Do people see the same colours?

Surely it can be tested. If you wore glasses that only allowed the red frequencies of the colour spectrum through and were asked what colour you saw you'd say red - any other answer and you'd see colours differently.

I haven't looked at the above tests but I'm guessing this is one way of doing it - restricting the colours able to be seen and confirming what colour this is.

Remember, colour isn't just an "opinion" ie 'what my red is could be your green', it's a frequency of light, as much as UV or IR is.
 
Guest2 said:
Again, missing the point. We could both look at something that is light red and say both say "thats light red" but it might look completely different to what i see (despite me also saying its light red)
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I was about to say that. We've learnt that green is green and red is red, but what is green for me might actually be red.
 
OzyOly said:
I was about to say that. We've learnt that green is green and red is red, but what is green for me might actually be red.
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So what if I put glasses on you that reflect all but the green frequencies of light? Assuming that's possible, testing what colour you call which would be straightforward.
 
Edward01 said:
Don't quote me, but I think it has been proven that people see almost the same in advanced maths somewhere
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You mean people who see numbers and huge number solutions in the everyday landscape like hills of numbers or certain colours as numbers?

There was a BBC docu on it a while back, the guys shown were classed as Savants.
 
Russinating said:
Surely it can be tested. If you wore glasses that only allowed the red frequencies of the colour spectrum through and were asked what colour you saw you'd say red - any other answer and you'd see colours differently.

I haven't looked at the above tests but I'm guessing this is one way of doing it - restricting the colours able to be seen and confirming what colour this is.

Remember, colour isn't just an "opinion" ie 'what my red is could be your green', it's a frequency of light, as much as UV or IR is.
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Well, that's true, the colour of light is defined very objectively and specifically, but you have to remember that what we see isn't a direct visualisation of the light that gets absorbed by our retinas, what we see is the result of that plus a lot of processing done by our brains in order to make the image we see cohesive. It's about how our brains interpret those light frequencies, which potentially could be different, as opposed to what light we immediately physically detect.
 
Take less drugs - and yes the majority of people see the same hear the same taste the same etc as we are all the same genetic speciaes... Only a few chemically inbalanced of genetically mutated mental people will perceive otherwise.
 
Here's a question which will blow your mind.

Why do we see a picture?

A camera takes in visual data like we do, but a camera doesn't see a picture. A computer can identify objects in an image, but it doesn't see the image. You can make a robot navigate an obstacle course, but it doesn't see the world it's moving in.

We could know what's around us, and react to it, without seeing it as a picture. Imagine a blind man, but one who knows where everything is around him, precisely and accurately.

But as well as allowing us to sense objects visually, our mind helpfully forms all this data into a picture. This picture is corroborated by our tactile senses. But it's actually an image formed entirely by our minds, isn't it?
 
I'm red/green colourblind but also blue (which is rare supposedly) which is seriously annoying. To me it just seems normal but as soon as I get a colour wrong and have to explain that thats the colour it appears to me as, I get a string of the "what colour is this" questions lol. Seriously annoying!

To put what I see in context. My dad said this forum is blue, although it looks green to me, which means if someone put what I think to be red on here, it all gets abit confusing lol.

I CANNOT see very dark green as it just looks black, same with light pink as it just looks white.

I made this mistake last week where I wore a pair of pink socks, thinking they where white, much to my friends amusement lol
 
Blue Cypher said:
Colours are light with different wavelengths, so if we see the same wavelengths we seem the same colour as that is how our eyes are designed.
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you are assuming that all eyes 'see' the same. which is what the OP is questioning.

No one is doubting the actual classification of colours, merely how each person interprets them.

Same with the likes of screens or image sensors. I have two monitors side by side, and white is different on both of them. I have a couple of cameras, and if i take the 'same' picture on a few of them and then view - the colours will be different.
 
I've had this conversation before with several people.

Frankly amazed at the amount of people in this thread that simply can't understand what the OP is trying to talk about.

Basically if you show two people green, as in pure green wavelength both of them will identify the colour as green because that's what they've been taught.

However if person A might be seeing what person B would describe as red or vice versa.
 
Efour2 said:
Take less drugs - and yes the majority of people see the same hear the same taste the same etc as we are all the same genetic speciaes... Only a few chemically inbalanced of genetically mutated mental people will perceive otherwise.
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Any facts or source for this comment. I know we are of the same species but how do you go about describing the taste of something? You cant just say "it tastes of chicken" or "its red" so what

I imagine that some philosophers may have taken drugs to expand their minds on topics like this as many ancient people did. Didnt native americans take the strongest drug known to man - Mescaline from the Peyote cactus to travel to spiritual worlds for guidance
 
I've actually thought this for a long time, how would you know? It's a great queation and I totally understand what you mean.
 
I think a computer analogy might help. Say you were to hook a very real eye up to a computer somehow. Think about the data you would get from that - you wouldn't get an image, you would get a load of frequency and amplitude values coming in from different rods and cones at different intervals - the eye doesn't actually make the image. For the purposes of this, we have to look at the frequency values we get - now, the light frequencies won't match up directly to our computer's #RRGGBB colour system, so we have to process that information. You could write a piece of software that translates it more or less correctly into our RGB format, but that doesn't prevent you from translating that frequency information into a BGR format, and then displaying the resulting image through some software that takes RGB values. The colours would be totally distinct and different in the same way that the RGB values would be, however the colours of the image would appear totally different (all the reds would be blue and visa versa, and all the colours would mix differently!)

We can take that analogy and use it on the way our brains process image information - in our 'mind's eye', we don't see an absolute translation of the data that our eyes give to our brains, our brains have to process that image to make it useful, so that our conscious minds can actually comprehend what the image means (if that didn't happen, what we would actually see would be an upside-down jittery mess with lots of dark spots).
 
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