Comment on "Trippy" Reality
erev@lemmy.world 2 months agothe logic might be the same, the perception may not
Perception is pretty much always different, but that doesn’t mean the underlying thing being experienced is itself different.
If you cut a pickle in half, and give each half to a different person, and one liked it and one didn’t, you wouldn’t say the pickle tasted different, just that both people perceived the taste differently.
Yes but for all we know one person perceives the pickles in a way i would consider tart or sour while the other may perceive them as sweet. but relative to everyone’s individual perception this fits along the broader categories that people may experience. the relatuvity may be the same while the absolute nature is not
At least it is in terms of a spectrum. Everybody finds orange text on a red background uncomfortable to read. So there are plenty of shared perception categories at least
i think the best example of this is music. most people have very good relative pitch perception, but mediocre absolute pitch perception. that shared relative pitch perception though will often be built based on ones own experiences and life. the shared perceptual relativity is both developed socially/culturally and innate based on how we process and abstract information, but that says nothing about our absolute perception of that information.
Its interesting. We can both look at a landscape and agree there’s two mountains in the distance and a forest in front, and can agree on a thousand further details like if the mountains are barren or snow-topped. But only when it comes to colour can we doubt whether what the other person sees is what we see. To be fair, the artist Monet did that experiment on himself. Painted a scene with one eye open and the next day with the other. Details are pretty much the same, but the spectrum is pretty different
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But not everyone agrees on which colors go together and which clash
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, that wasn’t a good example since taste is weird. A better example would be that most people would agree that the pink background on this sprite sheet is almost painful to look at while other, more luminous, elements are fine. If our perception significantly varies, then simple mid-luminance color blocks shouldn’t have consistent effects from person to person. Parts of that yellow gradient on the right should cause more strain to someone you know than the magic pink field if perception is strongly variable.
erev@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The relative perception of things may be similar while the absolute perception of something differs wildly for everyone
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
But perception is for a large part embedded in memory, which differs individually. For me steel foundries smell amazing because I used to play on the beach near a steel foundry, to the point I need to put effort into understanding that it’s actually kind of acrid. So am I still “having the same perception” as someone who doesn’t have the lived experience?
This can happen at a society-wide level too. Liminal beige and seafoam green were not intended to create a feeling of disquiet, but of calm neutrality. Modern audiences perceive them as disquieting because they have been systematically used in our society to impose a sense of calm on un-calm situations, such as operating rooms or hallways in sketchy buildings.
I honestly don’t know how much of the commonality of associations across cultures comes from instinct and how much comes from the fact that all children learn to live on the same planet with the same physical laws. I would bet that for 99.9% of children, their first experience with a strong sulphur smell is going to be from rotten eggs (or similar rotten goods) that others act disgusted by. So the fact that sulphur smells disgusting to the vast majority of adults is not evidence for instinct over memory. The same goes for green plants, red blood, blue skies, etc.