Thursday, January 19, 2023

Mary's room

 Frank Jackson asks what would happen if someone lived their entire life in a black and white environment and then was suddenly presented with colors.* I have performed just such an experiment with an A.s.a. H. robot. In the black and white world the visual input is a grayscale SCALAR quantity. With the advent of a colored environment this transitions to a VECTOR quantity. In the case of humans it would be a four dimensional vector quantity; one component each for rods, "red" cones, "green" cones, and "blue" cones. (Other animals and robots may have something other than a four dimensional vector input.)

* Epiphenomenal Qualia, The Philosophical Quarterly, 32 (127), 1982,  pg 127.

No comments:

Post a Comment