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billswift comments on ESR's New Take on Qualia - Less Wrong
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Comments (51)
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.
It was about the effect that actually seeing the color red had on Mary's brain. As opposed to learning about the color red from other sources. His claim was that there was something that could only be learned about the color red by actually seeing it, and that was the effect seeing it has on your mind.
That's the issue. I don't think you learn something about the color red; I think you learn something about your mind. There is no objective thing that red looks like; it is the result of certain neurons firing. If Mary's brain were wired differently, the experience of seeing red light would be different if it even existed. The only relevant thing about red light is that it stimulates certain neurons; if you knew absolutely nothing about it except that, you could fully describe explain Mary's experience of seeing red (in theory, of course; neuroscience ain't there yet). On the other hand, you couldn't explain the experience with unlimited information about red light plus only the fact that it stimulated Mary's retina.