There is a qualitative redness to red. I get that intuition.

I think "Mary's room is uninteresting" is wrong; it's uninteresting in the case of robot scientists, but interesting in the case of humans, in part because of what it reveals about human cognitive architecture.

I think in the human case, I would see Mary seeing a red apple as gaining in expressive vocabulary rather than information. She can then describe future things as "like what I saw when I saw that first red apple". But, in the case of first seeing the apple, the redness quale is essentially an arbitrary gensym.

I suppose I might end up agreeing with the illusionist view on some aspects of color perception, then, in that I predict color quales might feel like new information when they actually aren't. Thanks for explaining.