Sprite asks (as expected) the most classic kinds of questions. Recently it was whether or not two people can claim to be seeing blue but one actually sees red. How do you know that the blue you see is the same shade as the thing everyone else sees?
Some folks have said this is unprovable. I say it's rather obvious when you think about it evolutionarily. Which is to say what is an eye and why do we have them? What is a brain and how does it work? We don't have to really answer that, but we must certainly recognize that they are not different things in different people. Why would they evolve differently? Which is to say what is the likelihood that some individual would evolve a different kind of vision and what is the evolutionary reason why? If two people have perfectly healthy eyes and correct vision, why would that diverge into a different interpretation of color, or shape, or distance or any other aspect of eye function? There would have to be a biological reason for having red to look blue and a social reason to perceive blue as red.
I argue that it's possible for the premise of red being interpreted as blue but that would be considered a human mutation. The mutation would likely be in the optic nerve. Now I would allow that perhaps some variability in the number and density of rods and cones, like with taste buds, or eardrums would give rise to some actual perceptual differences, and certainly sensitivities would vary in people. But the assumption is that there is no defect, that a standard capable sense, in this case vision, would invert the values of blue and red.
Why would only blue be red? Wouldn't it be more likely that all colors would be inverted? Wouldn't somebody who saw blue as red similarly see black as white? Wouldn't their vision interpretation to be consistent see negative? If they actually saw one color differently, they would have to see all colors differently, primary colors and secondary colors. If red + yellow = orange in normal people then for our mutants, red + yellow would equal green.
Still, we have no objective way of determining the content of another person's thoughts, and only someone who was truly consistent in this regard would be considered the proper mutant.
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