Do you see violet....?

How do you know that your color sensation when you see a violet is not like another person’s sensation when he or she sees a marigold?

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Dinesh ^club

. . . . To take John Locke’s famous example of seeing colors: how do you know that your color sensation when you see a violet is not like another person’s sensation when he or she sees a marigold? The answer, which it has never required a great philosopher to demonstrate, is simply that you do not -- because, as Locke said, “one man’s mind cannot pass into another man’s body.” Of course, you long ago ceased to find this conclusion novel. Yet there is no denying how surprising it was at first discovery -- and how remarkable it still remains whenever you return to it: not simply an interesting tease but a startling metaphysical revelation.

Indeed, what a strange state of affairs. Nothing else in the world is private in the same way that conscious experience is. Everything else in the world joins up in the four-dimensional space-time manifold that basic physics says is sufficient to describe the universe. But consciousness, it seems, is essentially different. Each individual’s consciousness is as much a world apart, on its own plane of existence, as is each separate universe in the “multiverse” that cosmologists sometimes fantasize about. ~ Page 127

4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.

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Do you see violet....?

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