#additional note i also think the philosophical significance of tetrachromacy in humans is also a little overblown

[agueforts]

Raises paw hii we saw the colors posting and wanted to ask if you have anything to say about the "everyone literally percieves/processes colors differently" thing? It freaked us out in middle school and now im just curious abt it

well, see, the thing is everyone is living a different life from everyone else, because everyone in the world is in fact a different person. i think it's sort of like. fake deep, in the sense that people react to it like it's a big deal and so that makes other people react to it like it's a big deal, but it doesn't really say anything meaningful about the world if you actually dig into it

scientifically, we know concretely that some people intrinsically percieve colors differently — we call that colorblindness. perception of a color also shifts based on its surroundings (as i'm sure most artists are already aware of), and there's a biological mechanism behind that too, in how the optic system signals brightness to the brain

subjectively, some people percieve colors differently for non-intrinsic reasons — for instance, there's a great post somewhere out there on the vast landscape of tumblr that made a point about principles of painting and stuff like hue shifts when shading, which is a difference in perception that's based in knowledge and learned skill

objectively, there's absolutely variation in the experience of other senses that aren't treated nearly as novel — as someone who's extraordinarily sensitive to bitter tastes, this is my experience with an innumerable amount of foods (a notable example is fruit-based pastries, which nearly always taste predominantly tart to me, regardless of how sweet they are to others)

and practically, at the end of the day, what does it really mean if i see red slightly differently than someone else?

we're not telepathic, so there's never going to be an absolute certainty of its truth or lack thereof (though ofc in science nothing is ever set in stone, so that's really more about your own conception of the nature of knowledge than anything else)

it isn't something easily tested on your own — the most accessible medium is digitally, and that's a flawed experiment from the start, between environmental lighting, phone brightness, the differences in device's individual displays (see: the "woah this looks WAY different on my phone/computer" phenomenon), etc. too many other factors, none of them easily accounted for

sure, it sounds interesting philosophically, but there's very few tangible questions to ask about it. could i hold interest in the discussion? sure, absolutely, you've seen how i am about color, but you'd have to ask the right question. and personally, "what if your red isn't the same as my red" is far too undefined and ungrounded to be all that engaging for me (especially since it's the sort of question where people tend to take your disinterest for misunderstanding of the implications and assert their probing further as such)