I have often wondered if we all perceive senses the same. A big one is color (assuming all things are equal and we are talking about people with normal sight.). When I look at something blue I know what that color is because someone told me it is blue. But how do I know they are seeing it in the same way? If I could look through theirs eyes would I see a green, orange or red color?

I would need to think about it but I suppose colors could be compared scientifically but even then, I am not sure that changes how we all individually percieve colors in the first place.

I read up on this a year or more ago and my takeaway was that there is no conclusive evidence that we all see the same things the same way. As I said earlier in this thread, "What I see as blue, if I could look through your eyes, might be purple. Yet since we were born we've been in agreement that blue is blue and purple is purple." Just because our sensory observations are subjective does not mean we do not experience the same things in the same way to the degree that we could assign a name to the spiciness of a habanero and agree that that word does not apply to a jalapeno (some other word fits a jalapeno better).

For example, If I were to assign a word or number to the flavor that a Jalapeno has, let's say "BH-867," I think jalapeno and bell pepper both have a BH-867 taste, with jalapeno having obviously more spice (JB-756) but Habanero has very little BH-867 flavor.

 

But everything we observe and experience......and ponder......is colored by our memory. And everyone's memory is unique.

A name, word, or definition......is only a compromise.

 

It's quite possible my memory is intermixing the two. But for the purposes here, it still applies. Remove the lens and we can see beyond the range that we have names for colors, yet the fact that we don't have names doesn't prevent us from perceiving them.

are you sure about that? did you read the articles previously posted about the color blue? Not just the portion I quoted, but the portion which addressed the lack of any mention of the color blue in ancient texts?

Edit:
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-evidence-science

Another study by MIT scientists in 2007 showed that native Russian speakers, who don't have one single word for blue, but instead have a word for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), can discriminate between light and dark shades of blue much faster than English speakers.

This all suggests that, until they had a word from it, it's likely that our ancestors didn't actually see blue.

Or, more accurately, they probably saw it as we do now, but they never really noticed it. And that's pretty cool.

 

But everything we observe and experience......and ponder......is colored by our memory. And everyone's memory is unique.

A name, word, or definition......is only a compromise.

I'm not sure who that's addressed to or what the argument is supposed to be.

Are you asserting that since our memory is imperfect that there's no point in naming or categorizing anything?
So what if I remember the getaway car as being white when it was actually silver? I was still able to inform the police that it was a dodge stratus.
"yes officer, they drove away in a 4-wheeled metal box that was a color"

 

In my opinion, it is not possible for any two people to have the same sensory experience. Whether it is color or something else.

Again, to me (and I have had contentious arguments about this subject), when we "see" a color, it is the result of neuronal activity and absolutely nothing else. It is not even a matter where light of any wavelength is required (e.g., color in dreams, chromesthesia and electrical brain stimulation).

Normally, the process is that light initiates the experience of color by initiating the neuronal activity at the transducer (e.g., cones on the retina). The resulting pattern of neuronal activity is truly remarkable and not completely understood, but inherently knowable. The pattern created all the way through the visual cortex, but not limited to that pathway and involving many others, including prefontal cortex, memory areas...and more..basically I wouldn't rule out involvement by any portion of the NS. That net neuronal activity is the sensation that gives rise to the perception (what you experience or feel) of what you call color.

No two people can ever experience the exact same sensation because no two people have identical neural physiology. So, even given the exact same intensity and wavelength of light, no two people can have the exact same perception. Even if you could instantly clone yourself, within a few minutes, your clone's experience would diverge and so too the pattern of neuronal activity resulting from the stimuli.

How we give names to our perceptions when we want to communicate is greatly determined by learning, shared agreement, need, cultural factors and a whole bunch of other cognitive "stuff". So, light of a certain intensity and wavelength may very well be reported as being red by any two people with normal shared (but not identical) physiology and lexicon. There is nothing else that makes it "red". "Red" has no intrinsic property at all, it is red by majority agreement of a similar perception among those that we communicate with.

There is, however, certainly something to be said for discrimination training and the plasticity of the nervous system and that can legitimately lead to enhanced perception and an appropriately enhanced lexicon.

 

I am asserting the impossibility of 100% agreement between two human beings. We perceive with personal context. Some call it personal bias.

Ask any traffic cop or criminal investigator. We behave and perceive with personal bias.

We live in a world of personal bias. We are bias beings. The human condition.

This is old knowledge. Our Founders wrote a Constitution for it.

 

Science to the rescue Prisms have made differentiating colors easy, so now can definitively measure what people can and cannot see with colors, same thing with sound and the audio spectrum. over time we humans will perfect sensors to taste and smell and quantify those variables as for limited taste buds Music has defined set of measurable notes and humans write symphonies. As a tech who makes no claim to being an audiophile I have noticed the weakest link in listening to audio fidelity is usually the human ear.

 

Music has defined set of measurable notes and humans write symphonies.

While this is true, different cultures in different parts of the world use different note scales too. This is why Arabic or Asian music sounds different to Westerners ears.
https://www.howmusicreallyworks.com/Pages_Chapter_5/5_1.html

 

In my opinion, it is not possible for any two people to have the same sensory experience. Whether it is color or something else..

I am asserting the impossibility of 100% agreement between two human beings. We perceive with personal context. Some call it personal bias.

I get it guys, I agree with you. No two people taste horseradish the same way. No two people smell peanut butter the same way. No two people hear the same song the same way. No two people see the color red the same way. I agree with that, all of it. But I don't see how it's any kind of rebuttal to what I'm saying, or if not intended as a rebuttal, how it's even relevant.

No two people see the color red the same way, yet any two people who aren't colorblind (and probably even some who are), would agree that rudolph's nose and a fire engine are the same color, and we call that color red.

So why then can any two people with functional tastebuds agree that frog legs and chicken legs tasted alike, yet refrain from naming that taste and instead insist that half the animals on the planet "taste like chicken?"

 

"They note, for example, that the broiler chicken is now by far the most populous bird on the planet—at any given moment, there are approximately 23 billion of them. The second most populous bird, by comparison, is the red-billed quelea, and there are just 1.5 billion of them."

Maybe because there is more chicken.

 

Maybe because there is more chicken.

Maybe there is more red.

Until now you refuse to acknowledge my point, instead arguing with someone who isn't there, about a point I've now acknowledged multiple times, so I henceforth refuse to use any color words. Blue will the color of the sky. Red will be the color of blood. And so forth...

 

But I don't see how it's any kind of rebuttal to what I'm saying, or if not intended as a rebuttal, how it's even relevant.

It is not, necessarily, a rebuttal at all. I was trying to present a more thorough treatment of the factors related to identifying a color by name.

/-/
So why then can any two people with functional tastebuds agree that frog legs and chicken legs tasted alike, yet refrain from naming that taste and instead insist that half the animals on the planet "taste like chicken?"

I was trying to address your point, which I am taking as why is there so much variability in how we describe things across people and time periods...

How we give names to our perceptions when we want to communicate is greatly determined by learning, shared agreement, need, cultural factors and a whole bunch of other cognitive "stuff".

In a simple case, many words for snow (each describing some quality that differentiates it from the other words) could come about in a culture where such discriminations / descriptions have a particular value - that is, there are not simply a much greater number of synonyms. For another culture, just a few words might be good enough.

The vocabulary that a wine connoisseur uses to describe fine wine is quite a bit larger than what someone who buys their wine in a box might use. Beyond some degree of pretentious BS, there is probably a good reason to describe fine distinctions that the connoisseur is able to make - less so for the wino.

"Tastes like chicken" is pretty insufficient unless your available comparison [is] only pork and you don't eat frog legs enough for them to taste like frog legs.

If you get to the article that you linked, There's Evidence Humans Didn't Actually See Blue Until Modern Times...
The title is ridiculous for attention and could just as easily be written as There's Evidence Humans Didn't Actually use the Word Blue Until Modern Times. I don't think human neurophysiology has changed in a few hundred years. Also, I didn't read a whole lot of evidence.

So, again, I would say: How we give names to our perceptions when we want to communicate is greatly determined by learning, shared agreement, need, cultural factors and a whole bunch of other cognitive "stuff".

Am I missing your point?

 

I acknowledge your point. I have experienced it using a translator. I wasn't trying to goat you.

 

I get it guys, I agree with you. No two people taste horseradish the same way. No two people smell peanut butter the same way. No two people hear the same song the same way. No two people see the color red the same way.

I don’t know. I think the null hypothesis has to be that, since we are soooo very similar at a chemical level, that we are indeed all the same, within the typical bell curve of natural variation that we see with other biochemical processes.