5 ms·
>I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in
by fsckboy 2y ago
>I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row, conceding that ok, fine, maybe this is blue, whatever.
I agree with you, the whole thing is flawed when it could be better. When you ask the question "is my blue your blue?", you are evoking the old philosophical question, and it's a question about color perception, not words. This test did not test color perception, it tested "what word do you use?"
I think of blue as a pure color, and green as a wide range of colors all the way to yellow, to me another pure color. so if there's any green at all in it, I'm going to call it green. (maybe it's left over from kindergarten blending "primary colors". also, while I like green grass, I don't like green as a color, so any green I see is a likely to make me think, ew, green) But in terms of what I see, I can only assume I'm seeing the same thing as everybody else is because the test is not testing it. Just because I call something green doesn't mean I don't see all the blue in it.
>Edit: Possible improvements: changing the wording to "this is MORE green" and "this is MORE blue" and randomizing the order in which they are shown, somehow. I realize you're just doing some kind of binary search, narrowing the color range.
yes, the test should show you pure blue, then a turquoise mix, then pure green, and a ... etc. It should also retest you on things you already answered to measure where you are consistent.
- yarg 2y agoI do think that the philosophical question could potentially be approachable in a modern context; Show people a colour and map their brain activity - the level of similarity between two people's colour perceptions should be reflected by similarities in the activity.
- lazide 2y agoWhy do you think that would be the case? One persons ‘blue’ activity could be different than another’s while still being the same wavelength of light and general perception.
- yarg 2y agoThe philosophical question is not dealing with the objective external reality; It's a question of subjective experience - and that experience should be reflected in electrical activity. Given the fact that the broad structure of the brain is largely shared across members of the species, similar stimulation should trigger similar activity in the same regions of the brain. If the same colour triggers markedly different activities, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the subjective experiences are not the same.
- lazide 2y agoExcept that’s literally not how humans are wired or develop - even nerve paths and other fine grained details in our bodies show significant divergence, and there are major macro level differences readily apparent even based on gender, color blindness, etc. Honestly, it would be shocking if it were even a little true beyond ‘frontal cortex’ levels of granularity. And even then, Phineas Gage type situations make it clear that may not actually be required either. And that means completely different individual activity can trigger similar subjective experiences as much as similar activity can trigger different subjective experiences, no?
- amenhotep 2y agoIt sounds like you're in possession of a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, you should alert your nearest philosophy department.
- pminimax 2y agoPeople have done this. See, e.g. Brouwer and Heeger (2009), Decoding and Reconstructing Color from Responses in Human Visual Cortex.
- yarg 2y agoThanks. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/29/44/13992.full.pdf https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/29/44/13992.full.pd...