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The Knowledge Argument – Mary’s Room (The Color Scientist)


Linkzelda

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Isn't the whole color scientist thing just saying that there's a difference between knowing all the facts about something and experiencing it? I'd think that most people would agree with that idea.

We're all gonna make it brah.

 

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Yeah, but for example, Lucilyn, unless they can clarify this to me, would assume conceptual knowledge is sufficient enough to know the experience of crying, for example. That "we haven't done it" is the crux of the issue. Even if a tulpa was ominscient over what goes on in the mind (like Mary, but she would be omniscient in the physical facts and doings), and can create their own model of how to do such and such in this reality, that experiential learning within context of this spatio-temporal reality can help solidify true, genuine capture of qualia; if they haven't done it themselves, then they lack it.

 

 

Anyway, yeah, you're right. If this can be something people can agree on, then okay, but the thing is with this thought experiment is that physicalism, or other materialistic worldviews that don't welcome potential non-physical facts and presumptions about the world, including the mind, fall victim towards the very same thing that allows them to go about collecting those physical facts. In other words, that same phenomenal (definition #2) vision and sensations they have, and other qualities to experience the "ness" of something.

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Okay well, I'm really not so great at explaining this philosophy stuff if it's not something Lumi or Tewi have already thought about. But, I can imagine what it feels like to cry right now, as if I've done it once in the last few years maybe. I think that is because we've gathered enough information over our life to put together what it's like. Like, we have allergies (seasonal I guess) so we know what it's like to have a runny nose, we've had plenty of experiences of our eyes watering for lots of different reasons (and a mix of both so we were effectively crying but not, wiping eyes and nose from allergies - maybe dog allergies from 10+ years ago that we outgrew). And we know the tightness in your chest because.. I don't know.. that happens, when you're really sad maybe or something bad happens. And aside from the actual sobbing-physically part we've experienced all the rest of what goes with crying. See Lumi hasn't been super sheltered or anything, he just cannot physically sob or cry due to anything non-physical. I don't think we can either, it's like a huge subconscious mental block. But we've never been that sad. Flan and Reisen might've felt the impulse to cry from other reasons but they couldn't. Buuut, we just take the feeling for what it is. Reisen didn't have to cry to prove to herself or us that seeing the moonlit-night was really beautiful to her.

 

But I also think knowledge of crying might just be built-in to most humans by default. You don't really store memories as a baby, but surely all that crying counted for... Uh, just remembered Lumi's parents said he was a really calm baby and almost never cried. I give up.

 

 

Is this on topic? Man, I was tricked. I thought I was explaining off topic but you were actually doing the thread.. nice. All of the last few posts were just trying to solve misunderstanding...

Hi, I'm one of Lumi's tulpas! I like rain and dancing and dancing in the rain and if there's frogs there too that's bonus points.

I think being happy and having fun makes life worth living, so spreading happiness is my number one goal!

Talk to us? https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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No, these anecdotes add to the topic, IMO. It's just that maybe you undermine day-to-day stuff as off-topic, when they're really not since it's part of everyday experiences that allows one to know what it feels like to have them. It is relevant to a thread about experiences.

 

And man, today just isn't your day today, is it Lucilyn? As for knowledge of crying, or something like that being built-in..uh. Maybe? As it seems to be a reactive response you see from a baby, so maybe "crying" in this regard might be a moot point since it gets reducible to where it exists during childbirth. Something like drawing, or just touching a hot stove, and realizing we don't touch hot things because they hurt...that's a different story.

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I don't believe that Mary obtains any significant new information. At most she learns what it feels like to have her retinas stimulated from the inside, rather than just understanding the process.

 

Physicalism is in line with this. Can you explain clearly how it is not?

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I don't believe that Mary obtains any significant new information.

 

This reminded me of this http://www.sciencealert.com/humans-couldn-t-even-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-research-suggests

Hi, I'm one of Lumi's tulpas! I like rain and dancing and dancing in the rain and if there's frogs there too that's bonus points.

I think being happy and having fun makes life worth living, so spreading happiness is my number one goal!

Talk to us? https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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I don't believe that Mary obtains any significant new information. At most she learns what it feels like to have her retinas stimulated from the inside, rather than just understanding the process.

 

Physicalism is in line with this. Can you explain clearly how it is not?

 

You’re undermining the “what it feels like” for her to have as a physical attribute. She knows about measurements, and certain structures of light, for example, but a feeling, nor a color requires only some notes on wavelengths, or even retinal functions. If knowledge of perception is physical, then she shouldn’t be surprised to see red, but the key thing to focus on is that because she’s been in a black and white room for most of her life, how can she even gather experiential learning of “red,” or any kind of phenomenal vision of color?

 

The physical facts she has in her book, or series of book doesn’t suddenly make her have experiential content of phenomenal vision. The same goes for a color blind person who may not be able to pick out certain colors, but if they’re given some tool to experience those colors, I’m not sure if their first reaction would be, “Well, what’s so special about this color that I couldn’t see before?”

 

 

I’m sure there’s going to be some kind of profound feeling, or shock. There’s no point in being shocked over something you already knew as the novelty probably faded away before. But, there wasn’t even an experience of novelty being faded away in regards of color for that color blind person. Physical facts via a collection of textual data is not enough to match inner experiences as physicalism statements cannot really give a direct approach on that.

 

If that was the case, then minds being inaccessible would be…accessible. We wouldn't be talking about thought experiments, as we would be focusing on hard problems with consciousness (e.g. how qualia arises, and how a person can instantiate it easily).

 

 

 

Long story short: if one is undermining, or denying phenomenal experience, they would in a way be contradicting themselves.

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Physical facts via a collection of textual data is not enough to match inner experiences

The inner experiences are physical - the "redness" of red is not a thing in and of itself, just a collection of neurons in Mary's brain that point a certain way. Mary is shocked or feels a profound feeling, that feeling is due to the neurons firing when they have never fired before.

 

If that was the case, then minds being inaccessible would be…accessible. We wouldn't be talking about thought experiments, as we would be focusing on hard problems with consciousness (e.g. how qualia arises, and how a person can instantiate it easily).

Minds are pretty accessible, if you have sufficient knowledge(which we do not, since neurobiology is very difficult), a scalpel, and a sterile operating room.

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Minds are pretty accessible' date=' if you have sufficient knowledge(which we do not, since neurobiology is very difficult), a scalpel, and a sterile operating room.[/quote']

 

You may be confusing the physical brain with mind; the one that gets associated with mental. Inner experiences are not accessible, as if this were the case, there wouldn’t be hard problems with consciousness in general. We would know each other’s beetle in the box, and language wouldn’t be this large compensation to make inferences about it.

 

The inner experiences are physical - the "redness" of red is not a thing in and of itself' date=' just a collection of neurons in Mary's brain that point a certain way. Mary is shocked or feels a profound feeling, that feeling is due to the neurons firing when they have never fired before.[/quote']

 

If qualia is physical, this means that there has to be an indication for us to be aware of it being just as physical as any other physical object. And chalking up neurons as the physical object of qualia doesn’t make it any easier. How can physical matter, that’s non-experiential, suddenly turn into experiential matter? Can you rely just on a materialistic worldview to describe said qualia – would colors, after-images, and such still be physical?

 

If this is the case, what would you say about imposition? How can there be a physical instantiation of a tulpa, or any after-image/hallucination/projection? You can’t state it’s neurons that are the qualia, as we would be having our neurons shooting at the atmosphere to project this; no point in having a skull, actually. If qualia has no casual role, even for the materialistic worldviews, it doesn’t add up. Even a materialistic worldview wouldn’t imply of qualia not having a casual role.

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"Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete."

 

 

The assumption here is that it is possible to have complete knowledge of something without experiencing it for yourself.

Recording the data from your own experience is the final piece of the puzzle.

I think the premise is flawed.

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." - Carl Sagan

Host: SubCon | Tulpas: Sol, Luna, Alice, Little One, Beast and Solune (me) | Servitors: Odonata, Guardian

 

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