Exposure

Yesterday I came up with some crazy theory. It was one of those moments I regularly have on a cozy late night with a decent glass of wine (or two).

It’s about colors. When you see a leave of a plant, you know it’s green. But why do you see it as ‘green’? And how do you know it really is green?

Scientifically spoken, we see colours by the reflection of (sun)light. The amplitude and length of the lightwaves (is this correct English? Well... I guess you know what I mean ) that fall on your eye are translated in your brains to a certain reception of a color.
But... How do I know that you and I see the same thing in the same color? Well, we see the color (lightwaves), we translate it to a certain image in our brains. But how do we know that we both make that translation exactly the same way?

A little intermezzo:
We’re all convinced of the fact that the leave of a plant is green. Everybody says so. But... could it be that I translate the ‘green lightwaves’ the same way as you translate ‘brown lightwaves’? That means that actually leaves aren’t green at all.
Actually, in France they aren’t green at all. They are vert. That brings me to something crucial: The name of a color is just a name of a color. When we all start tomorrow saying the leaves of a plant are blue, that color is blue from then on. Let’s go back to the main story now.


This all means, I guess, that what I see as a green plant, could be translated different in someone’s elses head.
How do I actually know, that green is green? My parents told me that the color of the leaves of a plant is green. And I’m told what generally is regarded as blue and what should be yellow. But that doesn’t answer the question wether or not I interpret yellow or green the same way you do.
Possibly, I interpret green the same way that you iterpret pink. That means that, if you could look with my brains for one day, and I used that time yours, we could be seeïng really strange things. Like pink plants, or yellow water, or green milk. And vice versa when I use yours. Compare it to when you look though those funky colored sunglasses. But we’re so common to what we see, that we actually think that what we all see is the same, all the time.

This all is a really strange idea, isn’t it? When my favourite color is blue, and yours is blue too, we may think that we both like the same color, but maybe we interpret the color different, what results in another image in our minds. Actually, we both like another color. Or vice-versa: when my favorite color is pink, and yours is blue, but in our minds we accidentally interpret those colors exactly the same... do we have the same favorite color? Regardless of the fact that we give it different names?