Quantitative Qualia and the Science of Redness

[Stuart LaForge]

Here is an interesting study that reports using machine learning
techniques to analyze color qualia quantitatively. Basically they had
426 people with typical color vision and 257 individuals who were color
blind take a computer survey where they judged the similarity of
color-pairs chosen randomly from a pool of 93 colors using a point
scale. The results were then used to train an artificial neural network
(ANN) by unsupervised pairwise alignment of individual's similarity data
for the color pairs without reference to the color name or label. In
other word, it was told to look for similarities based on the numerical
distance reported by each pair of individuals for each color pair,
without being told what the colors were and then used the alignments to
form clusters corresponding to a "color map". When the relative
differences between colors reported by the research subjects were
clustered without reference to the color, it nonetheless turned out that
clusters corresponded to the various color labels and the color maps of
the normally-sighted group were similar to one another. The color maps
of the color-blind people were, also, similar to one another. However,
the color maps of the color-sighted people were different from the color
maps of the color-blind people.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00289-5

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LYgJrBf6awsqFRCt3/is-red-for-gpt-4-the-same-as-red-for-you

Using machine learning to analyze qualia like this is fascinating. Just
like an LLM can learn the contextual meaning of words without being
explicitly programmed with the definition of the words simply by
statistically analyzing the average numerical distances between words in
a corpus of text, this technique should allow AI to recognize and use
colors without being explicitly programmed with any particular
definition of say red. This would render the question of whether an AI
can truly see a color to be equivalent to whether an LLM actually
understands what it is saying.

Brent, you have have a thing for both color qualia and surveys so this
paper should be right up your alley.

Stuart LaForge

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stuart,

Yes, thanks for this reference.

It just must be kept in mind, that though an abstract intelligence (words only) can discover and model color qualities, without a definition of the words being grounded with factual physical qualities it experiences first hand, they can't know what the words represent.

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