Color is maybe more like sound than it is like texture, pressure, temperature, or scent/taste; but it doesn’t usually have echoes or beats like sound does, and people who see can perceive lots of different colors at the same time on different objects in view.
One element of color is brightness. If you’ve felt sunlight and shadow on your skin, well, brightness is a lot like that. People who see use brightness and shadow to tell a lot about shapes of things, because things that are illuminated by light cast a shadow.
Another element of color is hue. If you’ve studied physics, you’ve encountered the idea of electromagnetic waves having frequencies, which is the same as photons carrying different amounts of energy. Hue is (mostly) just those frequencies, within the specific band that eyes can see. Paints and dyes affect which hues a surface reflects, because those chemicals resonate with those frequencies.
This is a FASCINATING topic. Anything relating to qualia, honestly, is. My understanding on a blind person seeing color under hallucinagens is, it’d depend on why they’re blind. If it’s something with the eye or optic nerve, then the brain, the thing that actually MAKES the color, should still be able to produce them, but if that area of the brain is damaged, then it’d be a lot less likely for them to see any color.
Also consider, if they do see color, but have never seen the world before, they won’t have any way to map color to object. So they may see a stop sign (or their interpretation of it, more like) and it may be in color, but essentially random. Now how do we know two people’s ‘red’ is the same color? All of this is absolutely fascinating to me.
One model of reality says that all sensations share a common root. If you could speak in terms of that root then maybe you could describe color to a blind man. You could probably describe a whole bunch of other strange things too.
Color is maybe more like sound than it is like texture, pressure, temperature, or scent/taste; but it doesn’t usually have echoes or beats like sound does, and people who see can perceive lots of different colors at the same time on different objects in view.
One element of color is brightness. If you’ve felt sunlight and shadow on your skin, well, brightness is a lot like that. People who see use brightness and shadow to tell a lot about shapes of things, because things that are illuminated by light cast a shadow.
Another element of color is hue. If you’ve studied physics, you’ve encountered the idea of electromagnetic waves having frequencies, which is the same as photons carrying different amounts of energy. Hue is (mostly) just those frequencies, within the specific band that eyes can see. Paints and dyes affect which hues a surface reflects, because those chemicals resonate with those frequencies.
I wonder if a blind person could see color while under the influence of hallucinogens.
Here’s a “Blind people on LSD” thing. Haven’t actually read it.
https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-blind-people.html
This is a FASCINATING topic. Anything relating to qualia, honestly, is. My understanding on a blind person seeing color under hallucinagens is, it’d depend on why they’re blind. If it’s something with the eye or optic nerve, then the brain, the thing that actually MAKES the color, should still be able to produce them, but if that area of the brain is damaged, then it’d be a lot less likely for them to see any color.
Also consider, if they do see color, but have never seen the world before, they won’t have any way to map color to object. So they may see a stop sign (or their interpretation of it, more like) and it may be in color, but essentially random. Now how do we know two people’s ‘red’ is the same color? All of this is absolutely fascinating to me.
One model of reality says that all sensations share a common root. If you could speak in terms of that root then maybe you could describe color to a blind man. You could probably describe a whole bunch of other strange things too.