Mary in Mariupol

Monday April 18, 2022

There is a moment each year in the Hudson Valley when winter tips over into spring. The forsythia explodes into a fountain of gold and there is a sense of no turning back.

Yesterday morning was cold and breezy, but awash in springtime sunshine. A great day for a ‘car hike’. My wife loves to cruise the back roads and small towns at this time of year. I am content to ride shotgun, watching the road unspool and letting my mind wander.

Each corner brings a splash of color — yellow forsythia, white cherry blossom, pink magnolia, an occasional garden border of daffodils and hyacinths. Now and then an intrepid yard worker with a leaf blower or rake picking up downed branches, erasing the evidence of winter.

I’m surprised how many magnolias there are in Rhinebeck. I always thought of them as a southern tree, but they seem to be thriving here: massive white-edged magenta buds curling open, stray petals littering the ground like fragments of Styrofoam. There’s definitely a southern association though — for example the Bob Dylan song ‘….smell that sweet magnolia blooming, see the ghosts of slavery ships…’

Thinking about it now, I’m not sure I’ve ever smelled a magnolia flower. Do they even have a smell? Around here you’ll have summer evenings thick with the scent of lilac or honeysuckle, but I’ve never noticed magnolia. Maybe Dylan is just using a bit of poetic license?

Apparently not — according to google the scent of magnolia is like ‘…sweet candy, spicy verbena, tart lemon, citrus-honey or dusty violets…’. There you have it in a nutshell — if you know what verbena is, you’ll know how magnolia smells!

There is a raging debate about artificial intelligence and consciousness. There are vast neural networks gobbling up all the written language on the globe, parsing phrases, assimilating associations, noting nuances and so on and so forth. This is what makes it possible to ask your ‘Google Assistant’ a ‘natural language’ question in spoken English such as ‘what does magnolia smell like’ and get an answer referencing verbena.

Google could even describe the scent of magnolia in Ukrainian. But does google ‘know’ what magnolia smells like?

I read an interesting ‘thought experiment’ recently. Mary is a neuroscientist at the pinnacle of her field. She understands the way different wavelengths of light are translated into electrical impulses by the retina and conveyed by the optic nerve to the brain. Not only this, but Mary has studied the cultural associations with colors such as purple and red, the meaning of the phrase ‘seeing red’ and so on. If there is something written about color, Mary has read and absorbed it.

But here’s the thing. Mary lives in a black-and-white world. Her computer monitor is monochrome. When she looks out the windows of her bungalow, she sees only shades of gray. She has never known anything else.

One day Mary gets up from her computer and finds the door to her bungalow unlocked. She opens the door and steps out into the spring sunshine. All around her is a riot of color! Forsythia, hyacinths, flowering cherry, magnolias! POW!

It turns out the windows of her bungalow had filters in them. Mary’s eyes are perfectly fine, she just never had the opportunity to experience color directly before.

The question is this: does Mary learn something new when she steps out the door? Something she could not learn by reading about color, but could only learn through direct experience?

If you believe Mary learned something new, then apparently what she learned was the ‘qualia’ of color. Something uniquely subjective that an artificial intelligence can never know.

As we were driving around the countryside looking at flowering shrubs, I kept thinking of images of war-torn Ukraine. Snow-dusted tanks mired in mud, apartment buildings reduced to smoking heaps of rubble, subway stations crammed with women and children.

Although these images are ubiquitous on the internet, and in spite of my efforts to follow events in Kviv and Mariupol, I feel like Mary in her bungalow — there is something on the other side of the glass which I cannot really know.

What are the qualia of war?

As you step outside to the sound of gunfire and begin to run, are you suddenly aware of the fragility of society, its structures collapsing around you? As you step over the dead in the street do you understand that civilization is an illusion, man’s brutality never more than just below the surface?

Perhaps you are fortunate enough to escape to Poland, rushed along on a river of refugees, without forethought or destination, eventually washed up in a tiny village on the shores of a remote lake. Piotr the friendly anarchist, who does not believe in countries or governments, opens his house and takes you in simply because of your common humanity.

Waking in the spring sunshine, you step into the garden and smell the magnolia blooming.