Color and Consciousness

Color and Consciousness

What is the relationship between the problem of color and the problem of consciousness? Could they be fundamentally the same problem? It isn’t that consciousness is color, but that the problem of consciousness could be solved by solving the problem of color. Is the mystery basically the same? Consciousness of color is a paradigm of the mind-body problem, so perhaps the problems are at root identical, or at least overlapping: if you could explain color, you would have nailed consciousness too. This seems like an attractive idea, given that color seems a wee bit easier to understand. Certainly, the two problems are analogous; they have a similar shape. In the case of color, the problem divides into several subproblems: the emergence problem, the projection problem, the efficacy problem, the phenomenology problem, and the irreducibility problem. Where does color come from, how is it projected onto objects, what causal properties does it have (if any), what explains its phenomenology, and is it reducible to anything else? Does it emerge from the external objective world or the inner subjective mind? If the latter, how does the mind project it onto external objects? Do colors cause anything or are they epiphenomenal? What constitutes their phenomenal appearance? Can they be reduced to physical properties? If not, how can they fit into reality as a whole? The problem is that they seem mysterious, not part of physics, ontologically queer. Yet they indubitably exist. They pose a problem for materialism. How can a physical object be blue—in virtue of what? What is a color?

Does that sound like anything? Consciousness, of course. Consciousness has a problem of emergence, a causal efficacy problem, a phenomenology problem, and an irreducibility problem; it too doesn’t fit into a materialist framework. A projective account can seem tempting, though problematic (is the mind really in the eye of the beholder?). Color is a mystery, and so is consciousness. Both are physically irreducible yet physically grounded. It thus seems that if we could solve one, we would have solved the other, give or take a bit. At least it would put us on the right track. We might even hold out for an identity theory of the two problems: they are fundamentally the same problem, differently expressed. If we knew what makes an object blue, we would also know what makes an organism see blue, because these are problems of the same type. If color is projected from the mind, then objects are made blue by minds projecting color; and minds see colors in virtue of brains—so, brains make objects blue. Now we just need to know what makes brains see blue! The two problems are intertwined. Presumably, if we could solve the color problem, we could also solve the other sensory quality problems (sounds, tastes, etc.). So, a promising approach would be to start with the color problem and move on from there. This might come down to the problem of how the brain produces colors, these being constituted by sensations of colors; but at least we would have tied the problem down a bit, instead of working with the nebulous concept of consciousness. If the brain brought colors into the world, how did it do that (the color-brain problem)? In fact, all we need to know is how the brain gave rise to the particular color blue; then we would have essentially solved the problem of consciousness—or at least replaced a big mystery by a smaller one.[1] Blue can’t be so hard! A theory of blue would give us a theory of the conscious mind. What if all elementary particles had a touch of blue in them (“pan-blueism”)? It won’t make the mind-body problem an easy problem, but at least it locates the problem more precisely. No need to rattle on about “what-it’s like” and “qualia”; we are dealing with our old friend the color blue—and we know what that is (don’t we?). This might turn out to be a mystery on the same scale as the problem of consciousness (I suspect it would), but we have still made a discovery—it all comes down to blue (or red or yellow). If we knew what makes the sky blue, we would know what makes us conscious! For the problem of blue is the problem of consciousness writ small. They are problems of the same type. If it turned out (per impossibile) that blue is just a microphysical property of surfaces, then the odds are that pain would just be C-fiber firing—as many have contended. We would have a physicalist reduction in both cases. But if, on the contrary, blue is really a disposition to have experiences, and experiences are not physically reducible, then consciousness in general will not be so reducible. As it goes with color, so also it will go with consciousness. The two problems are not separable. I therefore recommend that consciousness researchers turn their attention to the color blue in hopes of a more tractable problem. Can we solve the color-object problem?[2]

[1] Compare: if we could solve the problem of geometrical knowledge, we would be in a position to solve the problem of arithmetical knowledge, given that the two problems are essentially the same. The geometry problem might be slightly easier.

[2] I don’t doubt that colors are perfectly natural features of nature, with not a whiff of the supernatural about them (no immortal color spirits etc.); the problem about colors arises from our intellectual limitations. It is a very old problem for which scientists have provided no solution beyond color-physical correlations. So, we need not opt for the supernatural or the implausibly reductive or the intrinsically irreducible. If color is a mystery, it is a natural mystery. There are easy problems of color and very difficult problems (how do colors come to exist in the first place?).