Oh okay... I thought you were denying the reality of first-person subjective experience as commonly understood, not a narrowly-defined technical term. That seems more reasonable then (though also less interesting).
As a real human story, it would be fascinating. As an abstract philosophical thought experiment, it seems close to worthless. How is it actionable?
Why bother with a thought experiment, when there are real world examples? The book Fixing My Gaze is a great place to start, written by someone whose eyes were out of alignment as a child and only gained true stereoscopic vision as an adult.
These intuition pumps are useful philosophical tools to test the limits and cohesiveness of a particular idea. Mary's room is intended to challenge materialism because it's very difficult to exlain using materialism how Mary could not learn something new upon seeing red for the first time, even in principle. So it's about the logical cohesiveness of the whole theory. That said, there are plenty of strong refutations of Mary's room, but intuition pumps typically just confirm your own biases, so materialists accept these refutations and antimaterialists are not convinced by them.
intuition pumps typically just confirm your own biases, so materialists accept these refutations and antimaterialists are not convinced by them.
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to describe my complaint about philosophical thought experiments. They’re fun to argue over, but very rarely actually cause anyone to shift their positions, and as far as I can tell have zero practical value.
I think it’s interesting to compare it to e.g. Einstein’s thought experiments around relativity, like photons bouncing between mirrors on a fast-moving train. Those are useful because they help explore the ramifications of some mathematically rigorous physics proposals, and point us towards real world experiments. The underlying postulates are well defined.
Similarly, Einstein again, the EPR paradox is a very strange thought experiment around quantum mechanics that has turned out to be amazingly fruitful (if not in the way he wanted). Again, the underlying assumptions being tested are well-defined.
In contrast, the “Mary’s room” scenario tells us nothing useful and has no connection to the real world, because it’s not actually about the physics or physiology of colour at all. It’s about “qualia” which nobody can agree on how to define in the first place. There’s no starting point for the discussion, so there’s always an escape hatch for the point of view you support.
> In contrast, the “Mary’s room” scenario tells us nothing useful and has no connection to the real world, because it’s not actually about the physics or physiology of colour at all.
But it could be. One materialist response to Mary's room actually disputes the physicality of the entire arrangement. Consider that in order for Mary to be able to answer any question about the optical system of the human brain, she would have to be able to answer nearly every question possible; it requires ungodly amounts of data and computing power from the quantum level and up.
That amount of information in a finite space would collapse into a black hole, per the Bekenstein Bound, so Mary's room is actually incoherent at its core. You can see shade's of this in Dennett's response to Mary's room.
ianmerrick: I never understand this. How is the fact of experience in any way debateable or something which people disagree on? I am not asking about the epistemological details which appear to be a prerequisite to experiences we have, neurons and neurotransmitters and brain networks and the physics of light and phosphorus and the eye etc , I am talking about experience itself. How can it be confusing?
Often when I have this conversation it appears to me that somehow, impossibly, the other side suddenly gets fuzzy on this thing I call "experience".
Well, they don’t call it “the hard problem” for nothing.
I’m reminded of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Deep Thought points out that they can’t begin to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything because they can’t even clearly state what the actual Question is.
