Color my world

Today, I'm going to indulge in one of my blathers and the starting point will be Crayola crayons.

Things were different when I was a child. School shopping meant clothes, book bags and lunch boxes. Basic school supplies were provided by (gasp!) the school. Periodically we would receive pencils and tablets of faintly-lined gray paper. (Probably at the beginning of each quarter, but I didn't keep track of such things in those days.) At the beginning of each year we'd each get a brand new 8 pack of Crayola crayons.

(I will grant that this may have had more to do with the fact that the Crayola factories are located within the greater Lehigh Valley, which is where I lived most of my life until college. But the fact remains that when I was a kid, real crayons were always Crayola crayons.)

In that basic 8 pack, were brand new, unbroken crayons of red, yellow, blue, green, orange, brown, purple, and black. (I know my memory is accurate because I double-checked at the Crayola website.) Thanks to that glorious annual 8 pack, every one of my classmates knew what a basic red crayon looked like.

Of course, as we got older, we would expand our horizons with packs of 16 or even 64 colors. (Note to self for further reflection: could Crayola's basic package counts be one of the reasons why at feel so comfortable in octal and hexadecimal? Is it possible I became a computer geek because Crayola crayons were packaged in sleeves of 8?) But that's where things start breaking down a bit, at least in terms of common experience. When you have many shades of red from which to choose, how do you tell them apart?

Now, if you're an interior designer or a graphic artist, you might be able to readily distinguish between crimson, vermilion, coral, scarlet, maroon, ruby, and plain red. You may even be able to identify them without having other samples for comparison. Most of us, however, would resort to identifying individual samples of these colors as simply "red".

Let's go one step further. Thanks to the miracles of computer technology, we can accurately specify over 16 million colors. (16,777,216 distinct colors using 24-bit RGB representation.) But who among us can actually tell the difference between #FF0000 red and #FE0000 red? Actually, that's the whole point of using 24-bits: the color "jaggies" disappear and we perceive smooth "true color". (Digital representation of analog forms is just practical calculus: if you make the partitions fine enough, the difference between the approximation and the actual smooth curve is insignificant.)

Here, however, is where we get to the crux of the matter at the heart of this essay: when I show you my red Crayola crayon, we both agree that it's red because it says so on the label and because we both know which "red" is in that basic 8 pack of crayons. But I do not (and cannot) know what you actually see. The version of red you see may be slightly darker or lighter than the version I see.

Try this simple experiment. Go to any store which has a wall of televisions showing the same program. Each of them is receiving the exact same signal (sensory input), but you can clearly see variations among the different pictures. Some are darker. Some are more saturated. Some are red-shifted. (Yes, I'm talking about value, saturation, and hue: HSV)

Now imagine those televisions are people. Each is receiving the same sensory input, yet each is experiencing a slightly different version of that input.

This basic, yet oft ignored, fact of the individuation of human experience is at the core of consciousness studies. I don't know, I can't know, precisely what it's like to be you.

IMNSHO, this fact also should be at the core of our interactions with other people. For simplicity, we assume that our experience is shared, and that you know full well what I mean when I say "red". Now granted, it isn't a matter of apocalyptic import that you might perceive it as scarlet (instead of as Rhett -- sorry couldn't resist.) But what about when we are discussing more substantial, and perhaps volatile, topics?

If we can find the common ground, if we can agree that we're all seeing slightly different shades of red, then we might be able to resolve our differences without resorting to alienation and violence.

And that would color my world with hope.