How can we truly know if the colors we see are the true colors of the plants and animals around us if all the information(colors we see) have to be processed through organic eyes nerves and brains?
In: Biology
This is what’s known as the hard problem of consciousness: how do we explain the experience we have? There is no answer yet, and it is a problem that scientists and philosophers are grappling with today. Some think that mind and body are separate things (dualism), and that there is some yet undiscovered thing that is consciousness or even that it is not knowable at all. Others think that consciousness is strictly explainable by the physical stuff of the brain (materialism) and that consciousness emerges from it. There is an interesting third group that claim every physical thing all the way down to atoms and electrons have some rudimentary form of conscious experience (panpsychism), so it’s more like building blocks of consciousness that add up to the experience we have. Which ever camp you are in, the answer is still unknown.
Edit: Strictly speaking though, there is no reason to believe that objects even have color at all outside of our experience. How could they? By definition, color must be generated by some observational mechanism–that is, it only exists because we experience it.
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