Keep in mind that the reason we sighted people imagine that blindness = darkness is because that's what we see when we close our eyes. But when we close our eyes, we don't stop seeing, we're just seeing the back of our eyelid.

In order to see darkness, you have to be able to see at least to some extent. For example, try your best right now to see something with your elbow. Your elbow doesn't see black, it just doesn't see at all. That's what total blindness is like - just not being able to see, period.

Yes, it's not darkness. We kind of know this a few ways. First, darkness isn't some objective property, it's an experience, at least in the form we're talking about, so if the person is experiencing nothing they're experiencing nothing and not secretly experiencing darkness. Second, we know that the equipment in the brain related to sight does need sight to develop in some ways, a blind person from birth who gets sight later in life (it happens if only really rarely) tends to have kind of weird visual issues because that faculty only develops after the critical period. So by not exercising your sight early on, you actually don't have the same brain structures that experience that sense, hence nothing and not darkness. And, finally, people lose their vision later in life, and while some of those people do experience something like darkness, many have other sense experiences that aren't darkness. So even people who know what darkness is, and lose their sight, don't see darkness, they see flashing lights, colors, patterns, or other phenomena. So the experience of blindness is really nothing like just closing your eyes, it has an effect on the brain, and the temporary experience of not seeing when a sighted person closes their eyes is really not much like the experience of a blind person in most respects.

Something that helps some people to understand is asking...what do you see from your elbow? (Hint: the answer probably isn't darkness.) Or imagine what the experience of life of animals who don't have vision might be, they just have a different way of experiencing the world. A cave bat doesn't see darkness, they see a rich world painted with sonar and other senses.

I am sighted, but back when I was in a relationship with someone born totally blind, I kinda knew he obviously wasn't seeing just black all the time, but trying to understand what it was truly like to never have seen anything like color or shapes really struggles to wrap my mind around. It really drew a lot of attention to the fact that our language makes a lot of assumptions about being able to see, hear or move in certain ways, leading to a fundamentally different experience with not just the senses but also language and even social interactions.

The lack of difference between light, or even being able to detect differences in light at all, really does develop a fundamentally different experience. There was a person I was in love with who experienced a world I literally could never understand. We tend to focus on things the other way.

I think more blind people should write about this, its a very interesting subject.

I was not born fully cited but I lost all the vision in my right eye a few years ago. It is truly like seeing nothing. Like, you can’t see out of the side of your face. Or, you can’t see out of the back of your head. It’s just nothing. It’s not black, it’s a literally like you’re trying to see through another part of your body.

As an aside as I am not completely blind and thus will not attempt to speak on this, but growing up I had a friend who was colour blind. We did not realize this until later as colouring utensils are generally labeled and their group members generally would pass them the colours just because that is what we did. The person also being born colour blind did not realize that green and red were in fact to the rest of us very different colours, they thought that they were 2 shades of of the same one. In reality colour is difficult because for somebody who does not share the experience our language just lacks effective ways to describe it so that it could be described without first being seen. Even for somebody who does share the context of colours it is difficult to describe a new one to a person. So I suspect that if it were complete darkness or blackness then it might not have an effective way of communicating it. Though it does sound like it is not the case

I’m completely blind in my left eye from birth. You see nothing. I’ve often forgotten I’m blind in that eye.

The parts of my vision that are completely gone are not 'black' nor 'dark', they just aren't there. And if it spreads and takes all my vision, it will be the same.

I will not just simply see darkness, I will see nothing.

( Retinal cone atrophy, if curious. Center of vision gone both eyes, shit for the rest of vision. )

I have minimal light perception, but I can't properly identify any colours, it's just bright and normal. Normal I suppose is black.

I had a teacher in elementary school with an odd sense of fun. She joked with me that I could see her whenever she wore black.

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I'm not fully blind, but I have been fully blind in my left eye from birth. It's hard to articulate. If I close my right eye, I see darkness. But the left eye? There's just no vision there, darkness or otherwise. It's literally nothing. It doesn't even register in my brain as being a thing that could could even be perceived as darkness, because it doesn't exist.