Is my blue your blue? (2024)

Posted by theogravity 17 hours ago

Is my blue your blue? (2024)(ismy.blue)

599 points | 393 commentspage 2

WesleyJohnson 14 hours ago|

I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.

mikestorrent 14 hours ago||

The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.

michaelmior 14 hours ago|||

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.

Nition 14 hours ago|||

I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.

WesleyJohnson 10 hours ago||

You certainly stumbled onto it much sooner in life than I did. It wasn't until I had children in my late 30s that this dawned on me - and has perplexed me ever since. Funny indeed.

dc96 14 hours ago|||

Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.

Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)

cbarrick 14 hours ago|||

Have I got a Wikipedia article for you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

WesleyJohnson 10 hours ago||

Amazing. I'm so glad to have a name for this.

namanyayg 14 hours ago|||

We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.

But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!

"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)

srathi 14 hours ago|||

If you want to explore it further, look up the philosophical aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

humanfromearth9 14 hours ago|||

It would be interesting to see if llms all share the same internal representation of red. It might hint towards how it works for humans.

Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.

humanfromearth9 14 hours ago|||

Chemistry is the same for each of us, as is physics, so I'd be inclined to think that red is the same red for everyone.

stevenhuang 12 hours ago||

You'd be inclined to, but no, of the little we do understand about human perception, we do understand enough by now to say that different people can genuinely experience and perceive the world differently, sometimes wildly so.

Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).

14 14 hours ago||

I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?

At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?

Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.

My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.

WesleyJohnson 10 hours ago||

Oh wow, I hadn't thought of taste, but you're exactly right. Fascinating subject.

fittingopposite 8 hours ago||

Interestingly, there are several languages where blue and green are one color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

porphyra 15 hours ago||

There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun

balupton 14 hours ago||

Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.

driverdan 13 hours ago||

I looked up the banknotes since I was curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_rupiah#/media/File:...

Is it the Rp2000 and Rp50000 that get mixed up? They seem obvious in that picture but it might be harder to tell them apart in low light.

balupton 11 hours ago||

In terms of pass me the blue note, yep. I consider the 2000 and 50000 in your photo as blue.

The added complexity is their currency is like paper, so it wears, fades, tears, and marks. Furthermore, there are so many zeroes. Their sizes are all identical or similar. Different generations of the notes are in use, some better than others. Indonesians also use "," as the decimal indicator, and "." as the thousands separator; in practice, both are intermixed with no sense or reason, sometimes even in the same paragraph, even on banking websites <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Indonesian/Lessons/Number...>, often due to misconfigured locale settings on computers (expect to see red spellcheck underlines on everything on Indonesian office computers).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Indonesian_ru...>

<https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.a04f7812fd4ef0b773c7b081206bc28c...>

<https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/new-rupiah-issued-2022...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/WC177J/a-pile-of-crumpled-indonesi...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/D17MR1/background-of-indonesia-mon...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/JN9ANB/close-up-picture-of-indones...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2CXNYGJ/indonesia-money-isolated-b...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2KBJ4H6/semarang-indonesia-novembe...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2T13B4R/stock-photo-of-indonesian-...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2R5K0NE/new-series-of-rupiah-bankn...>

keane 15 hours ago||

Same with Old and Middle Irish (1200 AD): "glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of gray"

I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue

My_Name 2 hours ago||

Tried this on 2 monitors, made a difference of 77%-85%

I noticed that what I was actually seeing later on was 'is this more blue or green than the last colour' due to my eyes adjusting to the previous screen and just seeing the difference.

mcalus3 4 hours ago||

In Polish language we commonly call turquoise "lightblue", so instinctively we'll have the boundary not at the middle of the turquoise, but between the turquiose and green, (i got hue 165, 95% of the population). We also call it "sea-color", but sea is also more culturally associated with blue than green.

seszett 3 hours ago|

In French, turquoise is "bleu turquoise", so obviously blue. So I'm not surprised it says "For you, turquoise is blue."

In Dutch it's called "appelblauwzeegroen" (apple-blue sea-green, yes it's weird) so it's not surprising either that my wife sees it as green I guess.

pppone 7 hours ago||

I would love to know if "Cambridge Blue" is actually blue to the average person, because, to me, it's green...

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Blue_(colour)

mrweasel 6 hours ago||

That's beige, but green.

thepra 6 hours ago|||

that's green! whoever invented the name of the colour had a different vision

philipwhiuk 4 hours ago||

It's named after Oxford Blue, which is in fact, blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Blue_(colour)

The Cambridge Rugby blue which pre-dates the Boating blue is also more properly blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_University_R.U.F.C.

Glyptodon 14 hours ago||

I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.

I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.

Seem to get ~172.

bandofthehawk 14 hours ago|

I feel the same way, after the first couple of responses, I was just thinking it's blue-green. So I just had to pick randomly.

A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.

fwip 14 hours ago||

I suspect that asking people to pick on a visual spectrum would lead to most people clicking closer to the midpoint.

pcblues 3 hours ago||

I had a colour-blindness test when I worked at an abattoir.

My job was to find odd things on a one third section of a side of beef as it went past and cut it off. 1500 or so per day.

The test showed numbers created with blobs of close colours.

The last test didn't have a number in it.

Cheeky buggers.

still_grokking 12 hours ago||

This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).

I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).

Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)

Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).

ticulatedspline 15 hours ago|

72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".

my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess

crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.

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