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.

That's vaguely phrased. "Quale" is defined as a term for sensory qualities and phenomenal feels. It is a further, non definitional fact that the set of qualia so defined coincides with the set of ineffable things.

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

If you look at the locus classicus, CI Lewis's definition, qualia are not defined in terms of language at all.

"There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. They round in practice".

Moreover, ineffability is two-sided: a particular class of entities isn't describable in a particular language. You can't put all the blame on language L when L can describe other thing adequately.

.. 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.

That is vaguely phrased. Of course, one has to know the meaning og signal-states in some sense. However, it is not clear that every symbol must match up one-for-one with a sensory referent. Moreover, abstract terms seem to work differently to concrete ones.

So, it is utterly and completely unsurprising that we have to be able to point to something red to communicate the idea of red.

It is only unsurprising if you have adopted a theory according to which someone would have to be acquainted by direct refrence with pentagons in order to understand the string "pentagon". However, that is not the case.

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.

Does the super-neuroscientists Mary understand dementia,psychosis, etc, in your opinion? Does she have experiences of excitation levels accross her synaptic clefts?

(If she hadn't experienced them, we also likely wouldn't be able to communicate with her at all!)

It's begining to look like all male gynecologists should be sacked.

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, 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."

Again, qualia isn't defined as "whatever is ineffable", so the analogy isn't analogous.

"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.

Do you? I think I was hacking that stuff when EY was in diapers. And you're not using "quale" properly.

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."

Please explain how that theory applies to mathematics.

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".

I've heard it all before. Projects to Dissolve all Philosophical Problems have been tried in the past, with disappointing results.

What's more, even that definition is still a red herring, because there is nothing we can communicate symbolically without experiential referent.

So you say. That's an unproven theory, for one thing. For another, there seem to be robust counterexamples, such as the ability of physicsts and mathematicians to communicate about unexperiencable higher dimensional spaces.

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.

If they are at the bottom of the pyramid, they are special. You current agument, that what is at the bottom of the pyramid cannot be explained relies on that. And it amount to gainsaying the premise of Mary's Room: Mary doens't know everything about how the brain works, because he doesn't know how qualia work,because no reductive explanation of qualia is available, because qualia cannot be reduced to simpler concepts because they are at the bottom of the pyramid.

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.

That's vaguely phrased. You have conceded it is special with regard to its place in the conceptual hierarchy and its communicabulity, for all that you are holding out that a metaphysical explanation isn't required.

But this is the exact same experience that we have when trying to communicate anything symbolically without a common reference point.

So: are attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials doomed?

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.

And she'd have to have a stroke to understand the effects of stroke on the brain? You need to be clearer about the difference between grounding symbol systems,and finding referents for individual symbols.

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

You are taking it as a thought experiment where she succesfully learns colur qualia, although the expected outcome of the original story is that she doens't.