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by nearbuy
761 days ago
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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. |
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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.