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I have always found describing color shades interesting/mind-fuck. Does the "red" that you see "red" to me? I am red-green color blind and a lot of "red" looks "brown" to me.



If you want to dig deep, that's a textbook example of qualia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

(Though I can't quite agree with Jackson that qualia refutes physicalism.)


> I am red-green color blind and a lot of "red" looks "brown" to me.

Stylized facts:

- Brown is dark yellow.

- Yellow is a mixture of red and green.


Color doesn’t actually exist. We don’t see actual objects as they are, we see the light that bounces off of them. Brains will create their own way of mapping wavelengths to colors, so therefore we do not see the same thing, but we perceive it as the same.

If I opened your brain and swapped your red with blue, you would not notice.


Yes, it's kind of like wondering "Does my computer store [R,G,B]? Or is it actually stored as [B,G,R] in memory? Are they represented in 2's complement form?", etc. Functionally our perception of colour is just how we mentally represent and compare vectors with 3 (or in this case 4!) components.

That said, our shared physiology and biology as humans makes my default assumption that red looks about the same to me as to anyone else. Unless they're colourblind or tetrachromats, of course.


Color does exist. The wavelength of light that is reflected by an object is its color. That wavelength can be measured objectively.


Yeah, but all real light is a mixture of a lot of wavelengths that our retinas filter down to three aggregates of "red", "blue", and "green".


You’re pointing out that wavelengths exist. The relationship between wavelength and color is not a universally shared experience.




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