It’s for good reason that so many people call you a pathological liar

I think the answer is ‘yes’ to all, if the information that the person is using to infer what it’s like is stipulated to be ‘complete’ in some sense, as it is in the Mary case.

Also, you might want to add a pedantic proviso such as ‘infer what’s like without having to change the physical constitution of one’s brain with any neuro-engineering.’

Uniting the world against privacy intuitions,
Ignacio

I didn’t define any of the relevant terms, like “figuring out” because I was curious, among other things, what the poll takers mean by them.

Wow! Thank you for the link. This is perhaps one of the most relevant articles I have seen to what I’ve been up to recently. Many lines of discussion are very helpful for me, particularly the references to the neurobiological stuff. I really like your discussion about “unconscious perception”. And I agree with Dennett’s point about Swamp Mary, which was my previous “2007” reference above. The discussion about “egocentric representation” is very cool, and I wonder if this is the sort of thing that grounds subjectivity, albeit via point of view – that very particular way we track our embodiment. Is this your own idea? I don’t recall seeing a citation there. I also like the discussion about the hierarchy of the processing loop: from specific to the abstract.

I think I have one central worry that developed progressively as I read through the essay though. On my view, you would appear to be conflating linguistic abstraction, or even the categorizing feature of ‘concepts’ as understood through our linguistic practice, with the mind’s unconscious binding of objects (and similar processing that results in conscious experience). I think the first step you make in doing this is by assuming that the knowledge of what it is like is propositional. This is in fact precisely what I think the knowledge of what it is like is not. (I think Jackson originally made this distinction too, arguing that Mary did not learn anything interesting at all with respect to ‘what it is like’, but rather simply learned a new fact.) I’m also suspicious about Beaton’s idea (or what appears to be the idea) that blindsight gives evidence for the fact that conscious experience entails the ability to report. Is there work that justifies this generalization from blindsight? Further, it is not clear to me that what we naturally consider a ‘concept’ is necessary for Mary to “detect and respond to red stimuli”. And as for the hierarchy of processing: I’m still not seeing the clear connection between abstract information content at V5 and what we take to be the categorization use of concepts. For example, it is not clear that color constancy in more abstract processing of visual perception is abstract in the way a categorizing concept is – the mind selects, processes, and binds, leading to a simplified production of conscious tracking, but once this process is complete, it does seem to come to us as a simple given (even though it is not). Isn’t experience a paradigm case of what is specific and concrete? Yet, Churchland’s comments about discrimination practices is certainly interesting. . .

I’m not yet convinced about your concluding point – I can’t be; I’ve written to much to the contrary! I take the element of surprise involved with Mary seeing red to be a strong way to make the central point of the story; but I think Mary’s emotions are not THE point. Hence, it seems problematic to claim degrees of the knowledge of what it is like in virtue of the level of surprise Mary feels. The reasons for the lack of surprise in your example seem independent of the special character of the experience under consideration.

This post is too long (sorry), so just one more quick comment: you want to treat “kinds of experience” in isolation, such as visual perception. But I argue that the unity of consciousness, similar to what Chalmers and Bayne proposed, make this impossible. Visual perception will be an element subsumed under the total ‘what it is like to be’. And it is for this reason that description cannot predict the specific character of an upcoming experience.

Thanks again for the link and any further comments about this would be helpful!

Re: motivation, take a look at http://www.petemandik.com/philosophy/papers/nos.pdf

Good point; the phrase ‘figure out’ does seem to bear this epistemological component too. To me, there is an important distinction here between your unconscious mind producing the experience of ‘what it is like’ to see red — a real possibility on my view and something that does not require a pre-existing concept — and the subsequent knowledge of what it is like to see red. It was the former scenario I had in mind, but perhaps ‘figure out’ requires the gaining of this phenomenal knowledge and not just the possibility of the experiential state. It might be good to specify the motivation for the language ‘figure out’ here.

According to that model, there is only a “what it’s like” for a given state if that state is conscious . And for someone to a have conscious experience of red that person must be able to have some sort of comparative concept of red. I presume if you’ve never seen red, you can never have a comparative concept of it.

However, if you are saying we would then expose them to red, person 2 would be okay.

I think……