Here's a random situation for discussion:
There are 3 individuals who are viewing an object in broad daylight. I'll take it in good faith that everyone's assumptions of the controlled variables will be the same, it is good weather, and visibility in terms of light penetration are the same. Their eyesight is also 20/20.
One of the persons views the object, for simplicity sake, lets just say it looks red or something. They have normal color vision.
Another one of the 3 has like color blindness, so they can only tell from what they've previously known, that the object is red or it can be green, but can only see a grayish (or whatever it looks like to them), so they can only distinguish that it may be red or green, or their own color for those things if they don't know that there was 2 separate colors. This person had red-green color blindness.
The last individual has tritanopia, and appears to see the object as what a normal person would see as the color orange, or pink. All of their colors are switched, so what they perceive to be red may be a different color for a normal person.
All 3 of the people seem to agree that the color of the object is consistent with what they know to be that color, aside from the color blind person calling it a red green mix. The person with tritanopia, although viewing the object as a color other than red, has come to associate the color red with whatever random color they have been seeing.
Now if we were to look outside of the box, these 3 individuals are humans and viewing it with human conditions which are limited to human species. Some animals may view the object in infared, which may just be a spectrum of intensity of heat, or maybe even UV rays. The object might even appear invisible depending on the situation. Say for instance there was no sun to illuminate the object. Would it have no color? Would it exist visibly if not for night-vision (which is incorrect because even night vision requires at least some ambient light source in order to pick up an image)? The colors we see are actually a reflection and absorption of wavelengths of light, the idea of color is actually the perception of different absorptions of different wavelengths of light photons.
In actuality, how would we know what the true color of an object is, given that we can only perceive such a small portion of a light's wavelength, or the spectrum. That also gives rise to the idea that a rainbow formed is actually based on the observer, and that rainbows do not actually exist without a lens to converge the light spectra into. If you ever noticed wherever you go, the rainbow always manages to appear uniform in some way. The amusing thing about a rainbow is the idea that it only exists within the receiving lens of the observer, whether it be an iris/cornea or camera aperture.
While we are speaking of these, I always thought this was a stupid question until years ago in college when I was taking social psychology; "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it (and I'm assuming all organisms capable of decoding sound waves), does it make a sound?" I guess the idea of sound, as well as the other senses, touch, taste, sight, smell- seem to be an interpretation of external stimuli, unique to different species. Dolphins have echos, and birds seem to have some magnetic sense, and some animals can hear in different sound frequencies as well as perceive infrared wavelengths.
I think I lost my train of thought.
