I’ve been leaning a bit more towards deflationism lately. Certainly some of the things we think of as ineffable knowledge are just really complicated—I have emotions and instincts and memories of colors that I could not put into words no matter how hard I tried. If that’s not ineffable, what is?
But we have this intuition that there is a further fact about the blueness of blue, some part of your color experience that consists of the mysterious blueness of blue independent of any instincts or associations or memories. But I think that this thing is purely the judgment that something is blue. It’s what a movie camera feels like from inside—an extremely simple core of experience. And therefore this part is in fact effable—“that thing looks blue” is a sufficient effing.
Of course, a representation doesn’t seem like a representation from inside. From the perspective of a cognitive algorithm that uses this representation, the representation seems like direct access to the world, and there’s no evolutionary pressure to learn otherwise.
This identification of the mysterious blueness of blue with the simple fact that our representation of the world marks some patch of the sensorium as blue explains many weird properties of the mysterious blueness. It’s difficult to break down into other mental pieces (because it’s already simple). It’s intimately related to first-person experience. Someone who has never seen a blue thing in some sense “doesn’t know what it feels like to see blue,” no matter their third-hand knowledge, but in another sense there’s almost nothing to “know” about seeing blue, it’s more in the class of something that happens to you. There’s nothing else quite like the blueness of blue—because it’s nearly a primitive feature of our senses.
Sorry for going off on my own little tangent, I was thinking about this on the bus earlier today.
I’ve been leaning a bit more towards deflationism lately. Certainly some of the things we think of as ineffable knowledge are just really complicated—I have emotions and instincts and memories of colors that I could not put into words no matter how hard I tried. If that’s not ineffable, what is?
But we have this intuition that there is a further fact about the blueness of blue, some part of your color experience that consists of the mysterious blueness of blue independent of any instincts or associations or memories. But I think that this thing is purely the judgment that something is blue. It’s what a movie camera feels like from inside—an extremely simple core of experience. And therefore this part is in fact effable—“that thing looks blue” is a sufficient effing.
Of course, a representation doesn’t seem like a representation from inside. From the perspective of a cognitive algorithm that uses this representation, the representation seems like direct access to the world, and there’s no evolutionary pressure to learn otherwise.
This identification of the mysterious blueness of blue with the simple fact that our representation of the world marks some patch of the sensorium as blue explains many weird properties of the mysterious blueness. It’s difficult to break down into other mental pieces (because it’s already simple). It’s intimately related to first-person experience. Someone who has never seen a blue thing in some sense “doesn’t know what it feels like to see blue,” no matter their third-hand knowledge, but in another sense there’s almost nothing to “know” about seeing blue, it’s more in the class of something that happens to you. There’s nothing else quite like the blueness of blue—because it’s nearly a primitive feature of our senses.
Sorry for going off on my own little tangent, I was thinking about this on the bus earlier today.