Topic: What if...

[Revned]

Here's something to get you thinking: what if you were born with a brain defect such that all your vision was inverted? Black would be white, orange would be blue, etc. Would you be able to tell? Would anyone be able to tell?



I think not. Unlike colorblindness, you would not lose any of the original image. It would look normal to you, having never seen what things should really look like. You would be completely unaware for your entire life. Imagine looking at the sun and being blinded by black light....

[Inty]

Revned Said:

Here's something to get you thinking: what if you were born with a brain defect such that all your vision was inverted? Black would be white, orange would be blue, etc. Would you be able to tell? Would anyone be able to tell?



I think not. Unlike colorblindness, you would not lose any of the original image. It would look normal to you, having never seen what things should really look like. You would be completely unaware for your entire life. Imagine looking at the sun and being blinded by black light....

You said black is white. The sun is orangeish yellowish, so wouldn't you be blinded by blue light?



<_<



Anyway, i'm sure someone would discover that you have it early on in life because of simple questions like `what color do you want your room to be painted?`

You ask for Green and get Green, when in reality you wanted Purple.

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I wonder if a girl will come over and play with my Wii.

[Revned]

If you look straight into the sun you get blinded by almost white light. Sure, it's a little yellow, so you're right. You'd be blinded by very dark blue light.



The color thing is the very essence of my idea. You wouldn't know what green looks like to other people. You would grow up calling green colors green, though they look like purple to you. You would be able to identify all colors just as well as other people, but they'd be the exact opposite in your eyes.

[Grizzly]

That would be quite strange. But I am not quite sure if you really would never realize that something is wrong with you. I mean people would get up if it is quite dark outside and everyone sleeps when colours get lighter outside, although the words would be inverted in your vocabulary so that the dark colours are called light ones and light colours are called dark ones. So everything would be fine when talking about it.

It would also be very white inside caves but still you wouldn't be able to see anything more than us there because there would be no other colour than that white just like for us there is nothing else than black.

It's funny that I cannot find any situation in which someone would realize something is wrong just by your reactions as you would learn in early years to fear the brightness (called darkness then) and that dark colours are friendly.



Although here comes a difficult question, what happens if some colour related things are determined by the genes?

For example if tiredness is set by the brain when it gets dark around you - would you become night-active? And would red attract special attention for you or would it just perish in all other colours because it's just a light blue?

[Revned]

That's an interesting thought. Maybe some nocturnal people really do have this problem? I doubt it, but it seems possible.

[Thraxian]

Borrowed from "Clarifying Ostensive Definitions by Logical Possibility of Inverted Color Perceptions", I'm sure that this will add to the discussion:





Although many materialists are not satisfied with the conclusions of logical empiricism, they have no different opinion about the view of logical empiricism on ostensive definitions because they believe that a sensation reflects a property of objects and there is a one-to-one relation between the sensations and the properties. As to that ostensive definitions are made with the sensations or with the properties, this is of no importance to them. They still more have no doubt about the identity between sensations of different people. What is critical in this paper is to prove that the identity between sensations or experiences of different people cannot be logically proved. And it is possible that different people with the same language have different even inverted sensations; and hence, the view of logical empiricism on the ostensive definitions is logically wrong.

[bustin98]

Imagine if everyone was able to "sync" their perceptions of reality with everyone else.



This brings another question: Will someone with inverted color perception be able to accurately identify how bright or shaded an object is? Probably not.



In the end, it seems it doesn't matter as perception is relative. Hopefully no one loses any sleep wondering if what they see is what the rest of the world sees.



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Cool beans

[bustin98]

Here's another thought to get you thinking:



Imagine a world that lives on a sheet of paper. There is no "up" or "down", only North South East West and everything in between. Now shove a pencil through the paper. How would that look to that world? A round object that grew from nothing to a stable size, then disappeared, leaving a 'nothing' in its wake.



A 3D object in a 2D world.



Now bump it up a notch. What would a 4D object in a 3D world be like? An object untouched by time and the movement of space? Could we even acknowledge the existance of such a thing?



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Cool beans

[Revned]

Very interesting, Thraxian. I never considered extending it to other senses. My friend also told me about some philosophy he read that says people's favorite colors can be applied to completely different objects, just whatever pleases them best.



bustin98, there's an entire book about that. It's called Flatland. It's about a flat world and how its inhabitants live, and an encounter with a 3 dimensional object. I understand the concepts and how they apply to the next level, but the fourth dimension still escapes me. I don't suppose anyone can really accurately visualize a 4 dimensional object anyway.

[Dan]

I've thought about this a bit too, but in a different way.



In 2d graphs, a tangent line consists of a single line, i.e. then entirety of a 1d graph.  In 3d graphs, a tangent plane consists of a single plane, i.e. the entirety of a 2d graph.  Thus, 4d graphs must have tangent cubes, the entirety of 3d graphs.  Simply trying to visualize this has put an end to my speculations, but I thought I'd throw this out there.



4d is crazy stuff, yo.

[Revned]

Tangent cubes? Oh goodness. My head hurts.

[JonLeung]

Inty's wrong about the colour.  I've actually had this very thought many times before, actually.  If the colours were reversed, you would always believe your reds to be blue, so you would always refer to the same colours even if you perceived them differently.  If you were taught that what you see as red is called "blue", you would always call it red regardless.



When you consider that our visual senses are limited to red to violet, and can't see beyond, like infrared and ultraviolet, then even if there were "true" colours, we're still missing out on a lot of light.  It's possible that other beings might see different ranges of light, resulting in a different view of the world.  We know that some people are colour blind, and that animals are more dependent on other senses, so we know it's not an impossibility.  While bats being blind is only a myth, they navigate using reflected sounds, so depending on how you define "seeing", that creates more variations on how the world is "seen".



I don't think we can comprehend 4-D.  The fourth dimension being supposedly time (or duration), what that might mean is that a four-dimensional image includes how something appears at all times all at once.  "Somewhen" becomes a concept as concrete as somewhere, so a four-dimensional image of me (assuming that my body didn't change much) already (or rather, always has) include(s) a younger self and a skeletal, long-dead self.  Weird.  Actually, I think I'm deviating a bit from what 4-D really is...but yeah, the weird things you think of when you consider time as either malleable or extremely concrete.

[Revned]

Most of the time when people talk about the fourth dimension, they're referring to a fourth physical dimension. If you're talking about a hypercube using time as the fourth dimension, you have to imagine a cube that appears and disappears after a time identical to the length of the sides. Figure out how to measure time in feet, and you're set.

[KingKuros]

Here's how the colors are inverted:



Red --> Green

Blue --> Orange

Yellow --> Purple





Here is a link to a page about the speculations of a 4th spatial dimension.



http://tetraspace.alkaline.org/

[Revned]

That site looks like a modernized version of Flatland. Very interesting. I'll add it to my bookmarks.