There’s a man who can see the sunset and it is purple. Next to him is a man who is colorblind and sees no color. Finally, there is a third man with them in attendance who is blind who cannot even see the sunset at all.
Who is in the right and wrong here concerning the color of the sunset or the absence of?
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.
Indeed. Though i think i will refrain from answering the question. It would probably be probably too much on the nose and remove other people’s chance to debate the topic.
I will give it a rest for a day, lets see if others wanna share their insight on the topic.
How do I know that the purple I perceive and interpret is the same as the purple you perceive and interpret?
That’s what I got out of it.
What they don’t know is that the sunrise is in a forest where a tree fell making them deaf prior to hitting the ground, plus it’s really inside a cave where a brain in a vat is forced by an evil demon to make a one-hand clap that is mirrored in each of the dew’s droplets. Now, someone starts changing the atoms of the sun one by one and making another sun and a teapot is going around it, while it is being watched by a featherless chicken in a fake barn that you can arrive by trolley if a lever is pulled by someone that lives in an entirely red room for all their life as being a punishment for never being able to reach a turtle that moves at half their speed at each step, tho their identical twin going at ~c did all the while carrying a boulder uphill each day
They have to assert stuff to be right or wrong, so so far they’re neither right nor wrong.
That first sentence is going to lead to problems later. It asserts what the color is not what he sees.
The man who can see the sunset is seeing purple visually. The man who is colorblind cannot even see the color purple and of course the man who is blind cannot see anything at all.
I was trying to frame this thread in a way of mental perspective of visual color or the absence of. Mental perceiving is kind of the default topic.
At least that’s what I was trying to construct here.
Yes, I got that. I just meant to be right or wrong you need to assert things. The question could have been who is seeing reality more accurately? Then the right wrong issue is off the table. I mentioned the phrasing with
That’s a statement from the narrator, you, and it is telling us the sunset is purple. Well, if it is purple then the one seeing it as purple is seeing it most accurately. These are fussy points, but I think if the OP is tight it avoids tangents later.
When I wrote that originally I just automatically assumed people would know that the person who can see is visually seeing purple.
Of course as another person here has said, while they may be perceiving the color purple of a sunset another individual could interpret the color differently.
In my personal opinion the answer to the question has 2 main branches.
The first is the specific.
What is the right answer?
Is it the source, the raw, the unchanged, unfiltered phenomena in it’s true self, or is it the representation of it inside the human brain, the “color”.
This is worth exploring because in reality, colors do not exist. They are simply a wavelength of light which our brain interprets as colors. We arent even capable of perceiving the entire spectrum of these wavelengths. In fact, what we see as colors is roughly 0.0035% of the estimated spectrum.
So would even the person with a perfectly intact sight, be correct about what they see?
Of course you could then argue that we do not need to compare to the unfiltered, unchanged phenomena, we can compare to it’s perceived effect, the color purple.
But then the next question would be: Which?
Color is a mental construct.
We can throw tests like the Isihara at it to see if people can correctly differentiate between colors, but what those colors are, how they are being perceived, that we do not know.
Is your purple the same purple as my purple?
Take 10 people with perfectly intact sight. Do those 10 people see the same thing? Perceive it the same way? Is #1’s purple the same as #2’s 3’s 4’s? And which purple is the correct purple? What would the right answer be?
This leads to the second point:
There is are multiple disconnects between reality and it’s downcast perception/representation.
The first is the biological. Most of the things we perceive are not reality. They are interpretations of it.
Everyone knows that your brain does not interact directly with the outside world, it uses nerve stimulus for data intake which then it converts, but not everyone knows how fundamental this is in the practice. It doesnt just mean that your brain is not exposed to sunlight or sound directly, it means that sunlight and sound does not exist in the first place.
Light is nothing more than electromagnetic radiation, and sound is nothing more than the mechanical effect of pressure waves traveling through air.
Light and sound are both transformed interpretations of reality, not reality itself.
In conclusion:
What is “right” always depends on the definition and parameters of what you consider to be right.
You could say that the man who was able to see the purple sunset is correct.
You could also say that nobody standing there can actually see the world for what it is, as it is.
You could also say that all three of them are correct because to us biological entities, reality will always be subjective. Reality is what we interpret it as, and as such, every each person who is capable of interpreting it, has already attained a form of answer which holds true for them.
Neither is right nor wrong. There’s no such thing as a wrong perception. The color does not exist in the object or in the subject but in the relationship between the two. Both are perceiving the same object in different forms. The sunset is such that when the color-sighted person perceives it, he sees purple color, and when the color blind person perceives it, he sees shades of grey. A wolf would perceive the same sunset but in a different form. Same for a butterfly and a parakeet.
That’s what I was trying to get at with this thread. We all perceive things differently mentally, which begs the question, do we see things as they really are, or do we mentally construct attributes to random phenomena?
Its the latter, but with two addendums.
a.) The stimulus (reality) is the same for all of us (noumenon). It’s only the interpretation which is subject to the individual (phenomenon).
b.) Its mental only in the sense that the interpretation takes place in the brain. It is however not a conscious effort since in this case the interpreter is your body, meaning the information present in your DNA that en/decodes reality in a certain way.
Its kinda fascinating if you think about it. This thing called life that not only goes counter to the entropic nature of the universe, but invents its own cipher for it, then decodes and interprets information off of it.