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What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

courses.physics.illinois.edu

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#41

Our eyes are sensors! We collect data from them, if Mary doesn't know what Red looks like, hence she lacks this data. Hence, she doesn't know all the physical facts about the universe. The initial point, of Mary, knowing all Physical facts hence doesn't seem to make sense, and therefore looks flawed!

But Mary does have all this data in her room - she knows every last interaction of wavelength to eyeball to neurons from her studies.

What doesn't Mary know in her room? You're proposing that you can codify that in some special (data-fied, 'factual') way that she couldn't possibly have access to in her room.

What is that codification, then? Be specific.

If you (we) can't do that, then aren't we just lunatics screaming and uttering and pointing at conscious experience with no ground?

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#43
I don't really understand the setup.

It seems to suggest that physicalism claims all things can be learned intellectually, in a box. It seems obvious to me that sensory experiences could be physical in nature yet also can only be learned experientially.

Is there really a debate that learning about color and seeing color are not the same things?

I don't know if the setup is unfair or the physicalism being referred to is silly. Either way this seems pointless to me.

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#44

Related to this would be Nagel's paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" We can't say what sort of echolocation sensation a bat has anymore than Mary can say what a color looks like before she leaves the black and white room. We're in the same position when it comes to bird vision. We can't say what the world would look like with four primary colors. What does that fourth primary color look like? We don't have a word f…

> It just means our scientific description of the world lacks the subjective.

Unless we have an independent reason to think that this thought experiment applies only to scientific knowledge, then it applies equally to all fields of propositional knowledge.

We can - and do - speak about subjective experiences by assuming that other people have them, and they are somewhat like ours (while recognizing that there are differences: some people are blind, or color-blind, or have synesthesic responses to color), but we cannot communicate what it is like to have those experiences to other people. That this is so is readily reconciled with materialism: firstly, because we cannot experience what it is like for other people to experience color, we cannot develop a common vocabulary for communicating it; secondly, even if we had the vocabulary, our conscious mind does not have the ability to bring about the necessary changes in our brain through willpower alone.

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#45
What we know by experience, by abstraction, or empirically, are three distinct modes of knowing. Experiences are directly known and always true. (Experiences might reference other potentially false things, and might be false indirectly.)

That resolves the whole Mary knowledge problem. Books cannot inject that kind of direct knowledge. Thus the claim "mary knows everything" is either false, or only true for a smaller domain.

One can think of analogies, like tamper resistant logs, or unique CPU states while doing static analysis vs running a program.

All in all, the non-physicalist conclusions are widely overdrawn. More over, for what it is worth, Jackson himself no longer thinks this argument is a good one.

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#46

This whole thought experiment is actually presenting what is quite possibly a limitation specific to human minds - no reason to extrapolate to all possible minds. That is, human minds seem to have two very distinct ways of altering their internal state. "Raw" sensory data gets stored in one way ("experiences"), while higher order data gets stored in another way ("memories"). That we can, to some extent at least, crea…

Is it humans or computers with a limitation?

A single celled organism lacks any sensory perception and so, from its perspective, it has explored the depths of the universe without having to ever even move. With each step upwards in complexity, the entire perceivable domain becomes wider. That humans can experience a facsimile of something and the "reality" of something differently, would seem to imply that we have a more sophisticated input system than something that would equate the two different "inputs."

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#47
post #25

Does the experience of zero-gravity reveal information not otherwise available via its deduction from physical law?

Interesting example. There have been many [failed] efforts to try to recreate the overview effect [1] on Earth. One hypothesis for the reason that facsimiles (e.g. VR) of such don't drive the same experience as the real thing, is that zero-gravity is somehow a component of it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#48
post #12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a fundamental epistemological limit to our ability to know how to combine the two. It doesn't mean the world itself has such a division. We just can't cognate how to reconcile the two. I’m not convinced there’s any indication of a fundamental limit to our cognitive abilities. What if we just don’t know how subjective experience works in the same normal way that we’ve not known how other stuff works until w…

You’ll end up in a category of your own if you “figure out” subjective experience. You’d be the greatest philosopher that ever lived. It’s not the same problem as figuring out how the brain works physically or how subjective experiences compare in peoples brains or observable states, but whether say our experience of seeing red is the same. Or what it’s like to be a bat. You can’t break that barrier, there is not obs…

I hope I didn’t make it sound like I think it would be some iterative invention like a better mouse trap, or some isolated Eureka! moment from someone who just thought hard for a bit. Perhaps that’s possible, but it feels unlikely. On the contrary, it would likely be a fundamental shift in our mode of thought and mode of explanation, less like huge discoveries like general relativity or quantum mechanics, and more like the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment.

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#49
In other words, "You can't derive 1st-person qualia from 3rd-person physics alone."

I've studied this for decades and it's a recurring theme not only with Jackson's "Mary" thought experiment, but with Nagel's "Bat", Searle's "Chinese Room", Leibniz's "Mill", etc.

The reason these arguments are often difficult to appreciate is because we struggle to put ourselves in the minds of other people, wondering how/if they perceive the world, but all the while we are using terms whose meanings and experiences we already understand intimately (e.g. red, rose, tomato... in the case of the Mary argument.)

The argument would have a bit more force if you imagined yourself landing on a strange new planet inhabited by Zorlichs. Zorlichs often drink Byzerp, which is a beverage made from Slayrne, Mucche, and Karlne. You're an expert molecular chemist. You've studied these ingredients for months and you now know all there is to know about Slayrne, Mucche, and Karlne. You know how they interact not only with each other but also with human biology (e.g. you'll know at least whether this beverage would harm you or not). Oh, you also happen to be a very picky person. Your entire life, you've never consumed any food or beverage that wasn't entirely bland. That means, you yourself have never had anything sweet, salty, bitter, or fizzy. So the question is: Would you know/learn something new to YOU upon first tasting Byzerp?

If we take "learn" to mean "acquire new experiences", then Mary certainly learns something new upon seeing red for the first time. Keep in mind that people can (and often do) learn something that is fleeting in time: you might have "taught" me how to bake brownies last year and, in that moment, I truly understood... that is too say, I was following along and comprehended every step along the way. But now it's 2023 and I've done nothing with that experience since. Indeed, I kinda forgot most of it. Is it now fair to say of me that I "know" how to make brownies?

"I learned" doesn't necessarily mean "I know".

And that flows both ways. Mary "knows" all there is to know about colour vision because she studied 3rd person objective facts about the world: light waves, retinas, brains, etc. But, if we stick with my definition of "learn" (i.e. "acquire new experiences") then Mary obviously hasn't learned what it is like to have a 1st-person red rose experience until she has that very experience.

That's not to say all learning must be a direct 1st person experience of the matter. I can learn all about the objective facts of skydiving without having experienced it firsthand. But I'll never know the subjective qualia of falling out of a plane towards the earth below until I actually do it.

Mary would have thought: "I don't know what it's like to see red." in the same way I currently think "I don't know what it's like to skydive". Yet both or worlds would be rocked (that is too say "learn something new") upon actually having the experience.

Re: What Mary Didn't Know (1986) [pdf]

#50
post #17

Not sure I follow the original premise. If Mary knows everything there is to know in physics, then Mary knows about the wave theory of light and the colour spectrum. She may not have experienced the colour red but she is aware of the concept of the colour red. Additionally, while Mary may only receive information in black and white, she perceives in full colour and can see the colours of her own skin and clothes. The…

> Additionally, while Mary may only receive information in black and white, she perceives in full colour and can see the colours of her own skin and clothes.

No, she doesn't (and never has) perceived in full color. Her entire world has been modified (Truman Show style) to shield her from ALL color at ALL times.

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