Mary’s room was clearly written by a man; adult human women are overwhelmingly likely to see red substances about a dozen times a year. If she was written as a colorblind person who had their colorblindness cured, the thought experiment would be more plausible. It is interesting in the context of discussing subjective experience how the classic thought experiment shows a lack of understanding of the kind of subjective experience its participant would have.
Anyways. I think for the way you’re calling subjective experience physical, language is also physical. Both acoustic and visual forms of language are constrained by our physical capacities, abilities whose initial development appears to pre-date the formalization of language itself. Words sound like they do based in part on the genetic accidents of our capacities to speak and hear. If our hearing worked better for different pitches, or the physical apparatus of speech could produce different sets of easily differentiable phonemes, we would use very different words.
And yet the physical artifact of language somehow manages to nevertheless be emitted by non-embodied systems. Interesting!
Mary’s room was clearly written by a man; adult human women are overwhelmingly likely to see red substances about a dozen times a year. If she was written as a colorblind person who had their colorblindness cured, the thought experiment would be more plausible. It is interesting in the context of discussing subjective experience how the classic thought experiment shows a lack of understanding of the kind of subjective experience its participant would have.
Anyways. I think for the way you’re calling subjective experience physical, language is also physical. Both acoustic and visual forms of language are constrained by our physical capacities, abilities whose initial development appears to pre-date the formalization of language itself. Words sound like they do based in part on the genetic accidents of our capacities to speak and hear. If our hearing worked better for different pitches, or the physical apparatus of speech could produce different sets of easily differentiable phonemes, we would use very different words.
And yet the physical artifact of language somehow manages to nevertheless be emitted by non-embodied systems. Interesting!