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Neural Myths of Colour: Why Nature Gets It Wrong
This week Nature announced that “my blue is your blue”: brains, they claim, represent colours in the same way. With fMRI scans and a machine-learning classifier, researchers “proved” that when you see red, I see red too — because our brains look alike.
This is not science; it’s a neural myth.
The Ontological Misstep
The article smuggles in a representationalist fantasy: that colour is a thing in the brain. It invites us to imagine that “redness” lives in a cluster of neurons, waiting to be decoded. This is category error of the first order. Colour is not matter; it is phenomenon. It exists only as construed experience. Neural activity scaffolds this construal, but it does not contain it. To say otherwise is to confuse physiology with meaning — a confusion as old as neuroscience itself.
The Classifier as Oracle
The machine-learning model is treated as if it were an oracle of truth: it sees across brains, therefore it reveals universality. But classifiers do not reveal; they cut. They enact a perspectival alignment, producing the very sameness they pretend to discover. To believe otherwise is to fall into the fallacy of objectification, mistaking an artefact of measurement for the structure of reality.
The Erasure of Difference
By trumpeting “shared neural codes,” the piece erases variation: the colour-blind, the synaesthete, the cultural other. If the study misclassifies, the article stays silent. Instead we are handed the fantasy of universality: “we all see the same.” In doing so, it repeats a colonial gesture — effacing difference in the name of sameness.
Value Disguised as Meaning
The real finding is trivial: similar physiological systems, when exposed to similar stimuli, show similar activations. This is a value-system fact — a matter of bodily organisation. Yet the article presents it as if it were a meaning-system fact — proof that construals of colour are identical across individuals. It confuses the scaffolding of meaning with meaning itself.
The Relational Reframe
Seen through relational ontology, the story looks different:
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Colour is always already collective construal. To say “red” is to align construals across a community.
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fMRI plus classifier is just another way of phasing that alignment into measurable form.
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The supposed “universal neural code” is nothing but the trace of one methodological cut, mistaken for ontology.
Why It Matters
The danger is not the study itself — mapping correlations is useful work. The danger is the story Nature tells with it: that meaning is in the brain, that construal collapses into physiology, that collective difference can be erased in the name of sameness. This is not science; it is ontological sleight of hand.
Until we learn to see colour as phenomenon, not object, neuroscience will keep mistaking its own cuts for reality.
