Post #3

By Unknown - February 05, 2018

Reading Response

I have often wondered what it would be like to lose a sense. Having had all of them for as long as I've been alive, I imagine losing one is much harder than having started without one in the first place. There is a certain understanding and sensation which comes with each sense that can only be truly described through experience. It's something like a brief moment of scent which suddenly reminds you of a feeling you had when you were little, which is gone just as quickly as it arrived, leaving you wondering how to possibly describe that scent or feeling. Senses are personal experiences that the user is exclusively privy to. Taste is unique, that we know for sure. No one has the exact same palate as another (although they all tend to generalize out as we grow older). Who's to say all other experiences of senses are universally shared? Who's to say the experience I call "redness" is even the same as yours? What if my experience of the world is the exact inversion of your experience of the world, but it all looks normal to me because that is all I've ever know? Perhaps everyone's understanding of color and the feelings behind color come not from the precise experiences themselves, but rather from the connotations of those experiences in relation to the rest of them. It's a difficult concept to pinpoint, as it is entirely impossible to prove. However, there have been studies to suggest that certain colors can be correlated with certain emotions, such as red stirring aggression and blue bringing calmness. But do these seemingly inbred emotional responses come from the experience of a universal thing we call red, or is the red, because of the context unique to each person, something which causes this feeling? Because if red were something experienced differently by each person it would still be the same color for blood and guts, roses and strawberries, and the occasional cardinal, it's possible to think that the idea of redness being aggressive or passionate or anything we attribute it to, comes not from its universal experience, but from what we associate it with. In that way, describing the feeling of a color, and telling what it is associated with conceptually, might be enough to give a blind person a taste of what that color is like.