Yes - the experience / quale has nothing to do with words.
The point (opinion) I'm trying to make is that something like the quale of vision, that is so hard to describe, basically has to be the way it is, because that is it's fundamental nature.
Consider starting with your eyes closed, and maybe just a white surface in front of you, then you open your eyes. Seeing is not the same as not-seeing, so it has to feel different. If it was a different color then the input to your brain would be different, so that has to feel different too. Vision is a spatial sense - we have a 2-D array of rods and cones in our retina feeding into our brain, so (combined with persistence of vision) we experience the scene in front of us all at once in a spatial manner, completely unlike hearing which is a temporal sense with one thing happening after another... etc, etc.
It seems to me that when you start analyzing it, everything about the quale of vision (or hearing, or touch, or smell) has to be the way it is - it is no mystery - and an artificial brain with similar senses would experience it exactly the same way.
Yep that's a cogent, serious stance, and it sounds a lot like illusionism (famously argued by Daniel Dennett) or functionalism if you ever wanted to check out more about it.
It’s a serious stance, but the really interesting thing to me here is that its not a settled fact. What’s quite surprising and unique about this field is that unlike physics or chemistry where we generally agree on the basics, in consciousness studies you have some quite brilliant minds totally deadlocked on the fundamentals. There is absolutely no consensus on whether the problem is 'solved' or 'impossible,' and its definitely not a matter of people not taking this seriously enough or making some rash judgments or simple errors.
I find this fascinating because this type of situation is pretty rare or unique in modern science. Maybe the fun part is that I can take one stance and you another and here there's no "right answer" that some expert knows and one of us is "clearly" wrong. Nice chatting with you :)
The point (opinion) I'm trying to make is that something like the quale of vision, that is so hard to describe, basically has to be the way it is, because that is it's fundamental nature.
Consider starting with your eyes closed, and maybe just a white surface in front of you, then you open your eyes. Seeing is not the same as not-seeing, so it has to feel different. If it was a different color then the input to your brain would be different, so that has to feel different too. Vision is a spatial sense - we have a 2-D array of rods and cones in our retina feeding into our brain, so (combined with persistence of vision) we experience the scene in front of us all at once in a spatial manner, completely unlike hearing which is a temporal sense with one thing happening after another... etc, etc.
It seems to me that when you start analyzing it, everything about the quale of vision (or hearing, or touch, or smell) has to be the way it is - it is no mystery - and an artificial brain with similar senses would experience it exactly the same way.