Private Color Perception

[scurvyfreedman]

As someone with deutanopoly color deficiency I've explained my color vision weakness this exact way. I tell people that you may see green one way and someone else a completely different way, but that it is equally distinct for you and that other person. But, for me I need it to be x-times more vibrant for me to differentiate green. Whereas, for blue and yellow I see them just as vibrantly as anyone else, but I may be seeing them completely differently, just as everyone else may.

 

[Holdfast]

Quote:
I think it's quite dangerous to say that "blue has a definite meaning, which is things that reflect light of a certain frequency" and thus to give that definition a veneer of absolutism/objectivity. It's still a very subjective/relative definition of colour, dependent on a number of subsidiary concepts about the model of the universe we inhabit, ranging from very fundamental assumptions about light to how we interpret signals we (or our machines) detect. Of course, I'd agree that abstract and moral concepts are more subjective/relative (as they're obviously built on a large number of complex assumptions), but there's no fundamental/objective/"real" reason even quite basic assumptions about the universe hold true.

To link that directly to your sentence: "If I were to meet a person who lived in the Amazon for their entire life without contact with Western culture, and told him, "this thing is blue - everything of this color, we call blue", he would know exactly what I mean...", this is because although the Amazon tribe's culture and ours is different in a large number of respects, it still shares some basic fundamental assumptions (e.g. there is a thing called "colour"). These may well be assumptions "hard-wired" into our neurophysiology and therefore common to all human perception, but that does not mean that human perception is truth.

Your original point in the thread that different people have different perceptual capabilities only underlines the fallibility of perception as a means of determining universal truth, by creating a real-life example of the subjectivity of a colour. The subjectivity of even the very concept of colour itself is not really that much more of a imaginative stretch. As Tropicalist and Gattopardo have suggested, these issues have been discussed at greater length by folks much brighter (and more verbose) than I, although I do find this sort of thing very interesting.

By the way, I can't resist deploying a rare on-topic use of an already-existing meme caption...

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[unbelragazzo]

This thread has become quite philosophical and perhaps past the point that I can convince even myself that I am making a useful contribution to the discussion. However you have all given me much to read and think about, and I wanted to thank you for that before the thread languishes. If I manage to delude myself into believing myself I have something valuable to say after further contemplation, I will come back and post it.

 

[FlaneurNYC]

Speaking of color perception, this is an interesting exercise in that very thing:

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=en

I scored a 7. But I'm also in a career that places a high value on visual perception and am experienced with subtlety in color, shape, etc...

 

[unbelragazzo]



Speaking of color perception, this is an interesting exercise in that very thing:
http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=en
I scored a 7. But I'm also in a career that places a high value on visual perception and am experienced with subtlety in color, shape, etc...

Cool stuff. I got a 19, so you win

 

[b1os]

12 for me with tired eyes and in a dark room.

 

[scurvyfreedman]

124. But, I know I am need 120 times the vibrancy of green to see it as well as normal color vision. I'm only 0.04 SD from the mean on the B-Y axis. Not the most stressful color deficiency test I've ever taken, but that was reasonably difficult.