Mr. I and the Experience of Color

(I don't remember whether we're all supposed to post, or only some us, but here's mine:)

Different parts of our reading for this week, and in particular Arnheim and Sacks, brought me back to one of the papers I had to write for a tutorial while at Oxford. The paper was specifically concerned with critiquing an argument by John Campbell called the Simple View, which kind of takes a Wittgensteinian/quietist approach to explaining the underlying nature of color. A number of philosophers of mind are very interested in color in general, as it plays a major role in human culture and art, and has more than once taken the spotlight in 20th-century philosophical debates about perception and consciousness. I'll briefly try to summarize some of the things I discussed in my paper, and then tie it into Sack's case study of Mr. I.

One of the major things debated between philosophers of color is its "underlying metaphysical and epistemological nature". For those who have learned some of the science of color (and we did in our readings for this week!), it may be apparent to some that a certain feature of what we call colors is not entirely explained by our scientific knowledge of the eyes and visual cortex. This is to say that the supposed "redness" of red is not intersubjective, and for example, we cannot explain what red "looks like" to someone born blind; it doesn't appear that we have the correct kind of words in the English language that allows us to describe "the redness" to anyone else or even to ourselves. Another way of thinking about it is that if we take a microscope and look at a leaf, we will see that its green color comes from the chlorophyll. If we "zoom" in enough at the chlorophyll, eventually we will no longer see any green color (remember that everything is "colorless" after a certain microscopic level -- all those electronic microscope photographs you've been shown are false-color images). Then if we zoom out again until we can see the color once more, and readjust the microscope to focus specifically on where it is, the moment we zoom in again it will disappear. We can keep zooming in and out, readjusting to the point of perfection, but we will never find the "part" of the physical object that is inducing the color experience we perceive (or alternatively, find the microstructural aspects of light that explain how certain wavelengths of it "look" the way they do).

What this means is hotly debated among different philosophers of mind. For some, the issue is merely that our science isn't good enough -- at some point, the sciences will give us some kind of knowledge about the microstructural aspects of light or our visual system (or both) that will solve the perceived issue, and even allow us to accurately explain what red "looks like" to someone born blind. For others, color is one of the features of human perception that truly subjective or perceiver-dependent, and it has a kind of special ontological status (e.g. objects are disposed to induce in us the experience of color). For John Campbell, there is no issue related to color at all, and colors are some kind of sui generis and intrinsic property of objects whose nature is already transparent to us. I won't go into the merits and pitfalls of each position, but I do think that Mr. I's case may help shed some light on the issue (that's a bad pun).

What I found most interesting about Sack's case study was how Mr. I could discriminate wavelengths of light using Zeki and Land's "Mondrians", unlike the typically colorblind individuals, but could simply not, as Sacks tries to find the right words for,

"Translate the discriminated wavelengths into color..."

"Arrive at colors on the basis of information about wavelengths, edge-matching, etc..."

"Construct color as an element of the visual world."

What is fascinating to me is how apparently Mr. I could make distinctions between colors based merely on wavelength (and without help from different amounts of gray) without the apparent experience of color. So while we typically explain that some such certain objects we are viewing are color X, Y, and Z because of their respective combinations of wavelengths of light striking our retina, Mr. I's case seems to demonstrate that the experience of the color truly may not be metaphysically tied to the specific wavelengths. Put another way, although we refer to "yellow" as the color we see when viewing light with a wavelength between 570 and 590 nm (in a globalized and Westernized culture), Mr. I's case suggests that our respective experiences of yellow are not universal or even necessarily similar. If both me and Mr. I can distinguish yellow from orange based on wavelength (and the two colors have equal amounts of white/black/gray), but he cannot experience the colors themselves, then the experience of color must not be metaphysically tied (in some form or other) to wavelength.

If not that, than I think that at least Mr. I's case helps us in trying to answer the question "are the colors that I see the same colors that you see?" by suggesting that we'll be more helped by studying the particulars of the visual association cortex than the particulars of light itself.