Questioning the subjective experience of color is an essay written by Sourodip Ghoshdastidar and shared with The Ugly Writers under the theme The Best Bad Idea for the month of January

Questioning the subjective experience of color

Here are a few questions that popped up into my mind the other day:

What if the color of the object that you see in front of you is very different than what other people see?

What if no two people see the same object in the same color?

Let us go back to our childhood. You started identifying colors when you were a kid. Take an object with a certain color.(Say an orange fruit)

Now you ask your mother, what color is this object?

Your mother says orange. You now know that the object in front of you is colored orange.

But do you really have a clue whether that object’s color is perceived by you in the same way as another person?

The subjective experience of seeing the color of the object in front of you might be totally different for someone else.

If your friend would’ve asked his mother about the color of an orange fruit, she too, would reply with orange.

However your friend’s subjective experience of the color orange(seeing, that is) could have been completely different from yours.

Now later on when your friend sees a different object of the same color as an an orange fruit, he would reply with orange, and so would you. Why, you may ask? You are seeing completely different colors, yet both of you identify the object’s color to be orange!

What you two have done, is taken the color of the orange fruit as a reference color (that is , you have connected the color of the orange fruit with what you truly think is orange color) and when you see the that color reproduced in a different object, you call it orange colored, however differently you might be seeing the same thing.

That sounds mind-blowing doesn’t it?

No, its not the same as color blindness, there is a subtle difference. Color blindness is when you both identify the same object as having a different color altogether.

Maybe each of us see color differently altogether without knowing about it!

Give some love to Sourodip Ghoshdastidar by reading his previous entries at The Ugly Writers: