Could color be a fundamental thing about the universe?

Question

I'm talking about the color that is inside our heads. I'm not talking about wavelengths.

It seems like any attempt to answer the question 'What is color?' or 'How does brain create color?' must involve referring to 'color' itself.

We've assumed in mainstream science that 'color' must be getting produced in our brain by some complex physical process, and yet we have no clue what that physical process is, or how that process achieves the phenomenon of 'vision'.

Any attempt to explain the origin of color using fundamental ideas like 'forces', 'space', 'charge', 'mass', 'time', etc, is paradoxical. Any complex phenomenon which is explained using those ideas is described by 'movement of particles' or 'flow of energy'. We can explain the phenomenon of planet formation using those ideas (because planet formation involves movement of particles or flow of energy wrt time).

But it's easy to see that 'color' is not one such phenomenon. When we question 'How color gets produced?', we're not asking why some particles move in the way they do. This question is not about movement at all.

In the end, asking 'What is vision?' seems just as complicated as like asking 'What is time?' or 'What is mass?'. These are the things which just are. Physics is about exploring the properties of these fundamental things instead of asking why these things exist.

So I'm saying that solving the mystery of color should involve advancing our understanding of fundamentals of Physics itself. I'm surprised that this is not the popular take on this question, because the phenomenon of 'color' is fundamentally different from any other phenomenon we've explained using the standard models of Physics.

Answer 1

We have scientific understanding of a lot that is relevant to color perception, not only wavelengths but also of photoreceptors, how they relate to color blindness, etc. But the subjective experience of color perception is perhaps the most common example used when talking about qualia, the what it is like of an experience. There are various arguments as for why qualia would be non-physical, such as one based on the inverted spectrum scenario, which indeed is also about color.

Answer 2

There is a lot of philosophy out there about colour perception. It's a big topic. So I will limit myself to a few remarks.

I would follow The Private Language Argument, to say the 'qualia' of colour is essentially meaningless, what matters is the accurate use of linguistic tokens, for generating the mappings behaviour is based on. The source of what you call paradox, is assuming that colour is a single 'kind of thing', when it is really a shortcut for a whole range of narrative groupings - wavelengths, sensations, internal experiences, labels, linguistic tokens.

Consider this account of someone with proven tetrachromatism, so who experiences 4 primary colours. She describes her experiences before she was diagnosed as having minimal discrepancies. The same genes can result in 2-cone colour-blindness, and there more discrepancies of mapping are seen - it prevents people qualifying as electricians in the UK, or being on the frontline in the fire service. But the inner difference of experience is rarely discussed, or even noticed.

The idea of colour as purely objective is challenged by impossible colours, and a range of optical illusions show us how much post-processing is done - we can deduce through modelling that this is something like a convolutional neural network, identifying image properties like edges, shade, orientation, volume, and textures, with progressive processing and converging towards a consilient cognitive model. The hyperbolic headline of that may be 'your brain hallucinates your conscious reality', but as Anil Seth here makes clear that is in the context of closely-argued well-evidenced thinking about perception. Even Donald Hoffman's work on why we cannot rely on evolution to give us accurate perceptions accepts that tools like reasoning and consilience can lead us to more accurate cognitive models, even with unreliable inputs.

"our understanding of fundamentals of Physics itself"

It sounds like you have decided to implicitly assume noumena for phenomena, that you think we can access the thing-in-itself of reality. I think that's misguided, and that the conservation of information in physics converges with the Buddhist idea of no-essences/sunyata, to suggest nothing is ever truly seperate, including observer and observed, noumena and phenomena, ontic and epistemic.

Answer 3

Indeed, there's a whole history regarding just this question: suppose Mary is a colorblind scientist who knows all the dynamical facts about color. One day, her colorblindness goes away and she finally sees a red apple as red. If intrinsic color facts are elemental, it seems she gains knowledge at this time. On the other hand, this "seeming" requires some atomization of "items of knowledge" such that awareness of qualia can be an individual such item (a counterargument being: in an ethereal way Mary now "knows more" but this kind of "knowledge" is trivial or weak or what).