"What's it like to be a computer?" or "Calculating remarks regarding Frank Jackson's thought experiment regarding qualia"
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 ...