I Am a Strange Loop

If objectively observable facts were all the inverted-spectrum riddle was about, it would be as easy as pie to tell the difference between ourselves and the fifty million French people whose inner sensations are all wrong! We would just examine their gray matter and pinpoint the telltale spot where certain key connections were flipped with respect to ours. Then we could watch their French brains engage in glebbing when the identical retinal stimulus would provoke knurking in our brains. But that’s not in the least the meaning of the inverted-spectrum idea. The meaning is that, despite having identical brain wirings, two people looking at the same object experience completely different color sensations.

The Inverted Political Spectrum

This hypothetical notion makes our inner experiences of the colors in the rainbow sound like a set of floating pre-existent pure abstractions that are not intimately (in fact, not at all) related to the physics outside our skull, or even to any physics inside it; rather, these inner experiences are arbitrarily mappable onto outside phenomena. As we grow up, the rainbow colors get mapped onto the spectrum of prefabricated feelings with which our brains all come equipped “from the factory”, but this mapping is not mediated by neural wiring; after all, neural wiring is observable from a detached third-person perspective, such as that of a neurosurgeon, so that rules it out.

Let’s now ponder the implications of this notion of the independence of subjective feelings and external stimuli. Maybe, just to pick a random example, the abstraction of “liberty” feels to me like what the abstraction of “imprisonment” feels like to you — it’s just that we both use the same word “liberty” for it, and so we are deluded into thinking that it is the same experience for both of us. This sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it? After all, liberty is pleasant whereas imprisonment is unpleasant. But then again, who can say for sure? Maybe experiences that I feel are pleasurable are unpleasurable for you, and vice versa.

Or maybe that churning feeling that I feel inside me when I run into right-wing flag-wavers and pro-lifers (those who dominated in the “red” states in the 2004 election) is identical to that churning feeling that you feel inside you when you encounter left-wing flag-burners and pro-choicers (those who dominated in the “blue” states in the 2004 election), and vice versa! This would be the inverted political spectrum! Are you getting a bit dizzy at this point? (Perhaps what you experience as dizziness I experience as clarity, and vice versa. But let’s not go there.)

The philosophers who take the inverted visual spectrum with total seriousness would not take the inverted political spectrum in the least seriously. But why not? Presumably because they don’t think our brains come from the factory with prefabricated political “feelings” inside them, feelings that can be arbitrarily attached to right-wing or left-wing politics as we grow up. And yet they truly do think that we come with knurking and glebbing built in (although they don’t use my words).

I once again wish to remind you that knurking is not an identifiable physical phenomenon in a brain (nor is glebbing). Knurking is that inherently incommunicable sensation that you supposedly have when red light (or blue light, if you’re French, reader) hits your eyes. French people have all the same internal physical events happen in their brains as we do, but they don’t have the same experiences as ours. French people experience glebbing when red light hits their retina, and knurking when blue light hits it. So just what is this knurking “experience”, then, if it isn’t anything physically identifiable in a brain?

The inverted-spectrists say it is pure feeling. Since this distinction is completely independent of physics, it amounts to dualism (something we already knew, in effect, since belief in Cartesian Egos is a kind of dualism).

Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue

Why is it that those who postulate the inverted spectrum always do so only for experiences that lie along a one-dimensional numerical scale? It seems like a great paucity of imagination to limit oneself to swapping red and blue. If you think it’s coherent to say to someone else, “Maybe your private inner experience of red is the same as my private inner experience of blue”, then why would it not be just as coherent to say, “Maybe your private inner experience of looking at a red rose is the same as my private inner experience of looking at a blue violet”?