By experience I mean anything which we detect with one of our senses.
The subjective part is, IMHO, the key to qualia.
Suppose that you’ve never seen red light, and that you are then told all of its properties in perfect detail. You would still gain new information by actually seeing red light, because you still don’t know “what it feels like” to see it. The qualia is not the objective facts, but rather what seeing the light “feels like”, your perception of the effect produced on your brain by the light.
(Qualia are usually taken to be an argument against materialism- because after you know every objective fact about something, you still gain new information (qualia) by experiencing it.)
This “Mary’s Room” argument, like the “Chinese Room” argument†, contains a subtle sleight of hand.
On the one hand, for the learning to be about just the qualia rather than about externally observable features of vision processing, the subject would need to learn immensely more than the physical properties of red light. (The standard version of Mary’s Room does so, postulating Mary to also deeply understand her own visual cortex and the changes it would undergo upon being exposed to that color.) In fact, the depth of conscious theoretical understanding that this would require is far beyond any human being, and it’s wrong and silly to naively map our mind-states onto those of such a mind.
On the other hand, it plays on the everyday intuition that if I’ve never seen the color red, but have been given a short list of facts about it and am consciously representing my limited intuition for that set of facts, that doesn’t add up to the experience of seeing red.
The equivocation consists of thinking that a superhuman level of detailed understanding of (and capability to predict) the human brain can be analogized to that everyday intuition, rather than being unimaginably other to it. So I don’t see that an agent who was really possessed of that level of self-understanding would necessary feel that the actual experience added an ineffable otherness to what they already knew.
That sense of ineffable otherness, IMO, comes from the levels of detail in the mental processing of color which we don’t have conscious access to. Our conscious mind isn’t built to understand what we’re doing when we visually perceive, at the level that we actually do it—there’s no evolutionary need to communicate all the richness of color perception, so the conscious mind didn’t evolve to encompass it all. And this limitation of our conscious understanding feels to us like a thing we have which cannot in principle be reduced.
† The application of this same principle to the Chinese Room argument is a trivial exercise, left to the reader.
Intuitions don’t matter. If Mary can’t activate her neural pathways participating in creation of experience of seeing red, then she has no means of knowing how she will experience redness. All models she can create in her mind will be external to her as the mind created by actions of human being in Chinese room is external to that human being.
And this limitation of our conscious understanding feels to us like a thing we have which cannot in principle be reduced.
It is not only conscious understanding that is required, we will need a conscious control of individual neurons and synapses to be able to experience qualia given just a description of it. For example, to be able to name color and imagine color given its name, Mary (roughly speaking) should manually connect neurons in her visual cortex to the neurons in her Broca’s area and to the neurons in her auditory cortex.
So I think that, contrary to Dennet, Mary will get new information when she will see colors, as human’s brain construction doesn’t allow to acquire that information by other means. Thus in a sense human’s qualia cannot be reduced.
That contradicts one of the assumptions in the thought experiment. You’re establishing qualia as a physical property; in that case, “what it feels like to see red” is amongst the things Mary knows about, by hypothesis.
Also, if it just comes down to activating those neurons, then Mary knows that too and can perform an experiment to activate those neurons without having a ‘red thing’ in front of her, using her incredible superhuman intelligence and resources.
I am not establishing qualia as physical properties of brain’s activity, I think of them as descriptions of specific neural activity in the terms of human’s self-model. And limitations of that self-model (it’s not sufficiently detailed to refer to individual neurons) don’t allow to establish unambiguous correspondence between physical description of brain and self-model description of brain within that self-model.
Mary knows that too and can perform an experiment to activate those neurons without having a ‘red thing’ in front of her, using her incredible superhuman intelligence and resources.
And what is a difference between seeing red thing and activation of those neurons? The point of “Mary’s room” is to know what seeing red means without actually seeing it.
And what is a difference between seeing red thing and activation of those neurons? The point of “Mary’s room” is to know what seeing red means without actually seeing it.
Depends who’s using it. For Dennett, for instance, the point of Mary’s room is to point out how ridiculous this notion of qualia is, or at least how silly the thought experiment is.
As stated, she knows everything physical about red. So she knows, for instance, how to build a machine that will activate her red-seeing neurons in the absence of the color. Also as stated, she can perform whatever experiments she needs to in order to become an expert color scientist. So she can have whatever experience would come from having those neurons activated.
If you think there’s nothing else to the experience, then I think we’re in agreement so far.
In fact, the depth of understanding that this would require is far beyond any human being, and we really have no intuition for what it would be like to have it.
So we have no intuition for that understanding level’s qualia? ;-)
Well, of course a verbal description of red light is different from seeing red light. One is an auditory stimulus, and one is a visual stimulus. They do different things to my neurons. Are qualia about something other than neurons?
I voted up WrongBot’s redefinition of his question, ‘are qualia about something other than neurons?’. Is qualia something other than a word that has been awkwardly defined? Why is colour always the example used to illustrate qualia? Is there something different between colour and things like position, texture, pitch? Has anyone thought of a better or even different way to experience our experiences?
Readers may be interested in my approach to the problem, or rather, the problem that remains even after any terminology issues are settled.
Summary: What we identify as “qualia” is the encoding of memories that we cannot yet compare directly between people, to the extent we can’t compare them. This incommensurability can easily arise among agents who are similar, but who self-modify in a way that does not place any priority on the ability to directly transfer memories to other agents.
In that case, their methods of storing memories are ad-hoc, and look like garbage to each other—but with the right assumptions and interaction, they can achieve a limited ability to compare, and thereby have terminology like “red” that means something to all agents, even as it doesn’t call up exactly the same idea for each one.
I was intrigued when I first read this when you last posted it, and I thought about it for a while. The problem with it, it seems to me, is that this is a good explanation for why qualia are ineffable, but it doesn’t seem to be come any close to explaining what they are or how they arise.
So, I could imagine a world (it may even be this one!) where people’s brains happen to be organized similarly enough that two people really could transfer qualia between them, but this still doesn’t explain anything about them.
The problem with it, it seems to me, is that this is a good explanation for why qualia are ineffable, but it doesn’t seem to be come any close to explaining what they are or how they arise.
You’re right. But I believe that that the ineffable aspect is closely related to the other two questions, although I don’t have an answer in the same detail as the ineffability question (which would still be progress!).
To give a sketch of what I have in mind, my best explanation is this: conscious minds form when a subsystem is able to screen itself off from the entropizing forces of the environment (similar in kind to a refrigerator or other control system). This necessarily decouples it from the patterns that exist in the environment, as well as other minds that have done the same.
So the formation of a conscious mind will coincide with the formation of incompatible encoding methods, unless special care is taken to ensure that the encoding protcols are the same. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised to notice that, “hey, everything that’s conscious, also has ineffable experiences with the other conscious things.”
But again, I don’t claim this part is as well-developed or thought-out.
By experience I mean anything which we detect with one of our senses.
The subjective part is, IMHO, the key to qualia.
Suppose that you’ve never seen red light, and that you are then told all of its properties in perfect detail. You would still gain new information by actually seeing red light, because you still don’t know “what it feels like” to see it. The qualia is not the objective facts, but rather what seeing the light “feels like”, your perception of the effect produced on your brain by the light.
(Qualia are usually taken to be an argument against materialism- because after you know every objective fact about something, you still gain new information (qualia) by experiencing it.)
This “Mary’s Room” argument, like the “Chinese Room” argument†, contains a subtle sleight of hand.
On the one hand, for the learning to be about just the qualia rather than about externally observable features of vision processing, the subject would need to learn immensely more than the physical properties of red light. (The standard version of Mary’s Room does so, postulating Mary to also deeply understand her own visual cortex and the changes it would undergo upon being exposed to that color.) In fact, the depth of conscious theoretical understanding that this would require is far beyond any human being, and it’s wrong and silly to naively map our mind-states onto those of such a mind.
On the other hand, it plays on the everyday intuition that if I’ve never seen the color red, but have been given a short list of facts about it and am consciously representing my limited intuition for that set of facts, that doesn’t add up to the experience of seeing red.
The equivocation consists of thinking that a superhuman level of detailed understanding of (and capability to predict) the human brain can be analogized to that everyday intuition, rather than being unimaginably other to it. So I don’t see that an agent who was really possessed of that level of self-understanding would necessary feel that the actual experience added an ineffable otherness to what they already knew.
That sense of ineffable otherness, IMO, comes from the levels of detail in the mental processing of color which we don’t have conscious access to. Our conscious mind isn’t built to understand what we’re doing when we visually perceive, at the level that we actually do it—there’s no evolutionary need to communicate all the richness of color perception, so the conscious mind didn’t evolve to encompass it all. And this limitation of our conscious understanding feels to us like a thing we have which cannot in principle be reduced.
† The application of this same principle to the Chinese Room argument is a trivial exercise, left to the reader.
Intuitions don’t matter. If Mary can’t activate her neural pathways participating in creation of experience of seeing red, then she has no means of knowing how she will experience redness. All models she can create in her mind will be external to her as the mind created by actions of human being in Chinese room is external to that human being.
It is not only conscious understanding that is required, we will need a conscious control of individual neurons and synapses to be able to experience qualia given just a description of it. For example, to be able to name color and imagine color given its name, Mary (roughly speaking) should manually connect neurons in her visual cortex to the neurons in her Broca’s area and to the neurons in her auditory cortex.
So I think that, contrary to Dennet, Mary will get new information when she will see colors, as human’s brain construction doesn’t allow to acquire that information by other means. Thus in a sense human’s qualia cannot be reduced.
You may be interested in this paper which makes a similar argument.
Thanks. It is identical argument modulo my inability to make all reasoning and premises sufficiently transparent.
That contradicts one of the assumptions in the thought experiment. You’re establishing qualia as a physical property; in that case, “what it feels like to see red” is amongst the things Mary knows about, by hypothesis.
Also, if it just comes down to activating those neurons, then Mary knows that too and can perform an experiment to activate those neurons without having a ‘red thing’ in front of her, using her incredible superhuman intelligence and resources.
I am not establishing qualia as physical properties of brain’s activity, I think of them as descriptions of specific neural activity in the terms of human’s self-model. And limitations of that self-model (it’s not sufficiently detailed to refer to individual neurons) don’t allow to establish unambiguous correspondence between physical description of brain and self-model description of brain within that self-model.
And what is a difference between seeing red thing and activation of those neurons? The point of “Mary’s room” is to know what seeing red means without actually seeing it.
Depends who’s using it. For Dennett, for instance, the point of Mary’s room is to point out how ridiculous this notion of qualia is, or at least how silly the thought experiment is.
As stated, she knows everything physical about red. So she knows, for instance, how to build a machine that will activate her red-seeing neurons in the absence of the color. Also as stated, she can perform whatever experiments she needs to in order to become an expert color scientist. So she can have whatever experience would come from having those neurons activated.
If you think there’s nothing else to the experience, then I think we’re in agreement so far.
So we have no intuition for that understanding level’s qualia? ;-)
Yeah, I realized the unintended recursion there, and have edited accordingly...
Well, of course a verbal description of red light is different from seeing red light. One is an auditory stimulus, and one is a visual stimulus. They do different things to my neurons. Are qualia about something other than neurons?
I voted up WrongBot’s redefinition of his question, ‘are qualia about something other than neurons?’. Is qualia something other than a word that has been awkwardly defined? Why is colour always the example used to illustrate qualia? Is there something different between colour and things like position, texture, pitch? Has anyone thought of a better or even different way to experience our experiences?
Readers may be interested in my approach to the problem, or rather, the problem that remains even after any terminology issues are settled.
Summary: What we identify as “qualia” is the encoding of memories that we cannot yet compare directly between people, to the extent we can’t compare them. This incommensurability can easily arise among agents who are similar, but who self-modify in a way that does not place any priority on the ability to directly transfer memories to other agents.
In that case, their methods of storing memories are ad-hoc, and look like garbage to each other—but with the right assumptions and interaction, they can achieve a limited ability to compare, and thereby have terminology like “red” that means something to all agents, even as it doesn’t call up exactly the same idea for each one.
I was intrigued when I first read this when you last posted it, and I thought about it for a while. The problem with it, it seems to me, is that this is a good explanation for why qualia are ineffable, but it doesn’t seem to be come any close to explaining what they are or how they arise.
So, I could imagine a world (it may even be this one!) where people’s brains happen to be organized similarly enough that two people really could transfer qualia between them, but this still doesn’t explain anything about them.
You’re right. But I believe that that the ineffable aspect is closely related to the other two questions, although I don’t have an answer in the same detail as the ineffability question (which would still be progress!).
To give a sketch of what I have in mind, my best explanation is this: conscious minds form when a subsystem is able to screen itself off from the entropizing forces of the environment (similar in kind to a refrigerator or other control system). This necessarily decouples it from the patterns that exist in the environment, as well as other minds that have done the same.
So the formation of a conscious mind will coincide with the formation of incompatible encoding methods, unless special care is taken to ensure that the encoding protcols are the same. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised to notice that, “hey, everything that’s conscious, also has ineffable experiences with the other conscious things.”
But again, I don’t claim this part is as well-developed or thought-out.