a specific light frequency, which would never change regardless of qualia inversion (it's just how that frequency appears to them). Or that the interpreted experience (qualia) and the experience itself (perception of specific wavelengths) are a categorical kind, and figure out a good, solid definition for what mental states are exactly (the qualia color interpretation or the experience of the particular wavelength). Or in other words, I guess I am not understanding why it would matter if the functional experience is different from the mental state if the mental state for each individual is internally consistent and they give the same external function. Kind of like, does it matter if a table is made of metal or wood if it's given the same shape still functioning the same way? That the underlying material is irrelevant. And if functionalism is an argument in favor of physicalism as opposed to dualism, even if the wires and neurons and eye goop is inverted, that mental experience is still caused by the same kind... a physical thing (wavelength of light) interacting with a physical thing (cone goop) to send a physical signal (neural impulse) to the brain.... you see where I am going with this. It sure seems like the same mental state and process even if the end qualia is inverted and like it doesn't matter if you can't even tell whether or not it's inverted.
It almost seems like another one of those errors of communication.
As the child of two optometrists who has far too much useless information about eyes, I'd like to point out that most red-green color blind people don't have a complete swapping of "the goop." The majority of folks with Protan-type and Deutan-type color blindness (so an error with the green or red cones) really have a *shifted* goop-setting rather than a fully swapped one. So their red cones pick up wavelengths that are closer to green than should be, or vice versa, making it harder to differentiate colors, but not impossible. IE: Bright red and bright green still look different, but less saturated colors just start to look brown or grey. Someone who has the same goop in both cones literally won't be able to tell the difference at all, so even the red and green of a stoplight would look exactly the same.
Point being, "color vision glasses" like Enchroma only work on people with shifted-goop color blindness. Those glasses actually work by filtering out certain wavelengths of light between red and green, allowing the brain to differentiate between the two "channels" more than it normally could. So when wearing the glasses, green light only activates the green cones and red light only activates the red cones, rather than both being activated to some degree at the same time.
What's SUPER COOL about that to me, is that under the paradigm he lays out in this video, where the activation of the "channels" = the qualia, Enchroma glasses actually literally allow people to see red when they couldn't before! If red goop in the green cone and green goop in the red cone would cause experience/qualia inversion, then the differentiation of your red and green channels IS THE SAME THING as true RGB color vision!
TL:DR: Enchroma glasses do actually let you see red/green!! For really reals!!!
(Not sponsored or anything I'm just a nerd)
Wonderful to watch on YT put in their glasses for the first time.
Pure joy ❤
I would utilize a dark hue of orange, purple and green and asked which one stands out to them more. The color that is Orange being warmer and brighter in it's very essence, should stand out more compared to colors closer to colder hues like purple and green, even if in it's tinted. I would ask him which color appears brighter in pigment in comparison and that' s how we would know we see the same thing.
This qualia inversion is a fact amongst many people. Let me give you an example. In the English language we announce the number like 45, by saying forty five we announce the tenth digit before the units digit. In another language the number are announced differently ie, the first digit is announced first followed by the 10th digital. This means that unless, there is a switch these two processing system would not be able to properly communicate.
One caveat here, the way we perceive the electromagnetic spectrum needs to be consistent. Blue could be described as greenish, and orange is not far from red. Our brains assign color qualia that makes the electromagnetic spectrum consistent. Blue and Yellow still have to make green. Red and Yellow still have to make purple. Yellow would be inconsistent if it mixed with blue to make red, but also mixed with green to make purple.
It is wired how many people thought about this when they were young, I find this interesting.
i love when Philosophy teachers tell you just to accept it for now...before we move on...
I might be very confused here but might there be a way to figure out if your color inverted? The colors red and green are at different wave lengthsnofbthe light spectrum, which means they have different properties and can be measured. I *think* thats part of the reason why plants (because chlorophyll) here on earth with our particular sun and atmosphere are green. If someone is color inverted could they see that their measurements dont make quite as much sense as otherwise. Cant word this properly on my phone :/
The question is, whether those wavelengths always produce the same subjective experience in the mind, the same qualia.
That baby would act and talk in a way that's completely compatible with science, it would call a certain wavelength green, it would call grass green, it would call things that have chlorophyll in them green, while in his mind perceiving a colour that most others would call red.
You're not confused at all.
Instead of comparing "fire trucks" and "grass" or how you "feel" about a particular color, you could know by comparing 700nm light which is "Red" and 540nm light which is "Green."
You'd also know because these colors appear in a particular, definitive sequence along the color spectrum from a rainbow or a prism: "Green" is the color in the middle; if you see it on one end, you're color inverted.
The way we see colors is irrelevant with the way they are. Actually there are no colors at all; it's just our brain's response to certain light wavelengths. There is no separate thing as light also. Light is just a tiny fraction of the whole electromagnetic spectrum - from radio waves to gamma rays.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum#Regions
I hope this can help your thoughts.
@@rickoshay6554 yet you are wrong. He would point the green correctly in the rainbow as well as its wavelength. Because that is what he learnt to call green. The fact that the cones or the optical nerves are swapped would make no difference in the reasoning. Unless you poke his brain with electrodes to compare the data streams against the expected values. From an outside point of view, it is indistinguishable from a normal person.
Black body radiation is an independent measure. Diffracted light places colours in a particular order. It should be easy to discover if your perception of colours was inverted.
How? In theory you show green, he answers green. You show red, he answers red. You show blue, he answers blue. You show red+blue he answers magenta. Unless you poke his optical nerves/neurons/etc (his internal hardware)
I thought about this when I was very young and was never able to find anyone that understood what I was talking about. In the end it doesn’t matter but explains why we all have different “minds” and therefore perceptions of reality. If you were me then I’d be you and everything would still be “normal”
Me too, but I figured that we are all genetically basically clones of each other so it would be very unlikely. I’m with the scientists tho, it’s possible if they goop gets mixed up in just the right way, then it could be a different experience.
I am absolutely serious. Mr. Caplan, this is the 4th video that am I watching. Videos from you. Everytime it felt like as if you were talking about something, that I already was thinking about and asking myself about, intensely, but I never spoke to anyone about these thoughts. Are you reading my mind or what is going on here? /// edit: It feels like a dejavue, or being inside the trueman show, or a glitch...
While it is obvious to anyone who thinks about it that our entire existence is a mental construct, it is not true to then say that therefore we have no way of knowing if our internal experience of the external world is the same as or different to anyone else's.
We can strongly infer that we have the same experience, aside from genetic or other abnormalities, because we share a common ancestor.
Temperature is related to color, higher wavelength light is warmer.
Use a prism and split the light and put a thermometer in each color, theyvwill read different temperatures
Perception of a visible wavelength of the light spectrum is recognized by every person (not physically colorblind by the physiology of the eyes) by the color name that has been identified for that wavelength universally is irrelevant to each individual’s personal experience of the wavelength. The wavelength is measurable and remains the same for everyone regardless of the way the individuals brain processes the information of the wavelength.
While admittedly our ‘normal’ color vision could be an inversion or mutation developed trough evolution and so we might not actually “know” whether we (all) are color inverted … when manner to know whether or not we see color in the same manner as everyone else is when we start driving cars … If we stop when we see “green” (“red” to us) … or vis versa … well then we “know” that we are actually seeing the colors differently than our minds previously associated with that respective “color” as we experienced it up until that point.
The problem with this whole argument is that you're assigning a particular nerve to a particular colour. Why is that assumption valid? If the nerve makes its way into the brain and stimulates neurons then its doing its job and the brain has neurons stimulated that it further interprets through subsequent neuron firings and so on. It could/should make no difference whether the signal came through one nerve or another when it enters the brain if the brain has learned "red" then its learned it through stimulation of the "red" nerve.
I can know it is the following way: if I heat a piece of coal and see it turning green then I am colour inverted as because thermodynamics tells me that the coal will turn red. This property of colour to temperature can allow to define colour unambiguously. That is colour is associated with a number, the wavelength of light, so it then can be made invariant of label. One can still define the label to be Green or red but the number will always tell if what definition you are using.
No it doesn't. Thermodynamics predicts the wavelength of the photon emitted by a black body. In this case the coal would emit higher energy photons from let's say 800-700nm. We all call that Red. But I don't have to see the same color to call it red. Red is how the brain interprets this wavelength, color is something your brain made up. So you can see other colors in the place of red and you'll learn to call it red. What most of this comment section doesn't seem to grasp is the wavelength of a photon is not the same as the color of the photon. Color is a qualia. It's just a tool our brain uses to differentiate between some of these wavelengths.
Color temperature is more complicated than you suggest, it's not just that reds are warm and blues are cool; there are warm tone blues and cool tones reds but colors that are thought of as warm have a wider range of warm tones and vis versa for cool colors.
The answer to your question is inheritance / evolution. There is color blindness, various kinds of but these are 'defects' from the evolved ability to distinguish colors but no color inversion. Your colors are the same as ours.
I thought of this in 5th grade and explained it to my friends on the playground. Later in college when I studied perception and psychobiology, I learned about cones and rods and the evolution of the eye, which tells us that we process the light spectrum the same way.. yes, there’s color blindness, but that’s different and mostly about how we parse blends or mixes of colors
The cause of colors is the wavelength of the light. It would be a simple matter to say that red light wavelengths are longer than green light wavelengths. This would not be the case for color-inverted people.
They would also be stimulated by the long red wavelengths, but their brains may 'decode' that wavelength as green, but they correctly name it red because that's what they learned to call it.
It is now the second video of you that I watch and I experience a deja vu. I read William Poundstone's Labyrinths of Reason 30 years ago...
This talk was before chatGPT obviously. And large language models erase Searle critique of functionalism
I know it's not the main topic here, but there is a way in knowing if someone has color inverted sight. I'm an electronics technician, resistors and wiring in some systems are color-coded, each color correspond to a number, converting those colors to numbers gives you their resistance in ohms, if I saw inverted colors, I'd mistake the resistance value of every resistor that has that color in them, thus realizing I have a problem seeing some colors correctly.
I experience dramatic colour inversion events several times per week because of my colourblindness. An example - I’ll be looking through my closet to get dressed in the morning while the light is dim. I’ll see a green sweater and decide to grab it. But as soon as I touch it, I recognize from the texture that it’s actually my purple sweater. (in bright enough lighting and from close up I can easily tell purple and green apart so I have separate qualia for them. In dim light they can appear the same). As soon as I recognize it as my purple sweater, its apparent colour will instantly switch from green to purple, and I’ll be unable to see it as green again.
To me this proves that qualia can’t be described with anatomical analysis of the retina or gene sequencing. The wavelength hitting my retina can be exactly the same, and my mind may construct a completely different subjective experience. If I didn’t touch the sweater, there would be no way to tell that my qualia was inverted.
Kinda like the optical illusions where multiple interpretation of the picture exist (like vase or faces and similar). Once you know about them, you might (I know I am, not sure about others) be able to switch what you see in the image.
Couldn't you have the colors labeled with their wavelength and just point to a color and say what color is this and find out if there was a difference between two people
I agree that there's no way to know if you have Qualia, but only if you stipulate that for some magical reason the physical wavelengths of light would also be switched. Because it doesn't matter what names you give colors, the spectrum will still be ROYGBIV.....and so if it's only switched for you, you would know immediately something is wrong whenever everyone else's Rainbow is colored in the wrong order, GOYRBIV. So again, only if you are also perceiving the wavelengths wrong, and not just the pigments. This is explained with the warm/cool attributes, which I maintain, come from the wavelengths.
Correct
Color is not an intrinsic property of light itself, but rather a property of how our eyes and brains perceive different wavelengths of light.
Watch the video again. You completely failed to understand it.
@@mrosskne No. I didn't disagree with the video. I was adding a stipulation for clarity. So you either misunderstood the video or my post or both. Probably both.
@@YoeyYutchexactly! Colors don't exist, wavelengths exist. But color is something that is made up by our brains because evolutionarily it can be advantageous for our survival to be able to differentiate between certain wavelengths photons.
Maaaaaan, I remember having this conversation when I was like 7 years old. I thought everybody had this conversation.
I've always thought about the possibility of other people being color inverted (in comparison to how experience colors), maybe since I was a child. More recently, I've used this as an argument to show that God exists.
Great content! Can you do an in depth video on Dworkin's constructive theory next?
Hopefully I will get to it soon!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is easily identified. As soon as an individual with inverted qualia is asked to create something for someone else, their inversion would become obvious. This is due to the fact that you can't always (or almost ever) reverse engineer, or back-out the result of combining qualia. In other words, combinations of qualia are usually more than the sum of their parts, so a single inversion would not remain reliable as that qualia was propagated down the line of emergent qualia based on the initial, inverted one.
Let's take paint mixing in kindergarten. In front of us, we have the typical 3 primary paint colors: red, blue, yellow. We both grab Yellow, and in this example, we know that yellow qualia are same for each of us. Now we each reach for red, which we would each describe as the color of a firetruck or a stop sign. We mix the colors and what appears in front of us would be described by both of us as the color of an orange. Technically, you're sensing blue, but you describe it as orange because that's what culture has done to you. Now we both take that resultant color and remix it back with yellow. I'm left with a color that I describe as yellow-orange, but you're somehow back (perceptually) to firetruck.
We can do this for sweet, savory, sour, whatever. Mixing qualia doesn't have symmetrical, separable results. My guess is that's how we learn anyways. At one time, we actually don't know the difference between Wet and Cold, but once we feel cold, and sense or know of the presence of water, we get to wet. We can't back-compute our way out of wet by our brains simply misrepresenting the sense. A bucket of cold flour feels wet with eyes closed. Open your eyes, the sensation doesn't collapse back into wet. It just stays cold.
It's obvious that we can trick our brains into seeing color/shadow that "isn't there". Optical illusions are commonplace and fun! But, when the brain has a chance to get a wider picture of reality and orient itself in space (color, taste, feel, etc), then we pretty quickly come to our senses, and can't reify the illusion that was so easy held when our reference frame was smaller.
This seems too easy, so I'm guessing I'm wrong...
As long as any two people had learned from birth the same terminologies for mutual objects they perceive, there is no way to know how anything is actually perceived by anyone other than yourself. It could be quite different than simply colors being inverted. One could see something like numbers, or strange textures (invert the sense of vision with touch) and both would call the fire truck red. Even the 'volume' of the experience of red could be way higher or lower in one person than the other and you could never share the difference in perception. Only when there is a difference in detectability in one experience can you demonstrate there's a difference (such as blindness). One person's whole experience could be absolutely foreign to another if for - even a moment - one could have the direct input from another's experience.
If someone was born with inverted color perception, they would have no way of knowing that they had it, since red that appeared green to them, they would have learned to call "red". It would, in fact, be impossible for them to communicate to others that the color they are seeing is not the same color that anyone else is seeing...and guess what? The same is true for all of us. None of us have any real idea whether or not we perceive colors the same way as anyone else, even when we use common terminology, because we have no way of experiencing what others experience.
Even if we are not color inverted, our perception of colors, e.g. red, changes over time as we get older... we notice this only when we start wearing glasses. red becomes redder... But we never question if what we are seeing as red is really red, although the reds we saw in years are different forms of red (sharper, duller) .... And, we do not notice it... What I am really after is, is there any discussion connecting this argument to reality arguments, reality as being socially constructed etc. If anyone came across any readings please put it in the comments.
I had this debate with myself a long time ago and came to the conclusion that it was almost a certainty that experience of colour is subjective and unique to each individual. When I lost vision in my left eye and my dominant eye switched I noticed my appreciation of colour was different. Things were brighter and more vibrant. When my vision returned it was only then I noticed that I had a different (very minor) experience with each eye. My appreciation of red in my left eye is not exactly the same as my appreciation of red in my right eye. There is likely a spectrum of colour appreciation so that minor differences can become major differences for people at each end of the red colour appreciation spectrum as a single example.
I would sort of agree with that to an extent. For example, i have noticed that colors seemed more vibrant and complex when under the influence of psychedelics. That would imply that the interpretation of color in the brain can vary. But what didn't happen was that colors switched around. Green was still green and red still red, just a different hue.
It doesn't matter. What matters is the frequency of the light detected. Two people looking at the same bird from opposite ends would be seeing different things, but it doesn't mean they aren't perceiving the same bird
This actually happened to tase impressions in Covid. It seems the connections between taste impressions and subjective taste perception got mixed up. So, as an example, wine tastes like piss to some post-covid sufferers. It seems that the internal state of sensing piss and wine still exist, but the connection that determines which sensory experience connects to shich internal state has been scrambled. I have not followed how this develops, but it was a problem during the pandemic.
Its funny that the "warm" colors actually come from light of lower frequency, while the "cool" colors come from higher frequencies of light. And the energy of light is proportional to its frequencies. So light of "warm" colors are actually less energetic and "cool" colors are more energetic - meaning out associations are physically wrong. Correlation is negative.
@@carlcramer9269the feeling of warmth is infrared light
It seems to be that in the last argument there's a problem with how the input is framed. To the brain the input is not the colour of light but which of the cone cells is excited and since the wiring of those cone cells is presumably the same this is in fact a case where functional input = functional output. That is the mind's wiring for green light is not green wavelength to green brain neurons, but green goop to green brain neurons. If you wire the green goop to the red brain neurons then yeah I guess internally your mind would interpret that excitation as 'red' but then its just a matter of the learned language for the colours. Internally nothing is broken and the inputs and outputs are in fact the same from the brain's perspective. So it would seem to me that the fact that there exist people who experience red green inversion that fact does not invalidate functionalism. In fact the system is working properly red goop reacts to red light and green goop reacts to green light. If you wire the red goop cells to the green network then that's the part of the brain that will respond to red light or vice versa. The system is working just fine you just crossed the wires.
You actually can find the difference. Let’s say I see color X as your color Y. While we can cannot distinguish our descriptions of the qualia, we can distinguish position. The two colors are on the spectrum, and therefore hold a particular position. Red is on the right and blue is in the left. We know something is amiss if we disagree on our perception’s position on the spectrum. We both say a fire engine is “red” but when we run the light through a spectrum, we observe a different position. I say red is on the right but you say it is on the left. It is settled who has inverted qualia, then, by majority rule.
What would purple look like? I wonder if there is a way. Yet again I’m too early was already half way through saying no a kid wouldn’t have that experience
when we were in college we talked about this idea without knowing it had a published philosophy paper, we are talked about make a movie like this that would be fun,
If only the red and green color receptors are switched, but the blue is not became yellow sensitive, the person having this will know that he see colors in different way then others, like in one of the comments. I have for example taste qualia inversion, just for few chemicals. Certain kind of cabage for me is bitter and an other person say the same cabage sweet. But there are foods on which we both agree that is sweet or bitter, probably same taste produced by different chemical like the one beeing in the cabage. Interestingly I like more eating bitter food then others :).
Isn't it true that, at a more basic level, when two people see green, different sets of neurons fire in their brains . But language teaches them both to call that experience green.
what about a color chart? ask the color inverted person to point out red and green. wouldn't that settle it?
thanks for the great videos my friend, love your channel!
Help. I am color-inverted. I only see GRED and REEN
Very interesting thought experiment but i dont think science will agree. By green we mean a light reflected on a certain frequency and we can measure that frequency. So we can actually check if someone sees green or not. The same goes for the sound (hearing) . I dont know about the other senses like touch , smell , and taste but we can make an educated guess that we can objectively measure these also.
"By green we mean a light reflected on a certain frequency"
No.
There is no color in the neural discharge frequencies transmitted
from the color sensing cells to the brain.
In the brain the discharge frequencies generated by those sensing cells
modulate the frequencies of other neurons via the synapses and
so on up a fairly long neural chain to eventual conscious experience.
Thus the meanings of the words for colors
are necessarily learned by experience only.
There was unmentioned another kind of color blindness in which
the number of red sensing cones are simply fewer than normal.
I have that kind of color blindness.
I can see a red golf ball in the green grass within a range of about 30 feet but
beyond that range the amount of red light reflected is not enough and
the surrounding sensors swamp the output from the red ones.
(In case you don't know,
considerable lateral neural processing (excitation and inhibition)
goes on in the retina before signals are emitted).
It is proper etiquette for golfers in a group
to search for others' balls that can't easily be found
so I ask them to use white balls only
else my ability to spot their balls is limited to 30 feet.
(Curiously, most prefer to take their chances and stick with the red).
3:40 The person, growing up with a "flipped" green-red sensor, would not even realize it.
They see all the things everyone sees as red, they are called red, and red mixed with yellow makes orange, it all _works_; he would not even be able to tell that his sensory input was different. The child would never even KNOW that the fire truck was "green"; it was the color everyone calls "red."