> Knowledge from around 3000 bc to 1580 or so just burned
If it makes you feel any better, it’s likely a LOT less time that that. They didn’t develop their complex social culture until ~750BC & the earliest sculptural examples of Maya script are ~300BC.
It’s extremely unlikely any books the Spanish burned dated back until then but that’s the likely earliest they would have been.
Still a massive cultural crime & attempted genocide tho
Actual texts might only span ~1900 years, but if they are anything like European cultures their texts also contain written recordings of oral tradition. That would extend the time window, though with decreased accuracy.
Like most arguments of this type it assumes the conclusion then acts like it’s terms don’t do that.
If Mary knows everything about red then she also knows what seeing it is like. If she doesn’t… then she doesn’t. They try to have it both ways by hand waving & hiding behind colloquial language but it still comes down to that in the end.
The thought experiment just reveals the writers own biases & limitations of thought rather than be revelatory in any way.
In fact this paper is often used by opponents of qualia as demonstrating why they are nonsensical & incoherent.
Got to say, I agree. Daniel Dennett has his flaws but his argument that this type of thought experiment is a category error & that qualia do not exist and are incompatible with what are basic facts we know about neuroscience should have ended this years ago.
> If Mary knows everything about red then she also knows what seeing it is like.
Not necessarily.
And if you assert it is true, then it can be true only in a limited sense.
Can you "know everything" about playing guitar if you've never actually done it yourself? I think you'll agree with me when I say the answer varies:
It's "Yes", if you mean "know everything" to stand for something like "know everything objective that can be passed along to another person without any loss whatever." (I'm thinking of things like how guitars are made, how they're tuned, how you play them, etc.)
But it's "No" if you mean "know everything" to also include your subjective first person experience of actually playing a real guitar (and why wouldn't you include that as part of your "know everything"?) If the subjective feeling is something to be known, then it ought to be included as part of your "know everything" list, right? (If not, why not?)
That is literally pronounced “boleevud”. Can you guess why?
"Bollywood" was invented & popularized in Bombay-based film trade journals in the 1960s & 1970s. It was an explicit reference *by the Indian film industry there to Hollywood. It was additionally a play on “Tollywood" for the Tollygunge-based cinema of West Bengal, which had been called that since the 30s.
The oldest is the French film industry (Gaumont still exists & is the oldest studio still in operation), closely followed by the British film industry (notably Ealing Studios, still the oldest continuously working film facility too).
Hell, the earliest American film industry was in Brooklyn. Hollywood happened initially due to it fleeing to the west coast to avoid patents (ironically) and later the cheaper land.
Yeah I find it ironic that the biggest proponents of what’s now called “intellectual property” are based where are they based, because they escaped high patents costs.
