h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Good solution to the wrong numbers problem!

But the original colour problem does not remain, Wittgenstein has comprehensively demolished it.

Perceiving a colour 'in your mind', where no one else can have access, is not a move in any relevant language-game.

It's not just about color. One could ask the same question about other sensations like cold and heat, and like sour and sweet. Also do siamese twins who can sometimes tell what the other is thinking have the same perseption of these things and could they answer the question for us?
Iluvatar

What would "the same perception" consist of? Solve that big one and the little ones pale into insignificance.

I hate to respond to a question so long after it was asked... but OO, I know this one!

Blue can be defined as a specific wavelength of the light spectrum, so the question becomes: do two humans have similar perception of this defined color.

Well, since humans are wired EXTREMELY SIMILARLY (being all the same species, and evolved from the same line and such), then we will all see the same blue, except in cases of color blindness, or some other sort of physical distinction. Of course, emotional reactions and such will vary.

Past that you get into Dennett's question of what it is in the brain that "sees"... but I've yet to make it through that book!

Keep reading! It gets easier.

Your solution is fine, until you take it back by considering colour-blindness. Bad move.

If we all have varying degrees of colour-blindness, then we have varying degrees of blue-perception. Shlump.

But it's not like that; experience shows that within narrow limits we can all distinguish blue fairly equally; colour-blind people are a small distinct subsection, not a continuum. The question is about how a wavelength turns into the unmistakeable blueness of blue, so indescribably different from red.

And all we can say at the present is, "it just does".

Maybe it's a failure of language.

Hardly, in this case. Language can't be blamed for most of our failures to use it skilfully, any more than a violin.

I dunno... with a sufficiently advanced language we might be able to objectively describe our subjective experiences.

(I'm having a flashback from Frederick Pohl's Starburst, I think).

Electronic keyboard designers may have thought "with a sufficiently advanced instrument we might be able to make better music" but I don't agree. Can't beat a bow on a string for picking up and communicating the magic vibration of a dedicated human, I suspect. Or the old vocal cords.

Yes. When learning an instrument, you have to learn how to play the notes. Then you have to learn how to make the instrument sing.

I wonder will we ever get over the desire for a better language?

Flutes and oboes went through many 'improvements' over the last two centuries, and then the early-music movement started reusing the old low-tech models . . . and a lot of people (myself included) find them mch more expressive, by which I suppose I mean flexible and capable of nuance.

So the same question with sounds- How different do different sounds sound to different people?

(Sorry about the frasing!)

what I mean is:One person's voice may sound high and squeaky to THEM,
but does it to everyone else?

Of course not. This is easily demonstrated by a typical household device: the answering machine. People don't recognise their own voices because they are hearing the tones strictly externally rather than a combination of internally and externally (when they speak). People....well me....anyway, sing in the shower and think they sound good (this is exemplified by the tv show American Idol)when they don't. Why? Because the reverberation of the sound waves as they bounce off of the shower walls cover the bad notes...trust me!

But this a different question than the one originally posed (obviously). The original question concerned the varying opinion of the color blue. If you hold up a yellow card and a blue card and ask anyone over the age of 2 (who isn't color blind) to point to the blue card, they will invariably get it right (barring any sarcastic remarks from the intellectually stillborn). If you ask the same person to identify a voice, the answer will vary. People spend time trying to figure out who does the voices in animated movies, but no-one tries to figure out the color scheme of the movie.

An interesting sidelight on recognising voices, from another perspective: F19585?thread=508032&skip=972