Reply to comment

Now I think about it, I always knew that what we perceive is a construction of the brain and there is no absolute truth in the things we see (or there is, but we wouldn’t know). I knew about color blindness, illusions we experience, and that colors on objects are really the different rays of color bouncing off the surface and how we perceive. Yet, it surprises me every time I experience some illusion tests, like the blind spot test and checkerboard example, and can’t believe how unreliable my brain is. I think I expect something more than “informed guess based on presumptions” for our brains.

Since we talked about how our brains perceive color this week, I was wondering, can we tell how differently we each perceive color? One can say something is red and another can say it’s orangish-red. But maybe, their brains are perceiving the color exactly same, but their explanation of the color is different. If we ask them to choose a color on the paper that best matches the color they see, they might choose exactly same color. How can we then tell they are perceiving it differently or are they perceiving it differently at all? Unlike illusions, for example like checkerboard example, where there is absolute truth and there is way for everyone to see the “answer”, color is much complicated concept, because subtle difference in the hue or shades of the color is difficult to verbally explain.