Liked this a lot, though it was basically my view already, so I’m decidedly biased.
Interestingly, I don’t think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don’t have Mary’s brain, so I can’t really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.
It seems that, in theory, an intelligence capable of reconstructing brains, wiring them into its own consciousness, and running them through stimuli could in fact understand their qualia, though such a procedure may not be meaningfully possible.
Interestingly, I don’t think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don’t have Mary’s brain, so I can’t really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.
It was about the effect that actually seeing the color red had on Mary’s brain. As opposed to learning about the color red from other sources. His claim was that there was something that could only be learned about the color red by actually seeing it, and that was the effect seeing it has on your mind.
His claim was that there was something that could only be learned about the color red...
That’s the issue. I don’t think you learn something about the color red; I think you learn something about your mind. There is no objective thing that red looks like; it is the result of certain neurons firing. If Mary’s brain were wired differently, the experience of seeing red light would be different if it even existed. The only relevant thing about red light is that it stimulates certain neurons; if you knew absolutely nothing about it except that, you could fully describe explain Mary’s experience of seeing red (in theory, of course; neuroscience ain’t there yet). On the other hand, you couldn’t explain the experience with unlimited information about red light plus only the fact that it stimulated Mary’s retina.
Interestingly, I don’t think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don’t have Mary’s brain, so I can’t really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.
That doesn’t explain why qualia are incommunciable, since others stuff that happens in brains is communicale. We expect Mary to understand everything except qualia.
Other mental content is expressible propositionally, whereas to duplicate someone’s qualia you have to literally duplicate their brainstate (or at least the functional equivalent of their brainstate).
When I say “Greece is in Europe” I am making a propositional claim that is relatively independent of the precise details of how my brain represents that belief, versus how your brain does. Maybe I am picturing a map, while you are remembering Greece’s EU membership. For the purposes of communicating that proposition, nobody cares about what your neural activity looks like when you think about Greece being in Europe. The description is higher level: many brainstates map to a single belief state. This is what makes it communicable.
Other mental content is expressible propositionally, whereas to duplicate someone’s qualia you have to literally duplicate their brainstate (or at least the functional equivalent of their brainstate).
To duplicate something, you of course have to duplicate it. That isn’t really the point. What you are tacitly assuming is that qualia cannot be communicated, know or understood without duplication. ie, there is something special about them in that regard. That is how that approach fails as a dissolution. Rather than showing there is nothing special about qualia, it assumes there is something special.
Other mental content is expressible propositionally, whereas to duplicate someone’s qualia you have to literally duplicate their brainstate (or at least the functional equivalent of their brainstate).
I don’t know about yours, but my qualia don’t look like neural activity.
I don’t know about yours, but my qualia don’t look like neural activity.
(blink) Can you clarify how you can know something like this about peterdjones’ qualia and not know it about simplicio’s? That is, what evidence do you have for the former that isn’t equally evidence for the latter?
Other mental content is communicable because it’s a lot simpler. All of the data of an entire human brain state, even considering only a snapshot taken at one instant in time, is many orders of magnitude of quantity/complexity beyond what the conscious mind is capable of considering and understanding.
Liked this a lot, though it was basically my view already, so I’m decidedly biased.
Interestingly, I don’t think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don’t have Mary’s brain, so I can’t really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.
It seems that, in theory, an intelligence capable of reconstructing brains, wiring them into its own consciousness, and running them through stimuli could in fact understand their qualia, though such a procedure may not be meaningfully possible.
I agree with this.
It was about the effect that actually seeing the color red had on Mary’s brain. As opposed to learning about the color red from other sources. His claim was that there was something that could only be learned about the color red by actually seeing it, and that was the effect seeing it has on your mind.
That’s the issue. I don’t think you learn something about the color red; I think you learn something about your mind. There is no objective thing that red looks like; it is the result of certain neurons firing. If Mary’s brain were wired differently, the experience of seeing red light would be different if it even existed. The only relevant thing about red light is that it stimulates certain neurons; if you knew absolutely nothing about it except that, you could fully describe explain Mary’s experience of seeing red (in theory, of course; neuroscience ain’t there yet). On the other hand, you couldn’t explain the experience with unlimited information about red light plus only the fact that it stimulated Mary’s retina.
That doesn’t explain why qualia are incommunciable, since others stuff that happens in brains is communicale. We expect Mary to understand everything except qualia.
They are incommunicable because you cannot occupy any arbitrary brainstate you want to. See the ability hypothesis.
To repeat my point: that doens’t explain why other metnal content is communicable.
Other mental content is expressible propositionally, whereas to duplicate someone’s qualia you have to literally duplicate their brainstate (or at least the functional equivalent of their brainstate).
When I say “Greece is in Europe” I am making a propositional claim that is relatively independent of the precise details of how my brain represents that belief, versus how your brain does. Maybe I am picturing a map, while you are remembering Greece’s EU membership. For the purposes of communicating that proposition, nobody cares about what your neural activity looks like when you think about Greece being in Europe. The description is higher level: many brainstates map to a single belief state. This is what makes it communicable.
To duplicate something, you of course have to duplicate it. That isn’t really the point. What you are tacitly assuming is that qualia cannot be communicated, know or understood without duplication. ie, there is something special about them in that regard. That is how that approach fails as a dissolution. Rather than showing there is nothing special about qualia, it assumes there is something special.
I don’t know about yours, but my qualia don’t look like neural activity.
(blink) Can you clarify how you can know something like this about peterdjones’ qualia and not know it about simplicio’s? That is, what evidence do you have for the former that isn’t equally evidence for the latter?
Other mental content is communicable because it’s a lot simpler. All of the data of an entire human brain state, even considering only a snapshot taken at one instant in time, is many orders of magnitude of quantity/complexity beyond what the conscious mind is capable of considering and understanding.
Is there independent evidence for that?