From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jul 21 2005 - 09:18:34 MDT
Tennessee Leeuwenburg wrote:
>
> One day she lands on Earth at the end of her mission. Upon opening the
> hatch, she casts her eyes first on an enormous bunch of red roses
> which have been given to her.
>
> "Oh", she says, "so that's what it's like".
>
> Has she learnt anything new about colour? If you accept that she has,
> then qualia must be real, because she already knew everything that
> science could inform her about the world and about colour. There must,
> therefore, be something real about colour which is not addressed by
> science.
Not that I'm still at the stage of my career when this sort of thing seemed
mysterious to me, but:
What new predictions can the scientist make once she actually sees a bunch of
red roses?
If she cannot make any new predictions then in what sense do you wish to imply
that she has increased her understanding?
I am not a logical positivist but I think that they ask the right questions.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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