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Juno_Watt comments on Reality is weirdly normal - LessWrong
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Can you point me to such an explanation??
There's actually one in that essay I linked to at the end of my post. Here is the most relevant paragraph (discussing the Mary's Room problem):
Reading Wikipedia's entry on qualia, it seems to me that most of the arguments that qualia can't be explained by reductionism are powered by the same intuition that makes us think that you can give someone superpowers without changing them in any other way. Anyone with a basic knowledge of physiology knows the idea you can give someone the powers of Spider-Man or Aquaman without changing their physical appearance or internal anatomy is silly. Modern superhero writers have actually been forced to acknowledge this by occasionally referencing ways that such characters are physically different from humans (in ways that don't cosmetically affect them, of course).
But because qualia are a property of our brain's interaction with external stimuli, rather than a property of our bodies, the idea that you could change someone's qualia without changing their brain or the external world fails to pass our nonsense detector. If I wake up and the spectrum is inverted, something is wrong with my brain, or something is wrong with the world.
That isn't a reductive explanaiton, becuase no attempt is made to show how Mary;s red quale breaks down into smaller component parts. In fact, it doens;t do much more than say subjectivity exists, and occurs in sync with brain states. As such, it is compatible with dualism.
You mean p-zombie arguments?
Whatever,tThat doesn;t actuall provide an explanation of qualia.
I presume that would be "Mary's qualia are caused by the feeling the color-processing pathways of her brain light up. The color processing parts are made of neurons, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Those parts of the brain are then connected to another part of the brain by more neurons, which are similarly composed. When those color processing parts fire this causes the connecting neurons to fire in a certain pattern. These patterns of firings are what her feelings are made of. Feelings are made out of firing neurons, which are in turn made out of atoms."
I don't get the appeal of dualism. Qualia can't run on machines made out of atoms and quarks, but there is some other mysterious substance that composes our mind, and qualia can run on machines made out of this substance? Why the extra step? Why not assume that atoms and quarks are the substrate that qualia run on? What hypothetical special properties does this substance have that let qualia run on it, but not on atoms?
I'm sure that if we ever did discover some sort of disembodied soul made out of a weird previously unknown substance that was attached to the brain and appeared to contain our consciousness, Dave Chalmers would argue that qualia couldn't possibly be reduced down to something as basic as [newly discovered substance], and that obviously this disembodied soul couldn't possibly contain consciousness, that has to be contained somewhere else. There is no possible substance, no possible anything, that could ever satisfy the dualist's intuitions.
Yes, plus the inverted spectrum argument, and all the other "conceivability arguments." I can conceive of myself walking on walls, bench-pressing semi-trucks, and flying without making any modifications to my body or changing the external world. But that's because my brain is bad at conceiving stuff and fudges using shortcuts. If I actually start thinking in extremely detailed terms of my muscle tissues and the laws of physics, it becomes obvious that you can't conceive of such a thing.
If anyone argued "I can imagine an anorexic person with almost no muscles lifting a truck, therefore strength cannot be caused by one's muscles," they would be laughed at. P-zombies and inverted spectrums deserve similar ridicule.
A claim that some X is made of some Y is not showing how X's are made of Y's. Can you explain why red is produced and not soemthing other.
I wasn't selling dualism, was noting that ESR's account is not particualrly phsycialist as well as being not particularly explanatory,
I find the Mary argument more convincing.
There are many different neuron firing patterns. Some produce various shades of red, other produce other stuff.
The intuition that Mary's Room activates is that no amount of book-learning can substitute for firsthand experience. This is because we can't always use knowledge we obtain from reading about experiences to activate the same neurons that having those experiences would activate. The only way to activate them and experience those feeling is to have the activating experience.
Now, in Dennett's RoboMary variation of the experience, RoboMary would probably not say "Wow!" That is because she is capable of constructing a brain emulator of herself seeing red inside her own head, and then transferring the knowledge of what those neurons (or circuits in this case) felt when activated. She already knows what seeing red feels like, even though she's never seen it.
The dualist says: 'I imagine Mary the color-blind learning all the scientific facts about color vision, including the fine neurological details, and correctly drawing any relevant inferences from these facts. Yet when I imagine Mary seeing red for herself for the first time, it seems to me that she would think that further epistemically open possibilities have been ruled out, that were previously open. There seemed to be more than one candidate subjective character red-detecting brain states could add up to, and learning "oh, that's what red feels like!" narrowed down the model further.'
Since Mary is color-omniscient, some explanation then is needed for why she would harbor this false belief, or for why she wouldn't really think that the first-hand experience had further narrowed down the experiential possibilities for her.
Saying 'she hadn't instantiated the property X' doesn't explain why anyone has this intuition, because in nearly all cases it's possible to understand and expect properties without instantiating them oneself. If Mary were a volcanologist, there wouldn't be some factual information she's missing by virtue of not having her brain instantiate all the properties of a volcano. What is it about certain mental properties that makes them relevantly different?
Mary isn't really color omniscient. The thought experiment has the hidden false assumption that human beings can learn all types of knowledge by study alone. Since we all know this isn't true, when we hear "Mary knows everything about color" our brain translate that into "Mary knows everything about color that one can learn by studying." Our intuitions about whether she'll say "Wow" or not are based on this translation.
jimrandoh makes a similar point:
In other words, Mary can't figure out what qualia feel like because she is using the "linguistic" program and needs to use the "visual processing one." It's like trying to do a slideshow using Notepad instead of Powerpoint.
Because human brains are much more complicated than volcanoes. Humans are only capable of assimilating so much prepositional knowledge and we are severely limited in our ability to convert it into other types of knowledge. orthonormal makes this point when explaining qualia.
Now, you could make Mary a superhuman creature that can assimilate vast amounts of knowledge and control and restructure her brain any way she wants. But if this assumption is made explicit my intuition that she would say "Wow!" when she goes outside disappears. A superhuman creature like that probably could figure out how seeing red felt without ever seeing it.
That's another major problem with Mary's Room. It posits a superhuman creature, capable of feats of learning and knowledge no human can achieve, but downplays that fact so that our intuitions are still conditioned to act like Mary is human.
Should probably be "propositional".
Ex hypothesi, Mary knows all the relevant third-person specifiable color facts. Our inability to simulate her well doesn't change that fact. If you're saying there are some physical facts it's physically possible for any agent to be able to figure out scientifically in principle, then you'll need to explain why.
But the intuition isn't that Mary would acquire the ability to recognize red objects for the first time. It's that she'd learn new facts about what redness feels like. Consider the Marianna variant:
"Like Mary, Marianna first (at t1) lives in a black and white environment. Contrary to Mary (at a later moment t2) she gets acquainted with colors by seeing arbitrarily colored objects (abstract paintings, red chairs, blue tables, etc. but no yellow bananas, no pictures of landscapes with a blue sky etc.). Marianna is therefore unable to relate the kinds of color experiences she now is acquainted with to what she already knew about them at t1. At t2, Marianna may wonder which of four slides (a red, a blue, a green and a yellow slide) appears to her in the color normal people experience when looking at the cloudless sky. At t2 Marianna knows, in a sense, what it is like to have experiences of red, blue, etc. But she still lacks the relevant items of knowledge about what other people experience: there is a clear sense in which she still may not know that the sky appears blue to normal perceivers, she may even have the false believe that it appears to normal perceivers like the red slide appears to her and thus believe, in a sense, that the sky appears red to normal perceivers. Only at t3, when Marianna is finally released and sees the sky, does she gain this item of knowledge."
Everything about volcanoes can be translated into a linguistic program, without information loss. Why can't everything about visual processing by translated into a linguistic program without loss? If it's merely a matter of qualia being complicated, then shouldn't all other complicated systems yield relevantly identical Hard Problem intuitions? E.g., shouldn't the planet Mars appear irreducible and ineffable and unphysical?
My intuition is that making Mary superhuman doesn't change that experiencing red seems to narrow down the possibilities for her. Analogously, a superhuman wouldn't be able to scientifically narrow down the possibilities for what it's like to be a bat to a single model, without generating bat-experiences of its own. Can you explain why this intuition persists for me, when (as far as I can tell) it doesn't for any other complex system?
Maybe, but in that case the challenge is to explain, at least schematically, what superhuman power Mary obtains that lets her solve the Hard Problem. Mere increased processing power alone doesn't seem to dissolve the problem.
It does if our inability to simulate her well messes with our intuitions. If, as I conjectured, we tend to translate "omniscient person" with "scholar with lots of book-learning" then our intuitions will reflect that, and will hence be wrong.
Is Marianna omniscient about light and neuroscience like Mary? If she is, she'd be able to figure out which color is which fairly easily.
It's not just a matter of qualia being complicated, it's a matter of the human brain being bad at communicating certain things, of which qualia are only one thing of many. And this isn't just an issue of processing power and the complexity of something being processed, it's an issue of software problems. There are certain problems we have trouble processing regardless of what level of power we have, because of our mind's internal architecture. Wei Dei puts it well when he says:
Furthermore, there are in fact other things that humans have a lot of difficulty communicating besides qualia. For instance, it's common knowledge that people with a few days of job experience are much better at doing jobs than people who have spent months reading about the job.
I disagree. If Mary was a superhuman she could study what functions of the brain cause us to experience "qualia," and then study the memories these processes generated. She could then generate such memories in her own brain, giving her the knowledge of what qualia feel like without ever experiencing them. She would see red and not be surprised at all.
If qualia were not a physical part of the brain, duplicating the memories of someone who had experienced them would not have this effect. However, I think it very likely that doing so would have this effect.
Because, as I said before, our emotions are "black boxes" that humans are very bad at understanding and explaining. Their Kolmogorov complexity is extraordinarily high, but we feel like they are simple because of our familiarity with them.
I think the ability to study and modify her own source code and memory, as well as the source code and memory of others is probably all she'd need, but I could be wrong.
Sure, that would be this mini-sequence by orthonormal.