How do we know that we all see the colours the same? i mean maybe for some people green looks like blue and opposite...

I don't disagree, I've said the same thing but people have trouble handling the concept for some reason, doesn't really change anything though

You retards aren't getting what he meant.

If I see blue as what appears to you as green, neither of us would ever know. I've associated what you call green with what would look blue through your eyes because everyone calls it green, and vice-versa.

To answer your question, OP, it is likely that nobody sees colors exactly the same, but they're close, since each cell that determines the colors we see have very similar genetic coding. A cell in my eye that processes red is very specifically coded for that, and is coded nearly identically to the one in your eye.
So we probably both see red almost the same.

You two get what he meant.

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Some interesting research has been done on peoples, such as those in the Himba tribe, which suggests that language may affect a person's perception of colour. For example, they split up what we might call 'green' far more than us, but their language doesn't really distinguish blue and green.

In experiments, a subject is shown a number of squares of what we would call 'green'. These look identical to 'us', but when asked, the Himba can identify the different 'green' effortlessly. However, when a blue square is placed among the green, they cannot identify it as being different. I highly recommend reading into it.

It seems daft that a person couldn't distinguish blue from green, but then I suppose they would find it daft that we couldn't distinguish 'green' from 'green'.

So I guess that suggests that we might not exactly perceive colour in exactly the same way. Our language may mean we perceive differences in colour quite similarly, but whether the perception of colour absolute is identical, is not fully understood.

We dont. See descartes

No, not that. That presupposes the experience of colour (or anything) is somehow isolated from the shared web of meaning that comes about through our social interaction.

Greenness beyond the physical is a semantic quality, and so not instantiated solely within the individual.

I've read this study but what I don't understand is how this could ever be possible. The sky is blue, and leaves are green. Whenever you look at leaves you're looking up and the only real way to distinguish them is to compare it to blue. I guess wherever the Himba tribe is from there aren't many trees to look up at..

Maybe the tribesmen were just playing along for some of that western money. Just like Africans would say yes if an explorer asked them if they saw a blue dinosaur roaming in their forest.

>I guess wherever the Himba tribe is from there aren't many trees to look up at..
But if that were true, then why is it they are able to distinguish between different greens so easily? What else is green other than leaves? It must be something physically different in their eyes. Maybe it's a mutation in the cones that caused the change in language rather than the other way around.

Basically this is right: our eyes can see certain spectrum, and that is true for all (up to minimal variations.) But this does not answer how our brains interpret the color. At the end of the day, is our brain the one that sees.

See my comment above. This same happens with hearing: chinese people can "hear" tunes that europeans cannot. What really happens is that our brain is not trained to differentiate certain things. For example, my native language is spanish. I learned long ago that many native spanish speakers speak a terrible english because they are not able to hear the different between sounds. For example the "v" and "b" are the same sound across all south-america, which is not the case in english. Another example, many people will pronounce "Yale" and "Jail" identically (this is funny, image someone tells you "I went to jail", but he was talking aboyt "Yale.") After years, I can hear the difference in those words and understand why my english teacher hated me, but it is really hard from time to time.

This still does not really solve the issue of how our brains see the colors, since it doesn't tell us if my red is your red or your blue.

The sky is 'blue' and the grass is 'green' because that is where our language separates those colours. The Himba's naming scheme for colours actually overlaps our blues slightly (roughly cyans) - so certain shades of blues will overlap our greens to form a colour known as burou. Deeper 'blues' and very dark 'greens' are a colour called zoozu.

As far as I'm aware, there are no mutations in the Himba's eyes.

And if they are just playing along for easy monies, they must be the luckiest people alive to differentiate between (to us) the tiniest shades of green. :P

I wonder if people would be able to tell different shades of color apart by sight if we used their names and didn't umbrella them all under "red" or "blue"

It is very very VERY probable that you share the basic genes that make up your eye with your parents, which have it from their, which have it from their, which ha... you get what I'm saying right?

The eye interprets color by tiny R G B sensors in the eye and these react to light of different frequencies. So this is pretty much invariable and geneticaly tied to our first ancestor and the language you use is tied to socialy... so Most likely we all see the same colors and name them the same names because nature and nurture. (except mild variance in sensitivity here and there)

You can spatially map a shape, unless you're implying we feel shapes to be differant in which case I shouldn't have even bothered giving you a (you)

>How do we know that we all see the colours the same?
How do we know that colours have a qualitative appearance at all, and aren't just interpreted by the brain as a numeric value at a certain spot on the visual field?

And you can assign colours to measurable wavelengths, same fucking thing