The Colour That Does Not Exist

Your brain has been lying to you about colour your entire life. Not bending the truth — lying. The tomato you ate for lunch was not red. Nothing has ever been red. What actually happened: light bounced off the tomato's skin at a particular wavelength, struck the back of your eye, and your brain invented red on the spot. The redness lives entirely inside you. The tomato, sitting alone in a dark room, has no colour at all. It is just matter, waiting. This is not philosophy. It is what the physics says. Out there in the world, there are only electromagnetic waves, vibrating at different speeds — no colour, no hue, no warmth, no cool blue. The rainbow you see is something your ancestors' brains built, over millions of years, because distinguishing ripe fruit from unripe fruit meant the difference between living and starving. Your red and my red may not even be the same experience. We both learned the same word, pointed at the same tomatoes, and assumed we were seeing the same thing. We have no way to check. There are people alive right now who can see colours you cannot — a fourth type of cone cell in the eye, letting them walk through a world painted in shades that have no name in any language you know. You are not seeing reality. You are seeing your brain's best guess at it. And that guess is beautiful. And it is also completely made up.