Question!

[conuly]

I had come up with this post last night, and then after I forgot it my philosophy class reminded me of it.

How do you know what you're feeling? What does it feel like? Do you think your physical responses to emotions are like other people's? Bonus question: Do you think it's possible that what you see as green, other people see as red? Or some color you can't see? I used to think that.

Comments

[goddess588.livejournal.com]

I think everyone's feelings and physical responses are much the same, though on a continuum and affected by environmental and internal factors. And there's not just the predominating emotion (mood) but the way it's put across (affect) too. eg: mood = happy, sad, angry etc - affect = blunted, expansive, restricted, congruent/incongruent to the mood.

Research shows that children under a certain age tend not to realise (for lack of a better word) that others are experiencing similar thoughts and feelings to themselves, and I clearly remember when that became apparent to me. I must have been so egocentric.

I'd agree that people see colours differently, I've had arguments with people over colour nuance - red vs orange etc. Also, the fact that we use the same names for each colour doesn't mean that we all see the same colour - 'blue' may be seen by others as a totally different colour/shade but we all know it's 'blue' because that's what we were told when we were learning how to talk. Who knows what each individual perceives - there's nothing to measure it against.

I had a dream once that there was another primary colour - now that was bizarre.