TheOtherDave 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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Tags: qualia philosophy reductionism

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 January 2013 04:56:54PM 0 points [-]

If we're agreed about the nature of Mary's Room, great.

I decline to get into a discussion of how thought experiments are supposed to work, but I certainly agree with you that they aren't supposed to be mathematical proofs.

I also decline to get into yet another discussion about the nature of conscious experience.

Comment author: Peterdjones 23 January 2013 05:19:45PM 0 points [-]

If we're agreed about the nature of Mary's Room, great.

Agreed on what about Mary's room? I don't agree that there a "right" and "wrong" intuitions about it, and I am not a fan of "M's R is bad because all thought experiments are bad".

Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 January 2013 05:41:08PM 0 points [-]

Agreed that Mary's Room doesn't demonstrate that information that is not in-principle understandable by the methods of physical science but is ordinarily extracted by particular cognitive systems exists; that it's solely intended as an intuition pump, as you say.

I certainly don't believe that all thought experiments are bad, but again, I decline to get into a discussion of how thought experiments are supposed to work.

Comment author: DaFranker 23 January 2013 05:36:56PM *  0 points [-]

Agreed on what about Mary's room?

Its "nature".

Mary's Room is:

  • A thought experiment.
  • Supposed to be an intuition pump.
  • Not a formal proof of anything.

Possible conditional extension:

  • Of usefulness dependent upon the relevance of its premises, the things it seeks to make you think about, and the reliability of human intuition.
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