With the exception of our thoughts, pretty much all of our consciousness experience, i.e. involving qualia, is due to perception. The person in my room (an ach

With the exception of our thoughts, pretty much all of our consciousness experience, i.e. involving qualia, is due to perception. The person in my room (an achromat) can't experience colours at all, and they're able to tell you that. Their eyes have no functioning cones. They see everything in monochrome, so to them, watching a colour movie is how watching a black and white one is to us. Under low light conditions our cones are inactive and we see only in monochrome using our rods, just like achromats do. So people with normal colour vision can experience what it's like to be achromatic, but achromats can't even imagine what colours are like. In the room, the person can only tell what colours the papers are by observing how dark they look when overlaid with the coloured filters (whose colours they know). The metaphorical use of colours in the language isn't really important, and as you point out is dependent on culture.