How would one go about describing color to a person that was born blind?
Color is like texture. Every surface has a texture that you can touch: hard, satiny, slick, etc. There is no point on the surface that has no texture at all. Like touch, where you can feel a whole surface at once with your palm, you take in the whole thing all at once. Your eyes are many, many sensors, like your hand has many nerve endings. (Unlike sound, where you really only have two sensors, and so while you can detect time-varying properties of sound easily, you have only limited ability to sense all the sounds around and position them in space.) So color is like texture you can detect from a distance. That’s not totally foreign to a blind person: they can hear at a distance, too. They know that the light is real; they can feel it as warmth on their face. You can describe how certain colors “go together” and others “clash” by analogy with sounds, which can be pleasant of cacophonous. The nature of each color, though, is hard to describe, even from one sighted person to another. Wha
