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Peterdjones comments on Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia - Less Wrong
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Since we don't actually have physical explanations of qualia, that is itself an intuition. It's one intuition against another. not one intuition against some fact that disproves it.
wouldn't everything physical include, say, your complete brain state now and what your complete brain state would be if you saw something red?
and wouldn't it be impossible for you to hold that info in your brain?
Not if you could losslessly encode it enough and also work directly with such encodings.
It is difficult to losslessly compress something that has already been losslessly compressed, because its entropy/bit will be very high.
De-compressing something you already had losslessly encoded feels like learning or discovery, depending on whether it is externally induced.
Like, if you know the statement of a difficult math problem, then you know enough information to pin down the answer, but you do not know the answer. If I tell you the answer, you will feel like you just learned something. And you did, in some senses of the word, learn something.
Google keywords: logical uncertainty
No, there are (or, at least can be in principle) various good reasons for thinking physicalism is true - it need not rest on mere intuition. And once you've assumed that physicalism is true, the above is a consistent, correct conclusion for the thought experiment.
If you think physicalism is false, I would not think the above explanation would feel very satisfying to you - but then, I was talking about what feels satisfying to me.
We still don't have a physical explanation of qualia. So it is still a kind of guess that physicalism, which has been successful in other areas cab be extended to all areas. It's an intuition based on evidence, but the intended intuition of the Mary story is based on evidence as well, since we have all had novel experiences which went beyond their descriptions.
Can't I just find it unsatisfying anyway?