= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nornagest comments on Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (152)
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.)
That more or less corresponds to the way I break it down, and I'd take it a step further by saying that thinking of the problem this way reduces Mary's room to a definitional conflict. If we classify the experiential feeling of redness under "everything physical about color" -- which is quite viable given a reductionist interpretation of the problem -- then Mary by definition knows how it feels. This is probably impossible in practice if Mary has a normal human cognitive architecture, but that's okay, since we're working in the magical world of thought experiments where anything goes.
If we don't, on the other hand, then Mary can quite easily lack experiential knowledge of redness without fear of contradiction, by the process you've outlined. It's only an apparent paradox because of an ambiguity in our formulation of experiential knowledge.
That's not how reduction works. You don't just declare a problem to consist only of (known) physics, and then declare it solved.You attempt to understand it in terms of known physics, and that attempt either succeeds or fails. Reductionism is not an apriori truth, or a method guaranteed to succeed. And no reduction of qualia has succeeded. Whether that me we need new explanations, new physics, non-reductionism or dualism is an open question.
I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say -- or, for that matter, what pjeby was trying to say. Notice how I never used the word "qualia"? That's because I'm trying to avoid becoming entangled in issues surrounding the reduction of qualia; instead, I'm examining the results of Mary's room given two mutually exclusive possible assumptions -- that such a reduction exists or that it doesn't -- and pointing out that the thought experiment generates results consistent with known physics in either case, provided we keep that assumption consistent within it. That doesn't reduce qualia as traditionally conceived to known physics, but it does demonstrate that Mary's room doesn't provide evidence either way.