hey vsauce michael here this appears
blue this appears yellow
and this appears green those of us with
normal color vision
can probably agree but that doesn't
change the fact
that color is an illusion
color as we know it does not exist
in the outside world beyond us like
gravity or protons do instead color is
created inside our heads
our brains convert a certain range of
the electromagnetic spectrum
into color i can measure the wavelength
of radiation
but i can't measure or observe
the experience of a color inside
your mind so
how do i know that when you and me
look at a strawberry and in my brain
this perception occurs which
i call red that in your brain a
perception like
this doesn't occur which you have of
course also learned to call red
we both call it red we communicate
effectively
and walk away never knowing just how
different each of our internal
experiences
really were of course we already know
that not everybody
sees color in exactly the same way
one example would be color blindness
but we can diagnose and discuss these
differences because people with the
conditions
fail to see things that most of us can
conceivably though there could be ways
of seeing that we use
that cause colors to look differently in
different people's minds
without altering their performances on
any tests we could come up with
of course if that were the case wouldn't
some people think other colors looked
better than others
or that some colors were more
complementary of others
well yeah but doesn't that already
happen
this matters because it shows how
fundamentally
in terms of our perceptions we are all
alone
in our minds let's say i met an
alien from a far away solar system who
lucky enough could speak english but had
never
and could never feel pain
i could explain to the alien that pain
is sent through a delta and c fibers to
the spinal cord
the alien could learn every single cell
and pathway and process and chemical
involved in the feeling of pain
the alien could pass a biology exam
about pain
and believe that pain to us generally is
a bad
thing but no matter how much he learned
the alien would never actually feel
pain philosophers call these
ineffable raw feelings qualia
and our inability to connect physical
phenomenon to these raw
feelings our inability to explain and
share
our own internal qualia is known
as the explanatory gap this gap is
confronted when describing
color to someone who has been blind
their entire life
tommy edison has never been able to see
he has a youtube channel where he
describes what being blind
is like it's an amazing channel
in one video he talks about colors and
how strange and foreign of a concept it
seems to him
sighted people try to explain for
instance that red
is hot and blue is cold but to someone
who has never seen
a single color that just seems
weird and as he explains it has never
caused him to finally
see a color some philosophers like
daniel dennett argue that qualia may be
private and ineffable simply because of
a failure
of our own language not because they are
necessarily
always going to be impossible to share
there may be an alien race that
communicates in a language that causes
colors to appear in your brain without
your retina
having to be involved at all or without
you having to have ever needed to
actually
see the color yourself perhaps even in
english he says
given millions and billions of words
used in just the right way
it may be possible to adequately
describe a color
such that a blind person could see it
for the first time or you could figure
out that once and for all
yes or no in fact you and your friend
do not see the same red
but for now it remains the case that
we have no way of knowing if my red
is the same as your red maybe one day
our language will allow us to share
and find out or maybe it never will
i know it's frustrating to not have an
answer but the mere
fact that you guys can ask me about my
internal experiences and the mere fact
that i can ask my friends
and we can all collectively wonder at
the concept of qualia
is quite incredible and also
quite human animals can do
all sorts of clever things that we do
they can use tools
problem solve communicate cooperate
exhibit curiosity
plan for the future and although we
can't know for sure
many animals certainly act as if they
feel
emotions loneliness fear
joy apes have even been taught to use
language to talk to us humans it's a
sort of
sign language that they've used to do
everything from answer
questions to express emotion or even
produce
novel thoughts unlike any other animal
these apes are able to understand
language and form responses
at about the level of a two and a half
year old human
child but there's something that no
signing ape
has ever done no ape has ever
asked a question joseph jordania's
who asked the first question is a great
read on this topic and it's available
for free
online for as long as we have been able
to use sign language to communicate with
apes
they have never wondered out loud about
anything that
we might know that they don't
of course this does not mean that apes
and plenty of other animals
aren't curious they obviously are
but what it suggests is that they lack a
theory of mind an understanding that
other people
have separate minds that they have
knowledge access to information that you
might not have even us humans
aren't born with a theory of mind and
there's a famous experiment to test when
a human child
first develops a theory of mind it is
called
the sally anne test during the test
researchers tell children a story about
sally
and anne sally and anne have a box in a
basket
in their room they also happen to have a
delicious
cookie now sally takes the cookie and
puts it
inside the box and then sally
leaves the room while sally is gone
anne comes over to the box takes the
cookie out
and puts the cookie inside the basket
now when sally comes back the
researchers ask the children
where will sally look for the cookie
obviously sally will look in the box
that's where she left it she has no way
of knowing what anne did while she was
gone
but until the age of about four children
will insist
that sally will check the basket because
after all that's where the cookie is the
child
saw anne move the cookie so why wouldn't
sally also
know young children fail to realize that
sally's mental representation of the
situation
her access to information can be
different than their own
and apes who know sign language but
never ask
us questions are doing the same thing
they're failing to recognize that other
individuals
have similar cognitive abilities and can
be used as sources of information
so we are all alone
with our perceptions we are alone in our
own minds
we can both agree that chocolate tastes
good
but i cannot climb into your
consciousness
and experience what chocolate tastes
like to you
i can never know if my red looks the
same as
your red but i can ask
so stay human stay
curious and let the entire world know
that you are
and as always thanks for watching