Another way to rephrase this is: Does the person who has read absolutely everything about love, know what it feels like to love? This thought experiment relies mostly on how fuzzy our understanding of consciousness is, and how vague our definitions of it are.
It confuses conscious 'knowing' and conscious 'seeing' (or 'feeling' in the love example), which are two different things. How can I state this confidently? Because we do have a wonderfully detailed computational model for consciousness, which explains a ton of data!
Most discussions of consciousness are frustratingly incomplete because they leave out a crucial aspect. Who is the “experiencer”, that is consciously “experiencing”? How is that "I" put together? Only a clear answer/theory that attempts to define and construct both the experience and experiencer will allow us to see through these cutesy philosophical constructs like Mary the color vision expert, philosophical zombies and more.
Here's a definition, based on the computational model I mentioned above, that makes a lot of sense.
Consciousness is the constellation of past experiences experiencing the present, assimilating it to act and prepare for future opportunities.*
So you are nothing but a bundle of experiences.
Each new experience, after it is had, is added to this bundle, and changes you. With that in mind, here's how Mary's experiences make sense. Mary could read everything there is about color vision, but all of these are just semantic experiences. They become a part of her. When the first visual experience happens -- when she actually sees red -- she has absolutely no visual experience to fall back on that explains this. Reading about it, does not in any way reconstruct the unique neural patterns going all the way from her retina to her inferotemporal cortex. The experience is utterly new, and as with all new experiences, it is memorable and retained and becomes part of her. That sadly, also means that all subsequent experiences of red are not as vivid, because they are now matched against what came before. (This invokes the idea of predictive inference; there are reasons to do this -- it is metabolically cheap to just classify and forget, rather than retain the full pattern.)
*-this definition of consciousness leaves out how an experience is constructed. To answer that very briefly, it is when the sensory data streaming in is matched locally and globally against past experiences and a broad agreement (a “resonance”) is achieved. This is obviously a very lossy summary. You can read this for article for a complete picture: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360801...
> Does the person who has read absolutely everything about love, know what it feels like to love?
No, but Mary knows much more than that. By hypothesis, Mary has complete knowledge of all physical facts. That is vastly more knowledge than a person can gain by reading "absolutely everything" about anything.
One big problem with the thought experiment is that the premise is so outlandish that almost nobody is willing to use it as given in their reasoning, including Jackson himself. Instead they substitute some vastly weaker premise and ignore the vast difference in implications.
That's all true, but that's not what the thought experiment is about. The thought experiment states that not only has Mary read everything there is about colour vision, but that she knows everything there is to know.
Yes, it hinges on the definition of "to know everything about something" as if there are neatly defined epistemic boundaries. Not all knowledge can be captured in words. Also, this assumes that all knowledge can exist independent of perspectives.
No.
There are qualia that are necessarily unique (because our constellation of experiences that generate these is unique) that we do not have shared definitions -- which is what words are. To then say that one can "know everything" is meaningless. It's generally the case with these seeming conundrums. The fault lies in the most basic of assumptions that are almost invisible to us because they rely on our intuition.
It confuses conscious 'knowing' and conscious 'seeing' (or 'feeling' in the love example), which are two different things. How can I state this confidently? Because we do have a wonderfully detailed computational model for consciousness, which explains a ton of data!
It's a real shame that it's largely ignored or unknown even in the field of neuroscience. I've written about this here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-... As I mentioned there, I also co-authored a book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...) where we go into this theory in greater detail. Stephen Grossberg and his work really do deserve greater attention.
Most discussions of consciousness are frustratingly incomplete because they leave out a crucial aspect. Who is the “experiencer”, that is consciously “experiencing”? How is that "I" put together? Only a clear answer/theory that attempts to define and construct both the experience and experiencer will allow us to see through these cutesy philosophical constructs like Mary the color vision expert, philosophical zombies and more.
Here's a definition, based on the computational model I mentioned above, that makes a lot of sense.
Consciousness is the constellation of past experiences experiencing the present, assimilating it to act and prepare for future opportunities.*
So you are nothing but a bundle of experiences.
Each new experience, after it is had, is added to this bundle, and changes you. With that in mind, here's how Mary's experiences make sense. Mary could read everything there is about color vision, but all of these are just semantic experiences. They become a part of her. When the first visual experience happens -- when she actually sees red -- she has absolutely no visual experience to fall back on that explains this. Reading about it, does not in any way reconstruct the unique neural patterns going all the way from her retina to her inferotemporal cortex. The experience is utterly new, and as with all new experiences, it is memorable and retained and becomes part of her. That sadly, also means that all subsequent experiences of red are not as vivid, because they are now matched against what came before. (This invokes the idea of predictive inference; there are reasons to do this -- it is metabolically cheap to just classify and forget, rather than retain the full pattern.)
*-this definition of consciousness leaves out how an experience is constructed. To answer that very briefly, it is when the sensory data streaming in is matched locally and globally against past experiences and a broad agreement (a “resonance”) is achieved. This is obviously a very lossy summary. You can read this for article for a complete picture: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360801...