I Am a Strange Loop

It all comes from the idea that you are supposedly so different from me that there is no way to cross the gap between our interiorities — no way for you to know what I am like inside, or vice versa. In particular, when you look at a bunch of red roses and I look at the same bunch of red roses, we both externalize what we are seeing by making roughly the same noise (“red roses”), but maybe, for all you know, what I am experiencing as redness inside my private, inaccessible cranium is what you, if only you could “step inside” my subjectivity for a moment or two, would actually call “blue”. (By the way, advocates of the inverted-spectrum riddle would spurn any suggestion that you and I actually are already inside each other, even the littlest bit. Their riddle is predicated upon the existence of an Unbridgeable You–Me Chasm — that is, the absolute inaccessibility by one person of any other person’s interiority. In other words, belief in the inverted spectrum is a close cousin to belief in Cartesian Egos — the idea that we are all disjoint islands and that “you can’t get there from here”.)

Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White, and Blue

Let’s consider this idea. Maybe, just maybe, when all fifty million French people look at blood and declare that its color is “rouge”, they are actually experiencing an inner sensation of blueness; in other words, blood looks to them just the way melted blueberry ice cream looks to Americans. And when they gaze up at a beautiful cloudless summer sky and voice the word “bleu”, they are actually having the visual experience of melted raspberry ice cream. Sacrebleu! There is a systematic deception being pulled on them, and simultaneously a systematic linguistic coverup is going on, preventing anyone, including themselves, from ever knowing it.

We’d be convinced of this reversal if only we could get inside their skulls and experience colors in their uniquely bleu-blanc-rouge way, but alas, we’ll never do that. Nor will they ever see colors in our red-white-and-blue way. And by the way, it’s not the case that some wires have been crossed inside those French skulls — their brains look no different from ours, on every scale, from neurotransmitters to neurons to visual cortex. It’s not something fixable by rewiring, or by any other physical operation. It’s just a question of, well, ineffable feelings. And what’s worse is that although it’s true, nobody will ever know that it’s true, since nobody can ever flit from one interiority to another — we’re all trapped inside our own cranium.

Now this scenario sounds downright silly, doesn’t it? How could it ever come about that the fifty million people living inside the rather arbitrary frontiers of a certain hexagonally shaped country would all mistakenly take redness for blueness and blueness for redness (though never revealing it linguistically, since they had all been taught to call that blue sensation “red” and that red sensation “blue”)?

Even the most diehard of inverted-spectrum proponents would find this scenario preposterous. And yet it’s just the same as the standard inverted spectrum; it’s simply been promoted to the level of entire cultures, which makes it sound as it should sound — like a naïve fairy tale.

Inverting the Sonic Spectrum

Let’s explore the inverted spectrum a little further by twisting some other knobs. What if all the chirpy high notes on the piano (we do agree they are chirpy, dear reader, don’t we?) sounded very deep and low to, say, Diana Krall (though she always called them “high”), and all the deep low notes sounded chirpy and high to her (though she always called them “low”)? This, too, would be the “inverted spectrum” problem, merely involving a sonic spectrum instead of the visual one. Now this scenario strikes me as much less plausible than the original one involving colors, and I hope strikes you that way, too. But why would there be any fundamental difference between an auditory inverted spectrum and a visual one?