Here—“fully understand” depends on definition of “understand”. What you understand is not a matter of fact, it’s a matter of definition.
It’s both.
All you talk about is how it is “counterintuitive” to call instantiating nuclear reaction in yourself “understanding”. “It’s intuitive to call new experience “additional knowledge”″ is an argument from definitions.
To the extent that any argument to the contrary also is..
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge
Cases, like that one, are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge.
That’s my point.
Even other mental phenomena don’t suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don’t involve qualia.
They are only edge cases of specific definitions of knowledge. There is no fundamental reason why you must call “knowledge” heart attack’s effect on your brain and not call “knowledge” fire’s effect on your hand.
The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
“Necessary” for what?
A complete understanding, including how it seems.
Judging from “epistemically unique” it is implied that it is necessary for knowledge?
Yes.
Then it’s certainly incorrect—it’s either not necessary, because Mary can have a more compact representation of knowledge about color,
What’s a more compact representation?
or it’s necessary for all things, if Mary supposed to have all representations of knowledge. It may be necessary for satisfying Mary’s preferences to have qualia independently of their epistemic value—that’s your perfectly physicalist source of subjectivity.
What? Are you saying that if it is necessary for something for her than completer knowledge, it isn’t necessary for complete knowledge?
If you only care about matters of fact, then there are no problems for physicalism in that the human qualia are unusual—it predicts that different neural processes are different.
Without predicting what they are.
And predicts that it’s useful to see things for yourself. And that it will feel intuitive to say “Mary gets new knowledge” for some people. I think it even follows from casual closure, that it doesn’t make sense for there to be unphysical explanation for intuitions?
Mary’s Room, AKA the Knowledge Argument is about knowledge. It’s epistemological. No explicit claims about ontology are made. No nonphysical ontology is implied by talking about qualia, either, for the usual reason that qualia aren’t defined as nonphysical.
If your intuition is not predicted by physics, then atoms somewhere have to be unexpectedly nudged—is it what you propose? I… don’t really understand the argument here? The physicalism doesn’t say that all things that it is intuitive to call “knowledge” are equally easy to get from books, or something
Physicalism has to mean something. For the purposes of the argument, it means that all facts are in principle derivable from physical facts. It is not implied that anything is eas y, or equally difficult. Mary is supposed to be a super scientist, so anything that is possible in principle is possible for her.
—why exactly it is an argument against physicalism that Mary gets what it predicts?
Physicalism in a strict sense means that objective knowledge is the only knowledge.
There’s no fact of the matter about that. If they are fully represented , then Mary would know what red looks like, otherwise not. If we could perform M’s R as a rela experiment, we would not need it as a thought experiment.
Wait, is the problem that you actually think that it is not obviously physically possible to imagine red without seeing it?
That’s not very relevant. If Mary imagines Red, she is still finding out what it looks like by personally instantiating it, not by inferring it from objective knowledge.
Like, knowing everything plausible includes having all permutations of neuron states,
?? She isn’t defined as knowing everything plausible, she is defined as knowing everything physical/objective.
including the state where you are seeing red. Is your “matter of fact” about knowing what it is like to see considers the possibility that without actually seeing Mary could only simulate zombie-red or something?
Again, not relevant.
Oh, I finally got why are you talking about predicting novel qualia—you are saying that physicalism doesn’t predict Mary seeing red, right?
No, red is not a novel quale. Whatever is experienced by a bat on LSD is novel quale.
Because it only predicts neural activity.
At a stretch you could say that predicting neural activity amounts to predicting qualia, so long as you can correlate qualia with neural activity. But you can’t predict novel qualia using a table of correlations between neural states and known qualia. Which emphasises the fact that you were never really predicting the novel qualia..
My point is that this complain doesn’t have anything to do with Mary or knowledge. If you only talk about Mary, then there is no motivation to doubt physicalism from the experiment. The point of Mary is that she gains knowledge and physicalism predicts gaining knowledge.
The intended point is that she gains knowledge from personal experience that isn’t predictable from a perfect understanding of physics. I don’t know what you mean by “physicalism predicts gaining knowledge”. Physicalism doesn’t predict that you should gain additional knowledge by instantiating a state yourself , because physicalism is the idea that all facts are physical facts, which implies all facts are objective facts, which implies personal instantiation can’t add anything (so king sc you, like Mary, dint have any resource limitationd)
There is no need to talk about novel qualia, because physical knowledge contains knowledge about differences between different, old and novel, qualia.
That’s not a fact. Physicalism doesn’t predict that anything feels like anything.
You agree, that physicalism at least (allows definition of knowledge where it) predicts gaining some knowledge from instantiation when Mary leaves room, right?
It does allow, it doesn’t predict it.
Then even if you have doubts about this predicted knowledge being incomplete, Mary doesn’t provide anything that justifies this doubt—your arguments about insufficient gears-level explanations would work the same way in situations without novel qualia or complete physical knowledge. Or do you have an example of specific difference between qualia that is not predicted by physicalism and uniquely depends on the whole instantiation thing?
I don’t think any qualia are predicted by physicalism. Since there is more than one quale, it follows that the qualia not predicted by physicalism are different to one another.
I mean, my position is that there are no differences between qualia that are not predicted by physicalism at all, so any examples would be appreciated.
Sure, we probably can’t ethically and consistently make a human say “wow, it was neither sight nor hearing” now
Even if you could, it wouldn’t l prove physicalism. Maybe people contain immaterial souls, and they implement qualia.
, but I really don’t get what’s the justification for ignoring other facts about qualia that physicalism can predict?
For physicalism to be be true, it has to be true of everything.
I don’t see the justification for “physicalism can explain some things, so it can explain everything”
Some of them were novel for humanity in their time.
Says who?
Induction.
Induction gives you a reason to think everything is physical. It doesn’t give you a reason to think everything is necessarily physical , since the defensible forms of induction are probablistic. It doesn’t directly answer M’s R, since it doesn’t suggest that qualia are fetvabke from physical knowledge.
We have a detailed gears-level explanation of fire, we do not have one of conscious experience.
We don’t usually have very detailed explanations of specific fires.
We could have,in principle. There is a reason why Mary is super scientist.
And we have detailed explanation of conscious experience—physics equations^^.
No. Equations only predict pointer positions, not what anything feels or seems like.
But ok, there is a space for more useful theories. The thing I don’t understand is how it is an argument against physicalism—do you expect to not get gears-level explanation in the future?
“Physicalism” means a bunch of different things, so does nonphysicalism. If physicalism means that you can predict everything from physics, then the existence of qualia means physicalism is incomplete. Without getting on to topics like epihenomenalism or ghosts and ghouls. The ontologicallcibxkysionvduesjt
The whole point of doing Mary is that no one expects it.
Merely saying that “X is an emergent, high level phenomenon..but don’t ask me how or why” is not an explanation, despite what many here think.
Yes, but that would just mean that the correct position is “physicalism is right, but the detailed explanation is in the works”.
There isn’t anyexplanation of qualia specifically. That s th point of the hard/easy problem distinction
No one is disputing that physically can addresn easy problem issues.
Not detailed-enough explanation at the present moment is just one of factors you weight, along with “physicalism has detailed explanations about physics, neurons and all other things”, not something that logically prohibits believing in physicalism. Again, that’s not what mainstream arguments against physicalism are? It’s always “physicalism can’t possibly explain consciousness even if it’s explanation have been detailed”.
It’s more that physics can’t reconstruct the subjective feeling stuff, after having filtered it out to get an objective, mathematical model
i) showing that two things are necessarily, not arbitrarily linked.
That’s what I am against—it’s not justified, depending on what do you mean by “necessarily”—atoms are not necessarily linked to fire.
Atoms undergoing exothermic reactions involving oxygen is exactly what is fire. If you use a sufficiently detailed reductive explanation,nl it does lead to identity. Heat is disorganised molecular activity.
In the end, we just arbitrary call some atoms “fire”.
Nope.
So why demand this only for qualia?
If physicalism means everything is reducible to physics, it means qualia are reducible to physics. There is no special pleading for qualia.
If it’s only “as necessary as reduction of fire”, than it is already that necessary—the expectation that you will get neurological explanation in future is the same kind of inductive reasoning that you do, when you decide that correlations between atoms and fire are enough to believe explanation in terms of atoms.
The explanations of fire, heat etc are not merely correlative.
The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
No, it means they subscribe to the idea that there is something ethically different about qualia/experience. It’s not unique, it’s like riding a bike. Human sometimes call physical interactions, utility of which is not obtainable by just thinking, “knowledge”, when these interactions are with human body. And “they feel” is not an argument about knowledge, it’s an argument about feelings. The difference between instantiating fusion in brain or red is not epistemical, it’s ethical—qualia are useful for humans, so they don’t properly transfer intuitions into Mary’s case, and even if they do, humans care more about their brain instantiating red, than their brain fusing. Fundamentally, they all can be viewed as different representations of knowledge. It’s just some representations are valuable by themselves.
What? Are you saying that if it is necessary for something for her than completer knowledge, it isn’t necessary for complete knowledge?
I’m saying that if differences in feelings of necessity are explainable by preferences, then what need there is to introduce problematic definitions of knowledge?
The intended point is that she gains knowledge from personal experience that isn’t predictable from a perfect understanding of physics. I don’t know what you mean by “physicalism predicts gaining knowledge”. Physicalism doesn’t predict that you should gain additional knowledge by instantiating a state yourself , because physicalism is the idea that all facts are physical facts, which implies all facts are objective facts, which implies personal instantiation can’t add anything (so king sc you, like Mary, dint have any resource limitationd)
Yes, and the consequence of this point is that you shouldn’t use such definition of knowledge, because it implies that knowing how to ride a bike is unphysical.
Physicalism in a strict sense means that objective knowledge is the only knowledge.
I don’t see how there can be any objective knowledge—encodings are subjective. By the way, why is ok for Physicalism to mean different things in context of different arguments? Physicalism in the Hard Problem doesn’t mean that knowing how to ride a bike is unphysical.
But if you insist on defining Physicalism in such a way, then yes, Mary doesn’t gain additional knowledge. Which proves that such definition contradicts some people’s intuition about experience and bikes. It doesn’t prove anything about real epistemology without additional assumptions.
Mary’s Room, AKA the Knowledge Argument is about knowledge. It’s epistemological. No explicit claims about ontology are made. No nonphysical ontology is implied by talking about qualia, either, for the usual reason that qualia aren’t defined as nonphysical.
I’m saying it doesn’t work as argument without ontological assumptions.
Without predicting what they are.
No qualia are predicted by phytsicalism.
That’s not a fact. Physicalism doesn’t predict that anything feels like anything.
You can’t conclude this without additional assumptions from Mary alone! I’m not arguing “physicalism is true” here, only that Mary is useless in disproving it. The only thing you can get from Mary, is that there is prediction-instantiation gap with experiences. But it’s the same gap as between knowing about a state and being in a state, like with knowing how to ride a bike.
One of such possible assumptions is that there is some difference between relations of knowledge and state in cases of experience and bikes. That in some sense knowledge without acquaintance about bikes is still about bikes, but knowledge about experience is not actually about experience. That knowledge without acquaintance about experience is incomplete in some additional way, not related to the ordinary difference between knowing and being. But it is an additional assumption, not something you can derive from Mary’s Room, because, again, Mary gaining something after leaving the room is predicted both in case of experience and in case of bikes.
Atoms undergoing exothermic reactions involving oxygen is exactly what is fire. If you use a sufficiently detailed reductive explanation,nl it does lead to identity. Heat is disorganised molecular activity.
I don’t see how you can get identity if you can just can have an ontology that doesn’t contain fire, only atoms. You can get some atoms to be numerically close to a reencoding of atoms of your brain that perceives fire. Or numerically close to some other previous model of fire. You can then check some limits for divergence and declare that atomic model matches empirical results precise-enough. But no one expects previous model to be precisely equivalent to new one? And reasoning about different specific fires definitely involves probabilistic induction.
Conversely, if by “necessary” you just mean ordinary way science does reductions, then Mary’s situation with experience fully qualifies: she correctly concludes that red qualia are activity of neurons, have as complete knowledge about bats on LSD as of bikes and fires, can say that the red of roses will feel similar to the red of blood, can predict her entire field of view with pixels marked “red” with more precision, than she will be able to track in the moment, and will get new experience after leaving the room as predicted. No part of it contradicts qualia being reducible to physics. You can only argue it by bringing zombies. Or show on which step Mary fails to reduce red qualia, that doesn’t work the same way with bikes or fires.
I guess the more substantial disagreement may be in the part, where a description of a bat-on-LSD experience in the language of physics or neural activity is somehow doesn’t count, as opposed to… I’m not sure what people expect, a description in the terms usually used to describe human experience starting with “it feels like...”? But that’s just the question of precision—why should describing nuclear reactor in terms of fire would be required to claim success in reduction? There is of course the difference between you knowing about bats-on-LSD and you having such experience—but that is also true about riding a bike or any other physical state.
It all looks to me like people are confusing knowing about qualia and being in a state of having qualia—that’s why they assume perfect certain knowledge of qualia they have, talk about qualia being impossible to communicate and so on.
?? She isn’t defined as knowing everything plausible, she is defined as knowing everything physical/objective.
It’s both.
To the extent that any argument to the contrary also is..
That’s my point.
The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
A complete understanding, including how it seems.
Yes.
What’s a more compact representation?
Without predicting what they are.
Mary’s Room, AKA the Knowledge Argument is about knowledge. It’s epistemological. No explicit claims about ontology are made. No nonphysical ontology is implied by talking about qualia, either, for the usual reason that qualia aren’t defined as nonphysical.
Physicalism has to mean something. For the purposes of the argument, it means that all facts are in principle derivable from physical facts. It is not implied that anything is eas y, or equally difficult. Mary is supposed to be a super scientist, so anything that is possible in principle is possible for her.
Physicalism in a strict sense means that objective knowledge is the only knowledge.
That’s not very relevant. If Mary imagines Red, she is still finding out what it looks like by personally instantiating it, not by inferring it from objective knowledge.
?? She isn’t defined as knowing everything plausible, she is defined as knowing everything physical/objective.
Again, not relevant.
No, red is not a novel quale. Whatever is experienced by a bat on LSD is novel quale.
At a stretch you could say that predicting neural activity amounts to predicting qualia, so long as you can correlate qualia with neural activity. But you can’t predict novel qualia using a table of correlations between neural states and known qualia. Which emphasises the fact that you were never really predicting the novel qualia..
The intended point is that she gains knowledge from personal experience that isn’t predictable from a perfect understanding of physics. I don’t know what you mean by “physicalism predicts gaining knowledge”. Physicalism doesn’t predict that you should gain additional knowledge by instantiating a state yourself , because physicalism is the idea that all facts are physical facts, which implies all facts are objective facts, which implies personal instantiation can’t add anything (so king sc you, like Mary, dint have any resource limitationd)
That’s not a fact. Physicalism doesn’t predict that anything feels like anything.
It does allow, it doesn’t predict it.
I don’t think any qualia are predicted by physicalism. Since there is more than one quale, it follows that the qualia not predicted by physicalism are different to one another.
No qualia are predicted by phytsicalism.
Red is not novel.
One that’s less than omniscient, I suppose.
Even if you could, it wouldn’t l prove physicalism. Maybe people contain immaterial souls, and they implement qualia.
For physicalism to be be true, it has to be true of everything.
I don’t see the justification for “physicalism can explain some things, so it can explain everything”
Some of them were novel for humanity in their time.
Says who?
Induction gives you a reason to think everything is physical. It doesn’t give you a reason to think everything is necessarily physical , since the defensible forms of induction are probablistic. It doesn’t directly answer M’s R, since it doesn’t suggest that qualia are fetvabke from physical knowledge.
We could have,in principle. There is a reason why Mary is super scientist.
No. Equations only predict pointer positions, not what anything feels or seems like.
“Physicalism” means a bunch of different things, so does nonphysicalism. If physicalism means that you can predict everything from physics, then the existence of qualia means physicalism is incomplete. Without getting on to topics like epihenomenalism or ghosts and ghouls. The ontologicallcibxkysionvduesjt
There isn’t anyexplanation of qualia specifically. That s th point of the hard/easy problem distinction
No one is disputing that physically can addresn easy problem issues.
It’s more that physics can’t reconstruct the subjective feeling stuff, after having filtered it out to get an objective, mathematical model
Atoms undergoing exothermic reactions involving oxygen is exactly what is fire. If you use a sufficiently detailed reductive explanation,nl it does lead to identity. Heat is disorganised molecular activity.
Nope.
If physicalism means everything is reducible to physics, it means qualia are reducible to physics. There is no special pleading for qualia.
The explanations of fire, heat etc are not merely correlative.
No, it means they subscribe to the idea that there is something ethically different about qualia/experience. It’s not unique, it’s like riding a bike. Human sometimes call physical interactions, utility of which is not obtainable by just thinking, “knowledge”, when these interactions are with human body. And “they feel” is not an argument about knowledge, it’s an argument about feelings. The difference between instantiating fusion in brain or red is not epistemical, it’s ethical—qualia are useful for humans, so they don’t properly transfer intuitions into Mary’s case, and even if they do, humans care more about their brain instantiating red, than their brain fusing. Fundamentally, they all can be viewed as different representations of knowledge. It’s just some representations are valuable by themselves.
I’m saying that if differences in feelings of necessity are explainable by preferences, then what need there is to introduce problematic definitions of knowledge?
Yes, and the consequence of this point is that you shouldn’t use such definition of knowledge, because it implies that knowing how to ride a bike is unphysical.
I don’t see how there can be any objective knowledge—encodings are subjective. By the way, why is ok for Physicalism to mean different things in context of different arguments? Physicalism in the Hard Problem doesn’t mean that knowing how to ride a bike is unphysical.
But if you insist on defining Physicalism in such a way, then yes, Mary doesn’t gain additional knowledge. Which proves that such definition contradicts some people’s intuition about experience and bikes. It doesn’t prove anything about real epistemology without additional assumptions.
I’m saying it doesn’t work as argument without ontological assumptions.
You can’t conclude this without additional assumptions from Mary alone! I’m not arguing “physicalism is true” here, only that Mary is useless in disproving it. The only thing you can get from Mary, is that there is prediction-instantiation gap with experiences. But it’s the same gap as between knowing about a state and being in a state, like with knowing how to ride a bike.
One of such possible assumptions is that there is some difference between relations of knowledge and state in cases of experience and bikes. That in some sense knowledge without acquaintance about bikes is still about bikes, but knowledge about experience is not actually about experience. That knowledge without acquaintance about experience is incomplete in some additional way, not related to the ordinary difference between knowing and being. But it is an additional assumption, not something you can derive from Mary’s Room, because, again, Mary gaining something after leaving the room is predicted both in case of experience and in case of bikes.
I don’t see how you can get identity if you can just can have an ontology that doesn’t contain fire, only atoms. You can get some atoms to be numerically close to a reencoding of atoms of your brain that perceives fire. Or numerically close to some other previous model of fire. You can then check some limits for divergence and declare that atomic model matches empirical results precise-enough. But no one expects previous model to be precisely equivalent to new one? And reasoning about different specific fires definitely involves probabilistic induction.
Conversely, if by “necessary” you just mean ordinary way science does reductions, then Mary’s situation with experience fully qualifies: she correctly concludes that red qualia are activity of neurons, have as complete knowledge about bats on LSD as of bikes and fires, can say that the red of roses will feel similar to the red of blood, can predict her entire field of view with pixels marked “red” with more precision, than she will be able to track in the moment, and will get new experience after leaving the room as predicted. No part of it contradicts qualia being reducible to physics. You can only argue it by bringing zombies. Or show on which step Mary fails to reduce red qualia, that doesn’t work the same way with bikes or fires.
I guess the more substantial disagreement may be in the part, where a description of a bat-on-LSD experience in the language of physics or neural activity is somehow doesn’t count, as opposed to… I’m not sure what people expect, a description in the terms usually used to describe human experience starting with “it feels like...”? But that’s just the question of precision—why should describing nuclear reactor in terms of fire would be required to claim success in reduction? There is of course the difference between you knowing about bats-on-LSD and you having such experience—but that is also true about riding a bike or any other physical state.
It all looks to me like people are confusing knowing about qualia and being in a state of having qualia—that’s why they assume perfect certain knowledge of qualia they have, talk about qualia being impossible to communicate and so on.
Sorry, typo—“plausibly includes”.