Assignment 6 - Sarah

I’m a Broadway fanatic. A few summers ago my father and I went to see Matilda and I fell in love with it. I downloaded the soundtrack on my phone and started listening to the songs on repeat and I started to learn the lyrics. A lyric from a song called Quiet caught my attention.

 “There’s no way of knowing if red means the same thing in your head as red means in my head when someone says red.”

I started thinking more and more about this lyric and it’s fascinating. In all actuality we have no idea if the colors I see are the same as the colors you see. If I point at a book and asked what color it was we might both say red, but we could be seeing two different colors and just have learned them as the same color name: “red”.

I love this theory because we don’t have an answer and we have no way of finding an answer with the technology we have available to us. I used to automatically think that I saw things the exact same way as everyone else and everyone thinks in generally the same process I do and although it is possible we have no real way to test it.

We both say the sky is blue and the grass is green. But we don’t know if we are seeing the same colors. All we know is that we both learned those colors as “blue” and “green”.