[ExI] [Extropolis] Quantitative Qualia and the Science of Redness

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stuart,
Yes, thanks for this reference.
It just must be kept in mind, that though an abstract intelligence (words
only) can discover and model color qualities, without a definition of the
words being grounded with factual physical qualities it experiences first
hand, they can't know what the words represent.

[image: The-Strawberry-is-Red-0480-0310.jpg]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2025 at 11:16 AM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

> Here is an interesting study that reports using machine learning
> techniques to analyze color qualia quantitatively. Basically they had
> 426 people with typical color vision and 257 individuals who were color
> blind take a computer survey where they judged the similarity of
> color-pairs chosen randomly from a pool of 93 colors using a point
> scale. The results were then used to train an artificial neural network
> (ANN) by unsupervised pairwise alignment of individual's similarity data
> for the color pairs without reference to the color name or label. In
> other word, it was told to look for similarities based on the numerical
> distance reported by each pair of individuals for each color pair,
> without being told what the colors were and then used the alignments to
> form clusters corresponding to a "color map". When the relative
> differences between colors reported by the research subjects were
> clustered without reference to the color, it nonetheless turned out that
> clusters corresponded to the various color labels and the color maps of
> the normally-sighted group were similar to one another. The color maps
> of the color-blind people were, also, similar to one another. However,
> the color maps of the color-sighted people were different from the color
> maps of the color-blind people.
>
> https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00289-5
>
>
> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LYgJrBf6awsqFRCt3/is-red-for-gpt-4-the-same-as-red-for-you
>
> Using machine learning to analyze qualia like this is fascinating. Just
> like an LLM can learn the contextual meaning of words without being
> explicitly programmed with the definition of the words simply by
> statistically analyzing the average numerical distances between words in
> a corpus of text, this technique should allow AI to recognize and use
> colors without being explicitly programmed with any particular
> definition of say red. This would render the question of whether an AI
> can truly see a color to be equivalent to whether an LLM actually
> understands what it is saying.
>
> Brent, you have have a thing for both color qualia and surveys so this
> paper should be right up your alley.
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
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