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I've had a handful of arguments w/ smart people about Mary's room lately. The conclusion I've come to is that the disagreement typically rests on how you defin

I've had a handful of arguments w/ smart people about Mary's room lately. The conclusion I've come to is that the disagreement typically rests on how you define "knowledge." To many, "what the color blue looks like" does not constitute knowledge, because it doesn't enable you to make any additional quantitative statements beyond what you would know from an objective study of color/light. But in common usage, we say things like "I know what that feels like," meaning "I've felt that before." In the end, this is just a semantic disagreement. But there are still philosophers like Dennett who take an even harder position, saying that functional knowledge is identical to experiential knowledge. I still can't quite wrap my head around this idea.

layer8 4y ago
To me, the knowledge about the qualia of some color is just knowledge about (some distilled form of) how you process the perception of that color internally, which may be slightly different for different people, and which is not directly observable (with today’s technology). There’s nothing particularly surprising about it, nor does it contradict a naturalist/physicalist view. Those who claim that functional knowledge is identical to experiential knowledge probably classify the internal processing of the brain as functional, and therefore classify knowledge derived from it as, fundamentally, functional knowledge.
missingrib 4y ago
>But there are still philosophers like Dennett who take an even harder position, saying that functional knowledge is identical to experiential knowledge. If you deny the existence of consciousness or qualia then you are making that claim. Strict physicalists all are committed to that claim.