CronoDAS comments on ESR's New Take on Qualia - Less Wrong

3 Post author: billswift 21 August 2009 09:26AM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 21 August 2009 08:57:35PM *  10 points [-]

Liked this a lot, though it was basically my view already, so I'm decidedly biased.

Interestingly, I don't think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don't have Mary's brain, so I can't really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.

It seems that, in theory, an intelligence capable of reconstructing brains, wiring them into its own consciousness, and running them through stimuli could in fact understand their qualia, though such a procedure may not be meaningfully possible.

Comment author: CronoDAS 21 August 2009 09:57:23PM 2 points [-]

Interestingly, I don't think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don't have Mary's brain, so I can't really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.

I agree with this.