Weird title, but bear with me.
The tongue can perceive 5 different tastes. Smell accounts for much of what we perceive as flavor.
Those 5 tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory/umami.
What I want to know is if, for example, all sweet flavors taste the same as every other sweet flavor, varying only in intensity.
Best I could find is that sweetness from sugar has a much shorter duration than sweetness from artificial sweeteners.
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The 5 flavors thing is a simplification of the truth. Think of a color wheel. You have primary colors, then secondary, then tirtiary on. It is as complicated. You didn’t even mention spicy/hot.
So no, they won’t be the same. Some people are less sensitive to flavor. And some are very sensitive to certain flavors. Maybe they really hate/love garlic.
The “five tastes” thing is an oversimplification. You can absolutely tell the difference between different types of sweet, salty, etc. It’s very handy for things like knowing whether a fruit will kill you.
Also, the “zones” you may have seen drawings of are basically untrue. Some areas of your tongue can taste certain flavors better, but they all taste everything.
Taste is actually just the sensation of an array of receptors for hundreds of different molecules (your taste buds) and similar receptors for the 5 base tastes just happen to be neat each other, but you can definitely have a different sweet sensation for sugar then let’s say for sweeteners
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