entirelyuseless comments on The AI in Mary's room - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 24 May 2016 01:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (58)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 01 June 2016 09:34:23AM *  0 points [-]

Mary's representation of reality is presumed complete ex hypothesi, therefore she will understand exactly what will happen in her brain after seeing color, and that is exactly what happens

Mary is presumed to have all objective knowedge and only objectve knowledge, Your phrasing is ambiguous and therefire doesnt address the point. When you say Mary will know what happens when she sees red, do you mean she knows how red looks subjectively, or she knows something objective like what her behaviour will be.....further on you mention predicting her reactions,

You wouldn't call a statement of PA that isn't a literally a Gödel encoding of a statement (for some fixed encoding) a non-mathematical statement. For one, because that statement has a Gödel encoding by necessity. But more importantly, even though the statement technically isn't literally a Gödel-encoding, it's still mathematical, regardless.

Is that supposed to relate to the objective/ subjective distinction somehow?

[Mary knows] how she will respond to learning what red is like. Mary knows how others will respond. This exhausts the space of possible predictions that could be made on behalf of this subjective knowledge, and it can be done without

So? The overall point is about physicalism, and to get to 'physicalism is false', all you need is the existence of subjective knowledge, not its usefulness in making prediction. So again I don't see the relevance

Suppose Mary has enough information to predict her own behavior. Suppose she predicts she will do x. Could she not, upon deducing that fact, decide to not do x?

Maybe. I don't see the problem. There is still an unproblematic sense in which Mary has all objective knowledge, even if it doesn't allow her to do certain things. If that was the point.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 01 June 2016 01:48:04PM -1 points [-]

If one of Mary's predictions is, "When I see red, I will say, 'wow! I didn't know that red looked like that!", then the fact that she has predicted this in advance is hardly evidence that she does not learn anything by seeing red. If anything, it proves that she does.

Comment author: ImNotAsSmartAsIThinK 02 June 2016 09:04:28PM *  0 points [-]

I think your post seems to have been a reply to me. I'm the one who still accepts physicalism. AncientGreek is the one who rejects it.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 02 June 2016 10:36:40PM 0 points [-]

I realize that. A reply doesn't necessarily have to be an argument against the person it is a reply to.