“Indeed when we first met, and he described how objects and surfaces “fluctuated” in different light, he was, so to speak, describing the world in wavelengths, not in colors. The experience was so unlike anything he had ever experienced, so strange, so anomalous, that he could find no parallels, no metaphors, no paints or words to depict it.” (p.29)
This passage drew my attention because I began to consider our conversation about qualia from last week in reference to Mr. I.’s in ability to express what he was seeing. He was only able to express what his visual impairment was in reference to what it used to look like, and he had no reference point in his memory he was unable to describe his current sight.
The impairment of his current visual perception was complicated by his lack of subjective experience, because he had no previous experience to draw upon to describe what he was perceiving. The frustration from not being able to adequately describe or understand his impairment added to the physiological effect that his impairment had on Mr. I. I considered if the physiological effect on Mr. I, being put off from foods, and social situations for example were apart of the neurological damage that caused his condition to begin with.
This specific passage made me think of our discussion about Higashida’s work and how metaphors are used to describe what NT people could never actually understand because they haven’t experienced it. But from this passage, Mr. I is colorblind – so he doesn’t have any means of describing what he sees other than what he knows (by describing what he sees in wavelengths). I don’t know how I’d process the description of wavelengths, but this made me think how would a color blind person process a description of color? Would these two descriptions somehow correlate? This also made me think of how I would even describe color itself.
Both of you make interesting points and pose great questions.mike, I wonder too how I would describe color to a person who is colorblind. Color is one of those things we never really describe on its own. Usually we would say something is a “bright red” or “soft pink”, “sky blue”. When saying this we are probably 9.8 times out of 10 talking to a person who can see color. A person who is able to take previous experiences and apply it to the current conversation. Explaining color to a person who has never seen color seems nearly impossible.
I do understand the frustration where we depend on others because I had surgery on my right eye. It’s a saying you never understand others pain if you been through the same pain. It reminds of this it’s very easy to point others and judge them, but we don’t know what they have been through. I think it’s very hard to live the life in black and white area where the limits are given to the person. It’s painful because we all see colors and we know how beautiful it is when we go to beach. It’s hard to even imagine where there is no color in our lives. Everything will seem boring and there will be no words to express their thoughts or their feelings about what they feel to others. Can we all imagine living our life without colors? We all will hate that even to imagine.
There’s an organization called Colour Blind Awareness. Their website offers some resources that try to help people who aren’t color blind get a sense of how various forms of colorblindness might be experienced:
http://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour-blindness-experience-it/
Describing color to a blind person seems impossible. It is like asking someone to describe how water tastes. Their are some things the human mind can understand and acknowledge yet we are unable to express exactly how we know. A person may not be able to see in color but does it mean they do not know about colors? Maybe they simply cannot express their own understanding. The brain is a very unique and complicated thing. I always wondered, if a person was born deaf and never heard the sound of a voice, do they hear a voice in their head when they think? More questions like these we will never be able to find the answer to, but it is something that makes our brains think!