| This article is very simplistic. The question "What can we know?" is one of the central questions of philosophy. (see metaphysics.) Answers go back to Platos cave allegory (and even further) to discuss it without mentioning some great philosophers like Plato, Descartes and Kant (at least) is criminally neglegient.
Similar goes for the question "What do we mean when we say words?". While to my understanding it has only become important in the 20th century, Nietzsche was neither the last nor the most famous. Not mentioning Wittgenstein or Derrida is similarly neglegient. The whole blue-green color blindness experiment is very ill concieved:
Assume you send a '1' (ascii character in some network endianness) to two computers one with big endian encoding, one with little endian encoding. Both correctly parse the character into an unsigned char. One into '10000000' and one into '00000001'. Does now one computer see the '1' as '128' if so which one?
And what would the activation pattern of neurons which represent 1 mean to that computer?
Perception means to translate an external simulus into an internal representation. Of course the internal representation might be different for different systems. So the only way we can compare those impressions is via the stimuli that they reference and the position we use to reason about them. Consider two mathematical notations which are identical except they have exchanged the meaning of '0' and '1'. One system would give as some of the axioms: x * 0=0 x * 1=x x+0 = x The other would give : x * 1 = 1 x * 0 = x x+1 = x because the axioms correspond we could show that the notations equivalent. Even if their representations of the neutral elements are vastly different. Interesting there might be a way to use something similar for colors: It is known that colors influence the mood(red makes you agitated, blue calms down...). If this is inborn to humans and not learned, one could actually compare perceptions of colors. If you blue agitate you but calms me down and red calms you down but agitates me. It would not be wrong to say you percieve colors differntly. (Of course it would be equivalent to say "we percieve them the same way, but you react differntly to them"). |