Do Colors Exist?

The text you’re reading right now is black—but actually, it’s not. “Black” is just what your eye and brain interpret from how this screen absorbs and reflects light. Same with red. An apple isn’t red in itself. Light hits the apple, certain wavelengths bounce off, and your retina picks them up. Your brain assigns the label red to that particular data stream. So what happens if there are no eyes nor brains?

If all conscious life disappeared, would the sky still be blue? This might remind you of the expression: if a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it, does it make a sound?—which I’ve come to understand is a far more profound question than I once thought. We can do this same thought experiment with sound, but I prefer color.

So.

Color isn’t painted onto objects. It’s not out there in the world like rocks or radio waves. It emerges only when light hits a nervous system capable of interpreting it. You need an eye to receive it, and a brain to perceive it. More precisely: light waves enter the eye, stimulate photoreceptor cells in the retina—cones, in this case—and those cells send electrical signals down the optic nerve to the visual cortex. Only there does the thing we call color begin to exist. Not as light, not as energy, but as experience.

That means color isn’t physical in the usual sense. It’s a private event. A mental one.

So before conscious beings evolved—before the first eye, before the first brain—there was no color. Only wavelengths. Only radiation. The world wasn’t gray. It wasn’t black. It just wasn’t colored.

Sometimes you don’t (seemingly) need light to see color. You can imagine color, right? Try it: don’t close your eyes, but picture the McDonald’s golden arches. Can you see the yellow in your head? Really see it? I think I can. Sort of. Picture a man eating a McChicken. What is the color of his shirt? Can you see it?

And what about dreams? We see in color when we dream, right? But no light is bouncing off anything. Nothing is entering your pupils. So when you see a red apple in a dream—or even just picture one now—what is that red?

It’s not a reflection of anything. Not a wave. Not a photon. So what is it?

Here’s a weird story. In ninth grade, I decided I was a philosopher. I googled “Top 10 Philosophers of All Time,” and Bertrand Russell was on the list. I think I liked that he was really skinny, the way I was—something I was very ashamed of. So I started telling people he was my favorite philosopher, even though I had literally never read anything by him. No one questioned it. Well, no one questioned it to my face.

Turns out it wasn’t entirely bullshit because I actually do happen to like Bertrand Russell’s work, particularly his Analysis of Matter. He might actually be my favorite philosopher, but I haven’t quite decided that yet. I have formally decreed that Cormac McCarthy is my favorite novelist, and that Franz Wright is my favorite poet, and that Dale Allison is my favorite historical Jesus scholar, but I am still undecided on my favorite philosopher. Russell is a serious contender, regardless of how slender he is.

Anyway. So Russell suggested something that we now call Russellian monism. Physics, he said, tells us what fundamental particles do—how they move, how they combine, how they repel and attract—but not what they are. It says nothing about the inner nature of matter. Russell suspected that consciousness—experience—might be that hidden side. That the stuff we call "physical" might already be experiential at bottom.

Russellian monism isn't quite the same thing as panpsychism, though they’re cousins. Russellian monism just says that physics leaves something out, and that whatever's missing might be experiential. Panpsychism goes a step further. It says that all physical things actually are bits of experience. Every atom, every particle. Russellian monism leaves more room for other possibilities. Panpsychism commits.

This idea—especially the panpsychist version—has become a new way of thinking about consciousness. Panpsychists aren’t saying that rocks have thoughts. They’re saying: maybe everything physical has a tiny sliver of experience in it. Maybe your brain doesn’t create consciousness—it just organizes it.

And maybe color is one of the clues.

Because color is not something the world gives you. It’s something the mind makes. And yet it feels so real. So obvious. So there.

Maybe consciousness is like that too.

The music behind the math.

The red apple in the dark.

(Illustration by Rembrandt)