This does not match my experience doing things after studying them thoroughly. Unless your definition of “everything physical about color” includes neurology far beyond the state of the art.
Unless your definition of “everything physical about color” includes neurology far beyond the state of the art.
Indeed it does. I believe a strong reading also involves knowing the position of every colored object in the universe, and the favorite food of every person with red hair.
Wouldn’t this include complete physical knowledge of the universe?
It is interesting to me that this is a contradiction in a finite universe. It intuitively feels like one might be able to analyze this self-reference and its source and derive a convincing argument against Mary’s room, but I cannot find one right now.
Consider one’s brain state on the granularity that it stores information. It contains N bits of information.
What would those N bits of information be if you saw something red?
It is impossible to know this information, because it would take all your available N bits.
Yet if you don’t know all this information, clearly you learn something new as soon as you see something red, at least, as long as your attention would then be drawn to the parts you didn’t previously know about, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption at all.
Now suppose that you have that knowledge in some compressed form, of M<N bits. But then seeing red and entering that state would be like completing a calculation, which frequently produces the “Aha! I have learned something new!” response.
Since a human mind can hold only an infinitesimal fraction of that information, Mary is now a mind quite unlike our own, and likely to have very different qualities.
This does not match my experience doing things after studying them thoroughly. Unless your definition of “everything physical about color” includes neurology far beyond the state of the art.
Indeed it does. I believe a strong reading also involves knowing the position of every colored object in the universe, and the favorite food of every person with red hair.
Wouldn’t this include complete physical knowledge of the universe?
It is interesting to me that this is a contradiction in a finite universe. It intuitively feels like one might be able to analyze this self-reference and its source and derive a convincing argument against Mary’s room, but I cannot find one right now.
Consider one’s brain state on the granularity that it stores information. It contains N bits of information.
What would those N bits of information be if you saw something red?
It is impossible to know this information, because it would take all your available N bits.
Yet if you don’t know all this information, clearly you learn something new as soon as you see something red, at least, as long as your attention would then be drawn to the parts you didn’t previously know about, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption at all.
Now suppose that you have that knowledge in some compressed form, of M<N bits. But then seeing red and entering that state would be like completing a calculation, which frequently produces the “Aha! I have learned something new!” response.
Since a human mind can hold only an infinitesimal fraction of that information, Mary is now a mind quite unlike our own, and likely to have very different qualities.
The Dennetian Answer isnt based on anything that actually happens.It’s based on having a really, really strong intuition of physicalism.
Exactly. It’s not a refutation so much as a bullet-biting, which is unenlightening even when correct.