red75 comments on Rationality quotes: August 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (201)
I am not establishing qualia as physical properties of brain's activity, I think of them as descriptions of specific neural activity in the terms of human's self-model. And limitations of that self-model (it's not sufficiently detailed to refer to individual neurons) don't allow to establish unambiguous correspondence between physical description of brain and self-model description of brain within that self-model.
And what is a difference between seeing red thing and activation of those neurons? The point of "Mary's room" is to know what seeing red means without actually seeing it.
Depends who's using it. For Dennett, for instance, the point of Mary's room is to point out how ridiculous this notion of qualia is, or at least how silly the thought experiment is.
As stated, she knows everything physical about red. So she knows, for instance, how to build a machine that will activate her red-seeing neurons in the absence of the color. Also as stated, she can perform whatever experiments she needs to in order to become an expert color scientist. So she can have whatever experience would come from having those neurons activated.
If you think there's nothing else to the experience, then I think we're in agreement so far.