… Asked the brain about itself. Typical narcissistic brain behavior, don’t see the other organs doing it.
If all else fails, a kick in the nuts is a reality check
I find myself often wondering what colors look like to other people because there is no way to know for sure that what I see as red looks the same to everyone else. It’s just a frequency of light. How the brain interprets that is anybody’s guess. I can’t describe the difference of red vs blue and I’ve never met anyone else who could either. Maybe what I see as red is actually what I see as blue to someone else.
Apart from the philosophical aspect which is unanswerable, I feel certain we see equivalent colors. This is an interesting article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space Scientists found what the three primary colors our eyes see are. Because of the overlap in cone activation they’re actually imaginary colors that don’t exist.
What the eyes do when receiving information isn’t the focus, it’s how those signals they send to the brain are interpreted is where the uncertainty comes from. Everyone will have the same data. How the brain renders it in our mind may not be.
Scientific research indicates we see colors pretty damn similarly, with edge cases for colorblindness and also people who are more color sensitive.
One way this can be studied is by studying the metamerism of different colors by different observers. Metamerism is the study of how colors change given different light sources.
There are other objective qualities that give hints that we have similar ways of experiencing colors. You mention that colors are nothing more than our brain assigning “color” to frequency of light – but light is itself just a frequency of electromagnetic radiation, namely the frequencies that make up the bulk of the radiation emitted by the sun.
So to a normal observer without colorblindness, there are more variants of colors of green than any other color. Green is of course situated in the very center of the roygbiv spectrum, it is the “most visible” color. The colors with the least amount of variations are red and violet, which are situated at the edges. Frequencies above violet or below red become invisible making up infrared and ultraviolet radiation.
Where we get tricked up, and I used to have identical suspicions as you did, is that we consider color to be purely subjective, because we aren’t taught to unify subjectivity and objectivity into a united whole. Color isn’t completely imagined, there are certain surfaces that absorb and reflect certain frequencies of EM radiation just as the structures in our brain that process this ocular input are more or less similar. Things that are subjective aren’t usually associated with being “real” the same way that objectively “real” things that exist out in the phenomenal world are. However, color is socially real, we can almost all identify colors that are the same and colors which are different. Since the set of colors which are “red” are fewer than the set of colors which are “green” then there is no way that what I experience as red is the same as what you experience as green. Artists use colors to convey emotion and are able to achieve this with many many different observers. Warm colors are warm, and cool colors are cool. There may be different levels of sensitivity but in my experience this can be somewhat trained into an observer though no doubt there are outliers who have a unique sensitivity to color differences.
So there are objective factors which align with subjective factors let’s say 90% of the time, which strongly supports the idea that we experience color more or less the same way. The trouble is not that subjectivity and objectivity are irreconcilable, in fact it is when we fail to reconcile them that our troubles begin. In my opinion, this is a huge problem that creates all kinds of issues when we try to relate to each other; it may be the most prominent philosophical problem of our age. Luckily it is fairly easily remedied with a slight change in the way we think about subject and object. Its useful to separate them sometimes but we need to be able to reunify them, which just takes practice in my experience.
I can’t describe the difference of red vs blue and I’ve never met anyone else who could either.
In the Mask movie there is a great scene where he demonstrates colors to his blind girlfriend. They did a really great job with it.
Maybe what I see as red is actually what I see as blue to someone else.
This is a very common interesting thought, but what I’ve started thinking is even more interesting is this related thought:
Why does red look like it does, to you? I’m not concerned with how other people see red here, I’m just thinking about a single person (me or yourself, for instance). Why does red look like that? Why not differently? Something inside your eyes or your brain must be deciding that.
You could say “oh it’s because red is this and that wavelength” but what decides that exactly that wavelength looks like that (red)? There must be some physical process that at some point makes the qualia that is red - but how does it do that? The qualia that is red seems to be entirely arbitrary and decidedly not a physical thing. It is just a sensation, an experience, a qualia. But your eyes/brain somehow decides that ~650 nm wavelength translates to exactly that qualia. What decides that and how?
And even then, the same physical red can look darker, lighter, washed out, more vivid etc. depending on the surrounding colours. I mean, maybe what I see as white and gold, someone else sees as blue and black.
I, too, think about this all the time.
Basically, yes. Our eyes capture the light that goes into them at 24 frames per second (please correct me if I goofed on that) and the image is upside down.
Our brains turn those images upright, and it also fills in the blanks. The brain basically guesses what’s going on between the frames. It’s highly adapt at pattern recognition and estimation.
My favorite example of this is our nose. Look at you nose. You can look down and see it a little, and you can close one eye and see more of it. It’s right there in the bottom center of our view, but you don’t see it at all everyday.
That’s because it’s always there, and your brain filters it out. The pattern of our nose being there doesn’t change, so your brain just ignores it unless you want to intentionally see it. You can extrapolate that to everything else. Most things the brain expects to see, and does see through our eyes, is kind of ignored. It’s there, but it’s not as important as say, anything that’s moving.
Also, and this is fun to think about, we don’t even see everything. The color spectrum is far wider than what our eyes can recognize. There are animals, sea life and insects that can see much much more than we can.
But to answer more directly, you are right, the brain does crazy heavy lifting for all of our senses, not just sight. Our reality is confined to what our bodies can decifer from the world through our five senses.
the 24 fps thing is one hella myth. our cones and rods send a continuous stream of information, which is blended with past-received information in our perception to remove stuff like the movement from darting your eyes around.
24fps vision is a lie told by Hollywood so they can save on film
It’s the lowest fps they can go without it being horrid, really.
If you want a fun experiment of all the things we see but don’t actually process, I recommend the game series I’m On Observation Duty. You flip through a series of security cameras and identify when something changed. It’s incredible when you realize the entire floor of a room changed or a giant thing went missing, and you just tuned it out because your brain never felt a need to take in that detail.
It’s sorta horror genre and I hate pretty much every other horror thing, but I love those games because they make me think about how I think.
Ha, I’ve heard of that one so I caught it. I missed 3 of the passes, though!
That sounds pretty interesting. Thanks
Also, your eyes dart around and you only see a little patch. You blink. Your brain makes up a nice stable image of the world, mostly consisting of things that your brain think should be there.
The 24fps thing sounds wrong. That’s not even a cinematic 30.
I don’t think it’s the brain but rather our consciousness that is limited. Our sensory inputs are always on and processed by the brain, but our consciousness is very picky and also slow.
People can sometimes recall true memories that they weren’t aware of, or react to things they didn’t think of and such.
Consciousness is also somehow lagging behind the actual decision making, but always presents itself as the cause of action.
Sort of like Windows telling you that you removed a USB stick 2 seconds after you did it and was well aware of it happening. Consciousness is like that, except it takes responsibility for it too…
When it encounters something that it didn’t predict, it’ll tell you that “yeah this happened and this is why you did that”. Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.
This is a good thing mostly, because it allows you to react faster than having to consider your options consciousnessly. You do not need to or have time to make a conscious decision to dodge a dodgeball, but you’ll still think you did.
This isn’t really what OP is talking about.
We really can’t see very well at all outside of the centre of our focus. this paper says 6 degrees, I heard this as a coin held at arms length.
Our minds “render” most of the rest of what we think we see.
You’re right that we discard most of our sensory inputs, but with visual inputs there’s much less data than it appears.
You’re right. OPs second question is more specifically about vision, while I answered more broadly.
Anyway, comparing it to data from a camera is not really possible.
Analoge vs. digital and so, but also in the way that we experience it.
The minds interpretation of vision is developed after birth. It takes several weeks before an infant can recognise anything and use the eyes for any purpose. Infants are probably blissfully experiencing meaningless raw sensory inputs before that. All the pattern recognition that is used to focus on things are learned features and so also dependent on actually learning them.
I can’t find the source for this story, but allegedly there was this missionary in Africa who came across a tribe who lived in the jungle and was used to being surrounded by dense forest their entire life. He took some of them to the savannah and showed them the open view. They then tried to grab the animals that were grassing miles away. They didn’t develop a sense of perspective for things in longer distance, because they’d never experienced it.
I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes a point. Some people are better at spotting things in motion or telling colours apart etc. than others. It matters how we use vision. Even in the moment. If I ask you to count all the red things in a room, you’ll see more red things that you were generally aware of. So the focus is not just the 6° angle or whatever. It’s what your brain is recognising for the pattern at mind.
So the idea of quantifying vision to megapixels and framerate is kind of useless in understanding both vision and the brain. It’s connected.
Same with sound. Some people have proved being able to use echo localisation similar to bats. You could test their vision blindfolded and they’d still make their way through a labyrinth or whatever.
Testing senses is difficult because the brain tends to compensate in that way. It’d need to be a very precise testing method to make any kind of quantisation for a particular sense.
When it encounters something that it didn’t predict, it’ll tell you that “yeah this happened and this is why you did that”. Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.
There are interesting stories about tests done with split-brain patients, where the bridge connecting the left and right brain hemispheres, the corpus callosum, is severed. There are then ways to provide information to one hemisphere, have that hemisphere initiate an action, and then ask the other hemisphere why it did that. It will immediately make up a lie, even though we know that’s not the actual reason. Other than being consciouss, we’re not that different from ChatGPT. If the brain doesn’t know why something happened, it’ll make up a convincing explanation.
Your brain is constantly processing the inputs from all of your senses and pretty much ignoring them if they fit with what it is already expecting.
Your brain is lazy. If everything seems to fit with what your brain expects then you believe that what you are seing is reality and you generally ignore it.
Generally the mind only focuses on what it believes is salient/interesting/unexpected.
I mean all animals have brains to render reality, aka visual, audio, predator awareness. It’s not so special, most animals have tiny little brains.
Some animals, such as certain deep water crustaceans (Matis Shrimp) and cephalopods (Cuttlefish) can see more colors than most mammals, and their brains are often smaller.
The theory you’re referring to sounds like the free energy principle (or a variation of it).
And in the end “reality” is just excitations in quantum fields. And you “perceive” mostly electromagnetic forces.
