Doubtless, this is in part because they evoke memories of glum hours spent in traffic during rainy commutes. In me, these create a powerful response (‘feel’, if you like). The ‘feel’ of metallic colour just is the expectation of this effect.Ī postscript: Another illustration of this is afforded by Gregory Thielker’s paintings of scenes though rain-spattered glass. We expect them to change in a distinctive way as we move in relation to them. What gives them their distinctive ‘feel’ is precisely the affordances they present. Shiny things are just regularly coloured things whose brightness (and colour if they are very shiny) varies markedly with viewing angle.

But, of course, they are not really different colours. These seem to have a distinctive feel to them, and as a child I was very puzzled as to where they fitted into the visible spectrum. Consider shiny, metallic colours, such as silver and gold. That’s still very schematic, but a little example may help. The blueness of blue is a distorted representation of the affordances it presents, represented as a property of the object itself. This is what we call their quality or feel. We experience objects as having a distinctive but ineffable significance for us, which is a marker of their affordances. The upshot of this is that we experience the world as being metaphorically coloured by our reactions to it. Now my suggestion is that the human brain monitors its own reactive dispositions and generates schematic representations of them, which are linked to its representations of the objects that triggered them. An object’s affordances are reflected in the suite of reactive dispositions its perception triggers in us - the suite of beliefs, expectations, associations, emotions, priming effects, and so on. Such properties afford us opportunities for action in various ways they have specific affordances. We are tuned up, by biological evolution, cultural evolution, and personal experience, to track worldly properties that it’s useful for us to notice. That needs a lot of unpacking and qualification, but the general idea is this. However, it’s a property that corresponds to, and carries information about, something real and important - namely, the affordances of the objects in question. It’s a property that our minds misrepresent external objects as having. My answer is that it is not really anywhere. And I’ve denied that there is any blue quality in our minds. Out there there’s just a surface with a microstructure that reflects certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

Where then is the quality of blueness ? It’s not out there in the world. I don’t think that experiencing blue involves entertaining a mental version of blueness - a blue quale or phenomenal property. Note that that I do not say that they are ones that produce blue sensations in us. Blue things are things that evoke a certain distinctive cluster of reactive dispositions in us. What are colours? My view is that they are properties of surfaces in the world around us - albeit complex gerrymanded ones, which can be picked out only by reference to our reactions to them. Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence.Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness.

Supermind evolution