The missing knowledge in Mary's room

Single source of computation fallacy 

There is computation in the body on which the conscious mind doesn't have insight into and plays only an observer role. 

E.g.: sympathetic nervous system, sensory signals triggering reflexes, nervous system triggering goosebumps, ... 

The fallacy lies in the assumption that all processing is done by the conscious mind, which is caused by the mixture of our mind processing the actual signal plus the feedback signal of computation done in other systems in the body. This leads to mistaking both signals as the conscious processing of the mind.

We are therefore being tricked and are unable to locate the computation of the parts we interpret as feelings or experience, which isn't the actual signal but the result of other systems' computations in the body. We simply have no conscious insight into other systems' processing.

This leads to the conclusion that something other than computation is happening by seeing color, but not having complete information about other processing systems gives us a hard time separating the conscious processing of the signal and the processing of the feedback from other systems. 

There is a clash between our intuition of being an observer of something other than our conscious computation (which is true) and the illusion that our conscious awareness and conscious processing are the only processing there is.

In conclusion, the missing knowledge is the missing computational insight into other computational systems in the body, but in total it is still all computation, even if we can't consciously account for it. 

So after Mary exits the room, she gains no new knowledge as she also knows about other computations happening in her body and the mixture of signals arriving to her attention, therefore perfectly predicting the feeling and experience of being a partial observer in the processing of red.


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