And because of something about qualia, since the ineffability applies only to them.

Uh, no, because "qualia" is just a word applied to things we don't know how to describe without reference to experience.

In other words, it's a term about language... not a term about the experiences being described.

Learning and education depend on an abstract conception of knowledge. A researcher can dump the knowledge in their brain into a book which is then absorbed by a professor and taught to students.

And that knowledge is represented in various physical forms: books, sights, sounds, symbols. The "abstractions" themselves are then physically represented by neural patterns in brains. At no time during this process is there anything non-physical occurring.

When you, as an observer, look on this process and claim that abstractions exist, what you are saying is that in your brain, there is a physical representation of a repeating pattern in your perception. When you say, "Person A communicated idea X to Person B", you are describing representations in your head, not the physical reality.

The physical reality is, you saw a set of atoms creating certain vibrations in the air, which led to chemical changes in another chunk of atoms nearby. As part of the process, the atoms in your brain also rearranged themselves, creating a -- wait for it -- abstracted representation of the events that took place.

In other words, all "abstraction" takes place in physical brains. It doesn't exist anywhere else.

No, but it should be a surpise that out of eveything she could know, only one is dependent on the instantiation of a physical brain state.

You've got that backwards. It should be no surprise at all that we can't directly communicate experience, because we don't have any physical organs for doing that. We do have organs for transmitting and receiving symbolic communication: in other words, signals that stand for things.

And in order to communicate by signals, the referents of the signals have to be known in advance. So, it is utterly and completely unsurprising that we have to be able to point to something red to communicate the idea of red.

Why can other brain states be understood without transmission? We expect Mary to understand memory, cognition, etc.

Because she's experienced them, and thus has referents that allow symbolic communication to take place. (If she hadn't experienced them, we also likely wouldn't be able to communicate with her at all!)

[several comments/questions implying specialness or puzzlingness of qualia]

Suppose I make up a term, foogly, and claim it is special. When you ask for some examples of this word, I point to various species of non-flying birds. You then say to me, "Those are just birds that don't fly."

"But ah!" I say, "Out of all the birds in the world, there are only these species of bird that don't fly. Clearly, there is something special about fooglies. What a puzzle!"

You say, "But they're just birds that can't fly!"

"Ah, but you haven't explained why they're special!"

"There's nothing to explain! Some don't have wings big enough, or muscles strong enough, or they lived in an area where it wasn't advantageous any more to fly, or whatever."

"Ah," I retort. "But then how come it's only fooglies that don't fly! You haven't explained anything."

"But, but..." you stammer. "You just made up that word, such that it means 'birds that don't fly'. The commonality isn't in the birds -- those different species of birds have nothing to do with each other. The commonality between them is in the word, that you made up to put them together. It has no more inherent rightness of grouping than that aboriginal word for 'women, fire, and dangerous things'. You're arguing about a word."

"That's all very nice," I say, "but you still haven't explained fooglies."

At this point, you are quite likely to think I am an idiot.

I, on the other hand, merely think you have failed to understand the sequence on the Proper Uses of Words -- a bare minimum requirement for having an intelligent discussion on Less Wrong about topics like this one.

The LW standard for philosophical discussion requires reference to things in the world. That, as far as possible, we expand our terms until the symbols are grounded in physical things, where we can agree or disagree about the physical things, rather than the words being used to describe the things.

When you do that, a huge swath of philosophical "puzzles" dissolve into thin air as the mirages that they are. There is nothing special about qualia, because it's a made-up word for "things we can't communicate symbolically without experiential referent".

What's more, even that definition is still a red herring, because there is nothing we can communicate symbolically without experiential referent. All our abstract words are actually built up from more concrete ones, such that we have the illusion that there are things that we can describe without experiential referent.

Take "abstract", for example. The only way to learn what that word means is by concrete examples of abstractions! To know what "communication" is, you have to have experienced some concrete forms of communication first

If language is a pyramid of concepts, each abstraction built up on others from more concrete concepts and experiences, then at some point there is a bottom or base to this pyramid... and the term qualia is simply pointing to all these things at the bottom of the pyramid, and claiming that they must be special somehow because, well, they're all at the bottom of the pyramid.

Yeah, they're at the bottom. So what? All it means is that they're stuff your brain has neural inputs already in place for, just like the only thing in common between birds that don't fly is that they lack the capacity to fly.

In other words, it's not a word for something special. It's a word for things that aren't special. Every animal with a brain has neural inputs, so qualia are abundant in the physical world.

It's only humans who think there's anything special about them, because humans also have the capacity to process symbols. And in fact, we are so accustomed to thinking in symbols, and being able to communicate in symbols, that we are surprised when we find ourselves unable to communicate symbolically about something.

But this is the exact same experience that we have when trying to communicate anything symbolically without a common reference point. As frustrating as it may feel, the simple truth is that you cannot communicate anything symbolically without a reference point, because symbols have to stand for something, that both parties to the communication have in common.

It's just that normally, we have no need to try to communicate something without a reference point.

Anyway, if you understand this much, then it's plain that Mary's Room is just a bunch of self-defeating words that can't happen in reality. For Mary to have "knowledge" of red, it has to have been communicated to her, either experientially or symbolically.

But, for it to have been communicated symbolically, there had to be a referent in experience... which would mean she'd have to have experienced red.

That's the physical reality, so this "thought experiment" cannot possibly take place physically.

Now, if you hypothesize a robot Mary or an alien Mary who has organs for communicating direct neural perception, or who has the ability to directly alter brain state, great. But in that case, Mary would not experience any surprise, since Mary would already have been able to induce the brain state in question.

Since a human Mary lacks either of these abilities, it should not be surprising that we cannot symbolically convey anything to her that is not grounded in something she already knows. That's just how symbolic communication works.