25 Same Red
(ns meme-constructor.speculative.story-2-same-red
(:require [scicloj.kindly.v4.kind :as kind]
[meme-constructor.figures :as fig]))A short story of Part VI (speculative). Fiction. It explores the idea from post S1 that the sameness of an experience over time is kept up by error correction, and Dennett’s point that the recurring pattern works as an index.
The first time Ilse noticed was in the shop on Kastanienallee, holding a tube of cadmium red medium she had bought perhaps two hundred times.
It was wrong. Not badly wrong. It was the right colour in every way she could name: warm, opaque, a little towards orange. She turned it in the light and read the label twice. She had a feeling she knew from other contexts, the feeling of meeting someone you have met before at a party and cannot place. The tube was an acquaintance. It should have been an old friend.
She bought it anyway. At home she squeezed a worm of it onto the glass palette next to the dried remains of the last tube, from before the surgery. They matched. Her eyes could see that they matched. She mixed a little white into each and they still matched, two identical pinks. But when she looked from one to the other, back and forth, each one arrived as if for the first time.
“It’s not uncommon,” Dr Bashir said, three weeks later, “for patients to report changes in perception after we tune the stimulator. We tell people in the consent forms. Usually it’s flashes, or a bit of blur.”
“It’s not flashes.”
“No. You said. It’s that colours don’t feel the same.”
“They look the same,” Ilse said. “I can match anything. I can match better than before, actually, I’m more careful. It’s that they don’t come back. Red is always new.”
Dr Bashir had the patience of someone who had spent twenty years with epilepsy patients, whose brains had been doing strange things long before anyone put a device in them. She pulled up the stimulator settings on her screen.
“The device sits here.” She showed Ilse on a model of a brain, a spot low on the side at the back. “It listens for the start of a seizure and interrupts it with a small pulse. What it’s interrupting, basically, is a runaway. Cells recruiting other cells into firing together, more and more, until the whole region is caught up.”
“Yes.”
“The trouble is that a lot of normal function works the same way. Just smaller. A group of cells gets a partial input, they recruit each other, and they settle into a pattern. It’s how the brain fills in. You see half a face, you get the whole face.” She tapped the model. “Your visual areas for colour are close to where your seizures start. When we turned up the sensitivity in April, the device may have started catching some of the normal settling as well. Not stopping it. Just damping it.”
“So the pattern doesn’t finish.”
“It finishes. You see red. But it might not settle as deeply. It might be a bit different each time, because it isn’t being pulled back to exactly the same place.”
Ilse thought about this.
“You mean it’s a different red. Every time.”
“I mean the pattern in your brain is a slightly different pattern every time. Whether that’s a different red,” Dr Bashir said, “I honestly don’t know how to answer.”
- a partial input; cells recruit each other
- they settle into a pattern
- pulled back to the same place each time
- the device catches some normal settling
- the pattern finishes, but settles less deeply
- a slightly different pattern every time
She stopped painting for a month. Then she started again, because not painting was worse.
She kept a ledger. She had always kept notes on mixtures, but now she kept a ledger of a different kind. Every morning she took the same card from the same drawer, a square of cadmium red medium she had painted in 2019, and looked at it under the north window, and wrote down what it was like.
The early entries were not useful. Red. New. Like meeting it. But she got better at it, the way she had once got better at seeing the difference between two whites.
Day 14. Warmer than yesterday? Or I expected it cooler. Can’t tell which.
Day 22. Very bright. Almost sore. Not like the card as I remember it.
Day 23. How do I remember it? I remember that it was red. I remember that I liked it. I don’t remember what it was like. I remember that it used to be the same.
That entry stopped her for a whole morning. She sat by the window with the card on her knee and tried to call up the red of 2019, the red from before the surgery, the red she had been looking at for thirty years. What came was not a colour. It was a kind of certainty, a click. It was the click that was gone.
She went back through her old sketchbooks and found notes she had written as a student. The red in Titian’s Venus is the same red as the geraniums on Oma’s balcony. She had believed that. She still believed it, in the sense that she could still say it. But what had it meant? It had meant that when she looked at the geranium, something in her had fired and settled, and when she looked at the Titian the same something had fired and settled, and a third thing, somewhere else, had noticed that the two settlings were the same and said: yes. This one again. Same red.
The noticing was what was damaged. Or not the noticing. The thing to be noticed. There was no longer a fixed place for the settling to land, and so there was nothing for the yes to point to.
Her friend Karim, who taught philosophy at the Humboldt and was patient with painters, came to the studio in November and looked at the ledger.
“This is extraordinary,” he said.
“It’s miserable.”
“Both.” He turned the pages. “You know there’s a whole literature on whether you could tell if your colours changed. Inverted spectrum. If I woke up and everything red looked the way green used to look, would I notice? Most people say yes. Some people say you couldn’t, because you’d only know by comparing, and the memory you’d compare with would have changed too.”
“I noticed.”
“You noticed something.” He put the ledger down. “What I want to know is: which thing did you notice? Did the red change? Or did the thing that says same red stop working?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, and I don’t think you can know. That’s what’s extraordinary about it. You’ve found a case where the two come apart.” He picked up the 2019 card and looked at it. “Dennett would say the second one. That there’s no extra red over and above the machinery. There’s a pattern your brain produces, and there’s a system that uses that pattern as a tag, a label. This is the red one. When the label stops being stable, the system stops being able to say same as before. And that’s all that has happened. The red was never anything but the label and what the label does.”
“It doesn’t feel like a label.”
“No. That’s his other point.”
Ilse took the card back from him. She held it up to the window.
“Here’s what I think,” she said slowly, because she had been thinking it for weeks and had not said it aloud. “I think he’s right that it’s a label. A pointer. That’s what it’s for. My whole brain uses it to find red things, to put them together, to say this tomato goes with that fire engine. Fine. But the label was also a real thing. It was a pattern. The same pattern, every time, for thirty years. The geranium and the Titian didn’t just have the same label, as if someone wrote red on both. They made the same pattern. In me. Exactly the same. That’s why they were the same red.”
“And now?”
“Now the pattern’s slightly different every time. So there’s no same. Each red is its own.” She put the card down. “I’m not seeing a different colour, Karim. I’m seeing a colour that doesn’t have a twin anywhere in my life.”
He was quiet.
“I don’t know if that’s a change in what it’s like,” she said. “I can’t compare. The comparing is exactly what’s gone. But it isn’t nothing. It’s the difference between one red that keeps coming back and a thousand reds that each come once.”
In January Dr Bashir offered to turn the sensitivity back down.
“We’d accept a slightly higher seizure risk,” she said. “You’d probably get the old settling back. Probably. The cells haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Would it be the same red? The one from before?”
“If the old pattern comes back, yes. If the network had drifted in the meantime, it would be a new stable pattern. Stable, but new.” She paused. “You’d never be able to tell which.”
Ilse asked for two weeks to think.
She spent them painting. Not anything in particular. She painted squares of red, one per day, from the same tube, mixed the same way, on the same kind of card. Each day she looked at the new square and wrote in the ledger what it was like. Each day it was like nothing she had seen before. She hung them in a row along the studio wall, fourteen of them, identical to anyone who came in.
Karim came and looked at them.
“They’re the same,” he said.
“To you.”
“To you?”
“To me they’re fourteen first times.”
On the last day she stood in front of the row for an hour. Then she called Dr Bashir and said yes, turn it down.
It took a week of adjustments. On the Tuesday of the second week she was in the shop on Kastanienallee, holding a tube of cadmium red medium, when something in her fell into place with a small, quiet click, like a key turning in a lock she had forgotten was there.
She knew the red. It was an old friend.
She would never know whether it was the old friend, or a new one wearing its face. But it was the same red today as it would be tomorrow, and that, she decided, standing in the aisle with the tube in her hand, was what she had missed. Not the colour. The coming back.
source: book2/notebooks/meme_constructor/speculative/story_2_same_red.clj