probably my deepest, interesting thought ever...

ok try to stay with me on this one...

what if everybody saw different colors and each and everybodys life is full of different colors? i mean the color green to me could be a completely different color to you, but the world continues to function because we look at something and are told that it is "green". the only way i can even try to describe what im saying is try to think of it like the matrix in a way. everything is a code and we see what our minds depict of this code.

when a kid is young and in school and learning the names of colors, they are exposed to a specific color (lets say yellow for example) and are told that color is yellow. in the kids eyes he sees a color, but it could be any color, he just know that that color is called "yellow". now apply this to all the colors. the world continues to work because we at one time see a specific color and are told the name, so uniformly as a people we see a color and call it yellow, but it could be a completely different color. we just know that, that is "red", that is "blue", that is "green".

i know this sounds completely stupid and as i become more and more sober i see how bad this sounds. but if you get really really ripped and think about it, it might just make a little bit of sense.

i am completely open to all feedback and i hope this doesnt make my future posts unreliable. thank you. lol

it doesn't seem stupid, it's a discussion that's had in most intro to philosophy courses... Many others (including myself) have sat and thought about that exact same thing, in fact I know we've had other threads previously about this.

Yea, that makes sense.
Same goes with other senses such as taste, hearing, other aspects of vision, and even touch.
Everything in the world is basically code in form of different atoms, chemical makeups, waves, etc., and your body deciphers that code in a way that makes sense to our conscious selves. The way each individual self "sees" this code could be completely different.

Yeah, I discovered the concept of differing perceptions when I was 4 or 5...


I was asking adults the same question and they were like "what the fuck?" and then I just realized that we all interpret things differently and agree commonly between things being what they are, thus making them what they are. A sharp knife to you could be dull to me, depending on our experiences with knives in the past. Shit like that.

That's what being colourblind is like. I have three friends who are colour blind, all to a different degree. Two of them just get minor shades mixed up, like light green looks like tan, or something like that. But the other one sees totally different colours. Green is purple, orange is blue, yellow is red, and vice versa.

Funny that we wouldn't even know we were colourblind if it weren't for the education system, or the eye doctor I guess.

PS - Remember the circle with the number in it that they use for testing colourblindness? For his birthday last year, we bought him a shirt that was like that, except instead of a number inside of it, it says "Fuck the colour blind." He still doesn't know what it says..

good thread i can see what your saying:thumbsup: got my imagination running riot playing with colors:jointsmile:

When I was a kid my dad and I talked about that a lot. There are some perceptual differences between people. For instance I enjoy a visual phenomena called "visual snow". My opthalmologist can't understand what's going on, but in dim lighting or low contrast I see what can best be described as a film grain type texture if you know what I mean. In total darkness I see spots, lines, shimmery and wavy things in different shades of mostly green and purple.

I've thought about that also, hard to know what colour looks like through another persons eyes. I mean how do you describe a colour? I suppose you could say 'yellow is bright' but still pretty vague and you can get dull shades of yellow.

I remember reading how different creatures can see different colours to humans, I think butterflies can see ultraviolet light and snakes can see infrared. If we could see all of the light spectrum I assume your vision would be too bombarded though to interpret it all.

I've also read about people saying they've seen a whole new colour while on psychedelics :silly: hard to imagine eh?

i took philosophy recent fall semester and the subject is interesting i have enjoyed hearing different arguments n whatnot. In my opinion, philosophy is pointless but it honed my logical process. it is helpful. the color perception i have thought about it before but it is experiences forms your perception on the world even colors too. Funny thing i was reading article about this blind woman i think her name was mary, (not mary jane mind yall!)who is colorist and studied colors extensively yet she has not experienced the colors. its interesting to think about that especially those people who lives in mental ward. sorry for nonsense im stoned as usual.

Like how people who don't smoke think weed smells bad. But to people that have grown use to the smell think it's good because when we smell weed our brain thinks "Time to get highhh"

Wee, I noticed that too man. Long before I ever thought of smoking weed, back in like the seventh grade, sometimes I would walk past people smoking weed at school and think, "Man that stinks like a skunk.."

Now it's music to my nose..

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Originally Posted by JD1stTimer

When I was a kid my dad and I talked about that a lot. There are some perceptual differences between people. For instance I enjoy a visual phenomena called "visual snow". My opthalmologist can't understand what's going on, but in dim lighting or low contrast I see what can best be described as a film grain type texture if you know what I mean. In total darkness I see spots, lines, shimmery and wavy things in different shades of mostly green and purple.

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Jesus thats really weird because I experience the same exact thing. So are you trying to say that it's not normal and other people don't see that visual snow? I always thought it was the norm in human beings.

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Originally Posted by Blazed Deafy

i took philosophy recent fall semester and the subject is interesting i have enjoyed hearing different arguments n whatnot. In my opinion, philosophy is pointless but it honed my logical process. it is helpful. the color perception i have thought about it before but it is experiences forms your perception on the world even colors too. Funny thing i was reading article about this blind woman i think her name was mary, (not mary jane mind yall!)who is colorist and studied colors extensively yet she has not experienced the colors. its interesting to think about that especially those people who lives in mental ward. sorry for nonsense im stoned as usual.

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philosophy can be of use when you can identify what people are actually saying and arguing and as you say, I think it helps with your 'logical processes'. It helps you think for yourself instead of relying on arguments based on authority and listen to arguments based on rationality:cool:

If a tree falls in the woods, but there is no one around to hear it, does it really make a sound?

Here's one... How would you describe the color purple to a blind person? Keep in mind you can't say something like it's the color of a grape, because they have no reference to that color. You can't really say it's a combination of blue and red either because that requires a visual reference also, and you'd then have to describe red and blue... so how would you do it?

^^ Thats much like trying to describe how feels to be high to someone who never got high... words cannot possibly explain it, one must experience it to know how it feels... :stoned:

Interesting that this question of how one percieves the colors was re-posted here, cause some time ago i was thinking exactly about this, but extending it to everything... not only the colors, but the thoughts, emotions, feelings, concepts, etc, in fact everything that makes our world is personal. Two persons can be looking at the same thing, but even if what they see were the same, still the thoughts that arise when they look to it, the memories, the feelings, etc, all of this is different for the two people. Each one of us experiences the world in a personal and unique way, shared by no one else. So what we call "the world", "the reality", etc, is not an absolute thing, but only OUR world, OUR reality... so we can say that each person is not only a person, but also a world, cause there is a world inside us all... :stoned:

i have thought about this for so long, and when i entered college it blew my mind to hear other people talk about it. one day i was hanging around this girl i dated, and her roommate just came out and said "okay you know what scares me? that we all see different colors". i instantly knew what she meant.

i've thought about this a lot, and have come to the conclusion that logic must MUSt paly a part in this somehow... like, if my green was your red, then your red would have to be my green. Your red couldn't be my blue, because green and blue are not opposite colors.

Even through somebody elses eyes, the world has order to it, it's not like Red all of the sudden becomes Black's opposite color if we are talking about everyone seeing different colors.

If we had a small conversation about the sky and the grass, and I said it would look funny if the sky were Orange, and not Blue, I think that to someone with "different colors", if my blue was their purple, then the "orange" that i describe would be their "purple".

i seem to be going in circles, not really completing my thought... i guess i just mean there would have to be SOME sort of order... like, each color would still have its respective opposite in the color wheel... if BLUE RED and YELLOW are my primary colors, and you see PURPLE instead of BLUE, then your primary colors are PURPLE ORANGE and GREEN. weird, huh! :)

if im wearing a black shirt and i ask you what color it is, your going to say black

that solves it

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Originally Posted by MPLSweedman

if im wearing a black shirt and i ask you what color it is, your going to say black

that solves it

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but if that person see's differently than you, say, the exact opposite of what you see, they will see what you refer to as WHITE, but have been trained to call it BLACK. so you have not solved anything, friend :smokin:

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Originally Posted by Coelho

^^ Thats much like trying to describe how feels to be high to someone who never got high... words cannot possibly explain it, one must experience it to know how it feels... :stoned:

Take that a step further and you realize that, chemically, we are as different as our fingerprints.
What you peceive as "high" may have nothing in common with what I feel and call "high".

Interesting that this question of how one percieves the colors was re-posted here, cause some time ago i was thinking exactly about this, but extending it to everything... not only the colors, but the thoughts, emotions, feelings, concepts, etc, in fact everything that makes our world is personal. Two persons can be looking at the same thing, but even if what they see were the same, still the thoughts that arise when they look to it, the memories, the feelings, etc, all of this is different for the two people. Each one of us experiences the world in a personal and unique way, shared by no one else. So what we call "the world", "the reality", etc, is not an absolute thing, but only OUR world, OUR reality... so we can say that each person is not only a person, but also a world, cause there is a world inside us all... :stoned:

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Gives a different meaning to Paul Simon's line.
"One man's ceiling is another man's floor, ya?
Food for thought.:stoned:

Weezard

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Originally Posted by MPLSweedman

if im wearing a black shirt and i ask you what color it is, your going to say black

that solves it

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Technically speaking, black is every colour mixed together. This makes it a shade, not a colour at all. Same goes for white, it is the absence of colour and therefore also a shade.

Imagine if black and white were colours though.. Charlie Chaplin movies would be fucked up.

i was thinking about this post on other day. i believe that experience creates the perception thus brain creates mind. so i am assuming whats out there which is physical n tangible environment and they are full of different color schemes that is so beautiful and perfect order i know for sure we all see tree same thing n same texture shades color all that shit but our perception on colors is different to individuals. :giggity:

back in the 1600's Rene Descartes wanted to find out what we truely KNOW and well... he came up with:

I think therefore I exist

I'm sure you've heard of that thrown around before

definitely check out his writings
mind blowing stuff :)

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Originally Posted by JohnnyZ

Technically speaking, black is every colour mixed together. This makes it a shade, not a colour at all. Same goes for white, it is the absence of colour and therefore also a shade.

Imagine if black and white were colours though.. Charlie Chaplin movies would be fucked up.

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The interesting thing is how the opposite is true when talking about light. White light split by prism reveals good ol' Roy G Biv.. and black is the absence of all light and thusly all color.

So I guess we could look at it like this: whatever properties give an object its color, lets say whatever makes a shirt red, absorbs every other color and allows red to be reflected back into our eyes. White shirts absorb nothing and allow all the colors to get back to us as one. Black, as we know, absorbs all light.. it is the absense of light and color being reflected into our eyes that allows us to register it as black.

Incidentally, the easiest way to imagine that we all see close to the same color is that it is the same wavelength of light reaching our cornea and visual cortex. Seeing as how we are the same species and genetically very similar, it can be deduced that most of us probably interpret them similarly. However there are clearly some who dont, which may be caused by genetic mutations as opposed to differences in subconscious constructs of perspective.

I too pondered that same thought with many other people. Including a color blind friend of mine. We all see the same color because are eyes respond to the spectrum light of the sun which gives off color and if we couldnt see color we would see gray which is a shade not on the spectrum.My friend sees gray instead of red.Optamoligists can test that.The reason we see black at night is because all the colors combined equals black, no color is white, Gray is a shade of white. So when the sun shines are eyes can differentiate the colors.

actually, the different colors correspond to different wavelengths of light. the whole spectrum of light is white...the lack of light is black. the reason objects have color is because they absorb this light spectrum and either reflect a certain color wavelength or transmit a certain color (like clear red plastic or whatever).

so what i mean is, color is a property of light...nothing inherently has a color. rather, it has pigments or whatever else that reacts with light photons in a way to give the object a color. that is why in absolute darkness you can't make anything out, ie nothing radiates its own color outwards.

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Originally Posted by vej33

but if that person see's differently than you, say, the exact opposite of what you see, they will see what you refer to as WHITE, but have been trained to call it BLACK. so you have not solved anything, friend :smokin:

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I think black and white are the only colors you can be sure of that are the sam for everyone, think about it light and darkness, since our eyes work with light black and white are like the off and on switches of our eyes, white is the most colour we can see and black is the least we can detect(lol stoner talk) I think we all see the same colours we might get other impressions from it (you see with your eyes and your mind so i what you feel/think when u see something is atleast as important as what u are seeing) but what we see is the same, afterall we are all the same intricate machine and we operate with the same kind of "program" that's just my way of looking at it, purely hypothetical ofcourse. I do believe colourperception is different for other kinds of animals (other ways of perception) my 2 cents

why do stoners always think about this. I was driving down the road one day (high ofcourse) and just thought about it with my bud brother for a long time.... its a very interesting topic....

If you really want to go deeper with the colors subject, as well as the subjective nature of color perception variations, read up on a genetic trait called Chromographic synesthesia; my cousin and I both have this type of synesthesia, and basically we "see" our letters, numbers, days of the week, etc. as specific colors. It's not a New Age aura kind of thing, but something that has been documented by several neurology journals.

I don't physically see colors, it's kind of like being in a dark room with a piece of hot pumpkin pie. You can smell the pie, and you get that mental image of a pie in your head? Same thing when I know it's Wednesday, it's a yellow day, or that August is a yellow-green color.

It's not the same for each synesthete- my cousin and I argue all of the time that V is red, no, it's purple, and that Friday isn't orange, it's green! The look on my mom and aunt's faces are priceless when they hear us argue about these kind of things...

right? because it would be impossible to prove that humans see the same colors. maybe thats why people like some colors, and hate others, but someone else will be the opposite. Maybe red looks like puppy-shit greenish yellow to some people.:wtf:

I too had this thought before, but I was completley sober when I had it.