“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]

You... disagree? Do you mean your own intuition is different, or do you mean you have some special insight into my psychology that tells you that I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting my own intuitions?

I mean my intuition is different.

I don't feel that mental states are simple! Yet the Mary hunch persists. You seem to be hopping back and forth between the explanations 'qualia seem irreducible because we don't know enough about them yet' and 'qualia seem irreducible because we don't realize how complicated they are'.

Alright, I'll try to stop hopping and nail down what I'm saying:

1. I think the most likely reason that qualia seem irreducible is because of some kind of software problem in the brain that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to translate the sort of "experiential knowledge" found in the unconscious "black box" parts of the brain into the sort of verbal, propositional knowledge that we can communicate to other people by language. The high complexity of our minds probably compounds the difficulty even further.

2. I think this problem goes both ways. So even if we could get some kind of AI to translate the knowledge into verbal statements for us, it would be impossible, or very difficult, for anything resembling a normal human to gain "experiential knowledge" just by reading the verbal statements.

3. In addition to making qualia seem irreducible, this phenomenon explains other things, such as the fact that many activities are easier to learn to do by experience.

I've never actually read any Denett, except for short summaries of some of his criticisms written by other people. One person who has influenced me a lot is Thomas Sowell, who frequently argues that the most important knowledge is implicit and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to articulate into verbal form. He does this in terms of economics, but when I started reading about the ineffability of qualia I immediately began to think "This probably has a similar explanation."

She isn't generating Red, she's generating a memory of the feeling Red generates without generating Red. She now knows what emotional state Red would make her feel, but hasn't actually made herself see red. So when she goes outside she doesn't say "Wow" she says "Oh, those feelings again, just as I suspected."

So she's bound and gagged, with no ability to use her knowledge? Seems implausible, but OK. (Did she get this knowledge by dictation, or by magically reaching out to the Aristotelian essences of neurons?)

In any case, at least two of us have linked to orthonormal's mini-sequence on the matter. Those three posts seem much better than ESR's attempt at the quest.

Ex hypothesi, Mary knows all the relevant third-person specifiable color facts. Our inability to simulate her well doesn't change that fact.

It does if our inability to simulate her well messes with our intuitions. If, as I conjectured, we tend to translate "omniscient person" with "scholar with lots of book-learning" then our intuitions will reflect that, and will hence be wrong.

Consider the Marianna variant.....But she still lacks the relevant items of knowledge about what other people experience

Is Marianna omniscient about light and neuroscience like Mary? If she is, she'd be able to figure out which color is which fairly easily.

If it's merely a matter of qualia being complicated, then shouldn't all other complicated systems yield relevantly identical Hard Problem intuitions?

It's not just a matter of qualia being complicated, it's a matter of the human brain being bad at communicating certain things, of which qualia are only one thing of many. And this isn't just an issue of processing power and the complexity of something being processed, it's an issue of software problems. There are certain problems we have trouble processing regardless of what level of power we have, because of our mind's internal architecture. Wei Dei puts it well when he says:

...a quale is like a handle to a kernel object in programming. Subconscious brain corresponds to the OS kernel, and conscious brain corresponds to user-space. When you see red, you get a handle to a "redness" object, which you can perform certain queries and operations on, such as "does this make me feel hot or cold", or "how similar is this color to this other color" but you can't directly access the underlying data structure. Nor can the conscious brain cause the redness object to be serialized into a description that can be deserialized in another brain to recreate the object. Nor can Mary instantiate a redness object in her brain by studying neuroscience.

Furthermore, there are in fact other things that humans have a lot of difficulty communicating besides qualia. For instance, it's common knowledge that people with a few days of job experience are much better at doing jobs than people who have spent months reading about the job.

My intuition is that making Mary superhuman doesn't change that experiencing red seems to narrow down the possibilities for her.

I disagree. If Mary was a superhuman she could study what functions of the brain cause us to experience "qualia," and then study the memories these processes generated. She could then generate such memories in her own brain, giving her the knowledge of what qualia feel like without ever experiencing them. She would see red and not be surprised at all.

If qualia were not a physical part of the brain, duplicating the memories of someone who had experienced them would not have this effect. However, I think it very likely that doing so would have this effect.

Can you explain why this intuition persists for me, when (as far as I can tell) it doesn't for any other complex system?

Because, as I said before, our emotions are "black boxes" that humans are very bad at understanding and explaining. Their Kolmogorov complexity is extraordinarily high, but we feel like they are simple because of our familiarity with them.

Maybe, but in that case the challenge is to explain, at least schematically, what superhuman power Mary obtains that lets her solve the Hard Problem.

I think the ability to study and modify her own source code and memory, as well as the source code and memory of others is probably all she'd need, but I could be wrong.

Kidney dyalisis machines don't need nephrons, but that doens't mean nephrons are causally idle in kidneys.

You keep bringing up that argument, but kidney dialysis machines are built specifically to replace the functionality of kidneys ("deliberately replacing them with a substitute"). If you built a kidney-dialysis machine by a 1:1 mapping and forgot some cell type that is causally active in kidneys, the machine would not actually work. If it did, you should question if that cell type actually does anything in kidneys.

Changing the physical substrate could remove the qualia, but to claim it could remove the qualia while keeping talk of qualia alive, by sheer coincidence - implying that there's a separate, unrelated reason why the replacement neurons talk of qualia, that has nothing to do with qualia, that was not deliberately engineered - that stretches belief past the breaking point. You're saying, essentially: "qualia cause talk of qualia in my meatbrain, but talk of qualia is not any indication of qualia in any differently built brain implementing the same spec". Then why are you so certain that your talk of qualia is caused by your supposed qualia, and not the neural analogue of what causes talk of qualia in WBE brains? It really does sound like your qualia are either superfluous or bizarre.

[edit] Actually, I'm still not sure I understand you. Are you proposing that it's impossible to build a straight neuron substitute that talks of qualia, without engineering purposeful qualia-talk-emulation machinery? Is that what you mean by "functional equivalent"? I'm having serious trouble comprehending your position.

[edit] I went back to your original comment, and I think we're using "functional equivalence" in a very different sense. To you, it seems to indicate "a system that behaves in the same way despite having potentially hugely different internal architecture". To me, it indicates a 1:1 neuron computational replacement; keeping the computational processes while running them on a different substrate.

I agree that there may conceivably exist functionally equivalent systems that don't have qualia, even though I have difficulty seeing how they could compute "talk of qualia" without running a sufficient-fidelity qualia simulation internally, which would again correspond to our qualia. However, I find it unlikely that anybody who is not a very very bored deity would ever actually create such a system - the qualia-talk machinery seems completely pointless to its function, as well as probably much more computationally expensive. (This system has to be self-deluding in a way consistent with a simpler system that it is not allowed to emulate) Why not just build a regular qualia engine, by copying the meat-brain processes 1:1? That's what I'd consider the "natural" functional-equivalence system.

That isn't a reductive explanaiton, becuase no attempt is made to show how Mary;s red quale breaks down into smaller component parts.

I presume that would be "Mary's qualia are caused by the feeling the color-processing pathways of her brain light up. The color processing parts are made of neurons, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Those parts of the brain are then connected to another part of the brain by more neurons, which are similarly composed. When those color processing parts fire this causes the connecting neurons to fire in a certain pattern. These patterns of firings are what her feelings are made of. Feelings are made out of firing neurons, which are in turn made out of atoms."

As such, it is compatible with dualism.

I don't get the appeal of dualism. Qualia can't run on machines made out of atoms and quarks, but there is some other mysterious substance that composes our mind, and qualia can run on machines made out of this substance? Why the extra step? Why not assume that atoms and quarks are the substrate that qualia run on? What hypothetical special properties does this substance have that let qualia run on it, but not on atoms?

I'm sure that if we ever did discover some sort of disembodied soul made out of a weird previously unknown substance that was attached to the brain and appeared to contain our consciousness, Dave Chalmers would argue that qualia couldn't possibly be reduced down to something as basic as [newly discovered substance], and that obviously this disembodied soul couldn't possibly contain consciousness, that has to be contained somewhere else. There is no possible substance, no possible anything, that could ever satisfy the dualist's intuitions.

You mean p-zombie arguments?

Yes, plus the inverted spectrum argument, and all the other "conceivability arguments." I can conceive of myself walking on walls, bench-pressing semi-trucks, and flying without making any modifications to my body or changing the external world. But that's because my brain is bad at conceiving stuff and fudges using shortcuts. If I actually start thinking in extremely detailed terms of my muscle tissues and the laws of physics, it becomes obvious that you can't conceive of such a thing.

If anyone argued "I can imagine an anorexic person with almost no muscles lifting a truck, therefore strength cannot be caused by one's muscles," they would be laughed at. P-zombies and inverted spectrums deserve similar ridicule.

There's actually one in that essay I linked to at the end of my post. Here is the most relevant paragraph (discussing the Mary's Room problem):

Here is my physicalist account of Mary’s “Wow!” What she learns is what it feels like to have the color-processing pathways of her brain light up. This is an objective fact about her subjectivity; with a sufficiently good MRI we could actually see the difference in patterns of occipital-lobe activity. And that will probably be a world-changing experience for Mary, fully worthy of a “Wow!”, even if we concede the Mary’s-Room premise that she has not learned anything about the world outside her own skull.

Reading Wikipedia's entry on qualia, it seems to me that most of the arguments that qualia can't be explained by reductionism are powered by the same intuition that makes us think that you can give someone superpowers without changing them in any other way. Anyone with a basic knowledge of physiology knows the idea you can give someone the powers of Spider-Man or Aquaman without changing their physical appearance or internal anatomy is silly. Modern superhero writers have actually been forced to acknowledge this by occasionally referencing ways that such characters are physically different from humans (in ways that don't cosmetically affect them, of course).

But because qualia are a property of our brain's interaction with external stimuli, rather than a property of our bodies, the idea that you could change someone's qualia without changing their brain or the external world fails to pass our nonsense detector. If I wake up and the spectrum is inverted, something is wrong with my brain, or something is wrong with the world.

I don't see what problems reductionism poses for qualia.

I've never gotten this either. It has always seemed to me that qualia exist, and that they can fully be explained by reductionism and physicalism (presumably as some sort of function of our nervous system interacting with stimuli). There are apparently some people who have a strong intuition that they can't be explained in such a fashion, but I do not share this intuition.

It seems to me that attempting to eliminate qualia is a repeat of the comedy of behaviorism. "All these mystical people claim that qualia can't be explained by physics, so I'll say qualia don't exist at all! That'll show 'em!"

(At his blog Eric S. Raymond wrote an article arguing that qualia are probably the sensation one feels when one's stimuli processing systems light up, and that attempting to eliminate them is silly).

eliminativism is true, and qualia are an illusion

I wasn't aware of eliminativism. After reading the wikipedia page, eliminativism seems to be nothing more than reductionism applied to the philosophy of mind, but I don't see what problems reductionism poses for qualia. I don't think that I'm missing a logical step, nor do I feel confused on this genre of philosophical issues. So if many people perceive that qualia and reductionism are incompatible, my current hypothesis is that "qualia' has some sort of definitional connotation attached to it that I'm not aware of, which somehow interferes with reductionism. I'd like to be informed about these connotations.

I guess "experience" is the most innocent word? Honestly, "Qualia", "(Subjective) experience", and "(save the) Phenomenon" all seem precisely identical to me, and I only use "qualia" because it's short and doesn't have any other definitions. If it's picked up additional connotations, then I'll have to find a new label for what I will temporarily call "Property Q, which separates counterfactual mathematical structures from reality".