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Look at this dress, what do you see? The answer is not black and white

Schrödinger argued that it was fundamentally unknowable to science. Dennett said it was an ineffable and wholly private human experience. And the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an entire paper about it, titled “What is it like to be a bat?”

Yesterday, the latest contribution to the ancient philosophical debate about the subjectivity, or otherwise, of personal perception came in the form of a white and gold dress. Or is it blue and black?

The world’s social media, normally fractious at the best of times, was split down the middle regarding a picture of what has become the most contentious blue dress — if indeed it is — since the one worn two decades ago by Monica Lewinsky.

Roughly half the population sees the heavily backlit