Reply to comment

I think this is really interesting, that since ancient times colors have been used to induce certain moods and states of mental health in people. To me this implies that perhaps there is some common reality innately true to each person, at least in terms of color. If each person saw a different blue then I don’t think this color could be used by so many different people, across many cultures and centuries of time, to induce serenity in people. Even though this suggests that many of us see the same colors, however, I still do not think that we can definitively conclude that objects are the colors that most of us see (who are not color-blind or have too much red or green etc.). All I think we can conclude is that many of us get the same input to our nervous systems and then make sense of it the same way. And I also feel that saying that one reality is more right than another is unnecessary. I really like Molly Pieri’s definitions of reality, particularly that of collective reality. There are things that many of us can agree on as being out there but that this may or may not reflect the ‘real’ reality. Some people in the class have stated their beliefs that we can definitively conclude that some aspects of reality are real, for example, that we were all sitting at a table. I think this goes against the original mantra of the class (that we are trying to just “get it less wrong”) and though I do believe that there is a table there I think there’s a possibility that that idea is merely a construction. I also think it’s possible that colors might merely be a construction of our nervous systems that evolved to help us effectively interact with our environments and with each other (which in turn may or may not be the “best” or most optimal way we could have evolved).