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Comment by Chinjut | Hacker News Reader

Why should the concept of color be harder to wrap one's mind around or describe than the concept of sight itself? Or, considering any animal with any kind of sensory receptors other than those you yourself have, wrapping your mind around or describing the concept of the data produced by such receptors? [A bat's echolocatory sense, say, or magnetoception...]

["Oh, it's easy to understand the PHYSICS and BIOLOGY of color, but can the blind really comprehend the EXPERIENCE of color?", some might say. Alright, fine, shades of "What Mary Didn't Know", but I'm not keen to get into that.]

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I suppose what I was getting at is this: How do you explain what color is to a natively-blind person in a non-mathematical, non-physics based approach? In other words, the way most of the world learns about color (qualitatively). You can't use words like "shade" or "hue", because the very definition of those words are themselves tied to color.

For example, attempt to describe a baseball. Descriptions invoking roundness and texture can be easily understood because the individual retains his/her sense of feel. But saying "it's white in color... white is actually the presence of all colors..." obviously doesn't work.

I'd be curious to hear an example of how you would explain color to someone who has been blind for life.

I've thought about this before, and concluded that the best analogy to draw would likely be that of sound pitch or timbre.

When a sound is close to you, it seems louder. When it's far away, it seems quieter. But sounds have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - pitch being the most recognizable. And a sound's pitch changes how you perceive it unconsciously - that is, there is a "qualia" to hearing a low sound vs. a high sound that cannot really be explained.

Similarly, visible objects which are close appear larger and those far away appear smaller. But visible objects have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - namely color. And an object's color also has a certain "qualia" that unconsciously affects how you feel about it.

This has the added advantage of making it easy to explain Doppler shift vs. redshift :)

Assuming they can still hear, I would probably try to explain the colour of light to be analogous to the pitch of sound.

Try looking into qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

This was touched on in The Giver, interestingly. The main character becomes able to see color after never having been able to.

Perhaps it's as good a place as any to make a scientific explanation but... I can see, hear, and understand the science behind light and sound. But as I sit here and think about it there is no link in my mind between the science of light and the EXPERIENCE of perceiving a color :|

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