http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/08/color-of-consciousness/

An interesting article (part 2 of 3 — part 1 is linked in the beginning of the article) suggests that the experience of human consciousness is fundamental to, and, perhaps, unapproachable by science.

Instead of suggesting that our senses deceive us, Riccardo Manzotti asserts a more obvious and sensible position: that without consciousness, without experience, there is neither science, nor anything for it to examine. Which recalls the fundamental question about consciousness: if it’s an illusion, or ‘a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity—then the senses with which you discriminate between reality and illusions are based upon illusions. There’s no way out, or forward.

But I find the example of the ‘visual illusion’ included particularly interesting to unwrap.

The take-away from from Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s spiralized ‘illusion’ is not that we are sensually delusional and thus prone to misperceive the world (as many scientists might assert), but rather that color does not exist as an absolute quality of objects. Its perceived qualities are, instead, the result of many relationships, including their context.

What is experienced by human beings actually depends upon many factors ordinarily dismissed; perspective, whether we are looking at additive color or subtractive color (in objects colorized by techniques, such as print or computer screens), lighting (the colorspace of the light you are seeing colors within affects their experienced hue), and perhaps most importantly: things in themselves do not explicitly possess qualities such as color.

Instead, colors acquire some their visual qualities from, for example, being overlayed with a repeating pattern of another color. Context matters. Environment matters. What colors are next to other colors … matters.

So this is not a case of humans »not seeing what is actually there; it is a case of humans seeing something that someone says they shouldn’t—but Mr. Kitaoka’s logic and understanding of color are woefully flawed.

The illusion here is not the way the sensed color differs in our experience even though the undercolor is the same in both spirals. It is that we ‘should’ see the undercolor as the same even though its context insures that we cannot.

The illusion is not, then, what we see; but rather, a delusional position held by someone determined to falsify our visual senses.