|
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. |
"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.