By: Alastair Waterman https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1N1TBvEKuF/
Why does red feel exactly like red, green exactly like green, and why can these two experiences never, ever swap places?
Most current theories of consciousness have no real answer. They explain how the brain detects wavelength, but not why one neural pattern feels “red” and its literal opponent feels “green”
Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT) offers the first direct mechanism.
Colour vision is opponent at every level: red and green are mutually exclusive from retina → LGN → V1 → V4 → inferotemporal cortex.
This hard-wired mutual exclusion is a multi-level structural refusal.
The claim: The specific feeling of redness is not the spikes that are transmitted.
It is the precise, reproducible shape of what is refused transmission — a stable ~55–65-event “hole” carved into each gamma cycle in the anterior cingulate cortex and self-monitoring networks.
Greenness is the topologically inverse hole created by refusing red instead.
Because the refusal profiles are enforced by the opponent wiring itself, red can never feel like green and green can never feel like red — the geometry physically forbids it.
Five concrete, near-term falsifiable experiments are listed (V4 microstimulation + optogenetic opponent silencing, ACC-rTMS, etc.). If even one holds, most positive-spike theories will have a very hard time explaining colour qualia. #consciousness #qualia #hardproblem #neuroscience #colorvision
Why does 700 nm light feel unmistakably red, 530 nm feel green, and never the reverse or like the taste of pineapple? This paper introduces a new solution to the hard problem of specific qualia within Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT).
Instead of locating phenomenal consciousness in positive neural activity (spikes, oscillations, or integrated information), RDRT proposes that the entire qualitative character of experience is carried by the low-entropy informational boundary (∆H_boundary) that the brain actively maintains between the tiny subset of microstates it realises and the astronomically larger set of physically possible microstates it systematically refuses to instantiate.
Colour opponency (red–green, blue–yellow, black–white) provides the ideal natural experiment: at every hierarchical level the two poles are mutually exclusive, creating a multi-level structural refusal. The subjective “redness” versus “greenness” is argued to emerge from topologically inverse, structurally enforced refusal profiles that converge as a highly stable ∼55–65-event “silence pattern” per gamma cycle in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and associated self-monitoring networks. This reproducible Local Post-Encoding Refusal (LPReff) pattern constitutes a phenomenal compression index of I ≈ 36.2 ± 3.1 bits (95% CI [33.1, 39.3])—the proposed direct physical carrier of a specific colour quale.