Dear David,
In honor of your birthday — a special birthday indeed, in that the associated integer is the smallest weird number* — I would like to offer a few quick thoughts on one passage from The Beginning of Infinity.
It’s the passage where you imagine someone trying to predict what the color blue will look like when they are about to see it for the first time. You note that qualia, such as what blue looks like, are currently neither describable nor predictable. You find this fact exciting, because it serves as evidence that there is a fundamental discovery yet to be made that will integrate qualia into our other knowledge. You write of qualia, “…we seem to have them; it seems impossible to describe what they seem to be. One day, we shall. Problems are soluble.”
Like you, I find the arguments for the existence of qualia persuasive. But will we indeed at some point be able to describe them? One way into that question is to ask whether it will ever be possible for a person to predict what the color blue will look like if they have never seen it. Let’s first consider a somewhat analogous situation. For her whole life so far, Alice has heard piano sounds only from her own piano, whose middle C key has always been broken. So she has never heard the sound of a piano playing middle C. Fortunately, her piano has just now been repaired. Before she strikes the now-functional middle C key, will she be able to predict what the sound will be like? In a certain internal sense, I think she will, because she has acquired plenty of experience with intervals, such as octaves, and this prior experience should allow her to hear in her mind the sound of middle C before she plays it. Now, is this a fair analogy? As difficult as it is for us to imagine how anything similar could be done with “what blue looks like”, I cannot rule out that possibility. Someday, a person with a mind much more powerful than mine might somehow disassemble memories of prior non-blue experiences into components and then mentally recombine those components into a valid imagining of what blue will look like. The person may even be helped in this endeavor by a detailed description—part of a future science—that explains how various experiences and their parts are related to each other. All of this is hard to imagine, but it seems within the realm of possibility.
On the other hand, there is, as you know, a much harder problem concerning qualia. Suppose Alice wants to tell Bob what blue looks like to her, or for that matter, what middle C on her piano sounds like to her. Then I don’t think there’s any adequate description that Alice can offer; even the powerful mind I imagined in the preceding paragraph will not be able to help her. Our language is ultimately based on what we share, but Alice’s internal, subjective experiences are private and not shared. I believe there really is something that blue looks like to Alice and, because of the privacy of subjective experience, it is fundamentally indescribable. I find this idea exciting, because it suggests that the world is even deeper than what we can capture in words, and I am happy to see evidence that we live in a world of such depth.
On this weird birthday, I wish you good health, and many more birthdays.
*In case you don’t know (as I didn’t know), a positive integer n is called weird if its proper divisors sum to a value greater than n, but such that no subset of those proper divisors sums to n itself.
In honor of your birthday — a special birthday indeed, in that the associated integer is the smallest weird number* — I would like to offer a few quick thoughts on one passage from The Beginning of Infinity.
It’s the passage where you imagine someone trying to predict what the color blue will look like when they are about to see it for the first time. You note that qualia, such as what blue looks like, are currently neither describable nor predictable. You find this fact exciting, because it serves as evidence that there is a fundamental discovery yet to be made that will integrate qualia into our other knowledge. You write of qualia, “…we seem to have them; it seems impossible to describe what they seem to be. One day, we shall. Problems are soluble.”
Like you, I find the arguments for the existence of qualia persuasive. But will we indeed at some point be able to describe them? One way into that question is to ask whether it will ever be possible for a person to predict what the color blue will look like if they have never seen it. Let’s first consider a somewhat analogous situation. For her whole life so far, Alice has heard piano sounds only from her own piano, whose middle C key has always been broken. So she has never heard the sound of a piano playing middle C. Fortunately, her piano has just now been repaired. Before she strikes the now-functional middle C key, will she be able to predict what the sound will be like? In a certain internal sense, I think she will, because she has acquired plenty of experience with intervals, such as octaves, and this prior experience should allow her to hear in her mind the sound of middle C before she plays it. Now, is this a fair analogy? As difficult as it is for us to imagine how anything similar could be done with “what blue looks like”, I cannot rule out that possibility. Someday, a person with a mind much more powerful than mine might somehow disassemble memories of prior non-blue experiences into components and then mentally recombine those components into a valid imagining of what blue will look like. The person may even be helped in this endeavor by a detailed description—part of a future science—that explains how various experiences and their parts are related to each other. All of this is hard to imagine, but it seems within the realm of possibility.
On the other hand, there is, as you know, a much harder problem concerning qualia. Suppose Alice wants to tell Bob what blue looks like to her, or for that matter, what middle C on her piano sounds like to her. Then I don’t think there’s any adequate description that Alice can offer; even the powerful mind I imagined in the preceding paragraph will not be able to help her. Our language is ultimately based on what we share, but Alice’s internal, subjective experiences are private and not shared. I believe there really is something that blue looks like to Alice and, because of the privacy of subjective experience, it is fundamentally indescribable. I find this idea exciting, because it suggests that the world is even deeper than what we can capture in words, and I am happy to see evidence that we live in a world of such depth.
On this weird birthday, I wish you good health, and many more birthdays.
*In case you don’t know (as I didn’t know), a positive integer n is called weird if its proper divisors sum to a value greater than n, but such that no subset of those proper divisors sums to n itself.