Do I see the same orange as you?

– by Muhammad Huzaifa, (student of AS Level Beaconhouse Potohar Campus) The universe consists of bouncing wavelengths and technically there is no colour in the universe. Despite the fact that the fruit orange has no colour, we unconsciously assume that it is orange in colour. Oranges instead possess certain qualities that cause them to absorb some wavelengths and reflect others. This doesn’t mean that the colour of an orange is determined by the light it reflects back since light too is colourless. Light consists of a variety of wavelengths and it is these wavelengths that generate different electrochemical impulses that the brain uses to create a visual sensation aka colour. That orange colour of an orange only exists inside your head. Colour is an illusion. This is where it gets interesting! You see, colour is an internal experience and we all have unique eyes and very distinctive brains and so one can raise a very interesting possibility that we may very well never get to prove, one that seeds conflict between our shared reality and our internal experiences. The effect of colour in your mind cannot be measured and so how do we know that if we look at an orange we see the same interpretation? It is very well likely that perhaps you see an orange as ‘purple coloured’ while i see orange as ‘orange-coloured’ and since you would come to think of the colour ‘purple’ as orange, everything that appears ‘orange-coloured’ to me would appear ‘purple coloured’ to you and you would call it orange. Now this is one example, apply it to our reality and each of us may very well see a brown or a pink or any other colour sunset, sea, plants and so on.. and since we can communicate effectively, we walk away never really knowing just how different our experiences may have been. We know that colour blind people exist, which aids this notion that there could be ways of seeing that could cause colour to look differently in different minds without altering their performances on any tests that exist. An interesting argument could be that in such a scenario wouldn’t our emotional experiences differ? Suppose that what I think of as red is blue to you. What we feel is a product of what we experience.. Like if you see fire as blue, you would come to think of blue as fiery and energetic while its red that evokes these responses in me. So in essence both of us have come to associate the same feelings with different visuals. We can’t encompass this experience of orange colour in words. This Inability to connect Ineffable raw feelings to physical phenomena creates a void that we call an ‘explanatory gap’ . How can you even describe red to someone who has never seen red or how do you describe pain to someone who has never felt it? Perhaps it’s not impossible to use words to make a blind person experience a colour but it is in essence a shortcoming of our language! Perhaps this may very well be the case till the end of time!