Why the Shimmer Is Not a Colour: A Relational Reading of Qualia

Liora thought she was seeing light — soft, spectral, otherworldly, as though colour had momentarily forgotten the rules it normally obeys. But what shimmered was not a hidden property; it was a relation coming into focus.

In representational thought, experience is treated as if it were an inner object — a private, ineffable something that stands behind perception, silent yet decisive. This generates the classic paradox:

if physical descriptions are third-person and experiences are first-person, how could one ever bridge the gap between them?

But the gap appears only if we mislocate experience.

Within a relational ontology, aligned with the SFL perspective:

• System is not a catalogue of fixed properties,

• Instance is not an object that carries them, and

• Phenomenon is not what lies “inside” a mind.

Rather, phenomenon is the construed actualisation of a relational potential —

not something we look at, but something that emerges in the looking.

Thus, qualia are neither:

• hidden physical micro-textures awaiting measurement, nor

• private mental jewels sealed behind consciousness.

They are first-order meaning-events,

actualisations that cannot be detached from the construal through which they occur.

When Liora encountered the shimmer, there was no mysterious inner glow that the physical world failed to explain, nor any mental theatre projecting private symbols outward. Instead, a relational potential was cut into phenomenon — her attention, expectation, curiosity and stance all forming the perspectival condition through which the event became.

The so-called explanatory gap is therefore not a metaphysical wound

but the shadow of a representational habit:

the belief that we must match inner contents to outer facts,

as if meaning were a correspondence puzzle rather than an ontological enactment.

The shimmer was not in the world, nor in Liora.

It was between — a luminous actualisation of readiness in context.

Or, in more formal relational terms:

• Qualia = First-order phenomenon = construed instance of systemic potential

• Their “ineffability” reflects non-objecthood, not incompleteness

• Explanatory gaps vanish when experience is treated as phenomenon, not substance

Thus, the shimmer teaches:

Experience is not a thing that occurs inside consciousness,

but the very mode through which reality becomes experienceable.

Not colour revealed,

but meaning shimmering into event.

And when seen through this lens,

qualia are not mysteries behind experience —

they are experience,

before we try to store them as things.