Is Your Red The Same as My Red?

Color isn’t a property of the outside world—it’s a construction inside the brain. The electromagnetic spectrum can be measured, but the lived experience of “red,” “blue,” or “green” can’t be directly observed in someone else’s mind. That creates a hard problem: even when two people point at the same strawberry and both confidently label it “red,” there’s no way to verify that the internal experience is identical. Communication and shared behavior can remain consistent even if the underlying perceptions differ.

This uncertainty matters because it highlights how private perception is at the level of “qualia”—raw, ineffable feelings like the experience of pain or color. The transcript uses an analogy to an alien who could learn every biological detail about pain (including neural pathways like A delta and C fibers) and still never actually feel it. Knowing the mechanisms wouldn’t bridge the gap between physical processes and subjective experience. Philosophers call this mismatch the “Explanatory Gap,” and it becomes especially vivid when trying to describe color to someone who has never seen.

A blind person’s perspective illustrates the problem. Tommy Edison, blind his entire life, describes color as a foreign concept and notes that common explanations—like red being “hot” and blue being “cold”—don’t produce the missing experience. The issue isn’t that language is insufficient in general; it’s that there may be no reliable way to map words onto the specific internal sensation. The transcript then turns to arguments from Daniel Dennett, who suggests qualia might seem private and unshareable partly due to limitations of language rather than an absolute barrier. In principle, a different vocabulary—or even a communication system that triggers color-like experiences without retinal input—could make sharing possible. Still, the practical bottom line remains: there’s currently no method to determine whether “my red” matches “your red.”

The discussion broadens from perception to mind-reading. Humans can ask questions about their own experiences and about what others know, but animals—especially signing apes—haven’t been observed doing the same. The transcript points to Joseph Jordania’s work on the first question and connects the absence of questioning to a lack of “Theory of Mind,” the ability to understand that other individuals have separate mental states and information. The Sally-Anne test shows how young children develop this capacity: before about age four, children predict that Sally will look where the cookie is now, not where Sally last placed it, because they fail to separate their own knowledge from Sally’s.

Taken together, the message is stark: people are alone inside their own minds. Even shared labels like “red” and shared pleasures like taste don’t guarantee shared inner experience. What humans can do is ask, compare, and stay curious—because the only honest access to another mind is through communication, not direct observation.