The strongest realist position, that of robust realism in the Taylor/Dreyfus view, is the most parsimonious account. When you claim panpsychism is the most parsimonious, I ask parsimony of what? If you do accept the Galilean framework, sure, but the framework itself is the least parsimonious move, requiring positing a vast gulf between manifest image and reality for an elaborate panpsychist bridge to cross. Robust realism never makes the initial Galilean concession, avoiding the problem altogether.
Realism denies that qualities are every primarily "in consciousness", perception on a phenomenological account is a form of skilled contact with the environment-- the redness a feature of the world encountered by an embodied perceiver. The absence of a mediating element in our perception avoids the question you seem to inherit of 'where do the qualities live?'. That problem only arises once you accept that scientific view is the primary ontological source.
Hence the brain in a vat argument never gets off the ground! The argument's force depends entirely on the premise that phenomenal character is fixed by internal brain states — that what it's like to see a red rose supervenes on what's happening inside the skull. But this is precisely the Cartesian picture the Taylor/Dreyfus view contests. Experience, on their account, is constitutively relational, structured by the organism's engaged situatedness in an environment. No redistribution of qualia into fundamental physics is required; no need to repopulate matter with consciousness. That is parsimony.
Let's say I have a blurry black and white photograph. I want to increase its clarity, so I go into a photoeditor and touch it up. I add details to people's faces where these details are missing and lost to blurriness. I add color where it is missing. I fill in details in the landscape background that are missing.
I have never seen the actual landscape of the photograph, nor the people in it. I don't know what they look like. I don't know what this place looks like.
What are the chances that, upon meeting the people and visiting the place where the photograph was taken, it turns out that they happen to look exactly like my recreation of them?
Seems like a strange coincidence, don't you think? Do you see my point?
The photo editor is blind to the scene — that’s what makes the match miraculous. Robust realism rejects the Cartesian enclosure entirely. There’s no mediating element between perceiver and world, no inner image needing to happen to match an outer reality. We’re embodied creatures in direct, continuous contact with an environment that pushes back — and that contact is self-correcting. When our grip on the world slips, the world tells us. Ongoing engagement answers to reality in real time.
> There’s no mediating element between perceiver and world.
Then what are my eyes and visual cortex doing, exactly? What is light doing? Why can I see nothing when it is dark? If you are right, it should just be an open gap of nothing from the world straight into the soul, which I can peer through, somehow, without needing any light as a "mediating element". When I see an object, I am actually just seeing light. I can trick myself by looking at a computer screen where there physical object is not there, but the pixels in the screen are arranged in such a way so that the computer screen produces light as if the physical object were there. This is called "looking at a picture on a computer". It's quite realistic these days.
Besides this, there's no red light in my head. The red light stops at my eyeballs. The eyeballs send electrical signals to my visual cortex. The mediating elements are imperfect. The visual cortex is processing and encoding visual information for the mind to analyze. I cannot see the physical world as it exists outside my head, I can only see the best facsimile my visual cortex can encode.
This is a basic fact of reality. It's not something Descartes came up with.
There is a subtle confusion In this reasoning; between causal conditions and epistemic intermediaries. Of course light and neural processes are causally involved in perception — nobody denies that. The question is whether those causal processes interpose a representation between the perceiver and the world, such that what we’re directly aware of is the inner image rather than the rose.
This is not settled by neuroscience. Knowing the causal story of how perception is produced doesn’t tell you what perception is of. Is it light waves hitting rods or is it me seeing my friend? The causal chain is not the object of awareness.
Dreyfus makes exactly this point against cognitivist neuroscience: you can give a complete causal-mechanical account of the substrate of skilled coping without that account showing that what the agent is engaged with is an internal representation. The map of the causal machinery is not a map of the intentional structure of experience.
So the claim that neural processing produces a private inner facsimile that substitutes for the world is a philosophical interpretation of the neuroscience. The data underdetermines it entirely and it’s not something neuroscience itself can deliver.
The physics is clear enough: a specific wavelength, a specific receptor response. But what happens after that is where it gets strange. The brain doesn't wait for complete information. It predicts. And once it has decided something is red, it will defend that interpretation even when the input changes. Which means what we call "seeing" is partly perception and partly confabulation, a story the mind tells itself about what's probably out there, based on what has always been out there before. The rose might not be red. But you will experience it as red because your brain has decided that's the most efficient version of reality to run. That's not a limitation. That's the system working exactly as designed. The question is just: who designed it, and for what?
Thanks for this post! I've been wondering about your stance on these issues. Unfortunately, I find myself taking your friend Feser's side on the issue of qualia.
—The redness really is in the rose, the greenness really in the grass, etc., and hence we have a ‘hard problem’ not just about consciousness but also about the qualities in external objects.
I don't get it. Why should colors be singled out as "subjective", but not spatial extension? I don't see how they can thought to exist apart from one another. If I look at some object and try to picture it without any color whatsoever, it simply disappears. Nothing visibly extended remains. I don't see how it can be both colorless AND visibly extended. Conversely, when I try to picture color that's not extended, the color disappears. Without secondary qualities, what is there for scientists to measure?
Regarding the brain in the vat, I don't get that either. Why can't Feser just say that Sara's hallucinating the rose? And why wouldn't the rose existing as matter (or whatever part of the rose that you think "really" exists "out there") also be an hallucination?
Under your view, what is the ontological status of rainbows? Are they not objectively real? :(
EDIT: I want to leave you with a quote. You once asked how values can be objective. I think rejecting primary/secondary qualities distinction might be a good place to start.
"The light of a candle changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops attracting the child's hand and becomes literally repulsive. Vision is already inhabited by a meaning which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. The pure quale would be given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one's own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself acquainted...Sense experience is that vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue which the effort to know will try to take apart." —Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
I think that a realist would say that a hallucination is only possible because it’s an exception to the general rule of direct perception. (And a hallucination, for sake of argument we can imagine as being absolutely identical to real experience, maybe because a brain scientist is stimulating those neurons perfectly. In reality hallucinations or dreams rarely have the kind of coherent veridicality that one would want for the thought experiment to hold. Which is interesting.) So, usually when I see a red rose, I’m really perceiving something about the object (its redness, among other features) and the general relation of mind to world is just this ability to take in the real essence of a thing and contain it within a perceptual mental unity. Now, Does this scheme work? Im not sure. But there are deep intuitions behind the idea that are hard to dismiss. The counterpoints you mention are strong too. Now, I think in regards to hylomorphic dualisms (Feser’s philosophy of mind) particular critique of panpsychism, the identification of perception as identical to conscious experience allows then for there to be conceptions of unconscious matter that, because they lack perception, are truly lacking consciousness of any kind. (Which is how we all pre-reflectively see the world.) Consciousness is not thought of as a substance in hylomorphism per se, but as a power that certain matter has and when that power exists so too does its phenomenal character. Indeed, the power is identical to the character is identical to the matter (at least in regards to conscious perception if not thought). So just as science doesn’t think that rednesss is in the rose, which in hylomorphism it really is, so too science can’t imagine how conscious perception is in the brain (though it is.) The idea that all the features of an object can be objectively found via scientific investigation and abstraction is what hylomorphism denies. So it’s not a surprise that there are features of the brain, like conscious perception, which cannot be objectively analyzed. But matter lacking this power, perception, would be unconscious through and through, because, again, consciousness would be a power not a substance. At least such is the thought of Hylomorphism, Aristotelian metaphysics, and Thomistic scholasticism. My bottom line is that I’m always inclined a bit more to a Kantian perspective here, but still find hylomorphism hard to dismiss.
Paid up in appreciation of your addressing this topic, which has long bothered me.
The philosopher's construction of 'hallucination' differs from the real thing. I've done my share of hallucinating back in the day. I was in college with Paul Stamets. Real hallucinations -- e.g. of auras, trails, mandalas ever-opening -- aren't mistaken for the red rose beside you as you sit in the garden. Hallucinations add dimension and depth to reality, while the red rose beside you remains as objective as the moon above. They take one towards Blake's 'infinity in a grain of sand'. They don't replace mundane reality; they augment it.
Even those auras, trails and mandalas may turn out to be objective perceptions of aspects of reality we've evolved and/or enculturated ourselves to largely ignore. Are you envisioning a panpsychism without pan-psyche? In a panpsychic universe, do we even remotely know how to build a vat which will isolate a brain from pan-psyche?
Doubting the redness of the rose is akin to Descartes doubting those walking past his window weren't automatons. Such 'method of doubt' wisdoms are a slippery slope to mad conclusions; if skepticism is appropriate anywhere, surely it is to these. One may use the method to argue anything at all is an illusion -- whether another's subjectivity (or one's own, like Dennett) or the color of the rose. The political cost of accepting the method is evident in the rejection of reality and science by the political sector currently atop America.
Should the proof of philosophy be in constructing arguments-from-illusion? Do we, as human beings, gain anything of value in our lives if we're trained to disbelieve in the redness of the rose? Or instead, does such a belief distance and alienate us from the richly colorful world of experience? In pragmatic measure, don't we lose by it? How is this pursuit congruent with eudaimonia?
As always, we partially agree and partially disagree. My take on colors is similar to yours, I don't think a rose is literally red, but that redness is part of my experience. Though this is where our views diverge. Tl;dr explanation of my view.
A rose is only experienced as *red* by us because the object that is the rose has certain properties that makes it reflect the specific wavelengths of photons that our brain interprets as *red*. As is true with all objects, we are only able to "see" them because they reflect light, if they didn't there wouldn't be anything for us to perceive, of course the object would still be there, you could touch it, smell it, measure it by other means. You just couldn't directly see it.
This is where, I believe, our views slightly diverge. I'm not convinced your red is the same as my red, we have simply learned to call our experience of the same wavelengths the same thing. I don't think panpsychism is true! My experience of red is exclusive to my mind, there is nothing about the photons that is conscious.
<<I agree with Galileo (ironic, given the title of my book) that the qualities aren’t really out there in the world but exist only in consciousness.>>
If the red is my experience and my experience EXISTS then the “red” exist and it it exist in my experience then why posit that my experience does not correspond to a real quality of the flower? Our experience is that our experience of what is there actually there. Why denying what experience tell you. What real reason do you have to negate what your experience tells you?
The hard problem does not exist if one does not posit that experience is explained from an aspect of Nature which can be scientifically described. If one simply deny it is the case then there is no hard problem. Experience is central to any living organism and correspond to its self-creating. The self-creating being an unstabilised reality giving rise to a stably existing new layer of the living interaction. So what is conscious, EXPERIENCE exists in a creating sense, not in a stabilised sense.
<<So when it comes to hallucinations, at least, the experience must be in the head.>>
The experience is about something out there. It is not in the head. Of course your nervous system is involved in supporting this experience, but the experience IS NEVER IN THE HEAD and always where it itself say where it is. In this particular case, it is faulty in the sense it is an hallucination so it mis-interpret the information on the retina but it is generated as normal vision although the process failed in mis-interpreting. It is no more in the head as a normal perception.
If "redness" actually, really is a literal property of an apple, not in the sense that "an apple has a surface that reflects red light", but that "the apple is itself literally has red qualia", that would be the strangest complete coincidence ever. It would be a level of fine tuning that would be proof of the existence of God, if verified to be true, except for the problem that there is no way whatsoever to verify this strange claim.
Let's assume panpsychism is true. Even still, couldn't it be true that redness is both in the rose and in the consciousness of the rose observer? Just two different aspects of redness. So the perception of redness is in consciousness. But the rose itself is absorbing full spectrum sunlight and re-emitting photons, the majority of which have frequencies in the range that, when they get absorbed by retinal cells whose impulses are sent to the visual processing brain region have come to be labeled as red by the rose observer? No way to tell if that particular rose observer's experience of red is the same as yours is when you look at the same rose, but your experience of red is yours and is palpably real, and at the same time, the rose itself is emitting light that any observer will experience as what they call red. The experience of red is one thing, the emission of "red" wavelengths is another, and both give an incomplete but complementary description of a process, the end result of which gets called redness by observers.
a rose is a rose is a rose, so Gertrude Stein said. The redness is there, or else we wouldn't be able to see it. What we're seeing is the world through rose colored glasses, our eyes. We filter light in a way that allows us to see the red in a rose. A dog can't see the red in a rose, but we can. What's the mystery? It's both intrinsic, and in a state of flux. Through different lenses, the rose is different. What color are the aspects of roses that exist in the 5th dimension? But in some aspect, here, in front of us, there are the imbedded components in it that make it appear to be red. To us. And we see that.
The strongest realist position, that of robust realism in the Taylor/Dreyfus view, is the most parsimonious account. When you claim panpsychism is the most parsimonious, I ask parsimony of what? If you do accept the Galilean framework, sure, but the framework itself is the least parsimonious move, requiring positing a vast gulf between manifest image and reality for an elaborate panpsychist bridge to cross. Robust realism never makes the initial Galilean concession, avoiding the problem altogether.
Realism denies that qualities are every primarily "in consciousness", perception on a phenomenological account is a form of skilled contact with the environment-- the redness a feature of the world encountered by an embodied perceiver. The absence of a mediating element in our perception avoids the question you seem to inherit of 'where do the qualities live?'. That problem only arises once you accept that scientific view is the primary ontological source.
Hence the brain in a vat argument never gets off the ground! The argument's force depends entirely on the premise that phenomenal character is fixed by internal brain states — that what it's like to see a red rose supervenes on what's happening inside the skull. But this is precisely the Cartesian picture the Taylor/Dreyfus view contests. Experience, on their account, is constitutively relational, structured by the organism's engaged situatedness in an environment. No redistribution of qualia into fundamental physics is required; no need to repopulate matter with consciousness. That is parsimony.
A thought experiment:
Let's say I have a blurry black and white photograph. I want to increase its clarity, so I go into a photoeditor and touch it up. I add details to people's faces where these details are missing and lost to blurriness. I add color where it is missing. I fill in details in the landscape background that are missing.
I have never seen the actual landscape of the photograph, nor the people in it. I don't know what they look like. I don't know what this place looks like.
What are the chances that, upon meeting the people and visiting the place where the photograph was taken, it turns out that they happen to look exactly like my recreation of them?
Seems like a strange coincidence, don't you think? Do you see my point?
The photo editor is blind to the scene — that’s what makes the match miraculous. Robust realism rejects the Cartesian enclosure entirely. There’s no mediating element between perceiver and world, no inner image needing to happen to match an outer reality. We’re embodied creatures in direct, continuous contact with an environment that pushes back — and that contact is self-correcting. When our grip on the world slips, the world tells us. Ongoing engagement answers to reality in real time.
> There’s no mediating element between perceiver and world.
Then what are my eyes and visual cortex doing, exactly? What is light doing? Why can I see nothing when it is dark? If you are right, it should just be an open gap of nothing from the world straight into the soul, which I can peer through, somehow, without needing any light as a "mediating element". When I see an object, I am actually just seeing light. I can trick myself by looking at a computer screen where there physical object is not there, but the pixels in the screen are arranged in such a way so that the computer screen produces light as if the physical object were there. This is called "looking at a picture on a computer". It's quite realistic these days.
Besides this, there's no red light in my head. The red light stops at my eyeballs. The eyeballs send electrical signals to my visual cortex. The mediating elements are imperfect. The visual cortex is processing and encoding visual information for the mind to analyze. I cannot see the physical world as it exists outside my head, I can only see the best facsimile my visual cortex can encode.
This is a basic fact of reality. It's not something Descartes came up with.
There is a subtle confusion In this reasoning; between causal conditions and epistemic intermediaries. Of course light and neural processes are causally involved in perception — nobody denies that. The question is whether those causal processes interpose a representation between the perceiver and the world, such that what we’re directly aware of is the inner image rather than the rose.
This is not settled by neuroscience. Knowing the causal story of how perception is produced doesn’t tell you what perception is of. Is it light waves hitting rods or is it me seeing my friend? The causal chain is not the object of awareness.
Dreyfus makes exactly this point against cognitivist neuroscience: you can give a complete causal-mechanical account of the substrate of skilled coping without that account showing that what the agent is engaged with is an internal representation. The map of the causal machinery is not a map of the intentional structure of experience.
So the claim that neural processing produces a private inner facsimile that substitutes for the world is a philosophical interpretation of the neuroscience. The data underdetermines it entirely and it’s not something neuroscience itself can deliver.
There is no redness anywhere. Carry on.
The physics is clear enough: a specific wavelength, a specific receptor response. But what happens after that is where it gets strange. The brain doesn't wait for complete information. It predicts. And once it has decided something is red, it will defend that interpretation even when the input changes. Which means what we call "seeing" is partly perception and partly confabulation, a story the mind tells itself about what's probably out there, based on what has always been out there before. The rose might not be red. But you will experience it as red because your brain has decided that's the most efficient version of reality to run. That's not a limitation. That's the system working exactly as designed. The question is just: who designed it, and for what?
Thanks for this post! I've been wondering about your stance on these issues. Unfortunately, I find myself taking your friend Feser's side on the issue of qualia.
—The redness really is in the rose, the greenness really in the grass, etc., and hence we have a ‘hard problem’ not just about consciousness but also about the qualities in external objects.
I don't get it. Why should colors be singled out as "subjective", but not spatial extension? I don't see how they can thought to exist apart from one another. If I look at some object and try to picture it without any color whatsoever, it simply disappears. Nothing visibly extended remains. I don't see how it can be both colorless AND visibly extended. Conversely, when I try to picture color that's not extended, the color disappears. Without secondary qualities, what is there for scientists to measure?
Regarding the brain in the vat, I don't get that either. Why can't Feser just say that Sara's hallucinating the rose? And why wouldn't the rose existing as matter (or whatever part of the rose that you think "really" exists "out there") also be an hallucination?
Under your view, what is the ontological status of rainbows? Are they not objectively real? :(
EDIT: I want to leave you with a quote. You once asked how values can be objective. I think rejecting primary/secondary qualities distinction might be a good place to start.
"The light of a candle changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops attracting the child's hand and becomes literally repulsive. Vision is already inhabited by a meaning which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. The pure quale would be given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one's own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself acquainted...Sense experience is that vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue which the effort to know will try to take apart." —Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
I think that a realist would say that a hallucination is only possible because it’s an exception to the general rule of direct perception. (And a hallucination, for sake of argument we can imagine as being absolutely identical to real experience, maybe because a brain scientist is stimulating those neurons perfectly. In reality hallucinations or dreams rarely have the kind of coherent veridicality that one would want for the thought experiment to hold. Which is interesting.) So, usually when I see a red rose, I’m really perceiving something about the object (its redness, among other features) and the general relation of mind to world is just this ability to take in the real essence of a thing and contain it within a perceptual mental unity. Now, Does this scheme work? Im not sure. But there are deep intuitions behind the idea that are hard to dismiss. The counterpoints you mention are strong too. Now, I think in regards to hylomorphic dualisms (Feser’s philosophy of mind) particular critique of panpsychism, the identification of perception as identical to conscious experience allows then for there to be conceptions of unconscious matter that, because they lack perception, are truly lacking consciousness of any kind. (Which is how we all pre-reflectively see the world.) Consciousness is not thought of as a substance in hylomorphism per se, but as a power that certain matter has and when that power exists so too does its phenomenal character. Indeed, the power is identical to the character is identical to the matter (at least in regards to conscious perception if not thought). So just as science doesn’t think that rednesss is in the rose, which in hylomorphism it really is, so too science can’t imagine how conscious perception is in the brain (though it is.) The idea that all the features of an object can be objectively found via scientific investigation and abstraction is what hylomorphism denies. So it’s not a surprise that there are features of the brain, like conscious perception, which cannot be objectively analyzed. But matter lacking this power, perception, would be unconscious through and through, because, again, consciousness would be a power not a substance. At least such is the thought of Hylomorphism, Aristotelian metaphysics, and Thomistic scholasticism. My bottom line is that I’m always inclined a bit more to a Kantian perspective here, but still find hylomorphism hard to dismiss.
Paid up in appreciation of your addressing this topic, which has long bothered me.
The philosopher's construction of 'hallucination' differs from the real thing. I've done my share of hallucinating back in the day. I was in college with Paul Stamets. Real hallucinations -- e.g. of auras, trails, mandalas ever-opening -- aren't mistaken for the red rose beside you as you sit in the garden. Hallucinations add dimension and depth to reality, while the red rose beside you remains as objective as the moon above. They take one towards Blake's 'infinity in a grain of sand'. They don't replace mundane reality; they augment it.
Even those auras, trails and mandalas may turn out to be objective perceptions of aspects of reality we've evolved and/or enculturated ourselves to largely ignore. Are you envisioning a panpsychism without pan-psyche? In a panpsychic universe, do we even remotely know how to build a vat which will isolate a brain from pan-psyche?
Doubting the redness of the rose is akin to Descartes doubting those walking past his window weren't automatons. Such 'method of doubt' wisdoms are a slippery slope to mad conclusions; if skepticism is appropriate anywhere, surely it is to these. One may use the method to argue anything at all is an illusion -- whether another's subjectivity (or one's own, like Dennett) or the color of the rose. The political cost of accepting the method is evident in the rejection of reality and science by the political sector currently atop America.
Should the proof of philosophy be in constructing arguments-from-illusion? Do we, as human beings, gain anything of value in our lives if we're trained to disbelieve in the redness of the rose? Or instead, does such a belief distance and alienate us from the richly colorful world of experience? In pragmatic measure, don't we lose by it? How is this pursuit congruent with eudaimonia?
As always, we partially agree and partially disagree. My take on colors is similar to yours, I don't think a rose is literally red, but that redness is part of my experience. Though this is where our views diverge. Tl;dr explanation of my view.
A rose is only experienced as *red* by us because the object that is the rose has certain properties that makes it reflect the specific wavelengths of photons that our brain interprets as *red*. As is true with all objects, we are only able to "see" them because they reflect light, if they didn't there wouldn't be anything for us to perceive, of course the object would still be there, you could touch it, smell it, measure it by other means. You just couldn't directly see it.
This is where, I believe, our views slightly diverge. I'm not convinced your red is the same as my red, we have simply learned to call our experience of the same wavelengths the same thing. I don't think panpsychism is true! My experience of red is exclusive to my mind, there is nothing about the photons that is conscious.
<<I agree with Galileo (ironic, given the title of my book) that the qualities aren’t really out there in the world but exist only in consciousness.>>
If the red is my experience and my experience EXISTS then the “red” exist and it it exist in my experience then why posit that my experience does not correspond to a real quality of the flower? Our experience is that our experience of what is there actually there. Why denying what experience tell you. What real reason do you have to negate what your experience tells you?
The hard problem does not exist if one does not posit that experience is explained from an aspect of Nature which can be scientifically described. If one simply deny it is the case then there is no hard problem. Experience is central to any living organism and correspond to its self-creating. The self-creating being an unstabilised reality giving rise to a stably existing new layer of the living interaction. So what is conscious, EXPERIENCE exists in a creating sense, not in a stabilised sense.
<<So when it comes to hallucinations, at least, the experience must be in the head.>>
The experience is about something out there. It is not in the head. Of course your nervous system is involved in supporting this experience, but the experience IS NEVER IN THE HEAD and always where it itself say where it is. In this particular case, it is faulty in the sense it is an hallucination so it mis-interpret the information on the retina but it is generated as normal vision although the process failed in mis-interpreting. It is no more in the head as a normal perception.
If "redness" actually, really is a literal property of an apple, not in the sense that "an apple has a surface that reflects red light", but that "the apple is itself literally has red qualia", that would be the strangest complete coincidence ever. It would be a level of fine tuning that would be proof of the existence of God, if verified to be true, except for the problem that there is no way whatsoever to verify this strange claim.
Coincidence? There is no coincidence involved in believing with common-sense that one perceives the world directly.
Let's assume panpsychism is true. Even still, couldn't it be true that redness is both in the rose and in the consciousness of the rose observer? Just two different aspects of redness. So the perception of redness is in consciousness. But the rose itself is absorbing full spectrum sunlight and re-emitting photons, the majority of which have frequencies in the range that, when they get absorbed by retinal cells whose impulses are sent to the visual processing brain region have come to be labeled as red by the rose observer? No way to tell if that particular rose observer's experience of red is the same as yours is when you look at the same rose, but your experience of red is yours and is palpably real, and at the same time, the rose itself is emitting light that any observer will experience as what they call red. The experience of red is one thing, the emission of "red" wavelengths is another, and both give an incomplete but complementary description of a process, the end result of which gets called redness by observers.
a rose is a rose is a rose, so Gertrude Stein said. The redness is there, or else we wouldn't be able to see it. What we're seeing is the world through rose colored glasses, our eyes. We filter light in a way that allows us to see the red in a rose. A dog can't see the red in a rose, but we can. What's the mystery? It's both intrinsic, and in a state of flux. Through different lenses, the rose is different. What color are the aspects of roses that exist in the 5th dimension? But in some aspect, here, in front of us, there are the imbedded components in it that make it appear to be red. To us. And we see that.