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anotheruser comments on Nature: Red, in Truth and Qualia - Less Wrong
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The color red has many associations to the subconscious. These associations lie dormant and unused until the first time she actually experiences the color red. No amount of study could enable her to understand every nuance of these associations to the color red. I think that she really would learn something upon first seeing the color red.
Those things would probably not be particularly important because if they were someone would have taken the time to write them down at some point and Martha would have read about them. Things like "The color red is associated with aggression" are easy enough to learn but they are only qualitative, not quantitative. Until she actually experiences the color she will have no idea exactly how strong those associations are.
Perceiving a color has many very subtle effects on the mind that are not easy to identify even while you are experiencing them. When Martha first perceives the color red she experiences these connections for the first time. I think this would suffice to explain that Martha feels like she has learned something, because she actually has learned something, it's just too subtle to point out exactly what it is.
That said, I think you are right in principle in that different parts of the mind/ mental agents/ memes can work against each other by mistake or be harmful to the mind as a whole because they don't realize that they don't apply to a given situation. I just think that this particular scenario has a different explanation.
She knows how the redness-aggression link works, she can compute it quantatively and know exactly how it would affect her behavior.
That is quite a lot of knowledge this Martha is supposed to have. If a human, or whatever species this hypothetical being Martha is, had so much knowledge about its own inner workings, would it really still be surprised? That Martha feels like she learned something new is by no means a given fact. We postulate that it would be so, based on the fact that we would think we had learned something new if we were in the same situation. If Martha really knows all this on a quantitative level, who are we to assume that she would still feel like she learned something?
That assumption is based on something we all have in common (our inability to understand ourselves in detail), but that would not be shared by Martha.
There is no way for us to know if such an intelligent and introspective being would actually learn something in this situation. This makes the question pointless if we assume that Martha is omnicient regarding her own psyche. The entire line of reasoning would depend on something which we can not actually know.
For this reason I was working under the assumption that Martha was merely extremely smart, compared to human scientists, but not able to analyze herself in ways we don't even begin to understand the implications of.
There's a limit to how much knowledge one can have about one's own inner workings since that knowledge would itself have inner workings. I think you can argue that nothing below the limit is sufficient to answer that problem.
You might be able to end this recursion problem ("I know about knowing things, but I don't yet know about knowing about knowing about things, and when I do know, then I'll have to go and learn to know about knowing about knowing about knowing...") by eventually reaching a point where each level is so similar to its predecessor that it and all its successors can be described with a quine.
The problem is that unpacking the quine requires computation, and you can experience the feeling of knowing from the results of a computation, e.g. by doing math.