I love meeting people and getting to know the lives of the others. In fact, that's the very mission of my blog. Sometimes, however, I prefer solitude. It is only by myself could I contemplate questions beyond without the distraction of society.
Today, as I had my second cup of coffee and as I read my second article in the Economist (which talked about the failing economy of Turkey), my thoughts were diverted onto an experiment I read earlier.
It was a famous psychological experiment involving people born blind at birth. That particular experiment revealed that the participant's dreams were actually pitch black as they had never encountered color.
However, what really struck me was the researcher’s interpretation of what the blind subjects saw during dreams—“Black” they called it. If blind subjects have no methods of identifying color subjectively, is it truly right for us to classify what they saw as "black"? This also triggers an interesting thought experiment. Hypothetically, if a person saw blue as green and vice versa from the first day, then when we point to blue, they would see green (according to our spectrum) but recognize it as "blue".
In fact, chances show that you might be the one with this symptom and there is currently no way to prove or disprove that claim. Say for example, that someone went to school, looked a blue color card, saw green, but because the card was labeled with the word "blue", they learned it as such. The next time they see something blue, though they are actually seeing green, but because they learned that their "green" translates into English as "blue", they say "blue", making us assume that they have perfect color discretion, while their brain stimulants are actually different from ours when we see the same color.
"Black” is the color our scientists claim the subjects saw, but the blind observer does not know what black is or is able to distinguish it from any other color as they were never exposed to color.
This brings up two questions. One, could we classify the color the participants' see "black" if they do not consciously recognize it as such. Two, is color subjective?
Sure, we have a way of classifying color by wavelength. Just get a spectrometer or wavemeter and measure the wavelength of the incident light. That would very objectively identify the so-called color of certain light. But, what about wavelengths outside of our visible spectrum? Some animals could see into the infrared or into the ultraviolet. Unfortunately, we can't. As such, can we still assign a color to those lights we cannot perceive? Even for electromagnetic waves (light) of frequencies we could see, who's to say that a certain wavelength is a certain color. Isn't every interpretation correct since the very nomenclature of the classification of light by color is, fundamentally arbitrary?
Today, as I had my second cup of coffee and as I read my second article in the Economist (which talked about the failing economy of Turkey), my thoughts were diverted onto an experiment I read earlier.
It was a famous psychological experiment involving people born blind at birth. That particular experiment revealed that the participant's dreams were actually pitch black as they had never encountered color.
However, what really struck me was the researcher’s interpretation of what the blind subjects saw during dreams—“Black” they called it. If blind subjects have no methods of identifying color subjectively, is it truly right for us to classify what they saw as "black"? This also triggers an interesting thought experiment. Hypothetically, if a person saw blue as green and vice versa from the first day, then when we point to blue, they would see green (according to our spectrum) but recognize it as "blue".
In fact, chances show that you might be the one with this symptom and there is currently no way to prove or disprove that claim. Say for example, that someone went to school, looked a blue color card, saw green, but because the card was labeled with the word "blue", they learned it as such. The next time they see something blue, though they are actually seeing green, but because they learned that their "green" translates into English as "blue", they say "blue", making us assume that they have perfect color discretion, while their brain stimulants are actually different from ours when we see the same color.
"Black” is the color our scientists claim the subjects saw, but the blind observer does not know what black is or is able to distinguish it from any other color as they were never exposed to color.
This brings up two questions. One, could we classify the color the participants' see "black" if they do not consciously recognize it as such. Two, is color subjective?
Sure, we have a way of classifying color by wavelength. Just get a spectrometer or wavemeter and measure the wavelength of the incident light. That would very objectively identify the so-called color of certain light. But, what about wavelengths outside of our visible spectrum? Some animals could see into the infrared or into the ultraviolet. Unfortunately, we can't. As such, can we still assign a color to those lights we cannot perceive? Even for electromagnetic waves (light) of frequencies we could see, who's to say that a certain wavelength is a certain color. Isn't every interpretation correct since the very nomenclature of the classification of light by color is, fundamentally arbitrary?
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