[ExI] Red

[Brent Allsop]

All we know about any physics, including the properties of the surface of
the strawberry, is abstract descriptions of what causal effects it has.  It
reflects red light, which has nothing to do with the physics our brain uses
to represent knowledge of such.

Somehow our brain can tell us more about physics than just
abstract descriptions of behavior.  Neurons are a detector of physical
qualities, like redness.  Something in our brain is behaving the way it
does, because of it's subjective redness quality, which our brain can
combine into one gestalt experience of the world.  A very powerful
computational ability which brute force discrete logic can't do.








On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 6:19 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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