Page 211 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

else sees the rose which we see as red in the same way as we do, or whether
what we see as blue he refers to as red." This applies to perceptions, not just
colors. Daniel Dennett, for instance, expresses his thoughts on and interest in
the subject:

Locke discussed it in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
and many of my students tell me that as young children they hit upon the
same idea for themselves, and were fascinated by it. The idea seems to be
transparently clear and safe:
"There are the ways things look to me, and sound to me, and smell to me,
and so forth. That much is obvious. I wonder, though, if the ways things
appear to me are the same as the ways things appear to other people."

Philosophers have composed many different variations on this theme, but
the classic version is the interpersonal version: How do I know that you
and I see the same subjective color when we look at something? Since we
both learned our color words by being shown public colored objects, our
verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different
subjective colors – even if the way red things look to me is the way green
things look to you, for instance. 50

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology from Harvard University, says
that from the scientific point of view we can never know whether somebody
else perceives a rose in the same way we do:
If perception is a creative, constructive process, to what extent do people
perceive the world in the same way? Does red appear to one person as it
does to another? If one person loves garlic and another hates it, are the
two loving and hating the same taste, or does garlic have a different taste
to each? The constructive nature of perception raises the equally
intriguing question of whether, or to what extent, people see the world as
it really is. Plato argued that what we perceive is little more than shadows
on the wall of a cave, cast by the movement of an unseen reality in the dim
light. What does it mean to say that a cup of coffee is hot? And is grass
really green? A person who is color-blind for green, whose visual system
lacks the capacity to discriminate certain wavelengths of light, will not see
the grass as green. Is greenness, then, an attribute of the object (grass), the
perceiver, or some interaction between the observer and the observed?
These are philosophical questions at the heart of sensation and
perception. 51

Replies To Objections Regarding The Reality Of Matter 209