this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
103 points (95.6% liked)
Asklemmy
44152 readers
1176 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Like hearing but with color.
No, seriously, it's impossible to accurately convey. You can talk about the mechanics, the use cases, what you can do with it, but you cannot convey "how it is", same as a bat cannot convey "how sonar is".
It really is, which is why I find videos like "Kids explain color to blind people" (which is an actual video that exists btw, it's the dumbest thing I've ever seen out of a clickbaity video trying to be smart, and one kid is even like "so you know what an apple looks like right?" or something) so dumb.
Only good answer, really - can only answer in the terms of other senses, however, since colour is meaningless too: "It's like being able to hear the texture of things, even at a great distance."
That's exactly the point. Nothing you say will have a meaning over what that person has experienced. You can't really convey what seeing means, and the "but with color" was meant to show exactly that.
You can explain the technicalities, but that's trivial enough that there's no point in explaining it.
Imagine explaining what it feels like to e.g. drive a really fast car to someone who has never been in a car. Yeah, you can say "it's really fast" or "it's exciting/fear-inducing" or "acceleration pushes you into the seat", but nothing you say can actually convey the feeling.
Same with seeing. You can say, "with my eyes I can differentiate objects over long distances", but I am pretty sure every blind person already knows that. You can say, "Different things have different colors", but also they know that, but at the same time it has no meaning to them.
But then try to explain a beautiful sunrise or a moving painting or something else that's evokes emotions and then it falls apart, because you cannot convey that.