A physically plausible scenario would involve growing up under a monochromatic light source.
Growing up without sensory input actually affects the brain; see Wikipedia's article on monocular deprivation. I'm actually an example of this - I was born without the Mystic Eyes Of Depth Perception so I'll never know what stereoscopic vision "feels like".
I propose that "qualia" is a word that, like "microevolution", is mainly used by people who are very confused (and dissolving the question is the appropriate approach).
I'm actually an example of this - I was born without the Mystic Eyes Of Depth Perception so I'll never know what stereoscopic vision "feels like".
If you turn something or move around it, even if you only use one eye to do this, your brain puts together the succeeding images to create a three-dimensional visual experience of the scene. Here is an example. If you're curious about "what it's like" to have stereo vision, in my opinion it is not far off from this, without the movement.
I'm not sure that this enterprise should be called "dissolving the question".
The question at hand is, "Is there something about red things that Mary can learn only by having certain kinds of input fed into her visual cortex?" This seems like a question that should be answered, not dissolved.
If you were trying to dissolve this question, you would probably proceed by trying to show that the concept of the things that Mary can learn about red things is itself meaningless, or at least that its meaning is too vague to give meaning to the qu...
The argument is called "Mary’s Room"...I prefer the more plausible and philosophically equivalent variant discussed above, although it drifts away from the etymology of the argument’s name
To be precise, the argument itself is called the Knowledge Argument (KA); "Mary's Room" is a name for the thought experiment Jackson used to present it.
Actually, it was one of two similar thought experiments in Jackson's original paper: the other one concerned a character named Fred who could see more colors than normal humans.
That someone knows every physical fact about gold doesn't make that person own any gold.
The Mary’s Room thought experiment explicitly claims that Mary knows every physical fact about the given phenomenon but does at the same time implicitly suggest that some information is missing.
Mary was merely able to to dissolve part of human nature by incorporating an algorithmic understanding of it. Mary wasn't able to evoke the dynamic state sequence from the human machine by computing the algorithm.
Understanding something means to assimilate a model of what is ...
FWIW, I'm satisfied with Dennett's explanation. If Mary knows everything physical about color, then there's nothing for her to be surprised about when she sees red. If your intuitions tell you otherwise, then your intuitions are wrong.
This begs the question, to be sure, but think of it more like moving to a more appropriate field of battle.
If Mary knows everything physical about color, then there's nothing for her to be surprised about when she sees red. If your intuitions tell you otherwise, then your intuitions are wrong.
Not really; it just means that our ability to imagine sensory experiences is underpowered. There are limits to what you can imagine and call up in conscious experience, even of things you have experienced. A person could imagine what it would be like to be betrayed by a friend, and yet still not be able to experience the same "qualia" as they would in the actual situation.
So, you can know precisely which neurons should fire to create a sensation of red (or anything else), and yet not be able to make them fire as a result.
Mere knowledge isn't sufficient to recreate any experience, but that's just a fact about the structure and limitations of human brains, not evidence of some special status for qualia. (It's certainly not an argument for non-materialism.)
Like I said, that's begging the question in the direction of materialism
Not at all. The question is only confused because the paradox confuses "knowing what would happen if neurons fire" and "having those neurons actually fire" as being the same sort of knowledge. In the human cognitive architecture, they aren't the same thing, but that doesn't mean there's any mysterious non-physical "qualia" involved. It's just that we have different neuronal firings for knowing and experiencing.
If you taboo enough words and expand enough definitions, the qualia question is reduced to "if Mary has mental-state-representing-knowledge-of-red, but does not have mental-state-representing-experience-of-red, then what new thing does she learn upon experiencing red?"
And of course the bloody obvious answer is, the mental state representing the experience of red. The question is idiotic because it basically assumes two fundamentally different things are the same, and then tries to turn the difference between them into something mysterious. It makes no more sense than saying, "if cubes are square, then why is a sphere round? some extra mysterious thing is happening!"
So, it's not begging the question for materialism, because it doesn't matter how complete Mary's state of knowledge about neurons is. The question itself is a simple confusion of definitions, like the classic tree-forest-sound question.
I was sort of toying with an idea a while ago; it is somewhat old though I've tweaked it a bit for presentation here. I don't like it so much anymore, but I still think it has some potential so I'll go ahead and share it anyway:
Suppose we alter the Mary's room scenario so that Mary isn't human, but rather comes from a race of philosophical 'Empaths' that have the ability to perfectly convey subjective experience due to some ability to transmit and read off another each other's neural patterns as well as hack their own CNS.
In this altered scenario, Mary can...
This is somewhat circular. There isn't anyone who knows everything about the visual system. Thus, we're hypothesizing that knowing everything about the visual system is insufficient to understand what red looks like... prove that knowing everything about the visual system is insufficient to understand what red looks like.
Even given this, the obvious solution seems to be that "What red looks like" is a fact about Mary's brain. She needn't have seen red light to see red; properly stimulating some neurons would result in the same effect. That the e...
This thought experiment always seemed silly to me. As if somehow the experience of the visual cortex reacting to "color" input was not a piece of knowledge.
If someone has a poor ability to mentally visualize 3-dimensional objects, and is shown a set of formula that will draw a specific and very odd object (learning everything but what the object actually looks like), and is only ever allowed to graph on paper, then of course when we finally hand them a physical model of the object we have given them new information.
I don't see this as any differe...
Let's take an analogy:
You're writing a video game that will run on hardware that doesn't do floating-point arithmetic (like the Nintendo DS), so you have to write a library to emulate floating-point arithmetic. You then port the game to a very similar system whose hardware does handle floats, so you replace your library with simple operations.
Mary's situation is similar: Mary is perfectly capable of anticipating any experience related to color, and "seeing red" doesn't change that, but allows her to use the functionality built in her hardware...
Looks really interesting.
I especially like the notion that the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind is important and the observation that some sensory inputs to our body feels ineffable and some do not.
It’s easy to imagine visual perception in relation to qualia ie how do I know that the blue I see looks the same to you beyond identifying it eg the sky is blue. But I think it’s harder to imagine qualia in relation to sound, that is how could sound have a subjective essence that is possibly unique to each individual. I think you either hear something or you don’t.
From just reading the definition of the Mary's Room problem my knee-jerk reaction was "this seems plausible." It is a textbook example of how an algorithm feels from the inside.
You might know everything there is to know intellectually about colours, but that does not induce sensations in your visual cortex. Humans don't work that way.
A bayesian AI might go "that is about what I expected" when you switch it from a black and white camera to a colour one, solely on the basis of the production parameters of the camera, a physics paper on optics and perhaps a single colour photo.
I like it so far! One question, though:
Our goal, then, is to build a model of a mind that would express analogous reactions in Mary's Room for a genuine reason
Are you referring the question of how to model a mind that would have analogous reactions to:
I assume the first, but I couldn't tell. In any case, both are worthwhile targets for reduction.
Edit: I had previous sketched out a reduction of qualia, but it seems more focused on the first issue -- why we ...
https://enchroma.com/blogs/beyond-color/how-color-blind-see
Does the fact this level of understanding of colour blindness is known and that for example the black and white type of colour blindness is observable and verifiable and contains no colours other than black and white , does this prove subjective perception is false or is there still an intrinsic isness that is unique to the individual ?
Interesting article I found about measuring subjective perception
https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1697
Does the evidence that suggests taste testers find Pepsi max quite sweet when compared to regular cola prove qualia false ?
"So bad, tastes like water with a bit of sugar in it," one taste-tester said of Pepsi, while another said of Pepsi Max: "Surprisingly sweet and not in a good way."
https://amp.nine.com.au/article/6e138365-a76a-46bc-816b-d6964e7078e5
When Mary exclaims “Oh” as she sees red for the first time, how would an observer know what Mary is expressing when she exclaims this ? If someone who spoke a different language were to exclaim the same thing in their language would their facial movements be the same obviously linguistically there would be differences that MAY prevent comprehension or would an observer be able to deduce what Mary speaking Italian was trying to express based on body language. When mentioning the subconscious and collective subconscious do a level of psychic powers come into play that help us understand things that are foreign to us ?
I just had a thought. If Mary was presented with a red, a blue, and a green tile on a white background could she identify which was which without additional visual context clues like comparing them to her nails? If not, I would expect a p-zombie to have the same issue implying that that failure isn't to do with consciousness.
If Mary had never counted more than 100 objects before, and today she counted 113 sheep in a field, we wouldn't expect her to exclaim "Oh, so that's what 113 looks like!"
I'd think that partly this is because 113 is an abstract internal representation - it can't be surprising, because we have to build it for ourselves. There is no "experience of 113" in normal human cognition. If I could just look at a pile of objects and go "That's 113" the way I go "that's 3!" or "that's 4!", I could imagine very well b...
Say I jam an electrode into Mary's optical nerve and send a pulse down it, causing the nerve to report to the brain that she sees red. In this hypothetical, her field of vision fills with red. Does this count as her experiencing the qualia of red?
If no: your concept of qualia is magical.
If yes: qualia doesn't do the work you want it to. With the word qualia, you're drawing a distinction between knowledge of the event and the actual event of the event - the event happening as distinct from a complete understanding of the event happening. This distinction is...
For example, we don't experience the feeling of ineffability for something like counting, which happens consciously (above a threshold of five or six). If Mary had never counted more than 100 objects before, and today she counted 113 sheep in a field, we wouldn't expect her to exclaim "Oh, so that's what 113 looks like!"
What about the case of 3 sheep? Are small numbers understood both analytically, and as qualia?
I think I have long since "dissolved the problem quite elegantly" ...
Basically Yes Mary can "know all there is to know about color ...." before being exposed. Yes she does learn something new when exposed to color.
But basically the knowledge of how her brain reacts to color is information that does not exist in the universe prior to her exposure. She is physically changed and the new information is thus created.
If her knowl...
Well, we could of course draw the analogy between colors of the spectrum and tones of sound
Puzzle: We sense colors, which exist on a continuum, by how near one color is to each of the only 3 colors our retinas can sense directly, plus intensity. We sense tones, which exist on a continuum, directly - we can sense each separate wavelength directly. Yet we have the impression that there are more colors than sounds - we draw sounds on a line, but colors in a plane.
Essential Background: Dissolving the Question
How could we fully explain the difference between red and green to a colorblind person?
Well, we could of course draw the analogy between colors of the spectrum and tones of sound; have them learn which objects are typically green and which are typically red (or better yet, give them a video camera with a red filter to look through); explain many of the political, cultural and emotional associations of red and green, and so forth... but it seems that the actual difference between our experience of redness and our experience of greenness is something much harder to convey. If we focus in on that aspect of experience, we end up with the classic philosophical concept of qualia, and the famous thought experiment known as Mary’s Room1.
Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has been colorblind from birth (due to a retina problem; her visual cortex would work normally if it were given the color input). She’s an expert on the electromagnetic spectrum, optics, and the science of color vision. We can postulate, since this is a thought experiment, that she knows and fully understands every physical fact involved in color vision; she knows precisely what happens, on various levels, when the human eye sees red (and the optic nerve transmits particular types of signals, and the visual cortex processes these signals, etc).
One day, Mary gets an operation that fixes her retinas, so that she finally sees in color for the first time. And when she wakes up, she looks at an apple and exclaims, "Oh! So that's what red actually looks like."2
Now, this exclamation poses a challenge to any physical reductionist account of subjective experience. For if the qualia of seeing red could be reduced to a collection of basic facts about the physical world, then Mary would have learned those facts earlier and wouldn't learn anything extra now– but of course it seems that she really does learn something when she sees red for the first time. This is not merely the god-of-the-gaps argument that we haven't yet found a full reductionist explanation of subjective experience, but an intuitive proof that no such explanation would be complete.
The argument in academic philosophy over Mary's Room remains unsettled to this day (though it has an interesting history, including a change of mind on the part of its originator). If we ignore the topic of subjective experience, the arguments for reductionism appear to be quite overwhelming; so why does this objection, in a domain in which our ignorance is so vast3, seem so difficult for reductionists to convincingly reject?
Veterans of this blog will know where I'm going: a question like this needs to be dissolved, not merely answered.
That is, rather than just rehashing the philosophical arguments about whether and in what sense qualia exist4, as plenty of philosophers have done without reaching consensus, we might instead ask where our thoughts about qualia come from, and search for a simplified version of the cognitive algorithm behind (our expectation of) Mary's reaction. The great thing about this alternative query is that it's likely to actually have an answer, and that this answer can help us in our thinking about the original question.
Eliezer introduced this approach in his discussion of classical definitional disputes and later on in the sequence on free will, and (independently, it seems) Gary Drescher relied on it in his excellent book Good and Real to account for a number of apparent paradoxes, but it seems that academic philosophers haven't yet taken to the idea. Essentially, it brings to the philosophy of mind an approach that is standard in the mathematical sciences: if there's a phenomenon we don't understand, it usually helps to find a simpler model that exhibits the same phenomenon, and figure out how exactly it arises in that model.
Our goal, then, is to build a model of a mind that would have an analogous reaction for a genuine reason5 when placed in a scenario like Mary's Room. We don't need this model to encapsulate the full structure of human subjective experience, just enough to see where the Mary's Room argument pulls a sleight of hand.
What kinds of features might our model require in order to qualify? Since the argument relies on the notions of learning and direct experience, we will certainly need to incorporate these. Another factor which is not immediately relevant, but which I argue is vital, is that our model must designate some smaller part of itself as the "conscious" mind, and have much of its activity take place outside of that part.
Now, why should the conscious/unconscious divide matter to the experience of qualia? Firstly, we note that our qualia feel ineffable to us: that is, it seems like we know their nature very well but could never adequately communicate or articulate it. If we're thinking like a cognitive scientist, we might hypothesize that an unconscious part of the mind knows something more fully while the conscious mind, better suited to using language, lacks access to the full knowledge6.
Secondly, there's an interesting pattern to our intuitions about qualia: we only get this feeling of ineffability about mental events that we're conscious of, but which are mostly processed subconsciously. For example, we don't experience the feeling of ineffability for something like counting, which happens consciously (above a threshold of five or six). If Mary had never counted more than 100 objects before, and today she counted 113 sheep in a field, we wouldn't expect her to exclaim "Oh, so that's what 113 looks like!"
In the other direction, there's a lot of unconscious processing that goes into the process of digestion, but unless we get sick, the intermediate steps don't generally rise to conscious awareness. If Mary had never had pineapple before, she might well extol the qualia of its taste, but not that of its properties as it navigates her small intestine. You could think of these as hidden qualia, perhaps, but it doesn't intuitively feel like there's something extra to be explained the way there is with redness.
Of course, there are plenty of other features we might nominate for inclusion in our model, but as it turns out, we can get a long way with just these two. In the next post, I'll introduce Martha, a simple model of a learning mind with a conscious/unconscious distinction, and in the third post I'll show how Martha reacts in the situation of Mary's Room, and how this reaction arises in a non-mysterious way. Even without claiming that Martha is a good analogue of the human mind, this will suffice to show why Mary's Room is not a logically valid argument against reductionism, since if it were then it would equally apply to Martha. And if we start to see a bit of ourselves in Martha after all, so much the better for our understanding of qualia...
One could reasonably ask what makes my attempt special on such a well-argued topic, given that I’m not credentialed as a philosopher. First, I'd reiterate that academic philosophers really haven’t started to use the concept of dissolving a question- I don’t think Daniel Dennett, for instance, ever explored this train of thought. And secondly, of those who do try and map cognitive algorithms within philosophy of mind, Eliezer hasn't tackled qualia in this way, while Gary Drescher gives them short shrift in Good and Real. (The latter essentially makes Dennett's argument that with enough self-knowledge qualia wouldn’t be ineffable. But in my mind this fails to really dissolve the question- see my footnote 4.)
1. The argument is called "Mary’s Room" because the original version (due to Frank Jackson) posited that Mary had perfectly normal vision but happened to be raised and educated in a perfectly grayscale environment, and one day stepped out into the colorful world like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I prefer the more plausible and philosophically equivalent variant discussed above, although it drifts away from the etymology of the argument’s name.
2. Ironically, it was a green apple rather than a red one, but Mary soon realized and rectified her error. The point stands.
3. In general, an important rationalist heuristic is to not draw far-reaching conclusions from an intuitively plausible argument about a subject (like subjective experience) which you find extremely confusing.
4. Before we move on, though, one key reductionist reply to Mary’s Room is that either qualia have physical effects (like causing Mary to say "Oh!") or they don't. If they do, then either they reduce to ordinary physics or you could expect to find violations of physical law in the human brain, which few modern philosophers would dare to bet on. And if they don't have any physical effects, then somehow whatever causes her to say "Oh!" has nothing to do with her actual experience of redness, which is an exceptionally weird stance if you ponder it for a moment; read the zombie sequence if you're curious.
Furthermore, one could object (as Dennett does) that Mary’s Room, like Searle’s Chinese Room, is playing sleight of hand with impossible levels of knowledge for a human, and that an agent who could really handle such massive quantities of information really wouldn't learn anything new when finally having the experience. But to me this is an unsatisfying objection, because we don’t expect to see the effect of the experience diminish significantly as we increase her level of understanding within human bounds– and at most, this objection provides a plausible escape from the argument rather than a refutation.
5. (and not, for instance, because we programmed in that specific reaction on its own)
6. Indeed, the vast majority of visual processing- estimating distances, distinguishing objects, even identifying colors- is done subconsciously; that's why knowing that something is an optical illusion doesn't make you stop seeing the illusion. Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works contains a treasure trove of examples on this subject.