4 ms·
The experience of colour is a fact about the brain, yes, which is additional to the knowledge of colour. A very simple system - a camera - can have knowledge of
by Smaug123 5y ago
The experience of colour is a fact about the brain, yes, which is additional to the knowledge of colour. A very simple system - a camera - can have knowledge of colour without the experience of colour. We say that something "knows" it is seeing the colour red if we can identify a part of the abstract world-model that is instantiated in that thing, such that the part is activated (for whatever "activated" means of that world-model's structure) iff the input to the world-model is red. I say that something "experiences" the colour red if additionally that world-model has a structure similar enough to my own that the "activated" part of the model has a direct analog in my own mind; and something "experiences" to a greater or lesser degree depending on how close the analogy is.
Of course I don't know whether anyone else "experiences" the colour red ("is my red the same as your red?"), but from the way people behave (and from knowledge of science) I have lots of evidence to suggest that their world-models are similar to mine, so I'm generally happy to say they're experiencing things; it's the most parsimonious explanation for their behaviour. Similarly, dogs are enough like me in various physical characteristics and in the way they behave that I'm usually happy to describe dogs as "experiencing" things too. But I would certainly avoid using the word "experience" to describe how an alien thinks, because the word "experience" is dangerously loaded towards human experience and it may lead me to extrapolate things about the alien's world-model that are not true.
Mary of Mary's Room therefore does gain a new experience on seeing red for the first time, because I believe there are hardcoded bits of the brain that are devoted specifically to producing the "red" effect in human-like world-models. She gains no new knowledge, but her world-model is activated in a new way, so she discovers a new representation of the existing knowledge she already had. The word "experience" is referring to a specific representation of a piece of knowledge.
- pests 5y agoI believe she does too. Change the set up slightly. Bring color to her world. Don't show her red - ask her to identify red. If she can, I'll admit I'm wrong.
- Smaug123 5y agoWell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem has been experimentally tested and it turns out that congenitally blind people, who are then granted sight, cannot automatically identify texture by sight alone; they have to learn to do so. So I would expect Mary to be unable to pass your test straight away, but I expect that she'll be able to learn do it with practice (because all the hardware is still there in her body, it just needs to be trained). And of course she'll be able to do it straight away given access to appropriate scientific instruments like a spectrometer; and she might be able to do it slowly and inaccurately without such instruments using her knowledge, in much the same way that I can multiply two three-digit numbers slowly and inaccurately. Adding new primitives to your mental model of a thing is useless unless they're actually integrated with the rest of the model! Gaining access to "colour" primitives doesn't help you if the rest of your mental model was trained without access to them; you'll need some more training to integrate them.
- Smaug123 5y agoBy the way, another analogy: I recently wrote a microKanren in F#. I taught this microKanren arithmetic with the Peano naturals; it knew how to count, and it knew what 37 was, but the encoding is very inefficient and it was slow to count. Then (https://github.com/Smaug123/FicroKanSharp/blob/912d9cd5d2e65bec2b685a8b722fbec5e50a9d8b/FicroKanSharp.Test/TypedArithmetic.fs#L9 https://github.com/Smaug123/FicroKanSharp/blob/912d9cd5d2e65...) I added the ability for the user to supply custom unification rules, and created a new representation of the naturals: "a natural is an F# integer, or a term representing the successor of a natural". I supplied custom unification rules so that e.g. 1 would unify with Succ(0). With this done, natural numbers were in some sense represented natively in the microKanren. Rather than it having to think about how to compute with them, the F# runtime would do many computations without those computations having to live in microKanren "emulated" space. The analogy is that the microKanren now experiences natural numbers (not that I believe the microKanren was conscious, nor that my world-model is anything like microKanren - it's just an analogy). It has a new, native representation that is entirely "unconscious"ly available to it. Mary steps out of the room, and instead of shuffling around Succ(Succ(Zero)), she now has the immediate "intuitive" representation that is the F# integer 2. No new knowledge; a new representation.