I always thought it was crazy to wonder what the qualia of colors we can’t see but other animals can is. It’s sort of like being a cat or some other animal with limited color vision and trying to imagine what humans see. How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
There’s a great old Vsauce video that goes over something like this but even crazier to think about: “is your red the same as my red?”.
How can you know if your red is the same color as what someone else calls red? We could both be looking at different colors, but we both call it red.
Even crazier, how do you explain colors to someone born blind?
How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
A spectrum test.
Show a human red fading to infrared, or purple fading to ultraviolet, next to cameras that can detect them in false color. Those are colors we can’t see, yet you can see they’re there.
I always thought it was crazy to wonder what the qualia of colors we can’t see but other animals can is. It’s sort of like being a cat or some other animal with limited color vision and trying to imagine what humans see. How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
I’ve wondered the same about dogs’ sensitive sense of smell. What’s that like?
Colors don’t actually exist physically. They are a creation of the mind.
Colors are physical wavelengths of light within a spectrum between UV and IR. WTF are you talking about.
There’s a great old Vsauce video that goes over something like this but even crazier to think about: “is your red the same as my red?”. How can you know if your red is the same color as what someone else calls red? We could both be looking at different colors, but we both call it red. Even crazier, how do you explain colors to someone born blind?
A spectrum test.
Show a human red fading to infrared, or purple fading to ultraviolet, next to cameras that can detect them in false color. Those are colors we can’t see, yet you can see they’re there.
Theoretically, it’d be the same for a cat or dog.
Maybe that’s why animals don’t seem very interested in TV. They don’t have the same cones as us