your red could be my green
I have been thinking about something mildly inconvenient: there is no way for me to know whether the color I call red looks anything like the color you call red.
We can point to an apple and agree that it is red. We learned the same word for the same wavelength of light, so the conversation works perfectly well. Red means that. Green means that. Nobody needs to investigate further.
Except agreeing on what to call something is not the same as knowing we experience it the same way.
What if the sensation that appears in my mind when I look at a strawberry is the sensation that would appear in yours when you look at grass?
You would still call the strawberry red.
I would still call the strawberry red.
We were both taught to.
There would be no obvious mistake to correct because neither of us could climb into the other's consciousness and compare notes.
Which is slightly maddening.
There are tests for color blindness, obviously, and science can tell us quite a lot about how light reaches the eye and how the brain processes visual information. But the private experience of seeing a color—the actual what-it-is-like of red—is accessible only to the person experiencing it.
Philosophers have a word for experiences like these: qualia.
The redness of red. The bitterness of coffee. What pain actually feels like rather than what nerves are firing while you feel it. The peculiar experience of being you, happening somewhere behind your eyes.
And suddenly this stops being a question about colors.
Because I have no idea whether sadness feels exactly the same to you either.
Or embarrassment. Love. Loneliness. Nostalgia.
We use the same words and assume we're discussing the same internal experience because language would become completely unusable otherwise. Someone says, I'm anxious, and I understand them by reaching for my own experience of anxiety. But what I am really doing is translating their interior life through mine.
Maybe their anxiety is nothing like mine.
Maybe their version of loneliness would be unrecognizable to me.
Even something as simple as pain exposes the problem. Two people can describe something as a seven out of ten and mean entirely different amounts of suffering. We invented a numerical scale for an experience that cannot actually be handed from one person to another for comparison.
Seven according to whose nervous system?
It makes me wonder how often we mistake shared vocabulary for shared experience.
Perhaps this is why it can be so frustrating to explain ourselves. We keep searching for increasingly precise words, hoping that if we arrange them correctly enough, another person might finally understand exactly what it feels like to be us.
But language can only point.
It cannot transfer consciousness.
And there is something both lonely and strangely beautiful about that.
Every person I have ever known has an entire sensory and emotional world occurring inside them that I can get extraordinarily close to and still never enter completely.
Maybe your red really is my green.
We will probably never know.
And somehow we've built entire relationships, civilizations, languages and lives together despite the fact that none of us can ever completely verify that we're experiencing the same world.