[ExI] Red

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 05/07/2026 12:00, Brent Allsop wrote:
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> Does the brain create redness out of nothing?  If not, then what?
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>     On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 6:49 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>         >  'Subjective redness quality' is one of the things that the brain creates. It's a product, not a cause.


Not out of nothing, at least not in the sense that the universe was created from nothing, but as I keep saying, there is actually no such thing as 'red', considered as a colour sensation, as that word is a category, encompassing all the many different 'red' sensations we can experience. Because of this, I think it's more confusing than helpful to keep talking about 'red' as a colour (or 'redness' as the experience of a colour).

If we take one specific red colour, this one (RGB code 124, 13, 14):
(ok, my email client can't show that inline. See the attachment if you can. If you can't, it's a dark red, #7C0D0e, or RGB 124,13,14).

Experiencing that is a result of the stimulation of a specific set of cones and rods in our eyes (we can ignore the additional information that tells us that it's a rectangle, and we are seeing it at a specific size and a specific position in our visual field, although in reality these are important signals too), together with information from adjacent areas in the visual field (it looks different surrounded by white than it does when surrounded by black, or blue, or green, etc.), together with other information from various parts of the brain.

In other words, it's not a colour at all, it's a set of information from all over the place in our nervous systems, somehow all related together.

What we are talking about is what it /feels like/ to experience that specific shade, hue and intensity of red. This will be different for different people and under different circumstances. For some people, it will hardly register at all, and for others, it may be a vivid experience, and trigger an intense emotional reaction (because it's associated with the tomato ketchup that they got a bollicking for spilling as a child, for instance, etc.).

The same is true for the thousands of other 'reds' that we experience (and all the other colours, and all the other visual experiences we have), they are all different, in different people, at different times under different circumstances.

So it's difficult to give a simple, or even a precise, answer to your question "if not nothing, then what?".

But we can take a step back, be more general, and talk about the types of events in the brain that give rise to experiences in general.

If you think about it (assuming a certain amount of basic neurobiology knowledge), there are actually surprisingly few types of things of any importance for our question going on in the brain, so our experiences must be built from those things (we can discount the many things that go on in cells in general, and just concentrate on the things going on in the brain in particular. We know that our livers don't think, for example).

Neurons are attached to each other in large, complex networks, using chemical and electrical connections like synapses and gap junctions and hormones diffusing over short distances. Signals travel along neuronal axons (the long thin tubes that act as 'wires' in the brain that go between neurons) in the form of 'spike trains', which are local depolarisations of the axon membrane travelling at roughly the speed of sound or slower. There are millions of these happening at any one time, even when we are asleep, and they embody the complex, ever-changing patterns of information that our brains have evolved to produce.

It's these patterns of axonal signals that give rise to things like 'brainwaves' which are basically the 'sound' of our brains at work.

The important thing is that we know, for a fact, that it's these patterns of neuronal activation that comprise our experiences. We know this because we can disrupt our experiences by disrupting the neuronal activity, and we can induce experiences by stimulating this kind of activity with electrodes embedded in the brain. And we know that anaesthesia 'damps down' or stops these experiences by slowing or stopping these signals. We also know that in deep, dreamless sleep, the patterns of activation are very different to when we are awake.

If our experiences were mediated by anything else, these methods wouldn't produce the effects we see.

So we can conclude that our experiences consist of information patterns in the form of neural spikes in our axonal networks.

That, of course, includes our experiences of colours. 

That's my understanding of how brains create experiences, without going into lots of technical details. That's the answer to your question.

This is also the argument that underpins the concept of 'substrate indifference'. Seeing as the important thing is the patterns of information, the mechanical details of how the information flows are created don't matter, as long as the patterns created are complex enough and of the right type. Our brains could be made of wires and springs (or beer-cans and string, or logic gates in silicon chips), and we'd still have the same conscious experiences. It's not the 'things' that matter (the atoms, or whatever), it's what those things are /doing/ that matters.

What, exactly, is the pattern that is me experiencing colour 124, 13, 14? Nobody knows, and it's possible that nobody will ever know. It's pretty certain that it's different to the pattern that is someone else experiencing the 'same colour' (if that's even meaningful). These patterns are all tangled up with other patterns in a way that makes them virtually impossible to unravel. Our minds are like humongous programs written in an old procedural language like BASIC or FORTRAN, with extensive use of GoTos, and everyone's is different, to an unknown extent.

I understand that all this can be difficult to take in. The key thing, I think, is to understand and accept what we are: Information patterns. I am a pattern. You are a pattern. Everybody is a pattern. We are embodied in biological brains and possess biological bodies, but those things aren't what we /are/.

We are like an image on a screen. Any kind of screen. It doesn't matter what creates the pattern that the image consists of, it's the pattern that matters.

(This has important consequences for other things, like uploading and death, but that's another conversation altogether).

-- 
Ben
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