We all know of the vision impairment "color blindness" in which a person sees either only in certain colors or has a metaphorically "dyslexic" mental color wheel. I don't know exactly how color blindness works, but I want to know how we would go about proving that we are not all in fact color blind.
Lets say that I can see every color, but they are mixed up. However, from when I was a toddler, my mother told me that the color of the apple in the refrigerator is red. Now, because of my impairment, I see what most other people call blue. But, because I was taught for years that that is what red looks like, your blue is my red.
So how can we prove that we do not all have such impairment? What if, as we all look at a "yellow" box, I actually see orange, you actually see green, and another actually sees blue. We cannot determine that we see differently because we were taught for all of our lives to interpret the color we connect with that box to be "yellow".
I hope that makes sense, it is sort of hard to describe. But color is the same way- we cannot check to see if we are all seeing the same thing except to confirm that this object is a dark color and that object is a light color. You can't really describe yellow.
What do you think?
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4 comments:
Great question, Ali! One that has been pondered for ages. One response would be to use a machine to measure the light waves bouncing off the given object. Person A, whose eyes register the object as green, but has been taught to call it blue, and Person B, whose eyes register red, but has been taught to call it blue, could together see from the measurements of the wavelengths where on the spectrum the object actually falls. They may both be surprise to find that it falls in the yellow range, but they would at least now know the truth.
I maintain that the colors red, green, pink, orange, purple, etc., are just delusions of the "non-colorblind" people of the world; little do they know that how we "colorblind" people see the world is actually how it really is! The only real colors are blue and yellow!
Much of the confusion regarding color comes from language. What one person calls "blue" another person may call "indigo;" however, they're both describing the same rays of light with wavelength of approximately 475 nanometers. There exists an objective truth to color, that being the wavelength of the particular rays of light being observed; however, humanity has muddied the waters over the years with all the different words for the same colors, and all the different types of the same color, such as "baby blue," "sky blue," "royal blue," "powder blue," etc.
Then there are the plain made-up colors, like mauve and chartruce.
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