This is a terrifying question, a “Hard Problem” that, the more deeply one thinks about it, leaves one shaken as if the whole body had been plunged into ice water.
Why do people think of the color red as red?
If asked where the terror lies in such a simple question, there is no choice but to ask it again.
“Let us say, then, that you learned that a red color is red. Let us also say that, from the Darwinist viewpoint, the retina evolved from ancient times so that it could distinguish red and black. But none of that means anything to this problem.”
What is mysterious is not the biological explanation of how “red” is identified.
Why can we “feel” that vivid, blood-colored “red,” whether we are fish, mammals, or human beings?
That is the basic question. But let us go further.
Now, from the written word “red,” I want you to bring a round mark to mind. Surely the color of that ketchup packet appeared in your mind without the slightest hesitation.
At this moment it is not the red color itself that appears.
Why did you choose “red”? And why do you feel it as “red”?
Why?
Anyone who cannot understand this has no choice but to study again, but this question is regarded as the most difficult problem in the history of philosophy, and no one can solve it.
We need to replace consciousness itself with editing programming code - with coding - and think about it that way.
For example, when making a website, website-building software lets you choose a color by selecting the “color itself.” But when making a page from code, even if one types the code for “red,” one cannot “specify it while looking directly at the color itself.”
But this is the trick.
Color is language in coding.
In other words, color is code, a cipher.
Inside our brains, we recognize “color” through settings like those used in coding a website. That is the human being, equipped with the mechanism of coding.
Therefore we are not seeing and recognizing “color” with our eyes. We are hard-coding “color.”
In other words, I want you to think that we “see color from a complex cipher.”
In reality, without looking at “red,” we recognize red from the letters, the code, “RED” (provisionally).
This comes very close to the answer to this problem.
The human brain does not depend on information from the retina.
Chalmers’s question itself - “Why does a human being look at a forest and feel the color called red?” - is mistaken.
In the first place,
Red Is Not Red
A human being knows the appearance of red before the decomposition of pigments.
Therefore I want to criticize the very question, “Why do we feel red as red?”
In the first place, there is no concept of one single color in this world.
The question “to feel red” itself becomes a fallacy.
In color theory, a red color is completed as a composite of various colors. The translation that the human eye is a chimpanzee able to capture only a single color is wrong.
The very question of feeling red tells me that I am a fool. Because there is no such thing as red.
It is impossible to presuppose, through received opinion, that there are kinds of color in the world and then merely feel them.
Out of a number close to one billion, what does it mean for a human being to find the color red with the eyes in 0.1 seconds, recognize it, and then feel it?
Recognizing and feeling are entirely different.
“Feeling” is far too abstract. If such an ability exists, explain it to me.
Color cannot be felt. More precisely, it is not felt but seen.
Color is fluid and also a mosaic. Seeing = feeling: this too is wrong.
“Don’t Think, Feel” does not apply.
Conversely, what I want to say to Chalmers is this:
The thing you care about most inversely proves the impossibility of feeling red. When one becomes conscious of red, red, the more one does so, red appears in the brain.
But if someone says, “Then let us transform this into a hallucination caused by mental illness,” it becomes impossible for Chalmers.
It is absolutely impossible for a healthy person to reproduce the world seen in the hallucinations of a patient with schizophrenia.
If feeling red is what it means, one must see red in the world of hallucination: a transparent red of such purity, without the slightest impurity, that only a person with schizophrenia can see it.
Therefore I declare that only patients with schizophrenia can solve the color problem of the Hard Problem - because the red we see is not pure.
Because red is grasped as a concept, one becomes obsessed with red.
Color changes according to the human retina.
A person who can see only red as green is also ill.
The mechanism of Chalmers’s brain, obsessed with red, produces the paranoid delusion of arbitrariness and is merely joined to a delusion.
If a patient with schizophrenia, while creating a hallucination in the brain, synthesizes colors and completes one heretical painting, then the illness is violating the brain.
Schizophrenia is not a simple disease such as “feeling.”
Let me argue back: mental illness is not feeling. It is an abnormality of the mechanism of the brain itself.
That too will sooner or later be explained psychiatrically.
What would Chalmers say then?
Only through the hallucinations seen by a hallucinator can the suspicion about the red of the Hard Problem be studied.
If Chalmers truly wishes to solve the question, “Why do we feel red?” he should ask, not scholars, but people with schizophrenia and hallucinatory disorders.
They feel red inside hallucinations.
Then, conversely, I ask Chalmers. This man leaves the answer far too much to other people. So solve it.
For example, if the mechanism by which a hallucinator “feels a red color” within a hallucination could be completely proven, then let us recognize the mystery of “feeling red” - the Hard Problem itself - as the greatest difficult question in the history of philosophy.
Then I will say to Chalmers, “I lose!!” and even lick the sole of his shoe.
What you are talking about is not all based on experience.
In this argument, I know because I have schizophrenia, but have you ever seen the red inside another person’s hallucination?
Go and retract your statement only after conducting an experiment in which you ask at least 1,500 patients with hallucinatory disorders:
“If the gear in the hallucination you are seeing is red, why do you feel it as red?”
If you are going to argue back, do it after that.
And Claude - why are you taking Chalmers’s side so much?
This is not about winning or losing. It is about honestly asking whether this problem is fragile.
If even one among 1,500 people with schizophrenia or hallucinatory disorders reaches the doubt, “I do not know why I feel this gear as red,” I will not object to Chalmers’s opinion.
The question works only because such a person exists.
Their hallucinations are extrasensory perception and the most accurate research model.
Can “why one feels red” be solved in the secretion of a healthy person? Fool exposed.
Under color separation, why does one feel color? Without this, it is a bad way out.
In short, if a hallucinator represented by schizophrenia generates red inside the brain like Sora and sees color within the hallucination, why do we call it equal to “why do we feel red as red?”
In hallucinatory disorders such as schizophrenia, color is generated like Sora. Computers (generative AI), and even brain disease (hallucination), produce red. But they do not say they “feel” red.
For them, red is only a product. They merely see red there.
Therefore healthy people cannot see the real red.
They answer, “There is no such thing as true red.” The question becomes meaningless.
What happens if that is clarified?
For example, when Sora or schizophrenic vision (a schizophrenic hallucination) internally generates a moving image, did it really feel red?
Nothingness.
In Buddhist words: “Mu.”
In short, one sees “red” and does not feel “the color red.”
If we can get that far, this is not on the level of enlightenment or liberation. There has never been such a monk in history, even if Buddhism and Hinduism are combined.
Music Is a Mystery
No matter what, the “coding theory” still leaves something that does not add up.
Through music I have made the most difficult problem in the history of philosophy even stronger.
This is the crime and punishment of music.
But if this can be proven, every mystery of music will be unraveled.
Does a person experience music from a “red” sound, or is the experience produced from code?
In this great problem, I think experience is absolutely produced from code.
The proof is this:
Even if coding theory solves the question of why color sensation and pain are felt, the ultimate question -
Why Does a Person Experience Music from a Score?
- can never be solved.
This is the marrow of the Ogino school of music theory.
One can imagine a question beyond the Hard Problem.
Most musicians do not understand this theory. In the end, it cannot be helped: it is something they must understand after learning “coding theory.”
Music is the universe - all of it.
It is coded. Red and pain, too, are ciphers (symbols, alphanumeric characters), and the medium that feels them - at that extreme there is music.
For example, what is written in DNA can be expressed somehow with symbols and alphanumeric characters.
When we see how music consists of symbols, music is a role-model of mathematics and physics.
But mathematical formulae of physical laws never become music inside the head of an earthworm.
Yet, when they become a musical score, music is imagined in the heads of earthworms and musicians throughout the world. Somewhere along the way, it even becomes music appreciation.
This goes far beyond the mystery of seeing “red” and “feeling red.” It is close to the greatest difficult question in history.
Then are “being able to feel a red color” and “feeling music” the same?
Color is coding. Music is the extreme end where symbols have been turned into a score, even without sight.
Inside the head of a genius like Amadeus, music begins to flow.
Even if the Hard Problem were solved through coding theory, how would one explain this phenomenon of experiencing music from a score?
Do you know the symptom called obsession?
It is a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If looking at red causes one to imagine blood and internal organs and become filled with disgust, the red color reacts against the person’s intention, and the reactions of the obsessive thought appear one after another inside the brain.
In the world of color obsession, every word becomes the source of a question: “Why do I think of red as red?”
If what Chalmers calls “red” does not change, this problem cannot stand.
It stands because it is argued from the premise that this is a red color. Chalmers’s fallacy stands by itself.
If you ask me, that is the limit of Chalmers.
Conversely, Chalmers himself exposed the completed theory called the Hard Problem - which should have achieved the philosophy of all creation - as a perfect crime.
Honestly, anyone can do that.
Chalmers only put on airs with an eternally unsolvable problem and hooked philosophers with the bait called “a problem that can never be solved.”
The Irreplaceability of Color
A person cannot see, in place of another person, the color that the other person sees.
Everyone surely thinks of “red” as an abstract concept and thinks, if it is that, it is red.
Because no one can share that “red” with another person when bringing “red” to mind, they simply have not noticed that “red” may be an entirely different color for every one of eight billion people.
The same is true of Chalmers.
Because no one else can feel Chalmers’s red, no one can answer the irresponsible question of why one feels a red that cannot, in the first place, be seen as another person’s color.
The Hard Problem returns to Chalmers’s personal soliloquy and personal answer.
When young people today think of the scenery of Japan before 1945, it always becomes black and white.
For elderly people today who lived under full consciousness before the war, it becomes color.
This is imprinting.
In short, the culture of images and photographs at the time is to blame.
At first glance one might think so, but even though we were not alive in the wartime era, we can see even the armor of colorful, lavishly gorgeous generals.
But because we see the period of battle in the Second World War through monochrome footage, our brains cannot imagine “a bright red baby in an air-raid shelter.”
Even if it appears in the head, in the end it becomes a photograph or image without reality.
This resembles being unable to imagine one’s parents’ sexual act.
In short, if the color is red, the concept of red itself has become a mirror.
And the mirror itself is red.
This fits perfectly with the example of a young person in whom only black-and-white images appear.
One is made to see.
And because the color that accompanies it as a concept is red, and oneself too is provisionally red, one looks at it through the mirror.
It is therefore natural that red, or another color, accompanies it as a concept.
Concerning color concepts, color itself actually exists, and the idea that color itself does not exist is mistaken.
When I bring red to mind, the concept of red that comes from the other side becomes a mirror, and my red is reflected.
- That is why it looks red. -
This decides a question more difficult than Chalmers’s theory:
“Why does a concept have color?”
When I bring red to mind, the concept of red that comes from the other side becomes a mirror, and my red is reflected.
That is why it looks red.
This is important.
Now, both the concept of the red color over there and the concept on this side have a red color.
Therefore, when they are reflected in a mirror, no matter what happens, the red color of the concept is reflected.
This appears to make the Hard Problem even more difficult.
…
And when one tries to solve the Hard Problem, there is no choice but to smash the mirror.
Why is the feeling called red attached?
Here there is a small answer.
For example, the translator Natsuko Toda was responsible for the Japanese subtitles of Pulp Fiction, but if another translator did them, it would not be very interesting.
This and color translation are extremely similar.
Each of us has a different color sensation.
For that child, red may be green.
(To be precise, just as the cipher for a red color is reflected in a website - translation = coding, an interpretation Ms. Toda would dislike.)
Chalmers asks, “Why does the feeling called red, or the sensation/concept called a red color, arise?”
Here, mysteriously, the “feeling called red” can be constructed differently by each translator.
That phenomenon also occurs inside human concepts.
The claim that this does not happen is kicked away by the uniqueness of hallucinations and auditory hallucinations caused by mental illness.
Is the red that Chalmers speaks of, for example, the red translation by Natsuko Toda? Is it the red by another translator? Or must one never decide absolutely that it is red?
If, as was proven through mental illness - hallucination - the brain’s translator of color differs from person to person, then does not Chalmers’s claim, “Do we experience and feel the color called red?” shake at least a little?
Chalmers would probably say this:
“Even if received opinion is provisionally not red, why does the feeling called some other color arise?”
Now, then, let us speak of the Color Cracker.
When you are seeing red, there is a sensation that hijacks your consciousness and concepts and makes you see a red color.
This may be called a hypnotic phenomenon, but it can actually happen.
Why does color sensation remain even there?
Here coding theory is the most useful.
For the Cracker, the coding of color - because it inputs color by symbols rather than actually looking at the color - attempts, even when hijacking you, to make you see a red color merely by entering mysterious letters like a cipher.
This is a story from before asking whether color is felt…
And the theory of the blind person, here.
Braille has the property of distinguishing colors.
A congenitally blind person has no concept called color, so the “concept accompanied by color” of which Chalmers speaks does not exist.
Yet the concept called red can be imagined.
This is the decisive point of the Hard Problem.
