Knowledge Tree
RoboMary
Facts (11)
Sources
What is hard about the “hard problem of consciousness”? philosophy.stackexchange.com Nov 18, 2020 11 facts
quoteDaniel Dennett states: "Robots don’t have color experiences! Robots don’t have qualia. This scenario isn’t remotely on the same topic as the story of Mary the color scientist."
claimDaniel Dennett argues that asserting the impossibility of a RoboMary is not an argument for the falsity of materialism, but rather an assumption of it.
claimDaniel Dennett argues that critics who claim the 'RoboMary' thought experiment leaves something unexplained must specify what that is without assuming qualia are non-physical.
claimThe RoboMary thought experiment proposes that a robot named RoboMary could learn what it is like to see a scene in color by being told the internal state corresponding to color vision by another robot of the same type that possesses functioning color vision.
claimDaniel Dennett's 'RoboMary' thought experiment features a conscious, self-aware robot that possesses complete knowledge of its own circuitry and programming, along with the ability to make targeted changes to its internal state.
claimIn the RoboMary thought experiment, qualia are neither intrinsically private nor ineffable because they can be transferred from one conscious entity to another via communication.
claimAnti-materialists argue that a hypothetical entity like 'RoboMary' would be a 'p-zombie,' which is defined as an entity that is physically and functionally identical to a human but lacks qualia.
accountIn Daniel Dennett's 'RoboMary' thought experiment, the robot RoboMary is equipped with monochrome cameras but uses her knowledge of color vision to calculate how color cameras would record a scene, deduce the resulting changes to her neural circuitry, and manually adjust her internal state to match what it would be if she had color cameras.
claimPhysicalists argue that if RoboMary's physical state is identical to the state that would result from seeing in color, there is no reason to assume she would experience the scene differently than if she were actually seeing in color.
claimDaniel Dennett's 'RoboMary' story is not intended to argue that Mary herself would be able to perform the physical changes described in the thought experiment.
claimThe validity of the RoboMary thought experiment depends on the possibility of creating an artificial conscious machine, which has not yet been established.