Today I Learned Thursday: Mary in the Black & White Room
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument#Thought_experiment
Before you ask, yes this is because I just watched Ex Machina.
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
In the movie it's framed in a way of explaining how a computer works, which I think is an amazing analogy. Your computer knows everything there is to know about everything but still doesn't know what it feels like to experience the things it 'knows' about. I also like the little bonus that a computer is all 0s and 1s (black and white).
In this case it's framed more philosophically, is the "feeling" of something uniquely different than the full physical understanding of it?
What are some of your favorite thought experiments or paradoxes?
Or, what's some weird stuff you like to think about?
I'm expecting big things from you on this one, @joelmw.
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I'm claiming this post right now. You're an awesome human being, @JonT. Thanks!
@joelmw I believe that's the most concise post I have ever seen by you,
I don't have any earth shattering or thought provoking things to share but I wanted to say, Ex Machina was AWESOME!
@stardate820926 It is. And troubling. And just sad, for a variety of reasons.
Call me Teary-Eyed Mystic.
I don't think I'd ever heard of this thought experiment before.
I'm going to place myself firmly on the side that her knowledge acquisition could not possibly have prepared her for what she experienced. There's no way to contain the gestalt of human experience.
So another aspect of the paradox is how do we define a perfect computer and perfect understanding and perfect data? And further, at the point that any of these limits is reached, how does that fundamentally change the entity described. I think that the sort of understanding that we're talking about here is only possible in the specific human form and existence--and that when we replicate that existence (a thing which I'm going to suggest is so far beyond our current capabilities as to be practically impossible; we can at best change what is already human into something humanish), we have a human.
But I believe that there are degrees of consciousness and that we may much sooner achieve machine consciousness--and indeed a consciousness which is at least similarly mysterious and inscrutable and glorious. Moreover there are surely varieties of consciousness, each not necessarily "better" or "worse" than another (and so, for practical purposes, coequal), but qualitatively fundamentally different.
And this is one of the reasons that art and music and literature and a yearning and grasping for the supernatural and/or divine are essential: they speak in ways beyond our analytical comprehension to an urge deeper than the analytical self. They are, I propose, precisely a struggle to articulate the ineffable--a thing as much ourselves as Otto's other.
Other weird things
One of the things that has long fascinated me (since about the age of 7, I think (and really it is kind of a simple thought, but paradoxical), is resolution of the dilemma of whether there is One God (as Muslims and Jews and Christians mostly believe) or whether it's necessarily true that God must answer to some superior being.
My mind is confounded as well by the existence or nonexistence of the material world. And absolute beginnings; or not. And time as a constant; or not. It seems to me in either case of each of the three dichotomies listed, there are unresolvable difficulties. Even saying "dichotomies" makes me immediately realize that the truth must be some third way. Like quantum realities and Schrödinger's cat (which I confess, I don't understand as well as I'd like).
Anyway,
@joelmw Here's a pretty good explanation of Schrodinger's cat that may help get your mind un-blown by it.
Granted, this guy is explaining it to a 6th grader, but sometimes it's the 6th grader-level explanation that some of us need in order to understand shit. :)
http://www.mtnmath.com/cat.html
But I'll only lend you this link on the condition that you admit that you like MY little dogs MORE than cats. ;)
@joelmw That physicist's absurd cat thought experiment was intended to show that the Copenhagen interpretation could not possibly be correct. Since then, many physical experiments have proved that the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong.
Spooky actions at a distance are real, but cats being in a superposition of both dead and alive, are not real.
One could answer the question "Will she learn anything or not?" with a request to define the nature of learning.
However, I won't do that. I believe experiential knowledge is different than theoretical knowledge. Thus, gaining experience will increase what one "knows" and therefore counts as "learning" in my book. That holds true whether or not one learned something objectively true (or false) or something subjective, e.g. "I love purple."
colors are pretty i like colors
@miko1 great input!
I spent what may have been an unsettling amount of time wondering, as a child, if the color I saw for blue might be the color someone else saw for red, etc. They would, of course, always see "red" in this way and that would be the color they always called red.
At times, this was curiosity about what was happening in other people's heads and how similarly or differently we perceived certain aspects of the world. At other times, I was merely trying to understand how someone could possibly have a different favorite color from my obviously superior favorite color. (In other words... how could they be so wrong?)
@christinewas I THOUGHT THIS TOO.
PS which Berenst#in universe are you from? I need to know if your colors can be trusted.
@Lotsofgoats Berenstein. I cannot accept this "a" nonsense.
@christinewas - I considered the question of semantics rather than perception. A child only knows something is blue if he's taught it is blue. So, perhaps a teacher with altered perceptions or different intentions might teach that the sky is green. In what ways might that affect the child?
So, this color blind guy saw in colors for the first time and freaked out:
search for enchroma on youtube, there are people crying all over the place. yes, i know that isn't the point at all about @jont's post but you aren't the boss of me.
This isn't quite the same, but reminded me of it:
I flew to Madrid on my own when I was younger, and since I can't sleep on a plane ever, over the long flight across the ocean I just dove deep into the street maps of Madrid. Like, for hours and hours I just stared at this city map of a city I'd never been to.
Madrid, like most old European cities, has a crazy street grid. I mean, it's roughly rectangular, and there's plazas and stuff, but since it was founded in 800(!) AD, there's just layers and layers of quirks to it:
Anyway, I just memorized every street I could and quizzed myself by imagining walking down streets, predicting in my mind what streets I'd cross and where different plazas and landmarks were.
It turned out to be super helpful, in having almost a sixth sense of direction just walking around. People at the hostel I was staying at couldn't believe I'd not been there before. But also it was totally surreal, because I, of course, misjudged the sizes of buildings and streets in my mind, so it was this almost Twilight Zone feel of being in a familiar place that wasn't quite right.
I recommend trying it, if you find yourself on a long flight alone to a city you've never visited.
@dave that's an awesome example that's totally relevant! That's super interesting.
Honestly as much as I hate to admit it, I don't think I would have the patience to try that now. I think the only way I would is if for some reason I couldn't have a laptop or phone on the plane. Plus now I would probably just assume I could use google maps to find out where to go, but I think your way is much cooler.
@dave A few years ago when I planned my first trip to Paris, after booking my hotel room I poked around the Google Map for the area and checked out how to get there via the RER and Metro from CDG. A month later, I was able to take the RER from the airport to the correct stop, go upstairs, think "Wait, I can walk from here," and be at the front desk in less than 10 minutes from there. It was a fantastic feeling. And I swear the experience was what gave me the confidence that my lousy French would still be good enough, which it totally was.
@dave I had a similar experience with NYC. I didn't take on the whole city, but significant portions of different boroughs, and focused a lot on the subway system. I needed to study it, though, because someone thought it would be a good idea for me to be our tranportation/where-the-heck-are-we expert for a youth group trip... when I was only about a year out of the youth group myself. The thing I was least prepared for, as I began walking the actual streets, were the distinct smells of the different places.
@dave I've had the opposite experience: if you try to get around London using the Tube, the physical proximity of stations has very little to do with how long it takes to get from point A to point F. It's all about lines, and it isn't helped by realizing that there are many stations which have been closed and are physically where you want to go, but not available via any line. Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere' uses this little quirk. The book disturbed my sleep for weeks, and now I'm about to watch the TV show.
if knowledge is strictly about objective definitions, then she learns nothing and knowledge is boring af.
also if somebody tries to do the "knowledge v. wisdom" thing here noooooooooooooooope
@Lotsofgoats I really like this way of looking at it and I totally agree. I think the interesting point to me is if you consider Mary to be an AI that was manmade, would she even care that her knowledge is boring af?
Would an AI with consciousness even "feel" the experience of seeing color? Or would it just be another piece of information?
I feel like most stories we have of manmade AI makes the immediate assumption that the AI would yearn to be free like we would, but we only frame things that way because the only form of consciousness we know of is our own.
cc: @joelmw
@JonT the question I have is really whether the physical manifestations of thought (chemical and electrical signals and such) are sufficiently "thought" itself. can we calculate things out such that a single thought has some kind of mapping in the brain? if so, a sufficiently spec'd computer could think just like we do.
so does thought have an abstract facet, or do we just not completely understand it yet? metaphysical af, bro.
when I see something, where am I seeing it? and what is even my seeing of it? there are a bunch of light signals going through my eye and being reflected in just the right way and then being computed in real time and interpreted as something with meaning but is the sight of it an actual reality? THIS IS WHY I DO THINGS LIKE PLAY ROCKET LEAGUE BECAUSE THINKING IS SCARY AND DIFFICULT
A lot of science fiction stories boil down to thought experiments. I have a book called "Introductory Psychology through Science Fiction" which will really give you some stuff to think about.
^ mine's a little more worn than that one
@katylava I want more examples!!
@JonT i'll have to bring it in, i haven't read it in a long time. i just remember that some of the stories really blew my mind.
@katylava I thought I was pretty well read in science fiction, but that's new to me. I just bought it on Ebay for $3.97. Thanks.