How would "YOU" explain color to a human who was born blind?
How would you describe it to him. Is it even possible for the explanation to be understood?
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But red can be cold and blue can be hot as well, can't it?
__________________ Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But, there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit..... A DARKSIDE.
as color is a visual perception, any explanation may be understood.....but completely unrelatable. They may understand how you can experience the perception but they themselves could never understand the perception.
how would I describe it to them? Light is the band of the electro-magnetic spectrum that the human eye can detect. It is comprised of photons, particles of energy. This energy is either absorbed or reflected by matter. The different ratios between absorbtion and reflection from matter to matter result in different ratios of photons reaching the human eye, resulting in differing perceptions from one piece of matter to another. We give these different perceptions names to describe the ratios. Those names are called colors.
I think that's a pretty decent, dumbed down explanation.......not requiring the blind person to hold a degree in physics or anything to understand the concept. No going into frequency or wavelength.....
You can tell them what color is, but you cannot make them understand what color is.... if you get my point. Perception is beyond reason.
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I suppose you could try to explain the concept to them better by comparing it to the sense of touching...you could say for oen tell them that with seeing you can make out shapes from far away, and like differrent surfaces have a different feel to them different part of shapes have these different "colours".
First of all, as Evil Dead showed, you Can explain it: you can give an intellect-based/scientific account of color. So the question (IMO) is really: how would you describe color?
That being so: hell, to someone who was born blind, how would you describe vision or anything associated with seeing (eg, light and dark)?
What would be the common experiential reference frame? Could there be one?
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Its impossible to explain a sensation. Sensations are not "explainable".
You can only give descriptions of what color is.
But descriptions and sensations are different entities, so even if you can describe it perfectly, it doesn´t means that the someone can feel the idea like an experience. This is valid for everything else, not just colors.
nice topic..
i always use this as an example when im trying to tell people why
certain stuff is impossible to grasp.
you cant describe a sensation - no way..
a smell or sound or colour.
have you ever stared at at a big patch of one colour (it must be very consistent - no light spots here or slight changes somewhere), say, blue?
for a while.. but only look at the colour - like with your nose right against it so you cant see anything else? it kindof loses it's definition as blue. it's like you cant tell WHY it's blue anymore - it's just "something" - then you realise you dont really know what it means for something to be blue. but yeah, like Evil dead sed; it's just a light frequency that triggers a sensation you know as blue..
Our point of views differ to facts. Each person lives an entire life and no matter how big and significant are their actions won't change things around after some time have passed, which is each generation.
iv always found colour fascinating, theres this thing called inverted spectrum colour blindness which is really interesting, partly because its impossible to tell if you or anyone has it or not!
Much in the same way you would imagine a color that you have not seen--you simply cannot do it.
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I doubt someone's going to be able to identify what the electro magnetic spectrum is, let alone be completely identified with photons, along with energy particles. They aren't going to regard aspects of sight as truly relatable, I agree with you there, but I'm sure there's a better way to attempt a description. Even the terms of absorbtion along with reflection might find troublesome definitions for say a blind five year old. You're using a decent vocabulary, but not a cooperative one. It's a decent explanation but certainly not dumbed down.
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I'm blind, explain it to me. LOL (nope I lied)
Well let's think outside the box, do you think you could understand thermal sensing, like snakes, you know... tasting heat, or ultrasound or any other senses we don't have? You could compare it to other senses, like on tv(incidentaly the chosen sense is usually sight) but could you sense it?
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When it comes to the experience itself, you can' t explain colour to someone who hasn' t had any visual experience. They' re not in a position to have the full concept of colour that the sighted have, nor can they understand the experience as fully as the sighted can.
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KMC Community Forums
Aug 26th, 2006 07:27 PM
Dont let anyone tell you that you're wrong. If u believe it it's true.
