Mary’s experience of the Qualia

[Amorphos]

Mary’s experience of the Qualia

I been having this debate at another forum so I have come to ask if you can help me understand this, I am not convinced that knowledge as not received from experience, can truly tell us what a given real thing is e.g. light and the colour red [for example].

I am sure you are all familiar with this but I will explain where we got to so far…

Qualia are, if I remember correctly, are the subjective qualities of an experience. the question for me is if sujective knowledge can tell us anything without the actual experience.

Mary’s room experiment from wiki

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”

Quoting a chap from the other forum;

“With such an understanding she would not only know about the nature of light and the fact that we attribute colors to different wavelengths but the process by which we do this“.

I would question if she can attribute colours to the wavelengths. This appears to be counter to the purpose of the experiment, if she knows colour already then there is nothing to learn when she goes outside.

It’s a good experiment if we can clarify that in the premise she doesn’t already have the experience-knowledge she is seeking. She is brought up from infancy inside the black and white room, and will never actually experience the colour red until she goes outside the room.

If then she does not know what the colour red is, but someone has described it to her e.g. as a shade of grey which corresponds to a given frequency of light, would that be anything like red as experienced?

Hence we arrive at the critical point where the answer is in the description of what is red. We have to describe that without experience of it. We cannot presume prior knowledge to what a given thing like ‘redness’ is.

I don’t think mary would have a clue what red really is! Even if we can find a way to describe it perfectly, does the description marry the experience-knowledge. Indeed if we take the same results for every aspect of the mind, we would be left with the notion that;

‘Given all knowledge of everything, we would know nothing without the experience of a given thing’ [quetz]

[Carleas]

‘Nothing’ is as much of an exaggeration as ‘everything’. It seems obvious that Mary doesn’t know something about the color red, but she knows a whole lot about red, and she could accurately identify it in a lot of ways that others couldn’t (i.e. by the amount it heats a surface, or by the neural cascade it triggers). Red isn’t either a wavelength of light or the color we see when we look at a tomato, it’s both. They are both descriptions of the same thing. So Mary knows a whole lot about the color red, but there is one thing that she is exceptionally ignorant about.

It seems to me that it’s more th exception than the ignorance that motivates saying she knows nothing about the color red, i.e. it’s because most people know red as an experience that we find it odd to attribute knowledge of red to Mary, who does know it in every way BUT the experience. But in other situations, it is more obvious. Two teams of scientists investigating the same phenomenon might apply two different methods. One might look at the spectra of light it produces, while another might meassure its gravitational field over time. Both teams will clearly learn something, but neither will know everything.

[Amorphos]

Red isn’t either a wavelength of light or the colour we see when we look at a tomato, it’s both.

Except when we imagine it. equally we don’t see light, light hit’s the back of the eyes and is translated into info, the red tomato apparently is a product of the ole graphics card in the brain. is all red/light imagined? if so what is it exactly.

I can have the knowledge of the spectra of light as wavelengths but what does that tell me about red if I have not seen the rainbow. If someone told me that a certain wavelength equals red then shows me the corresponding shade of grey, then the same with each colour, would I know what red is?

If we were given every bit of scientific data and info would that tell us what red is? Surely it is just info and design, I cannot think of anything that properly describes red, bar the actual experience of it.

[aglie]

Well I would think not. If you were to describe red to a blind person you could probably say quite a few things about it. It is fiery, evokes passion, and provokes bulls, makes salsa great, but that tells you nothing about red in itself. The only way we can experience red is through our vision because, unless you have synthesia, red is a completely visual construct. So only when you see red can you truly understand what red is. Maybe. I could be wrong. I could be totally off point. I don’t know.

[Carleas]

@Quetzalcoatl

Except when we imagine it.

True, if by ‘we’ you mean ‘we, the members of the sighted community’. When Mary imagines red, presumably she imagines the aspects of it that she’s familiar with. Likewise, a blind person might imagine a certain warm sensation or a reaction by their guide dog, or perhaps just the mathematical properties of that wavelength of light.

I’ve seen a rainbow, and I don’t know what the wavelength of red light is, and I’m not confident I could say where it goes on the spectrum. I’ve seen a tomato, but I couldn’t tell you what happens in my eye or brain when the light reflected from it hits my retina. There’s a lot I don’t know about the color red, and yet I’ve seen red things all my life. You’re prioritizing the visual experience of red as the ‘real’ way to interact with concept, but that’s a lot more than just a visual qualia that adheres to it.

[matthatter]

Well, the color red refers to one’s subjective experience of “red” (even if it is not exactly the same for everyone). Mary may know a lot about what correlates with the subjective experience of “red”, but she’s never actually experienced red.

So the question is if, when she got outside, she could identify a (subjective impression of a) color (as it has been defined with all the data she’s been exposed to)?

I guess it depends on the context (of other information she has to go by). She may know that “earth”, “plants”, “the sky” and “water” tend to have certain colors (which, though I can’t explain it in a more knowledgeable way, can correlate with how dense or solid the matter is), so if she sees the sky, and knows a clear sky is blue, or sees a bunch of of alive (not falling in autumn) leaves, she knows those are green, she can then interpret what subjective colors go with her learned words for colors.

It would be a different story if she left the room and the colored world was an interior one containing nothing but metal painted with random colors of varying brightness and shades, I think.

[Amorphos]

So only when you see red can you truly understand what red is.

I think the argument is that when we see red it is entered into the brain as info, hence if you could present that same info then ‘mary’ would be able to know what red is by the same cognitive processes as we do anyway [?].

The info we receive when we see red is not just knowledge but a very different kind of info ~ if it can be called info at all. Really we are talking about electromagnetic waves together with chemical interchanges. Our knowledge of that comes later, in an animal for example they would not have knowledge of red at all but only the experience of it.

The knowledge of red is thence secondary it can only tell us what red appears to be like, not what it is.

or perhaps just the mathematical properties of that wavelength of light.

It seams you could have all the info one wants but it tells us nothing without the experiential backup.

Find any description we will, it wont describe red! …can any description describe a thing aside from the experiencing of said thing?

You’re prioritizing the visual experience of red as the ‘real’ way to interact with concept

Indeed, it can be experienced completely without any knowledge of it whatsoever. …Like an animal would.
Perception of a thing is secondary to the thing itself. To perceive we take a step away from the source itself, a focal point is an abstract one.

[gib]

@Carleas

Red isn’t either a wavelength of light or the color we see when we look at a tomato, it’s both.

There are those who would argue that the electromagnetic wave is only the cause of red.

[Amorphos]

There are those who would argue that the electromagnetic wave is only the cause of red.

Indeed, one has to wonder exactly how such a wave says red! I would think the brain translates wavelength as red etc, hence without the brain knowing what red is it cannot attribute it so.

One has to wonder where the origins of the information arise from, genetic maybe. if so then mary already has the answer built in -so to say. which means that to qualify the argument we should be talking about a robot or something that does not already have the info.

now how would we program the meaning of red, i think our robot wouldnt know though he would be able to use it in conversation just as we do ~ he just wouldnt know red, only that a wavelength denotes what we humans call red.

[Carleas]

@Quetz

i think our robot wouldnt know though he would be able to use it in conversation just as we do

In what sense, then, can we say that other people know red? No two people are built the same, so their mechanisms for distinguishing between wavelengths of light are necessarily somewhat different. If our robot has a subjective experience of red, we must attribute to him experience of red, or else we cannot attribute it to anyone besides whoever first coined the term.

@Gib

There are those who would argue that the electromagnetic wave is only the cause of red.

That seems to be a popular definition of the term in philosophy (i.e. red is “the subjective experience of a certain wavelength of light”), but other disciplines, and the population at large, aren’t listening. People employ the word red as though it’s a property of the light, and not a property of the experience of the light. In common usage, red is (among other things) the light of a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and our experience of it is functionally no different from any apparatus that measures the wavelength of light (or some correllated property).

What’s the point of forcing the definition towards experience? Should we do the same for all such descriptions? Should we deny that ‘sharp’ things cut, and instead maintain that things that cut merely cause ‘sharp’? There doesn’t seem to be any compelling philosophical or practical reason to use language that way.

[gib]

@Carleas

In common usage, red is (among other things) the light of a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum

In common usage, red is a simple and irreducible property of an object. I think you’re referring to the scientific usage.

@Carleas

What’s the point of forcing the definition towards experience?

It is the whole point for phenomenologists, idealists, and other philosophers of similar persuasion.

[Amorphos]

In what sense, then, can we say that other people know red? No two people are built the same, so their mechanisms for distinguishing between wavelengths of light are necessarily somewhat different. If our robot has a subjective experience of red, we must attribute to him experience of red, or else we cannot attribute it to anyone besides whoever first coined the term.

We are built very similar from mechanistic pov, you can have different looking machines that all do the same job [cars]. If we both look at a green wall we will both see that, perhaps when early linguistics were being formed we would not have had a term for it but eventually a consensus is reached and we all agree it is green.

The difference between us and the robot is imagination ~ and that is a massive difference. From what I can tell the light we see is produced by the graphics card in our brains, which makes it purely imaginary.
An interesting point is that a computer producing green wont know what it actually is.
Our graphics card and the imagination are tied together in some way.

i.e. red is “the subjective experience of a certain wavelength of light”),

This is what confuses me. The light wave is not red but what we see is, thus our brains/minds see red when it is not an actual quality of the ‘real’ world. Moreover when I look at hubble images of space, I cannot imagine that all the redness in far off galaxies is there only in our minds.

Somehow we have to qualify what the redness itself is ~ aside from light and its wavelengths. Perhaps light has a body that is not physical in the way we normally perceive the physical. Otherwise what ‘exactly’ is the red we see? what is the so called subjective experience made up of ~ we cannot honestly say that we arent actually seeing anything can we?

[Carleas]

Gib, you’re right, my use “common usage” is not so much common as scientific. I guess what I’m trying to get is that people consider red to be a property of the world and not a property of their experience of it. That’s definitely an assumption underlying the scientific conception of ‘red’, but science adds a whole lot more to it.

And you didn’t answer my questions: “Should we do the same for all such descriptions? Should we deny that ‘sharp’ things cut, and instead maintain that things that cut merely cause ‘sharp’?”

@Quetzal

The difference between us and the robot is imagination ~ and that is a massive difference.

I think you’re artificially limiting robots. There’s nothing stopping a well-built robot from connecting experience and imagination. Not too long ago, a robot developed and tested a scientific hypothesis. It’s splitting hairs to claim that robots can’t imagine at this point. There’s nothing stopping a robot from having a subjective experience that is objectively indistinguishable from our own (i.e. we are as justified in ascribing a human-like mind to it as we are to another normal human).

@Quetz also

Somehow we have to qualify what the redness itself is ~ aside from light and its wavelengths

Why “aside from”? Why not “in addition to”? To restrict it to phenomena associated with the word that do not include wavelength, energy, scattering properties, chemical effects, etc., is to beg the question that red is not or should not be those things. Since I’m maintaining that those things are a part of what red is, I’m all for qualifying redness, but my qualifications are going to include those properties.

What are we asking about Mary? When she exits the room, will she have experienced red? Of course not, that’s stipulated. Will she be able to deduce that she’s experiencing red from indirect evidence? That seems equally well stipulated. Is this a question of what is a qualia, what entails knowledge, or what we mean by ‘red’?

[Only_Humean]

@quetzalcoatl

If we both look at a green wall we will both see that, perhaps when early linguistics were being formed we would not have had a term for it but eventually a consensus is reached and we all agree it is green.

We have no way of knowing what the experience is for anyone else who sees it. All we know is that everyone else also calls it (and other green things) green. Everyone responds similarly, so it doesn’t actually matter that it’s unknowable.

Although it’s not the point of the thought experiment, there are (I believe) neurophysiological reasons to doubt that someone whose brain has developed without having their retinal ‘red detectors’ stimulated would be able to see red, as the connections will not have been made. Although the problem states “black and white room” rather than “black and green” …

On a side note, this is an interesting diversion:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguis … n_language
Is how we experience a colour altered by our linguistic abilities to define and express it?

This is what confuses me. The light wave is not red but what we see is, thus our brains/minds see red when it is not an actual quality of the ‘real’ world.

The light wave (photon) is red; if it hit our eye we would register it as red. Anyone with normal colour vision who saw it would agree. What is not red about a red light photon?

Somehow we have to qualify what the redness itself is ~ aside from light and its wavelengths. Perhaps light has a body that is not physical in the way we normally perceive the physical. Otherwise what ‘exactly’ is the red we see? what is the so called subjective experience made up of ~ we cannot honestly say that we arent actually seeing anything can we?

Of course not, don’t make it so hard on yourself. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

[gib]

@Carleas

And you didn’t answer my questions: “Should we do the same for all such descriptions? Should we deny that ‘sharp’ things cut, and instead maintain that things that cut merely cause ‘sharp’?”

I’m not sure which of these would be the cause and which the phenomenon. To be sure, all perceptions of things in the world can be construed as phenomena, and we generally assume that such perceptions are reflections, or representations, of that which cause them. If you mean to say that ‘sharpness’ is the phenomena and it’s things in the world - things that cut - that cause our experience of ‘sharpness’, then sure we can say this. But by the same token, we can also say that sharpness as a real property of things in the world causes our perception of things cutting. It depends on which you want to consider the phenomenon and which the real object in the world - and that a legitimate causal connection can be shown between them.

[Amorphos]

I think you’re artificially limiting robots. There’s nothing stopping a well-built robot from connecting experience and imagination. Not too long ago, a robot developed and tested a scientific hypothesis. It’s splitting hairs to claim that robots can’t imagine at this point. There’s nothing stopping a robot from having a subjective experience that is objectively indistinguishable from our own (i.e. we are as justified in ascribing a human-like mind to it as we are to another normal human).

maybe. I think the whole thing would be mechanistic, lets say you had a very advanced robot and it had perfectly replicated eyes as ours and a competent processor etc. you can input the light to the eye and it would read red according to what red is in the memory of the robot. You could equally bypass the eye and just input the info as per this experiment, the robot could then plug itself into a monitor and display red.

But does it know what red is?

Why “aside from”? Why not “in addition to”?

Can be ‘in addition to’, my thinking was that as these things don’t actually tell us what red is, then its proper description is ‘aside from’ them. However I expect you are right and only by including every element do we address what red is.

I would think though, that mary’s experience precludes her from knowing some of the imaginary and physical info. For example, her eyes have only seen black and white, so she has had no info from the receptors in the back of her eyes which denote colour.

will she have experienced red? Of course not, that’s stipulated.

I thought the whole point was that she would have experienced it without ever seeing it.

---

We have no way of knowing what the experience is for anyone else who sees it.

…but through the comparatives. We all stop at a red light as we know what it is as compared to green, the physics are the same, our eyes are the same and our brains are the same ~ in terms of all being instruments that do a job.

If people experienced things differently we would surely know about that!

Interesting diversion indeed [the linguistics]. It seams like madness to me that colours are not always distinguished like green blue and black in Africa. I cant understand its practicality e.g. do they look up at the daytime sky and say black, then the same for the night time sky! One would think if a primordial distinction that even lower animals and insects can perform.

If we gave them a green, blue and black tub of paint, they would not know the difference?

The light wave (photon) is red; if it hit our eye we would register it as red. Anyone with normal colour vision who saw it would agree. What is not red about a red light photon?

Forgive my ignorance I thought light was colourless [not even white], and that our eyes simply read the different wavelengths of light and determined a colour accordingly?

Of course not, don’t make it so hard on yourself. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

Ha, true. Nice saying!

[spyderjoe]

Red is most certainly a product of a wave of light at a certain wave lenghth. It is also a product of the internal centers of the brain. Actuall most of our visual experience is generated and produced internally.

[Only_Humean]

@quetzalcoatl

We have no way of knowing what the experience is for anyone else who sees it.

…but through the comparatives. We all stop at a red light as we know what it is as compared to green, the physics are the same, our eyes are the same and our brains are the same ~ in terms of all being instruments that do a job.

I don’t know enough about brains and consciousness to say for sure they’re “the same”. If your experience of red is the same as my experience of green, we’d still stop when the top traffic light was lit, and consider it to be the same colour as a fire engine. If I experience pain in the same way that you experience sound, but I act indistinguishably - it makes me want to pull away from the source, causes me discomfort and distress and so on - you’ll never be able to find out.

Interesting diversion indeed [the linguistics]. It seams like madness to me that colours are not always distinguished like green blue and black in Africa. I cant understand its practicality e.g. do they look up at the daytime sky and say black, then the same for the night time sky! One would think if a primordial distinction that even lower animals and insects can perform.

If we gave them a green, blue and black tub of paint, they would not know the difference?

No, they have light blueblackgreen, dark blueblackgreen, the sort of blueblackgreen that you find in grass. We have grass green, bottle green, olive green…

As an example, in English we consider “pink” and “red” to be two different colours, but “cyan” and “ultramarine” to be shades of blue. If you asked a shop assistant for a blue shirt and they brought pale sky-blue you’d say “no, I meant a darker shade of blue”, but if you asked for a red shirt and they bought pastel pink you’d think there was something wrong with them. In Russian, on the other hand, they consider pale blue and dark blue as distinct colours, as we consider pink and scarlet.

It’s not that eyes are any more or less sensitive to variations in light between countries, but that the languages we use to talk about them and think about them, the way we structure our definitions and so on, has a practical effect in how we respond to them. I wonder how people in some languages talk of blue/green colourblindness…

The light wave (photon) is red; if it hit our eye we would register it as red. Anyone with normal colour vision who saw it would agree. What is not red about a red light photon?

Forgive my ignorance I thought light was colourless [not even white], and that our eyes simply read the different wavelengths of light and determined a colour accordingly?

Colour is indeed determined according to the wavelength (as well as the brightness, the setting, the expectations, and so on)… so what does it mean to say something’s colourless if we see it as red?

Just to muddy the waters a little…
blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas … the-green/
can you imagine why people don’t distinguish between blue and green?

[Amorphos]

If your experience of red is the same as my experience of green, we’d still stop when the top traffic light was lit, and consider it to be the same colour as a fire engine.

I cant imagine this being so in the real world there are simply too many comparatives. If the traffic light was a talking light then you would stop when it said red and showed red, so given enough comparatives the distinction become clear imho.

In Russian, on the other hand, they consider pale blue and dark blue as distinct colours, as we consider pink and scarlet.

Oh I see! It makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.

that’s one cool optical illusion! Of course we humans havent produced such images for very long so the eye isn’t trained to notice such vivid contrasts. Maybe in the future we will see it better.
What this points out to me is that the light we see is not the actual light, just a reflection/imagination of that…

so what does it mean to say something’s colourless if we see it as red?

Indeed, I may be wrong but I am sure that light itself does not have colour. Hopefully there is a physicist around who can clarify this point for us, though when we visualise a sinewave one has to wonder how it can ‘possses’ redness. [see also my real optical illusion paradox below]

This is very interesting for me as it means an omniscient god doesn’t ‘know’ anything.
This leads to many other questions and answers.

Humour me if you will; imagine you go to the beach, you are watching the sun go down and there is a golden beam cast across the sea aiming straight for you [the reflection of the sun on the sea]. Your friend stood next to you sees a very similar thing, then all your friends come along standing in a row along the beach, all seeing the same golden beam from different perspectives. One of your friend puts electrodes in all of your heads and connects you all up to a computer and monitor, the display shows a completely golden sea shining in a blinding glow of light.

Which is the real beam of light being seen? Yours, one of your friends, or the image on the monitor?

The answer must be that none of them are the correct vision of reality yes?

Here then we have an example of how optical illusions are an everyday occurrence. Just as there is no golden beam, there is no red or any other colour. The light waves are bouncing off the sea and telling us that there is golden stuff there, yet there isn’t, the suns light is simply present there and we interpret that as a reflection ~ no matter where we look from.

Maybe I gone off target a bit, but this has mystified me for some time.

[Only_Humean]

@quetzalcoatl

If your experience of red is the same as my experience of green, we’d still stop when the top traffic light was lit, and consider it to be the same colour as a fire engine.

I cant imagine this being so in the real world there are simply too many comparatives. If the traffic light was a talking light then you would stop when it said red and showed red, so given enough comparatives the distinction become clear imho.

Of course you would. But if our experiences of red and green are swapped - I experience every red thing I’ve ever seen or heard about the same way you experience green, but it’s always been called red, I’ll call it red. I have no idea that other people experience it differently, the assumption is naturally that they don’t, but there’s no possible way of knowing.

The colour-experience you get when you see a fire engine or a rose or a cherry, you’ve learnt to call red. You would call it that, whichever colour-experience it was. There’s no way “behind” the language to check otherwise.

What this points out to me is that the light we see is not the actual light, just a reflection/imagination of that…

Vision in general is very context-sensitive. It’s a very interesting field… just look at a few optical illusions and you’ll realise that what you see is not what light hits your eyes, but what your brain makes of that.

so what does it mean to say something’s colourless if we see it as red?

Indeed, I may be wrong but I am sure that light itself does not have colour. Hopefully there is a physicist around who can clarify this point for us, though when we visualise a sinewave one has to wonder how it can ‘possses’ redness. [see also my real optical illusion paradox below]

A sinewave is just a mathematical representation of light. It’s no more light than a splash of paint representing a sunbeam is light.

Colour is what we see, it’s not a Real Property of Things. Look at a plant under pure red or blue light, and its leaves are black. What we see is our brain’s processing of light hitting our eyes… but insofar as anything has an intrinsic colour, it must be light.

Humour me if you will; imagine you go to the beach, you are watching the sun go down and there is a golden beam cast across the sea aiming straight for you [the reflection of the sun on the sea]. Your friend stood next to you sees a very similar thing, then all your friends come along standing in a row along the beach, all seeing the same golden beam from different perspectives. One of your friend puts electrodes in all of your heads and connects you all up to a computer and monitor, the display shows a completely golden sea shining in a blinding glow of light.

Which is the real beam of light being seen? Yours, one of your friends, or the image on the monitor?

The answer must be that none of them are the correct vision of reality yes?

Depends what you mean. I guess you could say that no one perspective gives the total, complete view, by definition. But what’s a “vision” without a viewer? And a viewer implies a point of perspective.

Here then we have an example of how optical illusions are an everyday occurrence. Just as there is no golden beam, there is no red or any other colour. The light waves are bouncing off the sea and telling us that there is golden stuff there, yet there isn’t, the suns light is simply present there and we interpret that as a reflection ~ no matter where we look from.

I’d agree, perceptions require a perceiver. The perceptions are usually caused by interactions with the external world, by most people’s philosophies.

Perceptions exist though, and words like “red” refer to them.

Have a nice weekend