Mary’s experience of the Qualia

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Typically, when you want to explain something in physical terms, the criterion to be met is that given the physical terminology, no additional explanation need be given for how to translate it in the reverse direction. What I mean to say by that is that if you explain X in terms of Y, Y only counts as an adequate explanation of X if you can give Y to someone and they can see its relation to X without any further explaining. So if you want to explain why the sun sets every evening by saying “because the Earth orbits around its axis” that servers as an adequate explanation because if you give that explanation to someone who has never heard it before (say a child), that person will be able to piece it together in their head and say something like “Ah, so that’s why we see the sun set every evening”.

I don’t think any of the explanations given for red quite hits the mark. You can explain it in terms of the tendency of the electrons in the red object to jump from higher energy levels to lower ones, the difference being equal to the energy carried by one of the 700 nm wavelength photons emitted in the process. But supposing you gave this explanation to someone without telling them what it was an explanation for, how are they to reconstruct the color red in their mind? How are they go from the explanation (Y) back to the original problem (X)?

Same with explaining red in terms of the wavelength of light.

Same with explaining it in terms of neurons and chemicals in the brain.

The central problem in the Mary scenario is that an obstinant gap exists between any physicalist explanation one can give and the subjective first-person experience of red. That gap remains, to this date (as far as I’m concerned), unbridged, and so no explanation on the physical side can be used to reconstruct in the mind the understanding of red - that what it is an explanation of is precisely the subjective first-person experience of red.

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We have to assume that everyone would be seeing red as green and vice versa, that would be swapping terms not attributes. If not then one would soon find out that we are seeing things wrongly [in terms].

We can compare say variations from the full rainbow [spectrum of visible light], then compare. If we had no such base reference then we would attribute light in any variation of 7 ~ but we would all have the same attributes but use different terms.

Optical illusions are perhaps the far extreme of seeing incorrectly. We all see the same sky, trees water fish people etc, only non-natural appearances cause incorrect vision. The eye as an instrument simply has limits to its functionality, however within its function it works well and we all see the same things within that field. After all if you build a car and it does what cars do, it you try to make it fly you have to add things to it.

No light is a wave, a particle and a field, the wave is simply the photon moving in a wave like fashion.

Indeed, this is the point, colour is not a real property of things, light is transparent. When we see a red thing it is simply our brains reading the length of the wave and attributing red to it. If you change the light source that frequency changes, so we see a different colour.

Yup have a good weekend yourself, thanks for the interesting debate. :slight_smile:

Next we can begin to ask what red is apart from light.

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Hi gib,

I agree we cannot know what red is from studying light [without our inner vision of it], we have to say that red is not a quality of light, but a quality of the mind as it perceives light. Can we then give mary the quality of mind called redness, I am not sure if we can as we have removed the comparisons from which it is drawn.

Maybe its both the external and the internal reacting with one another. The internal gets input from the external world which it ‘produces’ [?] an image or idea for [noting that these things can cross over, an idea can become an image etc].

Does it do this for animals and insects? I doubt if their brain is complex enough. One would think that there is a direct relationship which has no subjectivity whatsoever.

On a weirder note; we still have to ask what is coloured light?_! So far we have described it as not being light itself. Is there a quality of colour in the universe?

can we show that some aspects of the real world are not physical?

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I’m convinced that Mary’s mind cannot contain red unless she actually perceives it.

An animal has whatever qualia it needs in order to survive… and as far as I’m concerned, everything experiences qualia.

Yes, I believe there is. Even qualia are part of the universe. I don’t see them as ‘fake’ or ‘illusions’ - it’s just that their essential character is to be mental. Just as it is the essential character of water to be liquid, the essential character of fire to be hot, the essential character of some things are to be mental (and as far as I’m concerned, everything is mental).

I’m convinced that a great deal of the universe is not physical, but whether we can ‘show’ that - or at least convince others of that - is a daunting challenge.

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acid trips? :laughing: I jest sir, the mind can produce many a random image but something as fundamental as colour probably not without percieving it first.

Interesting! My mind just rushed to find examples where this is not so, but I think even germs would have qualia of some kind. …but what the hell is it!

Is there a quality of colour in the universe?

Indeed, I cannot imagine our visual world as illusory for sure. I can understand mental as set apart from coloured light though? All the colour in the universe cannot be mental [well yes unless we see it all as mental]. Perhaps we can go so far as having a primary three, qualia, mental, physical, all of which are obviously variations of something that is neither.

When we see colour we are not just imagining or thinking it, hence it is not just mental, it has a quality aside from the thought. Imagine a medieval vision of light and that is how I am seeing what we are seeing ~ in a manner? this is our vision of the world, what we actually see, whatever that is.

Indeed, though we have shown that red is not light, next step, that it is not elecro-magentic and chemical on the neural scale. …this seams quite apparent that it would not be those things either.

:slight_smile:

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Red is a concept we use to describe the quality of “redness”, which is merely the experience or feeling of particular physical information that occurs within our visual spectrum. The physicality or information of something is wholly different from the quality it exudes within the experiencing being. For whatever reason materialist have a hard time comprehending this crucial point.

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There are electromagnetic and chemical correlates of the experience of red, but they only correlate with the qualia or feel of what red is. Interestingly enough, when experiencing red these correlations occur within the brain, which likely provides some sort of physical feeling within the body. If we were to circumvent the actual experience of red, and merely stimulate the part of the brain necessary to provide this physical feeling, will red be experienced? I would imagine that it would not, as it is the experience of red which prompts the brains firing. This neuronal firing is likely the mechanism that provides for the implantation of a memory within the physical body (hence the following feeling of what it is like to experience red). When we recall this feeling, we are not experiencing redness, but re-stimulating the neuronal correlates of experiencing red that allow us to experience the “memory” of redness. The experience of red stands as a necessary precursor to the possibility of this process. Mary, not having experienced red, would never have the correlate experience to even draw upon, therefore, a chemical or neuronal stimulation will fail to produce “redness”. She is most certainly lacking a fundamental feature of “knowing” or understanding what red is.

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Mary has only the info saying what red is, if she has the red receptors in her brain already the experiment is null and void. We have to presume that those neural pathways have not already been created and that we are trying to teach her what red is. …or produce the redness in different receptors.

This may still be possible, just as colours can get mixed up with smells in certain neural conditions, then we only need to find a way to tell the brain that something it already has equals red e.g. a particular shade of grey.

If the brain can make a smell into a colour or give an allergic reaction to the colour red [also possible] then we may presume it already has all the faculties necessary to create all qualia?_! You could essentially trick the brain into believing a particular shade of grey is red, eventually if we do this with all colours and greys, then Mary would be watching a colour TV in a coloured room ~ even though we would see black and white in it.

The question must be if we have to have the initial experiences [we build from infancy] in order to form the qualia which can thence be swapped around and changed? sites ferrel children.

The next level of experiment for me is to ask what within the qualia is redness ~ what do we actually see?

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No-one’s seeing anything wrongly, just differently. I’m sure one of us is missing the point here :stuck_out_tongue: The experience you have when you see something as red need not be anything like the experience I have. It may be identical to the experience I have seeing green. However, that experience you have learnt to call red.

The experience you have when you see the first colour of the rainbow may be the same experience I have when I see the fourth, and vice-versa. We still call the first colour of the rainbow “red” and the fourth “green”, even though we have different ways of experiencing it. There’s no wrongness, and no way to find out.

Optical illusions are perhaps the far extreme of seeing incorrectly. We all see the same sky, trees water fish people etc, only non-natural appearances cause incorrect vision. The eye as an instrument simply has limits to its functionality, however within its function it works well and we all see the same things within that field. After all if you build a car and it does what cars do, it you try to make it fly you have to add things to it.

You were talking about visualising a sinewave and wondering where the red went, though. That sinewave is just a visualisation.

“Transparent” means that something lets light through… colourless? :slight_smile:

I agree that it is simply out brains reading the light’s information and attributing red to it. So we perceive light of a certain wavelength as red. So we call it “red light”. It’s what we mean when we say “red light”. The experience only exists in our minds, but the things that cause it are external. And I think one only confuses oneself if one expect objects to have personal experiences attached as part of them, or experiences to have some external reality.

Cheers!

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The brain cannot create qualia, it can only trigger memories of experienced qualia. The initial experiences of qualia provide the brain with the necessary connections it uses to create or trigger these memories. Our knowledge is entirely limited to our experience. How does Mary assimilate the “physical” information she is provided with about red? Physicality can only exist for the individual, before experience. Mary had to experience the “physical” information, which at that point made the information subjective or non-objective. Mary’s experience of information will be different from mine, because our prior experiences dictate what exactly we might take from current ones, ie. I will understand the same physical information that Mary has been provided with in completely different ways, especially since I can see color. Furthermore, I contend that when Mary steps out of the room, and is provided with a bright red rose, that she will likely continue to see mostly in the gray-scale. Her cones and rods have been stifled, and are underdeveloped in the sense of recognizing color. She might see what she would call red, but it would be drastically different from what we understand to be our experienced spectrum of red.

As far as what we are actually seeing, Im not sure. That’s better answered by someone who has a scientific background in vision theory, but I will say this. I do not believe objects themselves “contain” qualia, that would make the qualia a physical attribute. Rather, qualia is what is felt by the experiencing being. The object provides the physical information, which is experienced by the experiencer. Within the experience lies the qualia, or quality of what it is like to experience that piece of information.,

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I see your point, but by cross referencing my sensory data with that of many others then one would know surely. If for experimental purposes I had a blue book and when I touched it is said I am blue, then if your experience of blue was red it would still announce that it is blue?

True, my point was that photons act like what that vision represents, colours are different wavelegths. I expect the eyes read the distance between one photon and the next to determine colour, but the colour itself is produced in the brain.

What other term do I have to describe light that has no ‘light’ or colour? ah by reading the rest of what you said, i see you understood what i meant.

There is an interesting dimension to qualia if I have the idea right?; we begin our lives with x amount of qualia which do not describe the world as well as y amount we have as adults. The same can be said for different animals and throughout evolution. Perhaps each developmental stage is derived from the extant qualia!

Even then, given infinite intellect an infinite being or god could be omniscient but without qualia, hence to build eden [so to say] one must go through all the stages of evolution.

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perhaps ~ though it can get confused and create new qualia like red as a smell? if you are right then we are born with a small amount of qualia, which is then matched to experience from which the other qualia derive, yes. Can we not imagine [e.g. when on psychotropic drugs] or develop other qualia by a similar process?

I agree Mary probably would still see in black and white.

One would think so, then we must find out what we are actually seeing before we can say that is an absolute. There are two problems, one of imagination and the way qualia exist in the brain I.e. that they ‘hold’ a quality in them like red. The second problem is that we are actually seeing ‘something’, and we have already described that as set aside from physical light.

If these tow last things describe something shared and not physical then there may qualia out there - so to say.

I certainly hope there is someone here who can answer these things.

:slight_smile:

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Well, how can you cross-reference experience? Only by language. And language is created and applied by the experiencers. There’s the problem.

The book could know what colour it is, but not what my experience of that colour is. And if it could… who is to say which is the “correct” perception of blue? Your question should really read “if your experience of blue was my red”… Whose definition does it settle on, mine or yours?

You’d need a separate, new vocabulary to define the ‘true’ experiences of colour, and then for each person you’d have to translate which of their experiences maps onto the ‘true’ colours… and no-one would be any the wiser after, as they’d still experience red the same way they always had, and they’d use the communal definitions in all their dealings.

An interesting possibility, if omniscience only includes facts and not experiences. It’s a lot to work up to in just six days work :stuck_out_tongue:

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We are evolutionarily predisposed to experience. I am personally under the impression that we do not need brains to experience, it is only here to connect the inner and outer experiences we incur. When the brain and the rest of the body is developing within the womb, it seems qualia would be experienced, therefore, the brain comes into the world with some experiences already having been integrated into the being.

We most certainly can create new qualia, but the caveat remains that in order to do so, we must have already experienced some other type of qualia. Psychotropics are like the brain in a sense, they provide for and create connections between what I feel is the embedded memory of physicality and our conscious awarneness. All of matter contains the memory of what came before, and we are made of physicality and matter. These substances allow us to tap into those deeply embedded memories from our evolutionary trek; ultimately I think they allow us to tap into much more, but that goes beyond the topic of this discussion.

The issue is that qualia cannot exist without physicality. They go hand in hand. When it comes down to it, we are “seeing” or experiencing a form of information/energy (it exists everywhere, even our imagination is an experience of energy), but if we continue to focus on that aspect, all we will ever come to understand is that there is physicality (hence our current predicament with this materialist paradigm). If you focus on the physical and an explanation from that end, that is what you will find. There are ways to explain the experience of color through the brain, but they are incomplete. When we begin to shift our attention to the fact that this physical information/energy must be experienced in order to be known, an enigma occurs. Experience itself feels different from a physical constant. It is what subsumes a physical constant. In this sense then it must be different from the physical constant.

Whitehead felt that subjectivity could only occur within the present moment, and all objects (reified physical information) were in the past. Thats brilliant, qualia must happen within the present moment of conscious awareness. Qualia do not exist in the brain, but in the present moment of experience. The brain simply connects moments, allowing us to utilize and integrate previous experiences into current ones. I do not know what seeing red entails physically from a scientific perspective (dont feel like looking it up), but I would put all of my money on the understanding that all that is occuring is our physical information is being coupled with another type of physical information that represents itself to us as red based upon previous interactions with information over our evolutionary period. Qualia/experience is the colliding or coupling of information being felt in the present moment, based on earlier moments.

Not sure if any of that helped, but I would imagine a shift in perspective needs to take place. It seems like you are looking for a physical explanation to something which you intuitively feel is non-physical. How can that work?

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I would go so far as to say even something as dead as a rock experiences qualia. What does it feel like? I have no clue - probably something we can’t even imagine.

Perhaps Berkeley would be instructive here. His famous mantra, other than ‘esse es percepi’, is ‘the only reality is ideas and the minds that house them’. I think the concept of ‘idea’ has evolved since then, or rather has become limited, so I wouldn’t use it. I think ‘qualia’ works much better (‘ideas’ in today’s parlance rings more like ‘thoughts’). The central notion is that because we only have our own experiences through which to know the world, one really can’t make a formal and coherent distinction between real things and our experiences of them (and I equate experience with qualia). So the whole world as we experience it (and what other sense of ‘world’ could there be?) is both real (i.e. out there) and mental (i.e. in here).

It’s easy to see how colors might be said to be mental, but not so easy with lightwaves - but there Berkeley would say lightwaves exist as ideas. For sure, we can only claim to know or be conscious of light by way of, first, conceiving it, and second, believing it to exist. What more is there than that? If there is anything more to establishing its actual existence (i.e. outside your mind) it would play no part in your experience, so you wouldn’t even have a way to feel it, recognize it, be aware of it, or connect to it through consciousness in any other way.

Berkeley guides my own philosophy of mind, though the details are different and I extend mine beyond the sphere of one’s personal experiences.

I would equate qualia and mental, recognizing little difference if any, and I would relegate the physical to the sphere of sensation (being consistent with Berkeley), which is a more specific instance of mind and qualia.

Well, hold up there - although I’ll hop on the former train (that red is not light), I’m much more hesitant to climb on board the latter (that red is not electro-magnetic and chemical). I don’t agree with the materialist who would have us believe that red reduces to neuro-chemical events, but I think the identity does hold - just in the opposite direction - that is, it’s the neuro-chemical events that reduce to red. I believe all neuro-chemical phenomena, and thus the brain itself, is a sensory representation of the brain-in-itself (think Kant) and that what the brain-in-itself actually is is none other than the experiences it is having. So when it comes to the specific neuro-chemical events we typically associate with seeing red, those events (the events-in-themselves so to speak), are really the experience of seeing red itself.

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Well said.

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If 10 people stand and look at the red book which has ‘I am a red book’ written on it, and speaks the same words, then they all do the same with every other coloured book, then cross reference that with light wavelengths, then they would all know what colour is what irrespective of subjective thinking.

that’s an interesting point, I agree, but I don’t know how one can experience without a brain. However we do seam to, so what is the ‘experiencer’?

I agree but how? Unless there is something external to material things, there is no way to achieve this.

They do in the imagination, however if there is an element to them that is non material we should call that a qualia? Or experiencer/thinker of qualia, or perhaps invent something new.

It helps a lot, thank you for that.

It cannot work, the idea is to show that real world experiences are not always in the material. That is a mighty big step towards spirituality or ‘factor x’ of some kind.

Or the only thing we can imagine/experience! As for the rock, can we say it experiences? Perhaps we have to rename qualia as potential for non experiencing things, if there are such things. I would say there is an experiencer both within and without, we experience within as an extension of the general and universal experiencer.

And before minds existed? :exclamation: I would say that statement is secondary to the first party + body of [physicality].

I would tie a piece of string at least between our experience of a thing and the thing itself ~ even if it can be cut [misperceived etc].

Lets just begin by saying there is something prior to us experiencing things, we are born and much qualia are produced from external input. Equally we can draw a reality may which would eventually include something like light or light exactly ~ if our description was true.

Hmm interesting. Something tells me that if we striped every aspect of the brains electro-magnetism [little different to light] and chemical makeup right down, then we would not find red [or much else]. At most we will find a matrix of info giving us the knowledge of red but not the experience ~ not the very thing we see. Nor would it tell us what red is or what the light we actually see is.

Qualia, mental and info, related but different?

Thanks chaps

:slight_smile:

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Yes, of course. They will all agree that that is a red book, because it is a red book. That’s part of my point.

However, they will not know that their experience of red is the same as each other’s, or whether half of them have inverted spectra, or shifted spectra, or even some categorically different qualia in terms of their experience of the colours. They will only know that they are experiencing something they have learnt to call “red”, and they will all agree that that is what they’re experiencing when they see the book.

So the second part of my point is: a shared commonality of conclusions based on a shared cause need not entail a shared private experience - as long as the experience has the same cause and permits the same conclusion, it’s impossible to say how it is experienced.

(You’ve got a lot of parallel talks going, I’ll restrict myself to one point for a reply. :slight_smile: )

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No, I mean it. It experiences qualia just as vividly as you or I experience color, sound, pain, etc. You see, my metaphysical outlook is that experience (i.e. qualia) underlies all existence and in fact is the foundation upon which things can exist. It is not something associated exclusively with brains or living organisms or even supernatural/spiritual beings; it is associated with all physical systems undergoing some kind of activity. The unique structure of each physical system and its unique pattern of activity determines the unique quality of the experience (i.e. which qualia it is). Albeit, a rock usually isn’t doing much of anything, but there’s always the activity of its molecular/atomic makeup which is constantly in motion. It is that with which qualia of some kind or another are associated.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

If I were Berkeley, I would probably say there was always some mind in existence, even if that mind were God’s.

Ah, but we find that the “thing itself” can’t be severed from your idea of the thing itself (you had to think it, right?). The idea can certainly be severed from your perception of the thing (i.e. your sensory experience), but both these find themselves rooted in the mind.

This indeed gets problematic at a certain point, and I find it just as troubling as you that this Berkelerian idealism doesn’t permit one to posit the existence of an outer world. I find myself compelled to regardless. To resolve this dialectic, I aim in my metaphysics for consistency, not truth and knowledge. I consider the latter to be hopeless and unsalvageable. But there is nothing inconsistent between the notion of an outer world and Berkeley’s idealism; it’s just that the latter prohibits one from claiming or believing in the outer world. So I abandon any claims to truth or knowledge, and I concern myself not with belief. Instead, I take simple pleasure in working out a metaphysical model of the universe so as to make it as internally consistent as possible. In that way, I can talk about an outer world beyond the experiences and qualia that make up our minds without claiming to be describing anything outside the model I have constructed. The minds I speak of and the universe beyond it are all elements in the model, and within the model it makes perfect sense to talk about things beyond the ‘minds’ therein.

There are things prior to our experiences, yes, and we are born with qualia produced by external inputs. Personally, I would say these things are simply more mind (or the greater mind), but that’s not so relevant. You could draw a reality (cognitively) that includes light as one of its elements, and the overall model that would result from this could very well match, in an isomorphic sense, the reality outside our minds. But this isomorphic match to things in the outer world is different from our actual referring to those things. On a Berkelerian account, one cannot refer to anything other than perception and thought. As I pointed out above though, we can work our way around this by referring only to elements in our models of reality - those are certainly in the head - and say of them that they exist outside the ‘mind’ insofar as the ‘mind’ in question is also an element in the model.

In a sense, you’re right, of course. If we stripped the brain down indefinitely, we’ll never see ‘red’, at least not quintessentially; all we’ll get are smaller and smaller physical components - pieces of neurons and the particles that make up the chemical neurotransmitters. But this overlooks the representative function I said that brains, and all physical systems, perform. That is to say that the brain as we perceive it is only a representation, a sensory experience, of that which gave rise to it (much like shadows are representations of objects with light casted on them - you don’t dissect the shadow to uncover the original object). Like I said, it’s the brain-in-itself, not the brain-as-perceived, that reduces to experiences, and in fact is experiences.

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This is an interesting view! I’ve reread it a few times, trying to get my head around it… On what is your outlook based? What would the consequences be of it being true?