An embodied thought
If structuralists are right, our perceptions of experience depend on how we have perceived all other previous experiences. When we encounter red, in order to define it or hold it in our heads as a distinct category, we contrast it with other colours, as well as compare it to entirely different perceptual categories. For instance, red is sort of like orange, but distant from blue, and nothing at all like pain or joy. Contemporary neuroscience has used this contrast and compare qualia situation to develop classification schemes of experience, often couched as abstract geometric shapes. “Our approach is to categorise all possible relationships between qualia,” says psychologist Nao Tsuchiya at Monash University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, who leads the Qualia Structure Project.
The Qualia Structure Project is regarded as being fundamental to an understanding of consciousness and it has at its core a mathematical approach that uses a geometric analysis enabling researchers to boil data down to shapes. For instance, based on his experiments, Tsuchiya estimates that we experience at least seven dimensions of colour. A report on the project states that it "has turned some of the classic philosophical thought experiments into actual empirical experiments. For instance, "is my red the same as your red?" ...The project invited participants into the lab for intensive testing. Four were flagged as colour-blind on a standard screening test, four weren’t flagged but volunteered that their colour vision seemed different and three had typical colour vision. Within each group, people made the same judgements about the resemblance of colours, but between groups, these assessments diverged. By doing a geometric analysis, the researchers boiled the data down to a shape. That of the second group – the self-reported colour-blind people – had features of the shapes of the other groups. “It’s an intermediate shape,” says Tsuchiya. In the structural way of thinking, what we take to be red is defined by its position within this shape. So, people within a group were entitled to say, “My red is the same as your red.” But what was red for people in one group might effectively be green for those in another. Tsuchiya describes the intermediate, second group as a “bridge” between atypical and typical colour experience, able to grasp the colour experiences of both." (Togashi, 2026)
Recently the project has been studying emotion. They have been showing participants pairs of videos that are supposed to elicit emotional responses. The early results are that both highly sensitive people and far less emotionally literate people experience emotion interoceptually in similar ways, but some people are more able to communicate this experience than others. I thought this chimed with my own work. Most people seem to have some awareness of their interoceptual experiences but they differ in their ability to articulate this. My work is mainly to help people become aware of these experiences, whilst this scientific project seeks to measure them; a typical art/science divide.
Many years ago when I was at art college we had to look at the work of J. L. Austin, his book 'How to do things with words', was seen as seminal by my then tutor Keith Arnatt. We looked at illocutionary acts and in particular I remember being very interested in Austin's thoughts on the nature of pretence. Austin broke communication down into three parts, Locutionary Acts: The literal, physical act of communicating something, producing the sounds and constructing the words or making in our case, the art; the welding, drawing, painting processes. Illocutionary Acts: The performance of a communicative function in saying those words (e.g., using the words within the context of a warning or a promise), or presenting the artwork (framed perhaps by the gallery blurb as a warning, as an aesthetic experience or as an investment) and finally the Perlocutionary Act: The actual effect or consequence the utterance or exhibition has on the audience (e.g., persuading, comforting, alarming, or annoying them). Consciousness in Austin's terms was more to do with how we used language, but what if we were pretending? Pretending in relation to art seemed to myself to be to do with mimesis and mimesis was one of the art raft's central planks. Austin made a distinction between pretending to do and pretending to be. Pretending to be something, such as an angry person requires carrying out a string of related behaviours associated with that identity and eventually the pretence behaviour will become assimilated. I. e. you will eventually become what you pretend to be. This was the point of the anger mask. In order to think about how it feels to be angry, sometimes we need to assimilate the related behaviours associated with anger. As we do this, we can be more aware of what we are feeling. But what if you are pretending to see a colour? “Colour blindness” was not scientifically recognised until John Dalton’s seminal report in the late 18th century. (Taniguchi, et al, 2025) This delay implies that atypical colour vision may have long gone unnoticed because people communicated without difficulty using a shared colour vocabulary, grounded in largely overlapping phenomenology. An alternative possibility is that a shared linguistic system itself shapes colour experience in a way that renders their qualia similar. The act of using language to cover up the fact that you were pretending to see, being gradually assimilated, so that in effect people can see, even though they cant see what others do see. This belief that you can see what you cant see, was something I came across several times during my career teaching foundation students. I encountered several students who were colour blind but they had never realised it and had had no problems communicating colour experiences before. It was only when we were exploring colour mixing that this became evident. Once it was evident and we gave them a colour blindness test, most of these students then admitted that they had felt something was wrong, but had purposefully behaved as if their perception was the same as other people.
References
bioRxiv 2026.02.13.705699; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.13.705699
