7 A thought experiment: Mr. Capgras

Finally, it might seem that whereas some subjective properties—cute, sweet, funny, sexy, the characteristic sounds of scale tones—might be accounted for in terms of Bayesian expectations about how one will be disposed to behave in their presence, the very simplicity of colors must block any attempt to treat them in a similar fashion. There is no way one expects to behave in the presence of navy blue, or pale yellow, or lime green. So it may seem, but this is itself an artifact of our penchant for thinking—as Hume famously did—of colors as simples. Hume was discountenanced by the notorious missing shade of blue, and found it ideologically inconvenient to suppose, as we now know, that color experience is in fact highly complex and compositional, and deeply anchored in dispositions of our perceptual systems.[6] Moreover, color experiences are no more atomic than scale tone experiences, and give rise to all manner of expectations, which tend to go unnoticed, but can be thrown into sharp focus by a thought experiment: my fantasy about poor Mr. Clapgras, the man who wakes up to find all his emotional dispositions with regard to colors inverted while leaving intact his cognitive habits and powers (see Dennett 2005, pp. 91–102, for a more detailed account, with objections considered and rebutted). Ex hypothesi, Mr. Clapgras identifies colors and sorts colors correctly (he does not suffer from the well-studied conditions color anomia, or cerebral achromatopsia), but he finds the world disgusting, unbearable. Food looks just terrible to him now, and he has to eat blindfolded, since his emotional responses to all colors have shifted 180 degrees around the color circle (Grush this collection). He calls shocking pink “shocking pink” but marvels at the inappropriateness of its name. The only way we can explain his distress is by observing that he notices that something is wrong—which has to mean he was expecting something else. He is surprised that breaking a fresh egg into a frying pan on a sunny morning doesn’t bring a smile to his face, that a glimpse of his obnoxious neighbor’s lime green convertible doesn’t irritate him the way it used to do, that he feels no stirring of childhood patriotism when he sees the red white and blue waving in the breeze. Like the sufferers of Capgras delusion, poor Mr Clapgras senses a disturbance: something is very wrong, but it isn’t the evaporation of intrinsic internal properties.