The Illusion of Shared Perception

We tend to assume that when we use the same words, we’re having the same experience. Color is a good example. We all learn that grass is green and stoplights are red. But what we’re really naming isn’t an image; it’s a frequency of light. What my brain turns that frequency into could be different from what yours does. There’s no way to step outside our own perception to check. We coordinate on names, not on private internal experiences.

//Most people assume their experience is the default This gets stranger when you look at how vision actually varies. Colorblindness is just difficulty telling certain light frequencies apart. Visual snow adds static to everything someone sees. Many people with visual snow don’t realize it’s unusual because they assume everyone sees the same thing. Nothing ever told them otherwise. Their experience works well enough, so the system never flags a problem.

The hard part is that perception is private. Your brain decodes electrical signals into a picture only you can see. There’s no direct way to compare that picture to anyone else’s. We can test responses and behavior, but not the experience itself. The bridge between physical input and mental interpretation isn’t visible or uniform. It just mostly works and we trust it implicitly.

//Coordinated agreement is mistaken for sameness Despite that, we build shared systems as if perception were identical. Language, design, safety signals, art, and interfaces all assume a common baseline. We use red for danger and green for go. We trust icons, charts, and labels to mean the same thing to everyone. Most of the time, that trust is good enough.

//Naming a color is an act of translation, not proof of perception What I find interesting isn’t that perception differs; rather how confidently we ignore that it does. We’re very good at naming things we can’t verify. But agreement doesn’t require identical experience, just enough overlap to keep things running. The rest is inference, habit, and a quiet trust that other people’s worlds are close enough to our own that it won’t matter.