ESR's New Take on Qualia

This is a standard reply, known as the Lewis-Nemirow "Ability Hypothesis". See here for a critique.

I once read an anecdote about a person who was determined to prove that "purely theoretical" knowledge was just as good as actual experience, and to prove it, he was going to teach himself how to swim by reading about it. After acquiring what he felt was a sufficient "theoretical" knowledge of swimming, he jumped into a pool and was immediately able to swim, much to the amazement of onlookers.

It's probably false, though.

Good analogy!

The ability to recognize red objects is like the skill of riding a bicycle

I don't think the question is about ability. Mary already has the ability to recognize red objects by using a light detector, for example. The question is that, when seeing red for the first time, it seems you've learned something new - i.e. what it feels like to see red.

The question boils down to whether subjective experiences are a form of knowledge.

This applies to humans, who have fixed systems for different kinds of learning. If marty or mary were AI's they should be able to gain abilities through knowledge directly.

I basically agree with what you said, but I would go one step further.

That is, we don't learn about redness as such. When we get the sensory stimuli of redness, we aren't learning the ability to recognize red objects as such. What we are learning is things and causes in the world and redness is just one attribute of the sensory data. It is useful, because it makes the prediction of things in the world more accurate.

Let's take one type of cause in the world that we learn: objects. When we are exposed to visual stimuli of a certain type of object, we learn to expect it to have some type of common pattern. One aspect of this is the color of the object. If the color is nearly always red, we learn to predict that this type of object is typically red. So our prediction of this type of cause in the world is enhanced by recognizing this attribute of the sensory data.

If the sensory data lacks color completely, or if the color is not what we expect it to be, the prediction of our brain is not as accurate. But we might be able to still make the correct inference of the world, it's just a bit harder. If the color is completely different of what we've learned it to be, we are typically still able to recognize the object, but we are surprised about the color, because it doesn't match our representation. Our attention is drawn to the peculiar color.

The high level representation of the object of certain type, then, is composed of these different aspects of what we have seen before. These different aspects are things like the pattern of the visual stimuli, the intensity of the visual signal, the color of the signal, etc. A person who has been exposed to color stimuli all her life, has these extra bits of information about objects of the world she has learned about. So "sensation of red" isn't a thing or place in the brain. It's not even a process in the brain. Redness (and color stimuli in general) is part of our knowledge of the world. It's part of the objects and categories we have learned. It's part of the representation of these objects in our brain.

So when Mary, in her black and white room, tries to learn about colors, she cannot directly influence her representation of the world in her brain. She would have to twiddle every piece of knowledge in her head with regards of its color.

As an example, let's say she has seen a lot of roses from her black and white TV. (Let's assume for simplicity that roses were pretty much always red.) Now, from her sources, she learns that roses are typically red. She would then have to locate the representation of roses in her head and add a probabilistic adjustment if the color of the visual stimuli is red. It's something like: "if the visual pattern is like this and if the color is red, then it's likely that's it's a rose." Or more precisely, it's some sort of conditional probabilistic table.

So for Mary to learn redness before being exposed to color stimuli, she would have to modify all the bits of knowledge of the world that she has acquired through visual data. This would mean all types of objects and other visual information she has. She would have to add this conditional clause to every type of object she has learned where the color red has any significance to the inference of the object. She would have to add this attribute also to every specific knowledge of the world she has too.

So in summary, this thought experiment seems to me like a huge misunderstanding of how we learn about the world.

Interestingly, I don't think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don't have Mary's brain, so I can't really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.

I agree with this.

It was about the effect that actually seeing the color red had on Mary's brain. As opposed to learning about the color red from other sources. His claim was that there was something that could only be learned about the color red by actually seeing it, and that was the effect seeing it has on your mind.

Interestingly, I don't think he bluntly said the (perhaps) most fundamental part of his position: what the color red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about the color red. This also explains how qualia are essentially incommunicable: I don't have Mary's brain, so I can't really observe what it is like for information to be processed in that brain.

That doesn't explain why qualia are incommunciable, since others stuff that happens in brains is communicale. We expect Mary to understand everything except qualia.

Is there a rule, in the Mary's room argument, against Mary doing some brain/electricity experiments on herself? ... I would expect that such a capable scientist could learn what it feels like to see red objects without any red light going through her eyeballs.

The way I see it, it's possible to learn ways to produce the sensation of red, but still learn something upon seeing red.

If each brain is wired up differently from birth, but in ways that achieve similar functionality, then Mary could only learn aggregate and past statistics about the ways brains responded to seeing red. She could make a good guess about the range of responses her own brain is expected to have upon seeing red. But until she sees red, she doesn't know which response within that range is the one she gets.

Funny how those highly unlikely borderline cases whisk away a lot of the confusion, huh? No committed physicalist can postulate a serious difference between seeing something red and having a virtual red-thing pumped into your optic nerve, I would hope. I think that’s a far more useful scenario than thinking about someone suddenly be able to see colour. In fact, you could probably keep moving a step towards your magical ‘inner perceiver’ and asking whether ‘it’s a real experience of redness’. That’s not to say that qualia are fundamentally dualistic, simply that it’s idle to discuss that question while we clearly don’t have the capacity to get anywhere near it at this point.

I’m always surprised to see people arguing for or against the existence of ‘qualia’ or similar as though they’re making some sort of contribution to the field. Particularly when it’s such nonsense as ‘if brain science doesn’t come up with an explanation for these thingies, it’s not complete!’

One such point of view is that currently all existing explanations for qualia - even the ones that try to be materialistic - are actually dualist. For instance, suppose we have a materialist-computational explanation of the brain, which explains how each neuron performs a certain type of computation, and how certain activity patterns in the neurons correspond to specific mental states. We find the model to be good and to accurately predict what people will do. So far, so good.

Yet here we run into a problem - we can now fully explain the brain and one's doings in terms of the computational model, without needing to include actual qualia or subjective feelings in the explanation at all. The model works just as well regardless of whether or not we experience phenomenal consciousness, or are p-zombies. In trying to explain mental states, we have actually explained them away and created a theory that has no need for them.

Therefore, the argument goes, assuming we don't deny the existence of qualia entirely, we must dualists. After all, we now have two models, one physical model which doesn't include qualia, and one which assumes their existence but provides no physical explanation.

The comments in this thread have been concerned with "the experience of redness" and whether this exists or not or is a real physical phenomenon or not. The answers appear to be straight-forward (yes, and yes) and I am left wondering what the dualism debate is all about. Below, I even argued that dualism may be obsolete.

Dualism is obsolete if dualism = {the experience of redness is a metaphysical phenomenon}. But then I remembered some ideas (15 years ago for me) from, "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". Dualism is not really about whether neuronal activity can account for all subjective experience. (It can, and a dualist need not object to this.) It's about whether redness exists.

Redness does exist, so redness is not the best example of qualia for understanding dualism. Consider the quale emphasized in Pirsig's book, "quality". We all agree quality exists in some sense (we'd all like to have quality posts on LW) but dualists want to think that "quality" exists in a real sense out in the territory. A quality book and a quality cheese have something in common; an essence of "quality" attached to them.

My two cents on the issue: I think that some qualia might exist in the territory, in some complicated way. But if they do, they're physical and we just haven't figured out how yet. I've babbled before about how I think qualia like "beauty" are concerned with the subjective experience of patterns, so these qualia are going to be more difficult to describe physically than, say, the experience of redness. We have no well-developed scientific theory for pattern recognition. We can write a code that recognizes a pattern (e.g., the letter "A"), but we don't have any idea what a pattern is.

I think I'm beginning to remember...(from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," which was 15 years ago, for me)...

Everyone, dualists and physical materialists alike, may agree that the experience of redness is a real physical phenomenon (as something that occurs in the brain). But isn't the qualia/dualism debate about whether a red object possesses a property (quality) of "redness"?

On the incommunicability of qualia:

First, I disagree that qualia are inherently incommunicable, they just always have been.

As children, we learn what a tree is when someone points to a tree and says, "tree". In this way, "what a tree is" is communicable.

Red is communicable too. However, what you experience when you experience redness has not been communicable, because it happens inside the brain. When someone says they observe something red, you can only assume that they have some experience analogous to your own experience.

But there's no reason why we can't observe the experience indirectly, eventually, as neuroscience develops. Hooked up to the right machine, it could indicate if I'm "experiencing redness", either because I'm observing something red or imagining something red.

Sounds like putting a name on 'the stuff we don't fully understand yet' - not helpful.

Helpful. We need to put labels on Stuff We Don't Understand yet so that we know what we are talking about when we try t understand it.

Seconded, I also downvoted for lack of summary. And ESR is known for talking out of his ass, so I'm not going to bother reading that unless I'm sure this is much more insightful than his typical writing.

Yes, by now ESR was corrected in the comments and has mentioned that he probably misread Dennett.

I'm not sure either, but at the least his explanation of what he thinks qualia is is clearer than any other that I have seen.