Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

 I wonder if it is the case that the colour qualia we 'see' is the only way to represent the data in a way that meets all the constraints of the system... that the palette we see emerges because it is the only way to differentiate, in the right ways, between the different states that are represented in the underlying neural hardware. That somehow an inverted colour world fails somewhere to meet the constraints of the actual brain-in-state and therefore does not, and cannot appear. That therefore all perception, whatever type it is, 'presents' the data in the only way it can to fulfil it's objectives.

Any thoughts are welcome on any aspect of this

Could I get some clarification.  Are you asking whether or not we percieve things the way we do because thi is the only way that we, as a system, -can- percieve them..or because this is the only manner in which they -could be- percieved.  That any system would have to arrive at this solution in order -to- perceive?  The former is likely, to a degree...the latter would be difficult to substantiate.

It certainly appears to me to be the case that colours are produced in the brain on-the-fly as it were - that we have not necessarily seen every colour it is possible for us to see and if each one was neurally encoded individually the brain would be a lot bigger than it actually is because there would be so many possibilities.

There is a point at which you need to make the architecture bigger to handle more variables...but...consider how many individual colors you can designate in each bitplace of a relatively simple computational device. I don't know that the brain would have to be immensely large to hold a designating variable for many more colors than we can currently see. After all, we have names for colors that we can't see. We have already defined them -as variables-. We're not entirely sure that we retain every specific instance or memory of color, btw.....we have reason to suspect precisely the opposite. If the data is largely dumped after any relevant computation is performed..then no amount of new colors, however large, would overload the capacity of the system. Basically just discussing a theoretical problem that can be solved by a "biological register"....yeah?