The question is how "but they didn't include color blind people" has any relevance to the subject.
For color blind people we already know that they don't see the same colors, so the answer for them is trivial. They can't even decode the same input, so nobody expects them to have the same color qualia as someone who does.
The purpose of the study is to examine the color of people with same typical vision capabilities. So regarding the objection, it's like some team doing a pitch perception study and someone asks why the deaf weren't included!
The study is meant for people with typical vision. Might as well object that they didn't include the blind...
Then there’s the fact that some people are unable to distinguish between blue and green colors, because their language uses the same word for both. They simply cannot perceive the colors being different. How would they compare?
> Now, a study that recorded patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of different people.
They're not asking the same question though. Neuroscientists are asking whether the brain processes the physical substrate (photons) that precedes the experience in the same way. Philosophers are asking if the subjective experience that follows (the qualia) is identical. The former is the easy question. The latter is the impossible question.
consider that subjective experience - to put it in the weakest and most general statement - clearly has a physical component. I'm being careful to not say that it is a physical phenomenon, is caused by physical phenomena, and so on, because while I think that's a reasonable assumption, we technically have no evidence for it.
but we do have plenty of evidence that, even if it is some supernaturally created magical process, subjective experience interacts with the physical world. for one, it clearly exchanges information with basic physical systems in your body - if it did not have some way to exchange information about what your eyes are seeing, you wouldn't be able to experience sight.
subjective experience is also easily altered with simple physical phenomena like chemical substances in your brain. so either these physics directly modify your subjective experience, or the subjective experience you have is mostly a physical product of your brain and the subjective experience part is only the end point of the process that receives all the information.
it's interesting because in physics, any exchange of information implies the existence of some directly measurable physical process. anything that is the product of such a process, you can generally speaking measure. all the things you can measure in an experiment are the things we eventually call the fundamental components of nature - like the charge, spin and so on of particles, as well as their place in time and space.
so subjective experience is either already some part we haven't observed of those fundamental components - which would in some way imply that everything is subjectively experiencing all the time - or it's an extra element we have not yet observed, but may be able to directly observe in experiment in the future.
Either way, both fields really seem to fumble around when they approach the other's domain.
Then I notice a loose screw and tighten it. Now you see Bob's blue as orange.
Was the machine properly functioning with the screw loose or tightened? Was it properly functioning in either configuration? How would you prove it?
There is something special about this wavelength; it's not a coincidence! It would be very surprising if the evolution of ALL life honed in on this critical range of the EM spectrum but left human perceptions open to wide interpretation. IOW interpreting "blue" is probably hard wired trait into most evolved life because we share a sun and the earth's atmosphere.
zahlman•5mo ago
Interesting, but I'm not convinced that it actually settles (would settle, if the "suggestion" is confirmed) the philosophical question.
smokedetector1•5mo ago
nyc_data_geek1•5mo ago
coldtea•5mo ago