[ExI] Red

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 6:54 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

On 26/06/2026 15:46, Brent Allsop wrote:
>


*> > Whatever has a red (or redness) quality is just a brute physical fact*
>
>
> * > I'm curious about this idea that molecule X (or some other physical
> object) has a 'quality' that results in our seeing colour Y.*
>

*There is a question I've been asking Brent for a long time but I have
never received a coherent answer: if molecule X in a strawberry is what
gives it the redness qualia (I'm talking about qualia, NOT the ability to
reflect light at a certain wavelength) then what gives molecule X the
ability to do that? There are only two possible answers to that question,
but I don't think Brent likes either one. *

*Brent, if I'm wrong about that assumption concerning you then please
correct me.*

*John K Clark*






>
> We keep seeing the word 'red' being used. But that's not really a colour,
> it's a colour category. We can see hundreds of different reds, taking into
> account the various combinations of hue, intensity and brightness. 'Red'
> refers to anything from a very pale pink, only just distinguishable from
> white, to a deep dark reddish-black, and even these aren't just two
> colours, the barest glimmer of red could be an almost-orange scarlet or an
> almost-purple crimson, or any hue in between.
>
> So if one object like a molecule has the 'red quality', does this include
> all the possible reds we can see, or just a specific one? Or is it a more
> abstract thing, like 'the essence of red' (in which case, how do we
> actually perceive hundreds of different reds? What extra factor
> differentiates them?) And is this quality restricted to what we can
> perceive directly, or does it include, for example, infrared?
>
> It would be strange if these physical qualities were restricted to only
> what humans happen to be able to perceive, don't you think?
>
> Orange is also a bit of a puzzle. Is that a colour in itself, a variety of
> red, or a variety of yellow?
>
> Thinking about it, we can distinguish about 6 million colours. So are
> there 6 million colour qualities, possessed by 6 million different types of
> physical things?
>
>
> > ... the strawbery still has the red quality, which is different from the
> different type of light that is reflected.  i.e. the light isn't what has
> the red quality, it is the strawberry.
>
>
> I don't understand this at all. You seem to be saying that strawberries
> are red regardless of what they look like? If they reflected yellow light
> they'd still really be red? (I think that if you put a strawberry under a
> yellow lamp, without any red light shining on it, it would look yellow, but
> I haven't done this experiment).
>
> I think it makes sense to say that, in the dark, strawberries are not red.
> Am I wrong?
> What I'm saying here is that nothing has a fixed innate colour, that it
> changes depending on (among other things), the light falling upon it. A
> sheet that is white under white light, for example, will be green under
> green light, and blue under blue light, etc. You seem to be disagreeing.
>
> Another puzzle is, if the 'redness' of strawberries is independent of the
> reflected light from them, how can we ever perceive this redness? We see
> the light they reflect. If there's something else that's independent of
> this, we can't sense it. Otherwise, we'd always see the white sheet as
> white, even in the dark.
>
> --
> Ben
>
> ___
>
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