Forty years ago, I was reading an essay by Bertrand Russell on the mind/body problem where he addressed the difficulties that arise once we try to explain how the brain perceives color.

Today, machine vision is a hot topic, with a great deal of R&D money being spent on figuring out how to help robots and other machines navigate the world.

Curiously, although everything we see consists of colored surfaces of one shape or another, color per se does not belong to the vocabulary of science. Now, to be sure, there are many otherwise educated persons, including Nobel laureates, who will hasten to tell you that color just is the frequency of the associated light. Or a trick the brain performs. To paraphrase Newton, these positions are not only incorrect, but unintelligible, and yet they are of a piece with what “everyone knows.”

I believe the correct answer is both wonderfully simple and remarkably profound, entailing a sweeping revision of the official ontology of the sciences.

~Brian J Flanagan