Does your RED look the same as my RED?
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- čas přidán 2. 09. 2020
- 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.
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.
This blew my frickin mind wow
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.
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.
Great work, glad you are so enthusiastic. You are a great teacher
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.
Damn these videos are enjoyable
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 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.
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...
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.
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?)
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.
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!!
Great content! Can you do an in depth video on Dworkin's constructive theory next?
Hopefully I will get to it soon!
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.
I would appreciate it if you can explain ceteris paribus in details and the back and forth arguments among philosophers of mind
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.
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
Great video
What do you say about color vision test . can we know if someone is inverted qualia by color vision test ?
Yes, I do get your point. How many times must your repeat the same info?
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!
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.
Just discovered your channel! Great... another science subscription!
How can it even be said that any two persons' experience of the world is at all similar? My experience of salt may be your experience of sour. My sharp pain from a pin may be your feeling of being tickled, and so forth. I actually considered this quandary back in middle school after reading Ray Bradbury's story "Tomorrow's Child".
I've been thinking about this in the context of our nervous system and emotional experiences. People often tend to belittle suffering of others, especially children. For example, someone accidentally stepped on a toy car. The kid who owned this car feels bad and starts crying. An adult just shrugs and says: "Your car is no big deal. My friend recently lost a job - that's a big deal". But actually, the experience of that child might have the same intensity as losing a job for an adult!
With more life experience, a person will learn that losing a job should be more emotionally devastating than losing a toy, but still, it will not change the fact that the same person in childhood might have experienced the same emotions. Thus we should not belittle other people suffering by explaining it away with a lack of experience or being too sensitive and emotional.
@@camelCasedthen you'll never teach the kid that toy cars aren't as big a deal as losing a job.
Living on the west coast, I once saw a green firetruck (used for wildfires) and it kinda took me a little too long to piece that together.
@JefferyKaplan On a world with inverted qialia people give grass for valemtines or is green rare?nAlso there are no canivores in an inverted world or blood is green. Is it?
Not sure I ever encountered a better explainer!
Trey the explainer
Wouldn't a test using color chart arranged according to the continuous wavelengths demonstrate inverted qualia?
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.
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.
Just look at the opening screen before starting the video. The CZcams button is MY definition of "Red" while his screen is red shifted toward yellow/orange. Do we make Pantone®19-1664 TCX the standard? or 32-C? Or just ff0000? More shades than grey...🙃
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.
..
@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.
..
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?
I always wondered about this
These presentations are great, thank you! Do you edit/flip the original filmed footage left to right so you've not had to write backwards?
There is cross stimulation of different cones. All three cones activate for all visual light wavelengths, but they activate in different log tiers for each specific pure wavelength.
how would this work in a colour wheel, wouldn't those swapped red and greens stick out in a colour wheel where the red you see doesn't fit between the purples and oranges?
How would color connotations work in this scenario? Maybe I'm mistaken but don't certain wavelengths of light (colors) make us feel certain emotions, generally? Or is that an association somehow formed with the color and how it's used?
I had a rear projection tv where the red went out for a few weeks, after watching the tv for a few hours it was hard to tell and when you go out from watching it without the red for awhile you would see the real world in a different way for a while as well. Quite funny!
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.
I have no idea what do you mean by pure and mixed colors. I was waiting for some kind clarification but you changed subject.
But what if the inversion of qualia concerns (not just colors) but functional perceptions ? What happens for instance if I see the dark where you see the light end viceversa ? I will call light what is my dark (in compliance) but will I be able to read and do the things that you can do (reading eg) when you are in the light and I'm in the dark (even though I call it light) ? Maybe I'm a bit confused....🤔🤔😂😂
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!!!
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.
You are fantastic 😊😊
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
How do you actually prove a difference between the states of two minds without the difference in behavior or function? Maybe there's some detail in the 'red cone/green cone' cartoon that was glossed over that could set me straight...The cartoon example just switches the positions of red and green cones, is that really enough prove a change in state of mind?
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
Things smell different to me after COVID. How else to explain that?
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.
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!
Help. I am color-inverted. I only see GRED and REEN
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.
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?
It is wired how many people thought about this when they were young, I find this interesting.
So I wonder if this works for sound? My family swears I have no pitch or music ability.
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.
Can I not test to see if our experiences of a color are the same or close enough that it does not matter if it's not exact? If someone else's experience of red is what I see as green, I can tell them this and have them show me the color they see using color swatches?
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.
Q - did you learn to write from right to left for the videos? :)
Could the pure/mixed colours test differentiate between biological males who have their photopigments swapped and biological males who don't have their photopigments swapped?
I guess the best we have, is structural equivalence of our qualia. Since that's a prerequisite of using the same terms functionally. For a functioning language with non-identical but structurally equivalent qualia, I guess a lot of color cycle aspects should change as well. So it would probably be similar to two color circles, where our circles would mismatch by whole steps. Doesn't seem impossible. Experience inversion could also be possible for tunes. But is it plausible? And what evidence or hints would we have? Observable biological differences seem a solid argument as pointed out by you. Inversion of dark and light shades are rather difficult to imagine though, as darkness is equivalent to silence and brightness to loudness. Although white-out and dark-out will both render you blind, so maybe it is. Thanks for the inspiration!
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.
22:24 I lost it the goop is too much lol
I have one question 3:37 in. If the two years old is told that what he sees as ”green” is red, as far as know the name of colour is atributed to the objects colour. Than what realy is red for most of us would still be red but called ”green”. The name of stuff i learned not something We are born with. (Okej You gave the ansver a minute later)
Ok there is one root past this that I can think of.
Different shades of light have different affects on our psychology and physiology in general.
Someone experienced red as green and green as red would possibly have a measurable reaction to this.
Seeing red all the time would add to stress.
I don't know but for those with inverted vision.
Does red that appears as green feel like green?
And when around too much green that appears red, is it too hot for the eye?
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
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.
What happens when one orders red paint, brings it home and paints his door and it looks green?
how would this work with traffic lights?
If everything increased in size wouldn't that make your vision corners smaller (like zooming into a picture)
Traffic lights? How would that work?
Well that depends on your eyesight. How good or bad is it.
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,
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.
Where can I find the reading?
I list the readings on my website: www.jeffreykaplan.org/youtube
Ive seen some other very interesting videos about this topic (e.g. by the channel "be smart" and "mailbab", which is German), who had stated that in ancient texts from Greece, like the Odyssee), the authors described the ocean as purple, but nothing as blue. They explained, that the ancient authors probably haven't have learned the right color ) nurture vs. nature. Some African tribes apparently can distinguish between different tones of yellow, which all look the same to us western people...
Not purple. Black.
I have been doing a different version of this thought experiment , more like how do we know that everyone ( including me) sees the color the same way others do , more like everyone is probably seeing the world in different colors !
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...
Are you writing backwards on a transparent screen (this would be very impressive). Or is there some image manipulation going on?
His ring is on the wrong hand, as is his watch. Also his shirts are buttoned on the wrong side. This means all he's doing is writing properly on a glass which to a camera looking at him through the glass sees everything reversed. All then that needs to be done is to invert the image digitally from left to right and bingo ... proper script as seen by you and me. He's also seen writing with what looks to be his left hand ... less common than righthandedness.
How about spell out the color sequence while you are looking at a rainbow?
If you use a paint program to make a pure red shape (RGB = 255,0,0) and a pure green shape (RGB = 0,255,0), then adjust the image to Black & White, then you will end up with two distinct colors of gray - a darker gray (RGB = 76,76,76) for red, and a lighter gray (RGB = 150,150,150) for green. So as long as the grayscale shading aligns when we both look at the color red, then we can agree that the colors we're seeing are the same. Right?
No. One's experience of color is entirely a matter of interpretation
(and can easily be changed (by LSD for instance)).
i love when Philosophy teachers tell you just to accept it for now...before we move on...
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...
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.
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
So, I had this happen and I just shrugged and said OK a new experience, took it all in stride and said ... this change is my experience. No problem.
I can’t watch the whole video. Do you talk about mixing the colours? Like mixing blue and yellow to get green.
Like if you see blue as red, yellow as blue. Then you would see red and blue mix to get you green. Or do you think green would have to look like purple?
Please correct me if im misunderstanding this concept, but if the person can read and has a box of crayons wouldnt he wonder why the colors that he sees inverted are labeled wrong?
Wouldn't you know if you were inverted if everyone told you the red stop light was on top of the traffic light and the green go light was on the bottom?
The first 5 minutes!.......I get it already.
I got it just by reading the title!
Let's get to the point!!
Wow i never knew that about inverted green / red in people. Usually our eyes are much more sensitive to green than red, so i wonder if that is inverted too.
Maaaaaan, I remember having this conversation when I was like 7 years old. I thought everybody had this conversation.