5 ms·
It's pretty clear Mary learns something new upon viewing the red apple and it's easy to create an experiment for this. We'll continue using Mary's monochrome ex
by kelseyfrog 4y ago
It's pretty clear Mary learns something new upon viewing the red apple and it's easy to create an experiment for this. We'll continue using Mary's monochrome example as a basis.
Consider the following experimental setup:
Mary is prepared with all the knowledge about colors and apples and every other odd thing just as before. Mary is then instructed to view an apple and then subsequently asked to follow the instruction printed in red in the next room.
In the next room there are two sets of instructions. The instructions in red say "Exit through the left door" and the instructions in blue read "Exit through the right door". Behind the left door is a million bucks and behind the right door is nothing.
Does Mary get the million bucks? Would Mary get the million bucks had she skipped looking at the apple? It's probably helpful to do this with several Marys and ask, is there evidence that our Marys choose the left door greater than the expected probability attributed to random chance? If we can answer yes, no, and yes, then we can infer that choosing the view the apple changed Mary's mental state and that yes, she did learn something new that helped her to identify the correct text.
- obastani 4y agoI'm not sure about that. If Mary knows all the physics of light, she can design and set up a sensor to detect the color of the apple and the instructions, just like we have sensors that detect ultraviolet and infrared light. Just as we will never know how it feels to "see" ultraviolet light, this thought experiment is about Mary's subjective experience perceiving color, not her ability to determine the color of the world around her.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoMary is using sensors either way: they either come pre-installed or after market. On a more serious note, I'm taking the question in the article at face value, "Has Mary learnt anything new about the colour red upon seeing the colour for the first time?" If the author really meant it to be a question about the subjective experience of seeing, they should have simply written a better question.
- jiocrag 4y agoYour confusion is not the author's fault. You ignored the parameters of the thought experiment, which clearly state that she can discern colors without "seeing" them. The question is whether the subjective experience of "experiencing" color adds new information.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoI'm familiar with the thought experiment and have been for decades. I still think the author could write more clearly. Besides, we can clearly perform a proxy experiment today by way of enchroma glasses and colorblind people. Simply devise a way to test for information predicated on trichromacy using bichromatic metamers. Did the subject experience a functional difference? If so, it's a pretty easy question to answer. If there's no functional difference then why does it matter?
- jiocrag 4y ago"Simply devise a way to test for information predicated on trichromacy using bichromatic metamers." lol... "Simply..." this is literally the 'the explanatory gap' described in the article. We don't currently have a way to measure if the brain "acquired new information" when it knows about something but then sees it for the first time... which is the whole point. "experience a functional difference" -- what does that even mean?
- kelseyfrog 4y agoLet me get this straight. What you're saying is that we categorically don't have an examination which tests if someone has acquired new information?
- jiocrag 4y agoAFAIK, we have no way of assessing whether “someone” has acquired new information other than that someone demonstrating their knowledge. We can’t MRI “acquisition of information”. So, as per this thought experiment, we have no way of telling if Mary gained new information by “seeing” red when she already “knew” what red was and could interpret it as such. That’s the whole point of the the thought experiment, which clearly went over your head.
- jiocrag 4y agoNot clear at all and addressed by the parameters of the thought experiment. Remember that Mary has near omnipotent knowledge of light and vision. She would clearly be able to interpret the color of the door with her expertise of light refraction, density, etc. She would "know" the door is red without having "seen" red.
- layer8 4y agoYou can set up the analogous experiment with an AI-controlled robot. You feed the AI all available knowledge about the color red. Still it will be as able or unable as Mary to recognize red, until you tell it which bits of the incoming video stream correspond to the red color channel. That is, the AI has also to understand how the robot’s visual hardware and video signal processing works, including the data formats involved. Then it can deduce how to recognize the color red. With Mary, it’s basically the same, she needs to map her internal experience to what she knows about colors.