I was sort of toying with an idea a while ago; it is somewhat old though I’ve tweaked it a bit for presentation here. I don’t like it so much anymore, but I still think it has some potential so I’ll go ahead and share it anyway:
Suppose we alter the Mary’s room scenario so that Mary isn’t human, but rather comes from a race of philosophical ‘Empaths’ that have the ability to perfectly convey subjective experience due to some ability to transmit and read off another each other’s neural patterns as well as hack their own CNS.
In this altered scenario, Mary can treat her CNS like a program and convert scientific data in a way that exploits her ability to hack her own CNS, and so experience new sensations by running the computational representation of the physical changes on her CNS.
Suppose we have a world inhabited only by Empaths. Would they think up Mary’s room? Wouldn’t every single one of them would be able to say that no new information was conveyed when Mary was exposed to light frequencies that stimulated her CNS and caused her to perceive color once she had already run the information on her CNS?
I was sort of toying with an idea a while ago; it is somewhat old though I’ve tweaked it a bit for presentation here. I don’t like it so much anymore, but I still think it has some potential so I’ll go ahead and share it anyway:
Suppose we alter the Mary’s room scenario so that Mary isn’t human, but rather comes from a race of philosophical ‘Empaths’ that have the ability to perfectly convey subjective experience due to some ability to transmit and read off another each other’s neural patterns as well as hack their own CNS.
In this altered scenario, Mary can treat her CNS like a program and convert scientific data in a way that exploits her ability to hack her own CNS, and so experience new sensations by running the computational representation of the physical changes on her CNS.
Suppose we have a world inhabited only by Empaths. Would they think up Mary’s room? Wouldn’t every single one of them would be able to say that no new information was conveyed when Mary was exposed to light frequencies that stimulated her CNS and caused her to perceive color once she had already run the information on her CNS?