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? ;-)
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...