Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.
Nothing.
Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn’t really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.
I think it might be useful to think about Mary’s room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia like with colour. Because colour is a general qualia of existence, as opposed to a specific experience (e.g. the example given elsewhere in the comments of the qualia of climbing Mt. Everest) we have different expectations around it. I would be curious to know if the more abstracted version of Mary’s Room outlined in this comment here would make this clearer.
OK, I think we agree that subjective mental states correspond to physically real states in the brain, and that Mary’s Room is insufficient to refute physicalism. Was that your point/conclusion?
What I’m not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it’s not valid, or I don’t understand what you mean.
I mean it was a point that I made from just playing around with the thought experiment. I don’t know if it is the point, that’s why I’m trying to dissect it a little here.
What I’m not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it’s not valid, or I don’t understand what you mean.
I would be happy to keep trying to explain. Let me try to lay it out again in a different way, and I’d be interested to hear what you think:
Mary has perfect knowledge—that is, all knowable information she possibly can—about an experience
At the start of the experiment, Mary knows with certainty that they have not actually had that experience
Mary goes through a door, and I randomly flip two coins—one to determine if we implant the memory or actually give Mary the experience, and one to determine if we inform Mary of the first coin flip. I don’t tell you about the outcomes of either flip.
Mary comes back through the door, and your task is to interrogate Mary to find out the coin flips.
What questions can you ask Mary to determine these answers? When can you be confident, and when is the answer indeterminable?
A second way to think about it is if you sent Mary through the door a 2nd time, in which scenarios would Mary learn something new—and therefore experience the qualia they did not posess at the start of the experiment, despite their perfect information?
Mary has perfect knowledge—that is, all knowable information she possibly can—about an experience
I dispute this premise. If Mary knows how to visualize something red (and learned how to do so through some means other than seeing it with her eyes) and knows that it’s called “red”, then that’s knowledge, and she won’t learn anything new by seeing it for the first time. This isn’t knowledge that Mary could acquire by reading black-and-white textbooks about cone cells and neurons, but hypothetically the knowledge could be implanted in her brain via some technology while bypassing her eyes.
Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.
Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is—what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.
The experience of recalling experiences is itself an experience. The experience of imagining an experience is itself an experience. These internal mental experiences are less vivid than a direct sensory experience is in the present for most people most of the time, but sometimes dreams can be as vivid as waking life. Internal mental experiences still have qualia, and they use the same sensory channels as the direct sensory experience does. You can recall or imagine or dream about how something looks or sounds or feels like etc.
The memory doesn’t have qualia except during the act of recalling it consciously.
Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.
Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn’t really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.
I think it might be useful to think about Mary’s room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia like with colour. Because colour is a general qualia of existence, as opposed to a specific experience (e.g. the example given elsewhere in the comments of the qualia of climbing Mt. Everest) we have different expectations around it. I would be curious to know if the more abstracted version of Mary’s Room outlined in this comment here would make this clearer.
OK, I think we agree that subjective mental states correspond to physically real states in the brain, and that Mary’s Room is insufficient to refute physicalism. Was that your point/conclusion?
What I’m not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it’s not valid, or I don’t understand what you mean.
I mean it was a point that I made from just playing around with the thought experiment. I don’t know if it is the point, that’s why I’m trying to dissect it a little here.
I would be happy to keep trying to explain. Let me try to lay it out again in a different way, and I’d be interested to hear what you think:
Mary has perfect knowledge—that is, all knowable information she possibly can—about an experience
At the start of the experiment, Mary knows with certainty that they have not actually had that experience
Mary goes through a door, and I randomly flip two coins—one to determine if we implant the memory or actually give Mary the experience, and one to determine if we inform Mary of the first coin flip. I don’t tell you about the outcomes of either flip.
Mary comes back through the door, and your task is to interrogate Mary to find out the coin flips.
What questions can you ask Mary to determine these answers? When can you be confident, and when is the answer indeterminable?
A second way to think about it is if you sent Mary through the door a 2nd time, in which scenarios would Mary learn something new—and therefore experience the qualia they did not posess at the start of the experiment, despite their perfect information?
I dispute this premise. If Mary knows how to visualize something red (and learned how to do so through some means other than seeing it with her eyes) and knows that it’s called “red”, then that’s knowledge, and she won’t learn anything new by seeing it for the first time. This isn’t knowledge that Mary could acquire by reading black-and-white textbooks about cone cells and neurons, but hypothetically the knowledge could be implanted in her brain via some technology while bypassing her eyes.
Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.
Why does that matter?
Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is—what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.
The experience of recalling experiences is itself an experience. The experience of imagining an experience is itself an experience. These internal mental experiences are less vivid than a direct sensory experience is in the present for most people most of the time, but sometimes dreams can be as vivid as waking life. Internal mental experiences still have qualia, and they use the same sensory channels as the direct sensory experience does. You can recall or imagine or dream about how something looks or sounds or feels like etc.
The memory doesn’t have qualia except during the act of recalling it consciously.