People speak of consciousness as having “emergent properties,” implying that reality is somehow more than a straightforward grouping of elementary particles and forces. This idea is much like that.
Consider what red is to you. Plenty of people would agree that if we could track the particles that make up your brain, we’d arrive at an explanation for why red is what it is to you: why you perceive it as brighter than blue, why it pumps you up slightly, why it is or isn’t your favorite color.
But this is all about you. When you look at Red, you don’t seem to just feel urges to think or react. That Red is a thing. If your Red and your Green were swapped, this fundamental feeling, this perception, this fundamental unit of visual experience, is the thing which would swap. This is separate from your reactions changing. Yet there is something there we feel we can imagine swapping.
But say there wasn’t. Say it was all reaction.
… You can’t, huh? Not really, not all the way down in your gut. It is so axiomatic, so clear, that there is something more than mere particle interactions that we call “seeing red”, because Red doesn’t seem to lie solely in those interactions.
Red is an “emergent property,” is axiomatically existent to the human consciousness. You cannot fully deny it without fundamentally warping what it means to be conscious.
So who the damn fuck decided what red is to you?!
First draft 9/13/21