That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing ‘qualia’ does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd—it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. “Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense” is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.
My view is that Mary’s Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don’t actually live in Mary’s brain, we can’t understand the qualia of “Mary’s brain being stimulated by red light”, but this is a limitation on our brains, not a “mystery.” Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others’ brains and experience their qualia; we just don’t know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.
I take a different but compatible objection to Mary’s Room—that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
“He sharply stubbed his toe on a large rock and proclaimed, ‘Thus, I refute this!’”
That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing ‘qualia’ does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd—it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. “Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense” is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.
My view is that Mary’s Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don’t actually live in Mary’s brain, we can’t understand the qualia of “Mary’s brain being stimulated by red light”, but this is a limitation on our brains, not a “mystery.” Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others’ brains and experience their qualia; we just don’t know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.
I take a different but compatible objection to Mary’s Room—that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.
Blatant strawman.