When I look into a blackness what am I seeing?

When you remove all the light in my field of vision I still see. I see black. It may not look anything different to when my eyes are shut but all the same i see black everywhere. I am aware my eyes are open and that I am observing black. The information I inherit from this experience is that I am in a place of total darkness. If the eye requires light to define contrasts what am I looking at when no light energy, when no visual information is coming into my eyes?

Is my brain constructing an image of blackness? Is this a conscious default setting when deprived of stimuli? Can we call black a thing? Does it exist? How can something devoid of information exist? If no energy is going into my eye how can I say I am seeing?

One possible theory is that all the information I obtain from "seeing black" is intrinsic to my awareness of prior knowledge and experience. I remember a state which was not black and therefore can extrapolate/ deduce what this experience of absence if light is despite the fact I am receiving no information from the environment. Obtaining information about a state from its opposite. Just as we see an object because we do not see what is behind the object.