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One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details

This is just another ‘chicken and egg’ thing, right? One of those conundrums that young students, backs leaning on dormitory walls, and well into their third beer at 3AM, try to resolve with their budding logic. I certainly tried… and failed of course; I mean if it were easy to solve, we’d have moved on to something else pretty quickly and made it to the next day’s classes better rested.

There are all sorts of puzzles like that aren’t there? We all need something to solve as we mature. One of my favourite problems was whether we all saw the same colour that we named – blue, say. But did some of us actually see green or something, but had learned to call it blue…? I mean, how would we know? And did it really matter? They would act the same each time they were asked. Maybe red was actually orange, or maybe yellow – whatever…

I’d kind of filed that conundrum away along with my other late-night youthful university discussions. It no longer came up when I was talking to my colleagues, and certainly never with my Wednesday morning coffee buddies at the Food Court. All of us in that group were old now; our curiosity was sated, our neurons were plaquing up. What most of us discussed nowadays was the weather, what meal we were looking forward to for dinner, and whether politics might interfere with the cost of our coffees -important stuff that we could easily get into.

Some of us, though (okay, me) yearned for the earnest discussions of yore -well my yore at any rate. Were we now so old we hesitated to stretch our neural tissue lest it break; ask searching questions; think? I despaired of any meaningful debates, but as I searched the rheumy eyes of my colleagues, there was one set that often twinkled at my spirit of inquiry and searched the others at the table for at least a few remnants of curiosity. The light-hearted eyes were owned by Lewis, a retired judge. Usually, however, they remained unrequited. Mine felt the same.

The other day though, when I arrived at our table only Lewis was there. Just as well, because I was armed with something interesting I’d found in one of my apps: an essay that purported to have partially solved the ‘do-we-all-see-the-same-colour’ debate.[i] Using MRI scans, researchers had found that participants’ patterns of brain activity were alike when looking at the same colors, although they didn’t always agree on what to call the colours they saw. ‘It turns out that while we may disagree over our personal experience of color, our brains actually share similar responses to certain hues… Objects themselves don’t technically have color. We see color when certain wavelengths of light reflect off an object and travel into the retinas at the back of our eyes, where photoreceptors transmit signals to the brain through the optic nerve. Our brains then translate that information to interpret color.’ So far, so good. But ‘just because our brains may light up in the same way, our subjective experience of a color is not necessarily alike.’

‘Colors are not just a physical property. Color perception always includes a calculation by the brain about the illumination. Sometimes, people’s brains make those calculations differently.’ The question -amongst many others still to be resolved- is whether there has been some evolutionary reason why our brain cells seem to be biased to naming certain colors. 

Lewis’ retrieved some eye-twinks from storage when I explained the article to him, and an unexpected smile surfaced on his face. “You just said that although our brains light up in the same way, our subjective experience of a colour is not necessarily the same… Have I understood it correctly?” Ever the judge.

I nodded; the game was on. The only things missing were the beer and the silence of  a university dorm after midnight.

“So,” Lewis started, picking his way carefully along the rocky and now overgrown path. “Are we any closer to knowing whether what you call blue is the same as what I call green?”

I had to think about that for a moment. Lewis was right to point out that although we knew how colour was processed in the brain, there was nothing definitive about the naming. Of course he was a judge; I would not expect him to overlook details like that.

“Well, there are commonalities across brains…” I answered, but slowly because I don’t think I was addressing the problem he was meaning: is your blue, my blue? Nor was I including so-called colour blindness: like red-green, for example, or blue-yellow. I was pretty sure the article didn’t mention those…

“It seems to me that although our brains are anatomically similar -albeit with different experiences stored in each- and our neural reactions to most colors are probably also similar and don’t seem to vary much from person to person, that still doesn’t answer the question of how they experience blue, or red, or green…” Lewis really knew how to burrow into a problem.

I think I had forgotten how he approached problems and I found myself immediately transported in my mind to the famous essay by Thomas Nagel: ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Even if I could imagine what it might be like, I’d still fall far short of experiencing it from the bat’s point of view. Conscious experiences are subjective and hence only knowable by the actual bat who experiences it.

I thought I’d try to reason the problem out loud. “I suppose my neurological experience of the colour may be the same, but not my subjective experience. I still wouldn’t know if others saw the colour the same as me…”

Lewis smiled and his eyes came alive. “Are you pulling a Nagel on me, G?”

I had to chuckle in response; of course Lewis would wonder that.

He rolled his eyes at my finding it funny. “I thought maybe you were going to answer the riddle of the Ages -well this Age, at any  rate. In the old days, I could have used it in my court: if I knew how the brain activity creates subjective inner experiences, then I might know if the defendant was telling me the truth as he knows it.”

I shrugged; I had prepared for that question: I hadn’t had my breakfast yet and I was hungry, so my stomach was growling. I had purposely not had my coffee or bagel before I sat down at the table with him either. It was a quiet day at the Food Court, and the usual guys had not yet arrived.

“Be really quiet,” I instructed him as I loosened my jacket. “What do you hear?”

He shook his head and his previous large, good-natured smile was replaced by a tiny pursed-lip grin. “I can hear your stomach growling, G.” I suppose he was trying to be funny.

“Then you do know at least a little of my subjective state: I’m hungry, eh?”

He threw his head back and laughed heartily at that. “Okay, trapped…!”

“Want another doughnut?” I asked, getting to my feet.

“Dare I ask for my favourite: the one with the pink icing, G?” Lewis never stops thinking; I’d hate to have had to appear before him as an accused in a trial…

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-we-see-the-same-colors-as-others-study-suggests-brains-respond-to-the-same-hues-in-similar-ways-180987307

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