Peterdjones comments on Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia - Less Wrong

38 Post author: orthonormal 26 May 2011 05:47PM

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Comment author: pjeby 26 May 2011 11:36:48PM 19 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: Peterdjones 31 May 2011 07:05:47PM 0 points [-]

Not really; it just means that our ability to imagine sensory experiences is underpowered.

Why does Mary need to imagine red in order to know what it looks like? If the physical understanding she already has accounts for it, then she should be able to figure it out from that, as per the Dennett response. Like several people in this thread, you are tacitly assuming that there is something special about qualia, such that they need to be imagined or instantiated in order to be known -- something that is unique about them, even though they are ultimately physical like everything else.