Comment on "Trippy" Reality
i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 1 week agoThey did researchers with fMRI that showed that the same colors activated brains of viewers the same way, giving as much weight as possible to the idea that people perceive colors the same way.
shneancy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
that’s not really a good study for the issue in question since getting a control group of people who never formed associations between colours and ideas would be rather difficult
even a day old baby would begin forming their first associations - yellow is warm because the sun is warm
has the study included totally colour blind people? (like literally blind to colour, full monochromacy) and if so how were their results interpreted?
i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 1 week ago
If they’re fully color blind, how could they be shown colors? That would be a bad control group.
Instead, when doing fMRI stuff, they usually create a “baseline” by showing their subjects random stuff to see how the brain fires up. For example, they could show greyscale images of grass, sun, blood, etc., then see how it differs from seeing contextless colors (ie: a uniform green screen)
shneancy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
if you show people colours you can be sure they already have associations with them - sun is yellow, sun is warm, yellow is warm - of course everyone will fire up the “this is warm” parts of their brain, but will it be the same thing i call yellow?
there are bound to be associations that transcend cultures and therefore fire up the same brain parts
monochromatic colour blind people will see the wavelength of yellow, but their eyes don’t have the receptors to distinguish it from light grey. objectively they still “see” the yellow, their eye-brain system just doesn’t interpret it in the way other people do
probably, this is what i know but it might not be true. if there is no way to get a control group of people who never learnt to associate colours with other things (pretty much everyone, aside from monochromatic colour blindess, and actual blindness since birth) then there is no way to test if we all indeed see the same yellow
threeganzi@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Isn’t the problem with your example that a completely color blind person cannot differentiate the wavelength, but they can differentiate the intensity of light. I’m also mostly assuming here, that our light cones are sensitive to certain ranges of frequency and that is how we can differentiate different wavelengths.
The scientific and philosophical question is if we can prove that each person perceive those combination of signals the same way. The subjective experience.
Unless of course the color blindness is a “software” issue rather than a “hardware” issue.