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ImNotAsSmartAsIThinK comments on The AI in Mary's room - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'd highly recommend this sequence to anyone reading this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5n9/seeing_red_dissolving_marys_room_and_qualia/
This thrust of the argument, applied to this situation, is simply that 'knowledge' is used to mean two completely different things here. On one hand, we have knowledge as verbal facts and metaphoric understanding. On the other we have averbal knowledge, that is, the superset containing verbal knowledge and non-verbal knowledge.
To put it as plainly as possible: imagine you have a box. Inside this box, there is a another, smaller box. We can put a toy inside the box inside the larger box. We can alternatively put a toy inside the larger box but outside the box inside this box. These situations are not equivalent. What paradox!
The only insight need here is simply noting that something can be 'inside the box' without being inside the box inside the box. Since both are referred to as 'inside the box' the confusion is not surprising.
It seems like a significant number of conventional aporia can be understood as confusions of levels.
I'd highly recommend reading the ]original paper.](http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Jackson.pdf)
I am not following the box analogy. What kinds of knowledge do the boxes represent?
The big box is all knowledge, including the vague 'knowledge of experience' that people talk about in this thread. The box-inside-the-box is verbal/declarative/metaphoric/propositional/philosophical knowledge, that is anything that is fodder for communication in any way.
The metaphor is intended to highlight that people seem to conflate the small box with the big box, leading to confusion about the situation. Inside the metaphor, perhaps this would be people saying "well maybe there are objects inside the box which aren't inside the box at all". Which makes little since if you assume 'inside the box' has a single referent, which it does not.
Edit: I read your link, thanks for that. I can't say I got much of anything out of it, though. I haven't changed my mind, and my epistemic status regarding my own arguments hang changed; which is to say there is likely something subtle I'm not getting about your position and I don't know what it is.