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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Philosophically speaking, does each of us experience "520 nm green" the same way?

Is my "520 nm green" actually your "635 nm red"? And vice versa?

Are all of our color embeddings different despite the same g-protein coupled biochemical activation?

My left and right eyes are shifted +cyan and +magenta respectively, so, no, definitely not — but hooray for the resulting semi-tetrachromacy :D

For different brains, the answer has to be no because the images you see are a "neural net" construction and if that neural net differs then the "image" you see is different

this is actually a surprisingly rich area of debate in philosophy of mind. see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/

Consciousness and qualia are a mystery.

I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.

There is a cognitive science research group in japan that looks into this kind of problems [0]. They made a similarity judgement task, and construct embendings using it, which is basically a similarity structure in some vector space.

[0] Is my "red" your "red"?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40124475/

This still can't show that my red is your red, only that my red is on the same position of my color wheel as your red is on yours

>the same g-protein coupled b

If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?

> If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?

That path leads down to solipsism which is not very intersting

I was talking about something a little more empirical. Like, literally, does my g-protein consist of exactly the same amino acids chained together in the same sequence, and folded identically? Some minor mutations don't always make the protein non-functional, not all would result in color-blindness. I thought this was the basis for tetrachromats anyway, just with a different protein (and a more significant mutation).

Same with "firmware". If our brains process the data differently, then our actual perception might vary in (eventually, I would hope) real-world measurable ways.

define "experience the same way"

There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.

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