“This is my favourite! I like it more than you.”
This argument always bewildered me as a child, and bewilders me even now. I can never know how much anyone else likes anything. The rose may be your favourite flower, but it may not be mine. Yet, I may like it more than you do, and no one can prove that one way or the other!
As a child, the more confusing problem was different. I looked at the sky and saw that it was blue. You looked at the sky and said that it was blue. How could I know for sure that the blue I saw was the same as the blue you saw?
When I grew older, I learned about the science of colour. Wavelength, and all that. Maybe that ought to have convinced me, but it didn’t because I learned that animals are colour-blind. What we see as so attractive in flowers, animal-mates, etc., doesn’t look the same to them at all! So, that number associated with the colour was, finally, just a number. So maybe, just maybe, you and I call something bright red, but in our heads, the way we see it is totally different. I remember spending hours imagining how red would look if it were green and how blue would look if I called it yellow. It fascinated me. And then I read about famous people asking ‘What’s in a name?’.
My questions began again. I wish I could get into someone else’s head to see whether purple is really purple. What do you know? It may be orange to me.
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