To my limited understanding, when we “see” color what we happens is the object we are viewing absorbs all the other colors of the spectrum except for what we see. So if I am looking at something purple, that object has actually absorbed all the other colors and is only refecting purple light.
Now…how does that work with black? If black is the absence of color, or light, how can I see it? Is a black light being reflected into my eyes? Or am I registering nothing?
In theory, black is what we perceive if a surface doesn’t reflect any wavelength of light. In real life, anything that is painted black will reflect *some * light, even if it’s only a small amount, and so we see a surface that is almost, but not quite, true black. It may be a gray-ish black or a bluish-black or a brown-ish black, but there will be a small amount of reflected light for your eye to detect.
In the presence of genuine, absolute blackness, there is nothing for your eyes to detect and so you perceive nothing. If you go on a caving tour, for example, and it’s one where they temporarily turn off all the lights, you can experience total blackness (absence of light). This was one of the nice touches when I took a tour of the Jenolan caves in Australia. It’s quite a curious sensation.
It’s hard to recreate this experience at home, because it’s hard to obtain perfect exclusion of all light sources.
Black items absorb an incredible amount of light, but not all light. So, you are usually looking at something that is very very very very charcoal grey in color.
Even very black items have some ‘gloss’…even the flat finishes. This minimal reflection is enought to help you register the color as ‘black’.
Real black is absence of ANY light hitting your eyes.
So what would happen if, in theory, I was able to produce a paint that reflected no light at all. If I painted a surface and shined a light on it, would it register as I know black now, or something more “pure”? if that makes sense
It’s hard to make a truly black surface because most objects have some sort of specularity, shininess that is independant of color. It may be a mirror like metallic surface or matte but it’s generally always there. As an experiment go to a color palette chooser on a computer and find the RGB value that looks like the gold of a piece of jewelry. You won’t find it.
The closest I have seen to a physical thing that looks truly black is spilled laser printer toner. The super fine particles don’t seem to have much specularity and if the room lighting is fairly flat, indirect bounce light rather than direct from bulbs, it can give the illusion of looking at a void rather than a thing.
It depends on how you conceptualize vision. If you had a “perfect” black, it would reflect no light and since light is what you “see” then you can’t “see” a perfect black. If there are other things besides the black object in your field of vision, you would see the difference between the stuff you can see and the perfect black which you can’t see. It would look as if it were a 2D surface blocking out the light of whatever is behind it.
Don’t forget that your brain registers everything in your visual field and then decides what to make of it. What you see is really the result of a synergy between your eyes and several different parts of your brain.
Maybe I can reframe the OP’s question more precisely.
Why does the qualia of pure black exist?
In a perceptual framework, as opposed to physical one, black is a sensation in colorspace that we treat as another member among the spectrum of colors we percieve i.e. Blue, Red, Black…etc. Now if one were to remove all light, would anything be perceived (including the sensation of a void visual modality)? If so, what and how? Would this experience be explained as background neuronal oscillations in the visual processing areas?
To help you grasp why you can experience black, it may help you to think about hearing silence. If there is no sound, you have the ability to experience the lack of it, only by contrast to hearing sound.
Left in a space with no light, I suspect you would quickly lose the ability to perceive blackness.
thanks gyan you expressed it very well! That is exactly what I am trying to understand.
If I have two red objects with a light absorbing object between them, and a bright light shining on all three, would that object actually be “black”? Could my mind even process it properly?
Yes, the object between them would be black. I really have no idea what you mean when you ask if your mind could process it “properly.” I’ve personally never seen anything that my mind couldn’t process. It may process what I see as “meaningless” shapes and colors, but that is still processing. If you mean what if you had a cube and you painted it with perfect black, would you see it as a cube, then the answer is maybe. If there were no visual clues, then like I said before, perfect black would register as a two dimensional surface because it is visual clues that tell us an object is three dimensional. It is, in fact, these visual clues that are used to create Trompe l’oeil (fool the eye) paintings which can look startlingly three dimensional until one gets very close to them.
The qualia of blackness exists because we experience blackness. Calling black a color is just a way of thinking about it. Sometimes it is a useful way of thinking about black and sometimes it isn’t.
Of course it could, why wouldn’t it? you’d see two red objects with “nothing” inbetween them, and your mind would perceive the “nothing” as black. Think of it in terms of how the light would strike your retina. There’d be red light rays striking a certain area of your retina, next to that a space on your retina where no light rays were striking, then a space where more red rays were striking. Why do you think your mind would have some kind of trouble interpreting that? I mean, go up on a mountain and look up at the night sky. What do you see? Dots of light with a whole lot of blackness – i.e. nothing, no light rays coming from that area – in between. I don’t know about you, but my mind does just fine looking at that.
Your eye’s lens focuses an image on the receptors of the retina. When an object doesn’t reflect any, or little, light the receptors in that area of the image aren’t stimulated to send out electrical signals. The mind processes that lack of signals as black.
In The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe invented a color “Fulgin” which was “the color darker than black.” I think the color (Used in clothing in the books) was a perfect absorber. A person who wore a fulgin cloak would appear like a walking shadow, with no folds creases or fabric to be seen.
Dunno if it’s pertinent to this discussion, but when I’m in a perfectly silent room, I do hear that constant tinny background whine that my ears are apparently subject to without surcease. Likewise, if I’m in a very, very dark room, I do see ghost flashes of light when I move my eyes back and forth, probably from the “floaters” that have resulted from my macular degeneration.
And if I were confronted with absolute silence or absolute blackness for any length of time, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found myself experiencing aural and visual hallucinations or at least an optical illusion.
So I don’t think a particular sensation can be separated from the organ that receives it, and the brain that processes it.
