thomblake comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Yvain 08 August 2009 10:57PM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 13 August 2009 09:28:04PM *  4 points [-]

My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. "Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense" is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.

My view is that Mary's Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don't actually live in Mary's brain, we can't understand the qualia of "Mary's brain being stimulated by red light", but this is a limitation on our brains, not a "mystery." Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others' brains and experience their qualia; we just don't know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.

Comment author: thomblake 14 August 2009 02:45:09PM 0 points [-]

I take a different but compatible objection to Mary's Room - that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.