Rhapsody in blue

From time to time one wonders whether one's own experience of blue is the same as another's, and this morning was an occasion for such a wonder.

First thought, taken from one Michael Gazzaniga (a famous split brain man), was that brain structures and functions are in very large part determined by our genes and more or less in place at the time of our birth. To that extent, we are all more or less the same and so we should see things in much the same way.

Second thought, was that colour does have a basis in physics and biology. There is a real sense in which one colour is near another colour, and my perception of that nearness ought to be much the same as that of another. So while my perception of blue may not be the same as yours, my perception that dark blue is like light blue maybe is the same as yours. And then there is the natural sequence of colours of the spectrum. Perception of those colours cannot be completely arbitrary. Returning to another thought of Gazzaniga, I am sure it would not take much to build a story according to which a sensible view of colour was adaptive and was, in consequence, what evolved.

I then think that my experience of blue arises from some pattern of firing of neurons, albeit rather a large number of neurons and rather a lot of firing. In principle, if one was able to capture that pattern on a number of occasions, there would be some invariance. There would be some part of that pattern which expressed the blue, in much the same way on each occasion.

Part of detecting which part might be experiencing other colours. It seems likely that the experience of colour is a module of brain, in some sense or other, and that there is some invariance in the way that colour is coded. It is not impossible, but it seems unlikely, that different colours are coded in entirely different ways. So if I do lots of trials with lots of colours, I should be able to work out where and how the firing pattern codes for colour.

Further, the module of brain which does colour is probably determined genetically, so my module is much the same as yours. One allows a certain amount of fine tuning as part of growing up from an egg, but essentially one colour module is much the same as another.

From which I deduce that your experience of blue is much the same as mine and that this much the same is more than just our agreeing on the names of things. But I allow that your emotional tone for blue might well be different from mine; blue might well have behaved in your formative years in a way that it did not for me. Perhaps you had a disastrous birthday cake when you were very young which was blue, a trauma which has hung around your blue ever since, blissful childhood holidays with sunny blue skies notwithstanding.

So a nice project for some bright young chap with access to lots of expensive machinery might be to do all this for lots of colours and for lots of people and to establish that you and I really do code for blue, that is to say to see blue, in much the same way.