[michaelmior]

The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.

[strogonoff]

Our experience doesn’t become unimportant just because it’s lost in translation. It’s a paradox that we can’t know what X feels like to another person because communication is very lossy, but that does not warrant dismissal. We are not p-zombies, we do feel things.

In fact, the argument that “what we experience doesn’t matter” looks incongruous insofar as it is made by an entity experiencing something and in fact because said entity is experiencing something—the entity has no access to anything but experience.

[michaelmior]

I'm not saying our experience is unimportant. I'm talking about how we communicate what colors are. I'm not an expert by any means, but it seems like the way we communicate a shared understanding of what colors are is based on observing things that are the same color. I just don't think we have a way of communicating our subjective view of what a color looks like without reference to some other color.