Perceptual structure of colors and sensorimotor contingencies

We have discovered a fundamental biological constraint that may explain the fact that certain colors like red, green or blue appear to humans as perceptually special, despite the fact that nothing in the nature of light would predict this.

Up until now it has been thought that the particular perceptual quality of color experience, and more generally of all experience ("qualia"), has to derive from some internal, neuronal constraints. The problem then arises of explaining how to make the link between the particular neural mechanisms and the particular experiences: a hotly debated mystery of consciousness.

Our finding of an objective basis for the perceptual singularities of color obviates the need to appeal to neural mechanisms that by themselves generate color experience, and thereby constitutes a very important new element in this debate.