If you discount inaccessible qualia, how about accurately representing the behaviors of subatomic particles in a uranium atom?
I’m not discounting qualia (that’s it’s own discussion), I’m just saying that if these are the only kinds of thoughts which we can defend as being potentially unthinkable by us, then the original quote is trivial.
So one strategy you might take to defend thoughts we cannot think is this: thinking is or supervenes on a physical process, and thus it necessarily takes time. All human beings have a finite lifespan. Some thought could be formulated such that the act of thinking it with a human brain would take longer than any possible lifespan, or perhaps just an infinite amount of time. Therefore, there are thoughts we cannot think.
I think this suggestion is basically the same as yours: what prevents us from thinking this thought is some limited resources, like memory or lifespan, or something like that. Similarly, I could suggest a language that is in principle untranslatable, just because all well formed sentences and clauses in that language are long enough that we couldn’t remember a whole one.
But it would be important to distinguish, in these cases, between two different kinds of unthinkability or untranslatability. Both the infinite (or just super complex) thoughts and the super long sentences are translatable into a language we can understand, in principle. There’s nothing about those thoughts or sentences, or our thoughts or sentences, that makes them incompatible. The incompatibility arises from a fact about our biology. So in the same line, we could say that some alien species’ language is untranslatable because they speak and write in some medium we don’t have the technology to access. The problem there isn’t with the language or the act of translation.
In sum, I think that this suggestion (and perhaps the original quote) trades on an equivocation between two different kinds of unthinkability. But if the only defensible kind of unthinkability is one on the basis of some accidental limitation of access or resources, then I can’t see what’s interesting about the idea. It’s no more interesting then than the point that I can’t speak Chinese because I haven’t learned it.
I’m not discounting qualia (that’s it’s own discussion), I’m just saying that if these are the only kinds of thoughts which we can defend as being potentially unthinkable by us, then the original quote is trivial.
So one strategy you might take to defend thoughts we cannot think is this: thinking is or supervenes on a physical process, and thus it necessarily takes time. All human beings have a finite lifespan. Some thought could be formulated such that the act of thinking it with a human brain would take longer than any possible lifespan, or perhaps just an infinite amount of time. Therefore, there are thoughts we cannot think.
I think this suggestion is basically the same as yours: what prevents us from thinking this thought is some limited resources, like memory or lifespan, or something like that. Similarly, I could suggest a language that is in principle untranslatable, just because all well formed sentences and clauses in that language are long enough that we couldn’t remember a whole one.
But it would be important to distinguish, in these cases, between two different kinds of unthinkability or untranslatability. Both the infinite (or just super complex) thoughts and the super long sentences are translatable into a language we can understand, in principle. There’s nothing about those thoughts or sentences, or our thoughts or sentences, that makes them incompatible. The incompatibility arises from a fact about our biology. So in the same line, we could say that some alien species’ language is untranslatable because they speak and write in some medium we don’t have the technology to access. The problem there isn’t with the language or the act of translation.
In sum, I think that this suggestion (and perhaps the original quote) trades on an equivocation between two different kinds of unthinkability. But if the only defensible kind of unthinkability is one on the basis of some accidental limitation of access or resources, then I can’t see what’s interesting about the idea. It’s no more interesting then than the point that I can’t speak Chinese because I haven’t learned it.