A man can only experience the world from his own perspective. The way he sees, and hears, and smells, and touches, determines what his world is composed of. I do not know, and cannot know, how my brother experiences the world. I can never know what my mother’s world is like, except through how I perceive it through my senses, and my mental capacities.
Really, this thought is profound and we should give it more thought. What I see, is a world composed of thousands of people, where each person supposedly has his own unique perspective on life. It is funny how even when two people are looking at the same apple, their perceptions of the apple can’t be identical, for each perception of the apple is a macroscopic result of the aggregate effect of trillions of molecules moving rapidly in the head, and also the interpretation of the person – which is so abstract an entity that it can’t possibly be quantised, and whatever can’t be quantised can necessarily not be compared.
So, two people are looking at the same apple kept some distance away from them. Both say that it’s not just an apple, but a Pacific Rose apple, that it’s not just red, but more like Block Red in colour, that it’s not just warm, but lukewarm… Let us suppose that both of them can think of a host of properties that any given apple can possibly have – how soft it is, how long is its stalk, what is the precise shade of green that the leaves have etc. Now, even if I were to concede that both of them agree on the precise values of all the properties that they can think of related to that particular apple, and that they do not disagree on any of those, and I further concede that the definitions and meanings of all the words used as adjectives, and the relative magnitudes of the numbers used to describe it wherever required are all understood with common knowledge, can we still say that the two perceptions of the same apple that the two of them saw from their own perspectives, are identical?
We can’t. For even if we had mutually decided on the definitions of the terms we were using, we have no way to verify that we are referring to the same idea. Let me clear this up.
Suppose there is a person, A. And imagine that due to some quirk of the cells in his eyes, his perception has switched for the colours ‘red’ and ‘green’. So, for him, the colour that the leaves of a tree have, is identical to the colour we see in an apple. One possible objection to this is that it’s simply not possible, as the red and green parts of the spectrum don’t occur together. But it is just a thought experiment, and that consideration can be kept aside for now.
Remember that throughout his childhood, A has been taught that ‘Leaves are green’ and that ‘Apples are red’. So, he has labeled the colour that the leaves are having as green when the colour is, in fact, red for him.
Now, suppose A was applying for the post of a traffic policeman, and C got to know about this. He went and told the Head of Traffic Management, that A was unfit for the job, as he had a defect in his vision – his vision was such that he saw red instead of green and vice versa – a condition that would put the lives of people at risk as he would be giving signals contradictory to what the traffic light demanded – he would ask the cars to move when the light was ‘Red’ as he would be seeing it as ‘Green’.
The Head said, “Crikey! That is a weird condition! Let me send someone to take a test!” And it was decided that B would go to take a colour test of A.
Here is the conversation.
B : Look at that tree. What colour are its leaves?
A : (turning his head and observing the tree) Light green.
B : Are you sure?
A : Absolutely.
B : What other things are green in colour?
A : Well, the outer covering of Avocado is a shade of green, a Mantis is green in colour and even Emerald is a shade of green.
B : Okay… And give me examples of things that are red.
A : Well, apples are red, the rising sun exudes shades of redness and, in fact, your shirt has red stripes on a background of white!
B : (turns his chin downward to cast an observant glance at his shirt, and raises his head, impressed ) Well, that’s good enough! I wonder why C told me your vision is defective! It isn’t defective at all, I would say!
A : What had he said?
B : He said that you see ‘Red’ instead of ‘Green’ and vice versa!
A : Well, in my humble opinion, that is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard about myself!
Understand what is happening here. A has put the label ‘Green’ on everything which is actually red in colour! When he was growing up, and the teacher would show to him a leaf, which would actually be appearing ‘red’ to him, she would say ‘this leaf is green in colour’, and A would feed that information in his mind. And the same thing happened for every red thing.
Come to think of it, it’s not really a handicap at all. A has labeled the world just like everybody else, he is merely experiencing the world differently. And it is this experience that is crucial.
Is there any way to show to A that the colour to which he has given the name ‘red’ is actually the colour to which all the rest of his species has given the name ‘green’? I’m afraid not! No matter what method you choose, or what apparatus you bring, or what conversations you have, this factor can’t be conveyed, unless the two parties are aware of the situation. A would stop at the ‘red’ light which would actually be appearing green to him, but he’ll be calling it ‘red light’ nonetheless.
Hypothetically, it isn’t much difficult to scale up the above case and say that a significant number of people suffer from this same physical quirk – switching of colours in their vision. What they perceive as red, we perceive as green, although both label the any given object as having the same ‘labeled’ colour. Maybe each person is labelingand saying that leaves are green, but some are perceiving it as blue, some as red, some as yellow and so on. Remember that we can’t even say that the waves with a wavelength so and so are called ‘Red’ and so and so are called ‘Green’, as even here the same issues will arise as discussed above. The labeling can be done and matched and verified in a number of ways, through such experiments as mentioned above, by taking pictures, by using prisms etc. But the perceptions can never be compared.
So, the world is nothing but the intersection of a billion perceptions of itself. It can only be understood in terms of the labels that everyone, or most of us, agrees to give it. In that sense, it’s a blatant example of the muscle that the power of majority wields.
But realise that in labeling, even those in minority won’t know that they are a minority! If the leaves are ‘green’, they are green for everybody, and even those who are perceiving it as having the colour ‘blue’, would still end up giving to them the label ‘green’.
In fact, we should thank our lucky stars that our perceptions can’t be compared, for the very possibility of such a comparison would have resulted in total chaos and absolute anarchy in the human thought system. Imagine a future where we could take a picture of how we are perceiving the world – much like an ECG measures the workings of a given person’s heart.
So, A snaps this ‘perceptograph’ of himself watching a tree – the tree has red leaves. B and C bring a perceptograph where the same tree has green leaves. Others bring in yellow, purple, brown and blue versions of the leaves and then the ‘International Labeling Committee’ is befuddled as to what labeling is correct.
It takes a vote on the issue, and it turns out that 37.4% of the people say that it’s basically a shade of green, 21.8% say blue, 16.3% say red, 10.2% say yellow and the rest are divided between purple and brown.
After viewing the results, the Committee is perplexed as no colour has got even a simple majority. Then, out of the blue (pun intended), activists from the ‘Go Blue Foundation’, headquartered in Washington, file a petition asking the ILC to accept the label for the colour of leaves as ‘Blue’, for they have already spent billions of dollars trying to appeal to citizens of the US, where a large percentage of the people perceive leaves as being blue coloured, to shift to renewable sources of energy. If the ILC were to label the leaves as being anything other than ‘blue’, then GBF will suffer huge losses of billions of dollars in trying to re-brand itself, and it will have no option but to sue ILC for damages. At this, the Head of ILC tries to bring to their notice that, forget about a majority, blue hasn’t even received the maximum number of votes! This leads to howls of protests from the activists of GBF, who shriek even louder, and the Head of ILC wrings his hands in despair and passes the motion, labeling the leaves of trees as having the colour ‘Blue’.
Chaos and anarchy prevailed on Earth from that day onward, with signature campaigns on perceptographs emerging from the remotest corners of the world, trying to raise their voice for standardisation, but to no avail.