Complex Numbers

Colorblind

I have a friend who is colorblind.

I don't mean that in the sense of he pretends to not be racist; I mean that he has the textbook male red-green colorblindness. He gets by just fine, of course; traffic lights always have red on top and green on the bottom. Except in Atlantic City, where the stoplights are sideways - it's a good thing I was driving, then. But it has led to some amusing stories, such as when he described a gray cat as "green."

When I was a kid, I had a realization: we have no way of knowing if the color I see as green is the same color as what you see as green, and vice versa. If neither of us is colorblind, we can agree that something is green, but if I could somehow see through your eyes, I might interpret it as yellow or red or some color that I've never seen. This was kind of a throwaway realization for me, but decades later, I saw a post where someone presented this as an epiphany they had while stoned, and the typical response was "...whoa." As if it wasn't something I didn't figure out when I was seven years old and most definitely not stoned.

I really should publish my epiphanies more often. Here's one: Creation and destruction are the same thing. Not just two sides of a coin, but the same thing. The only reason we call something one or the other is the value we place on the conditions before and after an event. For instance, consider a tree. You chop it down, destroying the tree - but creating firewood. You burn the firewood, destroying it - but creating warmth and light. Which of the two states you focus on depends only on your perceptions at the time. An argument can be made that creation is locally reversed entropy, while destruction is locally accelerated entropy, and I'd accept that argument to a point, but what about when you destroy a rock to create gravel? If you need the gravel more than you needed the rock, it's creation, even though you've increased entropy in the material.

We can't know if my green is your green, though. Maybe someday the technology will exist to allow us to see through another's eyes and hijack their perceptions, but even then, I'd still wonder. It's an untestable hypothesis, for now. But in at least one sense, we know that your green is not my green - because colors also have emotional associations. I think of money, because money is of great importance to me. Maybe you think of leaves and plants. Someone else might think of recycling and environmental issues. Yet another person could associate it with envy; another, with sickness, or mold, or Kermit the Frog. Maybe even all of these things, and more, at different times, in different moods. Possibly the earliest association I have with green was when I was riding in a car with my parents: "Green means go," they'd tell me, which would serve me well when I got my driver's license. Thanks, mom and dad; I never would have figured that out without your wisdom.

But I've still never seen a green cat.