-Myst 4 quote: "I. Am. Sirrus. And I will not be DEFEATED!!", Sirrus (well, yes)-
Had a very strange dream last night involving showers and watches. Hmmm... let me catalog the reality checks I could have easily done: memory, mirrors, digital watch time. I'm a dork.
Well, I have mused occasionally what it would be like if really, inside their heads, other people actually had switched "colors" representing real-life colors. E.g. they might see a blue block, which they would call red, but really in their head they see what I would call orange. The funny thing is, when you think about it, you would never be able to tell because all the associations that go with each color would appear to be the same from the outside. I mean really, they could be "hearing" the color or even "smelling" it inside their head, but we would never know because they would have been trained all their life to call it seeing. And they would think nothing is odd. Additionally, "warm" and "cold" colors would still have the same emotional responses attached to them, because they would consistently see "warm" things in colors they CALL red, orange, and yellow, but which would actually appear in their heads as (what I might see as) red, orange, and yellow.
So I was pretty amazed yesterday to find out that this concept has a name. The thing that we see (or hear or feel or taste or smell) "in our mind's eye" is called a quale (plural, "qualia").
Remember to reality check.
6 years ago
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There is a train of thaught regarding our perception of colour which revolves around the idea of an object - such as an orange - actually being every other colour the human eye can possibly see apart from that which the object seems to be.
ReplyDeleteIt works on the idea that light gives colour to everything and the whole spectrum of colour hits every object, and due to it's texture, reflectivity etc... certain ranges of colour bounce off.
It is hard for me to explain as I don't have my colour theory book at hand, but it is all about the way we see colour, or rather lack of colour, in the dark.
I listened to an interview with a blind photographer, and she said that, although she still has vague memories about any particular colour (she was not born blind), she has found that her other senses have taken over and it's now more about a 'feeling' than anything else.