2 ms·
Everyone experiences the same colors in the sense that sunlight has a particular emissions spectrum, Earth's atmosphere has a particular absorption spectrum and
by logfromblammo 8y ago
Everyone experiences the same colors in the sense that sunlight has a particular emissions spectrum, Earth's atmosphere has a particular absorption spectrum and light-scattering property, and any given viewable object has measurable properties for diffuse reflection, specular reflection, and its own emissions spectrum.
If you point a measurement device at a particular point, you can get a histogram of light intensity over several frequency bands. A histogram with many narrow bands gives a more accurate profile of the measured light.
The human eye usually has only three frequency bands: blue, green, and red. They overlap. They are not always the same width, or centered on the same frequency. The width and center of the red bar is defined on the X chromosome, so some people with two X chromosomes from lineages that see red differently have a fourth histogram bar, and therefore have better ability to distinguish between similar color profiles at the red end of the visible spectrum. Some people with only one X chromosome have a defective copy of the gene encoding for the red histogram bar, and thus only have two bars in their histogram.
So while color is objectively the same, different eyes--connected to different visual cortexes--quantize and encode color information differently. Each brain may interpret the data in the color channels differently to establish an individual's world model.
What I see as "red" is unique to me. If someone were to bridge my brain to someone else's, my "red" would not match to someone else's "blue". My color channels would be as their octarine, smaudre, and refulgine--three completely different color channels that they have never experienced before. But if our optic nerves were linked, rather than somewhere deeper in the brain, I would see their red as my red, even if their eye reads reds slightly differently because of a minor difference in their X chromosomes. The translation layer between raw visual data and personal worldmodel is not guaranteed, or even likely, to produce similar results.