As someone who is totally blind in one eye, and still has some light perception in the other, I can say with certainty that it is not a black or brown or any color, there is just nothing. When I close my eyes, I see the blackness you describe with my seeing eye, but a total absence of anything on the other side.

Totally blind guy here. There is no Black. There is no brown. There's just nothing. It's like trying to imagine what you would see if you had eyes in the back of your head. Scientifically, that could never happen therefore, you'd see nothing.

I went totally blind on left eye when i was 15 before i could read with that eye. To extremely simplify it I "see" Black with that eye but it's way deeper than any black color you can ever imagine. It's much scarier, deeper and darker compared to those when you just close your eyes this one is still so much brighter than blind black. Not even as black as sky in moonless black night when you go out somewhere where's there no other light. You cannot reproduce that even in 50% not even with simulation glasses, VR glasses, eye patch. Like you can't reproduce deafness when you have ability hearing you will be still seeing some tiny signals from retina even in pitch black room (that reddish, silver, colorful things on full blind eyes they're absent) like black OLED screen in black room just perfect black but you don't want to see it.
When I was a kid I thought if I would just cover my eyes with dark material, face mask, close my eyes I would "see" the world the same as my grandfather did, i walked at home on purpose in pitch darkness to train myself and understand how it is without sight, yes i know naive.

It might help you to understand that seeing happens in the brain. If the brain hasn't experienced sight, then it doesn't have anything dedicated to seeing. (Well, you still have the equipment, but you need to have seen at some point for it to become active.) Try to imagine you have electroreception, or sensing the electricity in other organisms, which is a real thing that sharks and platypuses have. When you think about it, do you sense an absence of electricity? No, of course, not, you don't sense anything. You're not sensing an absence, either, it's just nothing. That's how it is to think about seeing when you've never seen. It's not a sense of absence, it's just nothing. It's not so much that you see nothing, it's that nothing happens when you think about seeing.

If people have had sight, they may see black, they may see nothing as decried above (I think this is kind of rare), or they may see hallucinations and artifacts, like floating lights and patterns and stuff, which is pretty common.

As with everything else, the brain needs to learn to see, which for people who were born totally blind never happened. When people say it's exactly as if you tried to see out of your elbow that's the best description they can give. You cannot even imagine that because you've never had vision peripherals connected to the brain from there, which is exactly the same for congenitally blind people.

As someone who had sight in the past, and lost it 7 years ago, I do have hallucinations of seeing what my brain thinks is the world around me from my left vision field and white clouds on a black background in my right vision field. It started happening during my process of losing vision, and until recently I used to have the same hallucinations of seeing the world around me in my right eye as well, but for some reason now I only see the white clouds. I know it's not real vision because I can't, for example, see my phone's flashlight, which I remember being extremely bright, and in my hallucinations it's always day regardless of time. It's all very weird, but I do appreciate not living in complete darkness.

I had vision for 29 years before I lost it all suddenly with a retinal arterial occlusion, so I have visual context to put my visual experience or lack thereof in perspective.

For me, my vision is like a letterboxed movie; bands of dark stretching across that top and bottom of my visual field. The rest of my vision is a super dark and noisy field of grey, with some pinpricks of light flashing in and out randomly and rarely. The lowest 1% of my visual field can sense some movement and contrast, but nothing at all usable or functional in any way. The overall temperature of the grey noise changes with the overall brightness of where I am. I can sometimes sense sunlight versus a dark room, but the change has to be quite drastic to notice a difference.

When I initially lost my sight, I had Bonnat's syndrome, where huge fields of electric blue or intense fiery orange would appear in my central vision when I was sleeping. Those colors would infect my dreams and it was rather unsettling. The noise in my vision changes in activity when I'm falling asleep or waking up after a REM cycle, pulsing in time with my heartbeat before resolving back to just the dark TV static experience I have for the rest of the day.

I also had my left eye removed entirely when I was 2, so went through life monocular, and just never percieved anything from my left side. No memory of vision from there, so just nothing at all and defaulting to a singular view.

Nothing. Not too hard to understand really, we see nothing.
My retinas are detached. If you pull out a wire in a speaker, the speaker doesn't play music right? No music? No, its broken.
Same with my eyes... I see nothing.
Well not entirely true... If the lights are on, I can tell, but thats it. No colours, no shapes, no nothing. And I'm fine with that. Fuck sight.

Hi :)

Good question. When people ask me this, the best way I can describe it is, imagine my eyes are ornaments, they look pretty, but don't do much.

Sight is almost a foreign concept to someone who’s never see. I don’t see anything literally blip out of sight out of mind. I focus more on other senses if visual things are described then that’s great because I had very limited vision before. But as of now nothing no color. I see stuff but that’s the mind and because I already know the concept of sight for others it’s just other senses. I was having such a conversation on r/socionics and noted that blind people who’s never seen colors or anything can’t have synesthesia that includes vision at all if they never had that input. Same with awareness. If you’ve never developed it it is just like sight never existed in the first place. It’s not black it’s literally non-existent. Most time if I don’t think of visual I see nothing and I forget about vision honestly haha! Very capable blind person here and I use mostly other sensations.

Yay, the blind fetish person is back! /s

https://chicagolighthouse.org/sandys-view/what-blind-people-see/