The Human Question

Natural scientists aspire to be able to explain nature in quantitative terms : that is, terms of its common sensible characteristics as well as the force, and other quantifiable characteristics needed to explain changes in common sensible characteristics. out the recognition of the qualitative features of experience. Thomas Nagel recognized this problem in his article "What's it like to be a Bat?" That article points out that scientific knowledge of how a bat perceives can never convey the experience that a bat has from a bat's point of view. These perceptual notes are called qualia what it's like for a to perceive, so that if we never perceive things the way a bat does, we wouldn't know how to point out that part of nature that indicates that, when you've then you will leave out the recognition of the qualitative features of nature or experience, including the proper-sensibles. But that is not to say that these qualia are immaterial. Rather, it ma...

In Frank Jackson's thought experiment, Mary  knows everything a scientist can know about the color blue but has never sensed it.  Later, when she did sense blue, (Jackson points out that) Mary would know something new that she hadn't known before. BUT what would we say if someone gave Mary black&white-only night/day vision goggles and had her walk around the blue-lit world without letting her actually see the blueness of blue things, but while giving her blue detector so that she would be able to respond to blue colors in a manner roughly as adequate as those of us who have been allowed to use our eyes normally? Would she still know what blue is?  (To those of you who would say that, even though knowledge is knowing how to interact, yet she wouldn't know what blue is because her behavior would never be equivalent to that of a blue-seer, I would reply ad hominem, asking whether you think a computer could really act like a human being.  If you think the answer ...