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Q:
Does everyone see the world in the same way? For example, is green for me, green for everyone else, or might they see it as I see blue, but just have learnt to call it green?
- nick (age 16)
sixth form college, uk
A:
Nick -
You've raised a famous question that occurs to
almost everyone who starts to wonder about philosophy. The standard
answer is that we have absolutely no way to know. That's true for now,
but you could imagine that perhaps it might change in the future.
Perhaps
someday we will have detailed enough measurements of brain states to
see if the same things are happening in the brains of two different
people seeing the same color. If you assume that whatever subjective
sense we have of greenness, blueness etc is associated with a
particular physical state of the brain, then we would know if two
people are having similar subjective experiences of the colors. Of
course there's no way to prove the assumption that the subjective sense
is uniquely determined by the physical state, but it is at least
reasonable, and agrees with what we know of brain chemistry and
emotions.
(published on 10/22/2007)
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