>Consider what it must have been like to be a Leipzig Lutheran churchgoer in, say, 1725, hearing one of J. S. Bach’s chorale cantatas in its premier performance.
If all the ineffability of experience comes from associations, then novel experiences should be effable—but they are not.
There’s also a really good description of ineffability in terms of Jell-O boxes that, unfortunately, I will have to butcher in order to relate. Tl;dr: If you tear a Jell-O box into two pieces, one piece will be a detector for the other—it only fits perfectly with that one shape of torn cardboard. But this property is indescribable—if you try to explain what shape it is that the piece of Jell-O box detects, you can only wave your hands at the piece of cardboard plaintively.
If all the ineffability of experience comes from complexity, then simple experiences should be effable—but they are not.
Sorry, what’s a simple experience? There’s externally simple experiences like looking at a black room in the dark, but It’s not like those experiences use a smaller number of neurons than my other experiences.
Yeah, good point, we build models of the world, or at least of our senses, we don’t automatically build models of what our neurons are doing.
(Maybe any learning in the brain can be interpreted as a “model” of the neurons that feed into the learning neurons, but the details of that sort of thing aren’t available to our faculties for navigating the world, doing abstract reasoning, or communicating—they’re happening at a lower layer in the software stack of the brain.)
That’s veering towards a more “Mary’s room” sort of definition of “ineffability,” where you can’t freely exchange world-models and experiences, which isn’t really what the Jell-O box analogy was about—it was about interpersonal comparisons, and our inability to experience what other people experience.
But I guess they’re connected. Suppose we’re both listening to a simple tone, but my pitch perception is more accurate than yours. If you want to experience my experience for yourself, you might try taking your own experience and then imagining “adding on some extra pitch perception”—an act of model-to-experience exchange reminiscent of what Mary’s supposed to try.
>Consider what it must have been like to be a Leipzig Lutheran churchgoer in, say, 1725, hearing one of J. S. Bach’s chorale cantatas in its premier performance.
If all the ineffability of experience comes from associations, then novel experiences should be effable—but they are not.
If all the ineffability of experience comes from complexity, then simple experiences should be effable—but they are not.
Sorry, what’s a simple experience? There’s externally simple experiences like looking at a black room in the dark, but It’s not like those experiences use a smaller number of neurons than my other experiences.
Experiences like seeing a single colour, or hearing a single musical tone. THe number of neurons is irrelevant, since they are not experienced.
Yeah, good point, we build models of the world, or at least of our senses, we don’t automatically build models of what our neurons are doing.
(Maybe any learning in the brain can be interpreted as a “model” of the neurons that feed into the learning neurons, but the details of that sort of thing aren’t available to our faculties for navigating the world, doing abstract reasoning, or communicating—they’re happening at a lower layer in the software stack of the brain.)
That’s veering towards a more “Mary’s room” sort of definition of “ineffability,” where you can’t freely exchange world-models and experiences, which isn’t really what the Jell-O box analogy was about—it was about interpersonal comparisons, and our inability to experience what other people experience.
But I guess they’re connected. Suppose we’re both listening to a simple tone, but my pitch perception is more accurate than yours. If you want to experience my experience for yourself, you might try taking your own experience and then imagining “adding on some extra pitch perception”—an act of model-to-experience exchange reminiscent of what Mary’s supposed to try.