ABSTRACT
Searching for a reason other than a swollen bottom-line for the decision to ship coal from the Queensland coast to India on a 50 year contract, abandoned three years ago and now renewed, the essay supposes that there is a positive resistance to colour in Western epistemological systems, and that the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and its reduction to a colourless ruin is consistent with other past and present developments in the history of mind. Citing Tim Ingold, the author finds a source for this tendency in Descartes’s curious method of assuring himself that the thoughts in his mind after he expelled from it any trace of sensory perceptions were purely his. In the dark he finds a truth not afforded in the light of the sun, which after all is falsely attributed to the sun, being solely an event caused by a signal sent from the optic nerve to the brain: a message, not a sensation. How far such wilful ignorance of sensory impressions will carry us I am not certain, but powerful allies in cognitive science and the digital humanities are doing their bit to help us advance the Cartesian hypothesis, “What if what I do know, I didn’t?”
