Don't know how we got onto Mary's Room or what point was being made with it, but like most arguments of that sort, it rests on a very stupid notion. Propositional knowledge doesn't exhaust knowledge in general, including "physical knowledge." It's not the same thing as experiential knowledge/knowledge by acquaintance or how-to knowledge. That they're not the same thing doesn't at all suggest that experiential/acquaintance knowledge or how-to knowledge are not physical.

Robustness of a theory is subjective. It's robust enough for me. — Isaac

There are a number of speculations about how phenomenal consciousness works. Which one is your favorite? There used to be one about a central drawing board. Is that one still in play?

Consciousness does not yet need any mystical forces, there's no reason to believe it isn't just something brains do. — Isaac

I dropped the word "gravity" earlier. Newton was accused of dragging spirituality into science with the notion of gravity. He protested that he didn't have an explanation for it. He was just pointing to it.

Insisting that we wait for a decent theory of consciousness is a vote for de-mystification.

definitely makes a difference in how you experience that process for it to be your brain undergoing it instead of someone else’s. — Pfhorrest

How do you know this? Surely it's not a given. In fact experiments with psychotic hallucination seems to at least vaguely point in the direction of the fact that experiencing something through the senses and experiencing it through empathy, or imagination are actually the same.

That is roughly the same point I am making, so thanks.

There are a number of speculations about how phenomenal consciousness works. Which one is your favorite? There used to be one about a central drawing board. Is that one still in play? — frank

At the moment I'm keen on the expanding connectivity theory. The work's currently being done at Sussex (one of my old haunts). If you stimulate an unconscious brain with electromagnetic waves, they echo only very locally. If you do the same to a conscious brain, they echo all over the place. The same extention of connectivity has been recorded when waking up from sleep.

I think conscious experience is just the association of multiple parts of the brain with senate inputs. What it's like to see Red (not that I agree with the terminology of the question) is to have multiple areas of the brain interact in response to the stimuli.

Hallucination etc are still experiencing it. Like I said, you could use third-person knowledge to recreate a first-person experience, so Mary could surgically stimulate the part of her brain that would be stimulated by red light in a normally-sighted person and so undergo the same experience and then know what it’s like. But just knowing HOW to do that doesn’t suffice; she has to actually DO it.

This is why I like using sex as a better example. There was a time long ago when I had never had sex, but nevertheless propositionally knew a lot about it. After the first time I had sex, I hadn’t gained any propositional knowledge; there were no new facts I could report that I couldn’t report before. But I nevertheless felt like I had gained experiential knowledge: I now knew what it was like to have sex, and none of that propositional knowledge I had already had before had been enough to substitute for that experiential knowledge.

Yes, but Mary knows everything about the colour Red. Literally everything there is to know about it, every connection anyone ever made with it, every emotion it ever generated, every memory it triggered. When you imagine yourself running, for example, the parts of your brain involved in running actually start working. When you se someone in pain, the parts of your brain involved with pain start working. There's an additional part which says "this is all made up". That seems to be the bit that's missing in some schizophrenics.

So Mary imagining all those thins is the same as seeing red, she'd just additionally know it wasn't real.

think conscious experience is just the association of multiple parts of the brain with senate inputs. What it's like to see Red (not that I agree with the terminology of the question) is to have multiple areas of the brain interact in response to the stimuli. — Isaac

Cool. The central board idea was an attempt to explain how multiple responses take on the character of a unified experience.

:up:

When you imagine yourself running, you have memories of running or at least similar motor functions with which to generate that mental image. When you see someone in pain, you can sympathize because you have memories of your own pains. If Mary had gone blind later in life, or somehow had memories transplanted from a sighted person, or false memories of color generated from artificial brain stimulation, or whatever, I have no doubt that she could imagine redness from those memories. But absent her own brain having that configuration to draw from, she can’t, and just looking at other people’s brains doesn’t actually give her that same brain configuration, even if it tells her what configuration she needs to have. You keep giving examples of someone experiencing something in an unusual way, which don’t refute the point that knowing about other people experiencing is different from experiencing yourself.

I think part of the setup of Mary’s Room that is needlessly confusing if the stipulation that she knowns “everything”, just to then point out something she doesn’t know. The point is to highlight something that you can’t know just from observing other people. If Mary really knew “everything”, then if you showed her a collection of different colored balls and asked her which was the red one, she shouldn’t say “I don’t know”, but in stipulating that she’s colorblind we’re saying exactly that she would do that; we’re saying there’s something she doesn’t know. That thing that’s different between her and an otherwise identical person who isn’t colorblind is what it’s like to see color.

no amount of studying human sexuality in the third person can tell you what it’s like to have sex. — Pfhorrest

Nah. Don't understand this at all. I won't have the experiences associated with doing the sex act, but I can absolutely know what it's like to have sex. I don't think "what it's like to experience X" really makes sense as a thing; I have difficulty articulating why I'm so suspicious of it. I suppose part of it is that once people start talking like that, you end up with stuff like this:

imagine redness from those memories. — Pfhorrest

Is there a sexness? Do I somehow have access to sexness because I've had sex? "What is it like" is an analogy disguised as an event.

Are you familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem?
— frank

Yes. I don't agree it's remotely hard. — Isaac

It's a problem created by the framework itself.

When you imagine yourself running, you have memories of running or at least similar motor functions with which to generate that mental image. When you see someone in pain, you can sympathize because you have memories of your own pains. — Pfhorrest

No, you're not taking on board what I'm saying. That is not how the brain works. You might like it to, but the evidence contradicts it. Colour-blind synaesthetes have experiences of colour in response to other senses, colours they've never seen. Lifelong amputees have experiences of the lost limb that (if it happened before 5) they have no recoverable memory of ever having. Parts of the brain are wired to play the part delivering particular experiences. They usually do so in response to stimuli but not always. It is not necessary to have seen red to experience the same brain stimuli associated with seeing red.

The point is to highlight something that you can’t know just from observing other people. — Pfhorrest

No, the point was to refute physicalism by proving there were non-physical facts. To do this, Mary has to theoretically have access to all physical facts. Otherwise all Jackson proved was that if you lock someone away in a room they know less than they would had you not.

Is there a sexness? Do I somehow have access to sexness because I've had sex? "What is it like" is an analogy disguised as an event. — fdrake

Exactly, there's no thing it is to have sex, it's a slightly different experience every time, the experience is, as you say, just an event, a period of coinciding mental activities which you arbitrarily label 'having sex'. To say one can't know what it is like until one experiences it is nonsensical, because one still doesn't know what it is like after experiencing it, one only knows what that exact event was, no other.

Agree with the rejection of using "what it's like"...

Well I agree that Mary could not know what it’s like to see color no matter how much other information she had. — Pfhorrest

Seems to me the "what it's like" is redundant here. Mary simply cannot see red if she is red colour blind.

Descriptions of what it's like are analogies. Could Mary understand any analogy with seeing red if she can't even see red?

Colour-blind synaesthetes have experiences of colour in response to other senses, — Isaac

And those are still experiences of color, and if they had not had them, they would not know what it’s like to experience color.

As I said before you keep bringing up examples of unusual ways to experience things as though they were counterpoints to the complete trivialism that you need to experience something to know what it’s like to experience it. A simulated brain in a simulated vat being virtually stimulated can have an experience of color without any actual photons striking any actual eyes or even any biological brains being involved, and that is still an experience of color, without the likes of which that virtual brain would not know what it’s like to experience color.

I know Jackson set out to disprove physicalism. I think he failed at that but proved something else much more trivial instead. Just like Searle’s Chinese Room, which I think soundly shows that syntax is not semantics, but does not thereby show that artificial semantics is impossible or that there is anything magical about consciousness, just that much more trivial point.

Also, none is this is meant to essentialize anything. Not every red is the same, but we have that name for a similar range of experiences. Not every act of sex is the same either. Not every moment of being you is the same. “What it’s like to be you” isn’t anything above or beyond whatever you’re experiencing right now, it’s not an experience of some essential self in addition to your ongoing experience of the world, it’s just the having of any experience at all, in the way that you are capable of experiencing (in contrast to ways that otherly-constituted beings might experience the same phenomena impinging upon you now). It’s completely trivial and not worth the words we’ve all spent talking about it.

Isaac, what was it you thought we agreed on earlier?

Descriptions of what it's like are analogies. Could Mary understand any analogy with seeing red if she can't even see red? — Janus

That is the entire point. What something is like to experience cannot be described, other than comparatively with other experiences. You fundamentally have to undergo the experience yourself to have experiential knowledge.

If Mary can see other colours then of course that is the one salient analogy she could understand. Are there any other analogies at all you can think of?

It’s completely trivial and not worth the words we’ve all spent talking about it. — Pfhorrest

I dunno. What we think is trivial is usually fundamental to our worldview, and should usually be examined - special emphasis when others who we otherwise find sensible do not find it so. Especially if we're going to go from "you literally just saw a Red delicious apple" to "redness"; if it's literally just how we talk about our experiences or that we've experienced something, why the need to invoke stuff that resembles types/essences? If this wasn't so contentious a style of expression (smuggling in presumptions somewhere, or missing obvious facts), there wouldn't be such bitter argument around it when everyone thinks everyone else is missing trivial points.

It's like some arguments that we can have with the partners we live with; "this thing you do which you do not know you do, or this thing you do not do which you do not notice you do not do? Terrible. That cup you leave by the kettle in the morning? That feels like "fuck you" to me!".

I'm extremely suspicious that what goes on when we think about "what is it like to X" is that we aggregate over X experiences and form commonalities and analogies; and then we retroject the commonalities and analogies into the experience without giving a simultaneous account of how commonalities and analogies are always already embedded in first person experiences in the first place.

...know what it’s like to experience color. — Pfhorrest

What's the difference between experiencing color and seeing/sensing/detecting/perceiving it?

Seems to me that we all see it by virtue of having what it takes to do so. However, there is no single correct answer to what it's like to experience it, because each person's experiences are different according to the content of their own thought. All experiences of red include drawing correlations between red and other things...

That's it as far as what it's like to experience red. To add detail fill in the variable blanks. Set out those other things. What you'll end up with does not even come close to being a standard of what it's like...

That holds good for all "what it's like" notions, which renders it useless as a measure of anything.

No, and that’s kind of the point. If you have no experiential knowledge of anything like color, the only way to get it is to experience color. Whether that’s by having actual photons hit your actual eyes or the AI that runs the simulation you’re a part of virtually stimulating your visual cortex, it’s an experience either way.

I’m emphasizing the triviality to distance myself from what Jackson and his followers think. I concede that his argument makes A point, but I want to be clear that I don’t think it makes THE point that he wants it to be, but something much less significant.

As far as terms like “redness”, I don’t know why that has to evoke any kind of essentialism. Does “color” evoke that same essentialism to you, or “appearance”? To my ear, the redness of an apple is a narrower description of the color of an apple which is in turn a narrower description of the appearance of the apple, and I don’t mean “the appearance of the apple” to be some separate entity from the apple itself of course, just a name for a particular feature of it I’m talking about, the way it looks. Likewise it’s color, and its redness. I don’t know what other words I could possibly use to refer to the feature of the apple that consists of it being red other than its redness.

It doesn’t sound like we disagree.

t doesn’t sound like we disagree. — Pfhorrest

Maybe we agree. Not sure. "Redness" is rejected on my view.

I'm saying that maybe there's not a philosophical solution to that problem, maybe there's only a medical one. — Pfhorrest

On the contrary! .. medicine has no power to solve the mental problems you have expressed, and philosophical errors are the only cause of them.

functionality, which is what varies between me and rocks and clouds and so on. A rock may have a "first-person experience" — Pfhorrest

See, I can pick the first thing you say and show you, the problem is a philosophical bind of non-sense, rooted in an unrealistic idealism. Medicine can't solve that problem. The solution only comes by understanding that the true reason that your "first-person experience" is not like a rock's "first-person experience", is not because of function, but life. That is why only philosophy can fix mental illness, and medication, as a pacifier and substitution, can be useful in buying valuable time for Him who does the healing work.

Life is a functional difference. A living thing stops being alive when it stops doing the things that constitute living. Also, life isn’t the difference between me and a tree, but our experiences are still significantly different, as are our behaviors, because both of those are products of our functions.

I just can't see past the deflection in this response. The most value I can offer you, is to suggest reflecting on why. If I was to indulge my own interests, there is a lot that we could establish about the difference between the life of trees and humans, and to secure the definition of consciousness. But I can't begin to do that while you are fixed on the idea that rocks have a perspective (in all seriousness).

Arguing about panpsychism is really beyond the scope of this thread. — Pfhorrest

Yes, I don't know why people keep bringing up these tangential remarks in a thread about Frank Jackson's Thought experiment! Seriously, I'm only continuing this current derailment because it's your OP. If you want to reign in discussion about qualia because it's off topic, just say, we can discuss elsewhere.

Notwithstanding...

And those are still experiences of color, and if they had not had them, they would not know what it’s like to experience color. — Pfhorrest

This comes back to the issues I first raised about what an answer to the question "what is it like" would consist of with regards to qualia. The colour-blind scientist could not see red, and the claim is that without the experience of seeing red she would never know what 'it is like'. But the data from truly colour-blind synaesthetes is that they could know 'what it is like' to see red without actually seeing red, because 'what it is like' is to have the mental states associated with the activity and they seem to do that, simply because the part of the brain responsible for initiating the experience of 'seeing red' is stimulated in these people, by other senses.

So your assertion that one cannot know what a first person experience 'is like' from a third party account rests entirely of what sort of data 'is like' consists of. The various experiments with synaesthetes, phantom limb patients, split hemisphere patients etc give compelling evidence that Jackson own assertion that qualia are non-physical data is not right. So qualia must be physical data (data which can be altered by injury/problems with the structure of the brain. So if it's physical data we'd need a convincing reason why that physical data cannot be imparted verbally like any other data.

Say you've never had lemon cake before and I'm trying to tell you 'what it's like' to eat lemon cake. I could describe the taste in terms of things you have experienced "like a sponge cake but more tangy", I could describe the various ways it makes me feel "satiated, but moreish", I could describe the memories it generates "sitting at my Grandma's table when I was nine". You'd have a pretty good picture, no? But not a complete one, you'd argue. there's something missing. But what is missing these are the exact same set of things that happen when I actually do taste lemon for the first time - "Oh, it's like a sponge cake but more tangy", "gosh that's filled me up but I still want more", "I think my Grandma used to serve this cake when I went to visit". Nothing more is happening than these thought (I mean a vast quantity more of them, but not of any different type). I could, in theory at least, impart them all to a third party.

Essentially my disagreement is not about the quality fo third party accounts - they're massively flawed, gappy and biased. My issue is with the sublimation of first party experience - which is massively flawed, gappy and biased. Next time you think your first person experience is delivering you something so full of good data that a third party account could not possibly generate it accurately, just remember that you're blind for 2 hours in every day (your occipital cortex switches off signals every time your eyes move), you're completely making up the colours in your peripheral vision (which is actually black and white) and the two blind spots which your eyes have, and then the very second all of this data is recorded into the short-term memory, it is recalled and altered by the cerebral cortex to better fit the what it expects to see. These processes produce different results each time depending on mood and life experiences thus far. There's every possibility the third party description is more accurate than the one your brain is now delivering to you as your own memory of 'what it was like'.

I'm extremely suspicious that what goes on when we think about "what is it like to X" is that we aggregate over X experiences and form commonalities and analogies; and then we retroject the commonalities and analogies into the experience without giving a simultaneous account of how commonalities and analogies are always already embedded in first person experiences in the first place. — fdrake

That's pretty much how I see it too. Interestingly, since we were talking about Ramachandran earlier, he has my personal favourite solution to the Mary's Room problem. He thinks Mary (on seeing a Red apple for the first time) will respond in one of two ways.

1. She will see the apple as grey. Having had no experience of colour, the sections of her brain that deal with colour will have simply atrophied (we can see evidence of this happening in real brains) and so she simply won't have a mechanism to deal with the different light waves hitting the retina. She might slowly develop one in later life, but it's possible she'll just always see grey. Note this is different to blind people who have their sight restored (another fascinating and again unexpected set of results) because the idea behind Mary is that she would have all the requirements of visual processing, so all the wiring would be attached already to shades of grey. Difficult (if not impossible in adulthood) to re-wire them.

2. She would simply say "Oh a red apple". In her colour isolation, the centres of her brain which deal with colour may simply send out their signals anyway in response to other stimuli (again we have examples of this happening in real brains), and so she would feel as if she'd always know what some colour was like. A bit like if you've never seen an exact shade of blue before, you still know what it is, even though the exact experience is completely new.

He errs on 2, but 1 is my personal favourite.

I'm extremely suspicious that what goes on when we think about "what is it like to X" is that we aggregate over X experiences and form commonalities and analogies; and then we retroject the commonalities and analogies into the experience without giving a simultaneous account of how commonalities and analogies are always already embedded in first person experiences in the first place. — fdrake

Chalmers speculated at one point that Dennett might truly represent a different kind of consciousness, that he might be a sign that we're not all alike. I notice the way you pull the words apart trying to find the meaning in them and my instinct is that Chalmers was right.

Chalmers speculated at one point that Dennett might truly represent a different kind of consciousness, that he might be a sign that we're not all alike. — frank

It would be extremely surprising that there were two different flavours of consciousness, that agree with each other almost all the time, but differ solely in whether they agree or disagree with (the framing of) a philosophical point.

Discussions about 'what it is like to...' are essentially discussions about the nature of being, although nobody puts it in those terms.

When Nagel wrote about 'what it is like to be a bat', he said that while it is possible to imagine what it would be like to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects ''like a bat’, that would not constitute 'being a bat'. Nagel claims that even if humans were able to metamorphose into bats, their brains would not have been configured as a bat's from birth; therefore, they would only be able to experience the life and behaviors of a bat, rather than literally being a bat.

The reason 'being' is such a difficult subject to discuss, is that it's something we're never outside or, or apart from. It's never an object of perception, but rather that in which perception and thought inhere. The proper response to this realisation is something similar to Husserl's epoche or suspension of judgement, rather than attempting to articulate a theory about it. Which is why it’s an outrage to Dennett: if you can’t articulate a theory about it, well, then, it doesn’t exist. ;-)