At a recent talk at BU about Consciousness,
Steven Horst, a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan
advanced an apparently
well-known argument by Frank JacksonThe argument uses the thought experiment of a woman named Mary
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Platonic ideas vs realityfareApril 3 2008, 08:16:44 UTC
Mystics, after Plato, consider knowledge as the passive attribute of an ethereal mind, directly related to the known object. Realists consider knowledge as the interactive feature of a physical mind, operating on a representation that is related to the known object only through indirect potential interaction.
Platonists are indeed insane, by Korzybski's criterion. They can't distinguish the notion of representation.
I agree mostly with your assessment of this thought experiment. As I read it, Mary does not and cannot have the same information by merely studying 'red' as she would by experiencing it, and for the same reasons you state: in the abstract representations, she is not taking into account the impact on her mental state. The only way she would be able to get this information would be by creating and running a full-scale simulation of herself - and that would be the same as herself actually experiencing 'red'. It's basically the Halting Problem
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"I don't think anyone denies that meditation, introspection, asceticism, mental and physical discipline, can have a lot of practical, observable, effects."
Perhaps, but those are secondary.
"What is being dismissed, for good reasons, are the explanations of those effects as supernatural phenomena involving forces that transfer energy or information outside the body of the meditating person. What is being laughed at, for just as good reasons, are claims that these experiences reveal anything about the universe, great cosmic principles even, when they only reveal delusions of the human mind."
On this I'm afraid we must disagree. I believe that the already accumulated scientific data as described by Radin, Puthoff et al *do* describe exactly such a transfer of information.
"Your ESP explanations will be much more credible once one of your gurus claims and wins one of the many million-dollar prizes offered to whoever can provide evidence of such phenomena."
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Realists consider knowledge as the interactive feature of a physical mind,
operating on a representation that is related to the known object only through indirect potential interaction.
Platonists are indeed insane, by Korzybski's criterion. They can't distinguish the notion of representation.
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Perhaps, but those are secondary.
"What is being dismissed, for good reasons, are the explanations of those effects as supernatural phenomena involving forces that transfer energy or information outside the body of the meditating person. What is being laughed at, for just as good reasons, are claims that these experiences reveal anything about the universe, great cosmic principles even, when they only reveal delusions of the human mind."
On this I'm afraid we must disagree. I believe that the already accumulated scientific data as described by Radin, Puthoff et al *do* describe exactly such a transfer of information.
"Your ESP explanations will be much more credible once one of your gurus claims and wins one of the many million-dollar prizes offered to whoever can provide evidence of such phenomena."
Why? James Randi is not a scientist - and it's already been well documented ( ... )
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