Comment on Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia

Fri, 27 May 2011 20:34:20 GMT

I think you're mistaking the conclusion that the non-reductionist philosophers draw from the thought experiment. They're not generally substance dualists like Descartes. Instead, they claim that reductionism is false because it is epistemically incomplete, even within a purely physical world: a human (or an AI, or anything other than a bat) cannot ever understand the experience of being a bat, and therefore not all knowledge reduces to mathematical patterns of physical objects.

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