Is the colour you see the same as what I see? It’s a question that has puzzled both philosophers and neuroscientists for decades, but has proved notoriously difficult to answer… Now, a study that recorded patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of different people.
The researchers found that in most cases they were able to predict which colour was being viewed by a participant in this second group, using the patterns of brain activity they had seen in the first group. They also found that different colours were processed by subtly different areas within the same region of the visual cortex, and that different brain cells responded more strongly to particular colours. These differences were consistent across participants.
The paper on Journal of Neuroscience (sadly not open access): https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2025/08/29/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025
My critique is… the researchers are based in Tubingen, Germany, and I assume most of their 15 participants are of European cultural heritage (cannot verify… no open access). I would love to see if they can replicate this in a more multi-cultured setting. Some Asian cultures have rather different verbiage for different colors, and I wonder whether that would bias ppl’s perception.
This is completely missing the point, which is that qualia are only experienced by the conscious mind. They cannot be measured by anything other than the mind of the person experiencing them.
Measuring that the brain activity is the same is not sufficient to prove this unanswerable philosophical question. You would have to also prove that different minds have the same experience while exhibiting the same neural activity - a problem which reduces to the same question: is my experience of blue the same as yours?
Yeah:
No, dumbass. It was always obvious it’s unknowable.
Just because basic research doesn’t resolve a question perfectly does not imply that it ‘missed’ the point. I think this is a serious mistake in a lot of people’s understanding of science, and it’s worth sitting on.
Most things we learn are incremental.
This is normal. An experiment is not bad just because it is incremental. We should be looking at every opportunity to chip away at seemingly impossible questions.
And I think the study here is unusually high in information gained and context relevance. This experiment could have given extremely strong evidence that we do see colors differently than each other, because if we have different neurological reactions it would be pretty weird for our qualia to agree (most physicalist descriptions would have consider it proved that we see different colors). If, when we both see blue, our brains light up in very different ways, that would be weird!
So this is a point in favor of shared qualia. It doesn’t resolve the question; that will require several new ideas, breakthroughs in consciousness, and a lot of back-and-forth with philosophy. But it damages any theory that qualia are different because of brains being different, and that’s cool.
It is possible that you’ve defined qualia as explicitly non-physical (and so must posit a bunch of extra stuff for this study to stay irrelevant). This is done in some circles, but is not standard afaict. It comes in as definition (4) here, after several that are consistent with the study and OP’s use.
I have noticed that you can broadly put people into two cups.
People who understand why this is an unanswerable question, and people who say “Bro, what the fuck are you on about, I can see blue just fine, it looks the same as it does for anyone.”
Both of those cups are out in force in this post.
i don’t agree with this reasoning. why would the same neural activity result in a different experience? other than reactionary doubt and preconcieved belief, what reason do you have to actually question this? you seem to be smuggling in an assumption that the same neural activity could result in different experiences, isn’t this a positive claim that requires its own proof; wouldn’t the null hypothesis be that similiar phenomenom play out similarly until there is shown a reason to believe otherwise?
As an analogy, just like dragging a 1000kg at 1m/s is not the same experience as dragging a 10g sphere at 1m/s. The same thing happened “something moved at 1 m/s”, yet they were very distinct experiences.
That being said, Occam’s razor applies here. If it’s the same brain activity, it probably results in the same experience.
But there’s still room for doubt. Since brains don’t all have the exact same amount of neurons arranged in the exact same way. And their chemical composition might be slightly different. They also change with age.
I don’t think science can prove definitely that a slightly different brain structure won’t result in a different perception of color. Just like it can’t prove/disprove the existence of god. Some questions are just unsolvable. But science can get far enough so we say “this is probably true/false”
Two people can have a different experience of smell and taste despite the input as well as the way their brains are processing that input being the same. While not a perfect analogy, I don’t see why assuming that everyone experiences colors the same would be any different than assuming that everyone likes the same food.
I’m not saying I definitely believe that everyone does share color experience, I’m saying the evidence presented in OP seems to suggest they could share color experience, and that evidence should not be simply dismissed. It’s not direct evidence for the belief imo, it’s more like evidence that suggests new lines of inquiry.
Because the brain’s neurons aren’t identical from person to person.
I keep seeing these types of articles periodically and the reductionism is always assumed to be valid. It bothers me so much.
I think this is the closest we have ever gotten to being able to answer the question. But yes, it might not ever be completely solvable
Our biology is deterministic and thus can be measured, including the mind and experiences.