I’ve been thinking about the colour black recently. We associate it with darkness, the lack of light, but I have a feeling that they aren’t the same thing at all. In our reality, with the senses that are available to us, they certainly look the same. I’m not arguing that. But I had the idea that maybe we are only seeing a limited aspect of those two things —aspects that happen to look the same to us from our perspective.
As an analogy consider if we had a cube and a square pyramid and that the base of the pyramid had the same dimensions as the sides of the cubes — 10 cm by 10 cm, for example. In our reality with our three dimensions of space, if you showed someone these two forms, it would be easy to tell them apart. But if you painted one side of the cube and the base of the pyramid and then pressed those wet sides on a piece of paper, they would both leave the shape of a square, and both squares would be 10 cm by 10 cm. If you then asked the same person to identify which one of those squares was made by the cube and which one was made by the pyramid, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. They would only see two squares that were the same size. The information that makes a cube and a pyramid two obviously different forms can’t be expressed by the 2-dimensional surface of the paper. They would seem to be identical.
So, maybe this is the case with the colour black and darkness. To us they look the same, but maybe from a higher dimension, or different perspective, they are as different as a cube and a pyramid.