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How do I know your blue is the same as my blue?
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It probably isn't lol. At the very least my blue could easily appear as a different shade of blue from yours.The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
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The best thing you can do is show your blue. Then despite what shade I actually see that differs from yours, we can at least agree nominally about what we're looking at.
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It's just...the thing. Like color is a facet of wavelengths hitting the eye... the wavelengths don't change, regardless of how your eyes interpret it. Interpretation allows the wavelengths to have an apparent quality to you and me, and maybe the apparent quality differs, but we can agree that there is a thing we have both seen. If something existed to let the blind sense it, they could also agree that there is a thing they are sensing, too.
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My answer: no.
Let me add another layer of convolution to this issue. Even if we could all see the exact shame shade of blue it wouldn't necessarily be so that our qualitative experience of it is similar. Different Qualia are attached.
So even if your blue is the same as mine, it's might still be miles away from what your experience of blue is.
Maybe should all have lived in a tribe where they can only distinguish a couple colors then there is no blue, because what is blue? There's no concept for blue. The rare few people who can only see in monochrome also wouldn't know, perhaps those who are colorblind see more things as blue than actually are commonly seen as blue.
Despite these complexities, if we communicate and we don't have the visual defects above and have learned what blue is, then we can communicate and at least be able to give people a rough approximation of what we really mean. Even if we were perfectly capable of seeing and feeling the exact qualia that somebody else has when they explain it correctly, we'd still probably not exactly experience, because there's inherent noise and error when we communicate, but what matters in the end that despite us not being able to communicate, if we play things right we can actually do a pretty darn good job"Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism.
Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations."
Nietzsche
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Vive, that's a great allegory for many things in life.
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I'd say that the only way we "know" that someone's blue is the same blue as our own is if we use an external metric, such as a hex code. Then we can know that even if the qualia are different, the blue is "objectively" the same, so we can then state it's the agreed-upon hue for, say, "periwinkle blue"...or "aquamarine"...or whatever other name you want to give it.
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