[card_zero]

Much though I'd be interested in Daniel Dennett's responses, I don't think you understood mine. I'm saying:

Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically.

If you want to sweep this aside with a magic gesture, and assert that she does somehow have all the facts (alright, all the objective third person facts), you are also making the science, communication, imaginative simulation, verbal learning process, all that kind of stuff, into something magical. Because what you're saying is that it now somehow has the power to be exactly like the real experience, which in this magical scenario will thus come as no revelatory surprise to her. We only expect it to be a surprise because of realism about the limits of book-learning as we know it, because she can only learn all that is explicitly known about colors that way, which is not all there is to know about them, and is not even all that is commonly known.

[nearbuy]

But like the brain, language is Turing-complete. Any information Mary's brain can figure out can also be described in language. If the brain could deduce something that couldn't be described with math and language, it would be doing something outside of our current understanding of physics.

You could respond that even though computability theory tell us it's possible to describe in language, the description would be far too long and complicated for Mary to understand. But I think that misses the thrust of the thought experiment. Even if we imagine Mary being so smart that she could understand and absorb the full written description of the color red, it still doesn't seem like that should be the same as experiencing seeing red. Most people's intuition would be that internal experiences are categorically different than facts.

And also, intuitively, the experience of the color red doesn't seem complex. The dumbest person on Earth can easily experience it, as can a newborn baby with no knowledge to draw on (I guess assuming newborns are sentient). Even a honey bee may be able to experience it. It's such a simple thing that it seems weird to think it's theoretically possible to describe with language, but the description is too complex for humans to understand.

It fundamentally feels weird to think that any combinations of words could ever be the same as experiencing the color.

[card_zero]

Oh! That's the argument, "it feels weird".

Yes, it may do. I wonder what that feeling means. All this stuff about "Mary" doesn't clarify the source of the feeling. Often a weird feeling points to a misconception.

I think language could technically fully describe the experience, but it would be an unimaginable language, and that's why the idea feels weird: it's too difficult to imagine. Also as you say a pre-verbal child can get the idea just by seeing the color (though we might speculate that the inner significance and feeling of red evolves over a lifetime). So conveying it in language is a dumb-ass way to go about conveying it.

So various experiences convey complex ideas. How? We don't absorb ideas directly from the world through our pores and palps, we create them through interaction with an existing body of ideas in our minds. How much of that is gifted to us in DNA, a kind of natural set of default ideas about the world? IDK, some, like how the brain contains a body map and the eye does movement detection (which is repurposed as edge detection via a kludge involving tiny eye movements). The brain anticipate salient features of the world being a certain way, like residing in a monkey-shaped creature on a surface with gravity where objects have edges and move around. But some ideas are conveyed, through culture, non-verbally. This may include a lot of the early significance and feeling of seeing that something is red. What is that thing? Perhaps a toy, a shoe, a flower? It's probably a special thing requesting focus, anyway, so the cultural environment is already telling you things about it, and people around you will probably encourage your focussing on it, and that's how communication of the feeling of red begins, I reckon.

[nearbuy]

Oh! That's the argument. You "reckon" a lot of things about perception here. [Apologies if I misread your tone]

"feels weird" means "seems unlikely" in this context. At the end of the day, that's the most anyone can say on either side of the argument. You can't demonstrate perception works the way you think it works. You're relying on your intuition.

There are some things we can state definitively though.

> I think language could technically fully describe the experience, but it would be an unimaginable language

If it can't be described in normal English, then the brain is doing something beyond what a Turing machine can do. That means it's doing something beyond our current understanding of physics and quantum mechanics. I would call that non-physicalist. You have to choose: either perception can be fully described in English, or the brain is doing something non-physical. Neither option is intuitive, but that's the consequence of the Church-Turing thesis we must live with.

[naasking]

> Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically.

The premise of the argument is that Mary has all of the facts, and you can even imagine that she has a super powerful computer accessible to her to perform any calculations needed. The goal is to point out that it still seems implausible that Mary could infer knowledge of the experience of redness despite having an unbounded set of dry facts about physics and biology, because to most people, qualitative experience seems like knowledge of a different kind.

That said, you're sort of on the path towards Dennett's response.