This is how you see the Lake District, right?
I don't find this week's thought experiment all that troubling, but I'll be interested to see how others see it...
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If you could view the world through other people's eyes, what would you see? This question had ceased to be either hypothetical or metaphorical for Cecilia. She had just tried out the remarkable U-View™ Universal Visual Information Exchange Web. This enables one person to connect themselves to another in such a way as to see exactly what that person sees, as she sees it.
This is a remarkable experience for anyone. But for Cecilia it was even more startling. For when she saw the world as her friend Luke did, it was as though the world had turned inside out. For Luke, tomatoes were the colour she knew as blue. The sky was red. Bananas turned from yellow to green when they ripened.
When the U-View people heard about Cecilia's experience they subjected her to further tests. It transpired that she saw the world with what they called an inverted spectrum: every colour looked to her like the complement of the colour it looked to other people. But of course, because the differences were systematic, if it weren't for the U-View system no one would ever have known. After all, she rightly called tomatoes red just like everyone else.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 175.
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It feels like we're back to freshman-year dorm-room philosophy with this, but I'll try to find something deeper in it when I discuss it on Friday. Until then, let me know in the comments below how you see this.
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If you could view the world through other people's eyes, what would you see? This question had ceased to be either hypothetical or metaphorical for Cecilia. She had just tried out the remarkable U-View™ Universal Visual Information Exchange Web. This enables one person to connect themselves to another in such a way as to see exactly what that person sees, as she sees it.
This is a remarkable experience for anyone. But for Cecilia it was even more startling. For when she saw the world as her friend Luke did, it was as though the world had turned inside out. For Luke, tomatoes were the colour she knew as blue. The sky was red. Bananas turned from yellow to green when they ripened.
When the U-View people heard about Cecilia's experience they subjected her to further tests. It transpired that she saw the world with what they called an inverted spectrum: every colour looked to her like the complement of the colour it looked to other people. But of course, because the differences were systematic, if it weren't for the U-View system no one would ever have known. After all, she rightly called tomatoes red just like everyone else.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 175.
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It feels like we're back to freshman-year dorm-room philosophy with this, but I'll try to find something deeper in it when I discuss it on Friday. Until then, let me know in the comments below how you see this.
