What it means to "connect” with others when objective communication may be fundamentally impossible
Even people with what vision scientists call color normal vision don’t see things quite the same way. The devil in the Blue Dress is that my blue might not have been your blue. Some research says that given a chance to choose a wavelength of light to represent an ideal yellow, most people pick pretty close to the same one. But ask about blue or green (the “grue” region of colorspace), and you get 80 nm worth of different answers. Might have something to do with the way the photoreceptors in the eye work. Or it might not. No one know
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to communicate those differences. Telling the person next to you what’s going on in your head, what your hallucination is like—I think that’s what we mean by “finding connection,” by making meaning with each other. Maybe it’s impossible, in the end. Maybe we’re all alone in our heads. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on being alone together.
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