Would you rather see the world in black and white or live without music? This is one of my favorite questions. Most people tell me that they would give up color before giving up Bach and the Beatles and so on — except kids, who usually make the opposite choice. I’m with the kids, and I always have been. In the third grade, we were asked to name our favorite book. Mine was The Wizard of Oz, because it was colorful. I remember how disappointed my teacher was to learn that I was referring to the brightly colored watercolor drawings in my edition of the book. The right way to use the word “colorful” to praise a book, she explained, is to describe distinctive or memorable characters, such as the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, or surprising and whimsical events, such as a house falling on a witch, as being, in a metaphorical sense, “colorful.” The Wizard of Oz was good because it was colorful, but not in the superficial way I meant it. This was the same teacher who got annoyed when, having told the class to draw a picture of spring, she observed I had drawn a metal coil. (The possibility of drawing trees and birds and sunshine did occur to me, but that seemed harder, and I am not good at drawing.) There is a flat literalism to the way I think, and there is a flat literalism to color as well: somehow, color flattens the world. The puzzle is that it also, at the same time, enlivens it. The movie version of The Wizard of Oz builds a bridge between literalists like me, and sophisticates like my third-grade teacher. Dorothy starts out in the sepia-toned plains of Kansas, a world of dirt roads and open sky and old scattered farm equipment, and when the color gets turned on she is in a place chock-full of amazing, impossible wonders. The advent of color means the exit of the dull, the flat, the ordinary; with literal color comes metaphorical color. You can experience a version of the opposite when you switch the display of your phone or computer into black and white mode. Suddenly it is a much less appealing world to spend time in; you have drained it of life, even though it was never alive in the first place. Color means liveliness, despite the absence of any correlation between how alive something is and how colorful it is: some colorful things are alive, some are not; some drab things are alive, some are not. When a given instance of color is very colorful, it is often described as vibrant, a word related to the word “vibrate,” as though the color were in the business of moving rapidly, even though it is not moving at all. Arguably, color is one of the things that never moves. Things that are colored can move, and your eye can move across a field of colors, but colors are no more capable of motion than numbers are capable of emitting smells. So here we have two features of color: it is flat and it is lively. This is not exactly a contradiction, but there is some kind of tension between the reality of color as literal, as flat, as shallow, as a property of the outermost surface of things, and our sense that color is a mark of liveliness, of vibrancy, of energy, pointing us to the life that teems deep within. I want to explain why I choose color over music; to do that, I am going to have to make sense of how color vibrates without moving. 
Let’s start with a different question: which comes first, color or shape? You might think that this is a bad question, but Plato, a top questioner if there ever was one, disagreed. There are no fights about the chicken and the egg in the Platonic corpus, but there is one about the relative priority of color and shape. It starts when Socrates defines shape in terms of color: “Let us say that shape is that which alone of all existing things always follows color.” Socrates is saying that shapes precipitate out of colors, in the sense that we identify shapes by tracking color boundaries. Socrates’ interlocutor, Meno, calls this definition “foolish”: what if a person came along who claimed “that he did not know what color is, but that he had the same difficulty as he had about shape?” Meno is complaining: what if I were blind? So Socrates offers Meno a second definition: “shape is the limit of a solid.” But Meno is not satisfied and pushes Socrates to define color. Socrates complies: “color is an effluvium from shapes which fits the sight and is perceived,” by which he means that objects emit streams of tiny shapes, which we perceive as color when they enter our eyes. At this point, Meno is satisfied. He loves this definition, “This seems to me to be an excellent answer, Socrates.” And Socrates rebukes him for loving it: “it is a theatrical answer so it pleases you, Meno . . . it is not better . . . but I am convinced that the other is.” The dispute between Meno and Socrates is this: Meno prefers to define color in terms of shape, whereas Socrates prefers to define shape in terms of color. Consider trying to actually use Socrates’ second definition of shape — “the limit of a solid” — in order to identify a shape. If Meno were blind, he would find the limits of solids by attending to tactile changes, but as it is, given that he is sighted, he relies on color differences. Socrates’ first definition stands behind his second one. Color is what helps us find limits. You are using color that way right now, to read these words. Maybe that will be easier to see with words you (probably) can’t read: ἔστω γὰρ δὴ ἡμῖν τοῦτο σχῆμα, ὃ
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence