Initially, I struggled a bit with Jackson’s knowledge argument because it didn’t quite click with me but I was not sure why. At first, it seems to makes sense- someone who has never seen red before has no way of knowing what that color looks like. It is impossible for us as humans to understand what infrared or ultraviolet would look like, what it would be to experience those colors. This leads to the argument that not all information about an object is physical, there must be some mental property, just as property dualism states. But I think the problem with Jackson’s argument and property dualism is that they take experience, which is a very individual thing, and map it onto the object as a “property”. An individual’s experience of a color is not a fact about the color, but rather how the individual perceives it, which I believe is a result of their physical brain structure. Because of this, I would agree more with Lewis’ ability theory, that instead of seeing red being some sort of “knowledge” that they lack if they have not experienced it before, but rather that the perception of red is an ability of the individual. And this perception is due to the physical nature of their brain. So, I suppose this is an argument in favor of physicalism. Which although can be scary to think about because it kind of reduces humans to solely physical beings that really do not have free will, kind of makes sense. In neuro, we talk about the physiological underpinnings of emotions, motivations, cognition, and other aspects of human experience and consciousness. In neuro classes I accept that neurons firing in certain patterns are the causes of these feelings. So why is it hard to accept that we are completely physical beings? It is because consciousness and thought and imagination seem so intangible. But I think the more we discover about how the brain works, the more we will accept the physical nature of human life and experience.
The knowledge argument put forth by Frank Jackson is based on an interesting thought experiment that attempts to argue against pure physicalism.
The thing that jumps out immediately to me is the premise of the thought experiment itself. As Daniel Dennet argues, if Mary really knew everything about colour and how it works, she would also know what to expect when she was exposed to a colour such as red in the outside world. The concept of the ‘qualia’ that is a visual experience of redness would be explained in terms of neurological functions as well, and therefore she would not be gaining any new knowledge when she was released to the outside world.
However, another fact of the outcome would be that upon being released, Mary would experience all these new colours for the first time. And it is extremely possible that she would elicit a cry of surprise or some other such behaviour. Although she has prior knowledge of the neurophysiological underpinnings of what this experience is, her surprise would come from actual, real-time neural connections and activations in the brain that occur upon her seeing red for the first time. The difference here is that although she has the knowledge that does not mean that she has had the impact of the experience before. Neural connections and changes in the brain that take place as soon as she sees something red allow for her to receive the representation of the qualia of redness, despite her knowledge of how these neural changes allow her to do so. This is what would elicit her reaction of surprise.
Another issue I found with the thought experiment itself- the experiment is conceivable, but without sufficient or compelling evidence or reason to believe in the real-world possibility of it, I see the argument as being not as strong as it is made out to be.
At first glance, the knowledge argument as presented by Jackson seems to make sense. If Mary knew every physical fact about light and the way the brain perceives color then she would still not know what the actual experience of seeing red was like until she did. If we take this to be true, then we must concede that physicalism is not correct in its purest form. This is also known as the explanatory gap because there is a gap in our ability to explain qualia within the physicalist definition that all facts and information are physical in nature.
Although logically this must be the conclusion, I still find physicalism to be a more compelling point of view than property dualism. Therefore I am forced to deal with the problem of qualia. Over the years there have been several attempts to find a way to maintain physicalism. One such way comes from a qualm I have with one of the central premises of the knowledge argument. Since I believe in physicalism, I can’t quite believe that Mary could know every physical fact without knowing what it was like to see red. Dennet wrote a convincing arugment that complied with this idea. He said that, while there is an explanatory gap right now, eventually we will have the technology and understanding of the physical world that we will be able to define qualia in a physical manner. This could be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years in the future, but it is just as conceivable as the second premise of Jackson’s argument. Where there are two contradictory but conceivable ideas, I choose to accept the one that I find more comforting, which is a physicalist view of the world.
The knowledge argument seems to be logical at first glance. However, I think it is sound but not valid. For I remain doubtful of the second premise in Jackson’s argument. First, it seems impossible and implausible that Mary knows all of the physical facts about the world. This is simply too good to be true. How can one know that he knows every single physical fact about the world that could possibly be known? Second, if it is (hypothetically) possible that Mary knows all of the physical facts about the world, why couldn’t she imagine the visual experience – that is, what it is like to see red – based on all the physical facts she has? So I think the question at stake is: Must experience be experienced? Is it possible to imagine (or deduce) an experience? Here is a rough example that might shed some light on this idea: no one has ever seen the whole universe, yet by mapping, imagining and deducing, I think we can confidently claim to know what this vast universe looks like.
I have a more general doubt about the whole debate whether consciousness is physical or mental. I think the physical and mental dichotomy is an ontological dichotomy. That means, we use this distinction to understand the existing entities. However, “consciousness” just doesn’t seem to belong to the ontological realm. I understand “consciousness” as a concept coined by human beings to describe their experiences. Consciousness is not a word like “chair” which refers to a specific object. It makes sense to discuss if a chair is physical or mental, but to ask if consciousness is physical or mental is like asking whether “red” is salty or spicy.
I feel “consciousness” aligns more with the group of words such as “justice.” Is justice physical or mental? This question sounds weird, because we don’t talk about justice in such a way as if it were a substance in our world. It is an intellectual abstraction that we use to better describe and understand our world. And so is the word consciousness. Again to quote Wittgenstein roughly, it is an illegitimate use of our language when we ask whether consciousness is physical or mental.
Like many of the comments posted beforehand, I too am conflicted about my feelings towards Jackson’s knowledge argument – on the one hand, the argument provides some evidence towards the incompleteness of physicalism; however, it does so within the (extremely wide/hypothetical) parameters of its own thought experiment. For me, basing the conclusions (and fairly drastic conclusions, at that) of this experiment on such an extreme hypothetical situation both detracts from of its overall points and conviction. Sure, I can imagine some world in which a person such as Fred exists, however this is not (at least as far as I am aware) a possibility on Earth. Why then should I say that Physicalism is false on Earth as opposed to on this hypothetical world that obeys the parameters of the experiment? For example, I could imagine a retort to this argument against property dualism in which, after examining Fred’s rods and cones and eventually identifying a gene that encodes for the additional rods/cones, scientists become able to and do implant this gene into the next generation of humans and thus they, too, are able to distinguish between Red1 and Red2. If this were the case, Sure, this argument seems like a stretch of the imagination, but I don’t find it it much more ridiculous than the world presented in Jackson’s own argument.
A supporter of Jackson’s argument might retort that even implanting the genes for the additional rods and cones would not allow for the next generation to distinguish their descriptions of seeing the two colors, as it is perceived by something non-physical. Yet, how are we to accept that (according to the thought experiment) physical entities such as rods and cones are responsible for Fred’s discriminatory ability, but that his ability to describe them does not relate to a physical property whatsoever? Perhaps there is a connection between the optic nerve and a seat in the brain for qualia and consciousness. Would it still be correct to say then that not all facts are explainable through physical properties? This all being said, Jackson is far from rare in his usage of particularly hypothetical thought experiments – in fact, the very notion of physicalism that he attempts to disprove utilizes them quite effectively for its own support- and if one is to accept the world presented in his hypothetical, then his conclusion follows not only clearly, but logically.
I wish we had a distinction in English like the difference in French between savoir (understanding facts) and connaitre (being more intimately familiar with someone/place/concept) which both translate to “know.” Jackson’s trying to prove that the conceptual understanding is different than the intimate knowledge and intuitively this makes sense, especially when you take into account individual differences in sensory perception and that the same stimuli can evoke a large range of emotional responses in different people. But one of the aspects of the knowledge argument that I don’t agree with is the idea that it is impossible for Mary to understand or know red by teaching with language. We are perhaps just at a place of unsophisticated communication. If we can imagine zombies, why not better linguists? Also, I don’t see why the ability to verbally explain something is necessarily the way in which we should differentiate physical from non-physical phenomena. I am still a fan of the idea supplies by Kant in one of the previous readings, that perhaps the meta-view of our minds isn’t representative of its actual cognitive processes or organizations. Maybe this leans away from physicalism, but there really should be more options to chose from when trying to pinpoint consciousness.. The intangibility of qualia by current language is motivation enough.
The knowledge argument seems sound on paper for property dualism (you can know everything about how humans perceive color without knowing what it’s like to see color), but I still am not convinced for a couple reasons. To me, the argument basically boils down to saying that experience and knowledge are fundamentally different. Fine. I haven’t read any physicalist text that argues against that. In fact, I would guess most scientists (whose job it is to study the physical nature of the world in some form or another) would agree. Sure, all facts are physical facts, and all information is physical information. In the “Mary” thought experiment, Jackson argues that Mary learns all the physical facts and information about seeing, but still can not know what the experience of seeing red is like. So, he concludes there is some fundamental property of seeing red that is not physical. But when Mary sees red, she is still receiving physical information, just of a new kind. How could she predict this input of physical information without having experienced it? She could not, just as she would not be able to guess all the physical facts about human perception of color unless she learned them.
There is also a distinct component of these thought experiments that seems circular to me. They begin by saying the situations of Mary and Fred are conceivable, which seems to me like a contradiction of physicalism. This would make the argument circular.
I suppose I don’t think the knowledge argument for property dualism is a good one for these reasons.
The knowledge argument for property dualism is simultaneously compelling and frustratingly lacking. It seems almost unobjectionable that Mary could know all the facts about the color red without really understanding the experience of seeing red (what it’s like to see red). That this experience gap could ever be closed by future scientific understanding seems unconvincing to me. At the same time, the argument seems lacking on some level, precisely because it relies so heavily on qualia, which seem to evade any type of actual definition. It strikes me as unsatisfactory to say simply that qualia are what experiences “seem like” or “are like,” because this definition does not offer any reason to believe that qualia are even remotely similar in different individuals. This idea seems bizarre: every person could have a radically novel qualia experience in the world, which seems counterintuitive.
Furthermore, Jackson’s knowledge argument begins with a rather weird-sounding definition of physicalism. Physicalism is most frequently referred to as the idea that there is nothing “over and above” the physical. It’s not clear to me that this is equivalent to “all facts are physical facts” or “all information is physical information.” These definitions seem to be used specifically because the terminology lends itself to a convenient argument.
Ultimately, I find it extremely hard to argue about qualia. Arguments for and against property dualism seem incomplete or fatally vague, probably because our definition of qualia is similarly painfully vague. It feels like trying to debate a topic about which we don’t even have a sufficiently basic understanding to talk about with any meaning. I believe that, linguistically and conceptually, we have work to do before we can meaningfully discuss qualia.
Property dualism is the idea that all substances are physical, but there exists two different kinds of physical substances in the world, physical and mental properties. Therefore, the qualia you are experiencing is a type of physical substance—it is a mental property of a physical substance. The basis of the knowledge argument states that knowledge is subdivided into separate mental and physical components. In this argument, there exists no reducible physical basis, contradicting the theory of property dualism. A supporter of the knowledge argument would say that a complete physical description of everything happening within us during something like a visual experience, for example, is destined to exclude the qualitative nature of that experience.
Jackson, in the knowledge argument, places Mary in the situation of visually experiencing a rose for the first time after only having known everything about color perception, but living in a colorless environment. He holds that Mary is learning something new upon this exposure to the rose that she was unable to grasp through physical knowledge about color perception. Using this conclusion, Jackson goes on to argue that physicalism is false—due to the fact that physicalism theorizes that “all facts are physical facts.” However, philosophers that believe in a non-reductive physicalist view of the mind might claim that all that physicalism requires is that every specific mental state is identical to some specific physical state; therefore, allowing not all mental properties to necessarily have to be reducible to physical properties.
In assessing the knowledge argument, I question whether it is strong enough to support property dualism. I come to the conclusion that the knowledge argument is a solid argument against physicalism. However, I would object to the statement that it is that strong of an argument for property dualism. The knowledge argument holds that knowledge boils down to the mental and the physical. However, property dualism stresses the origin of mental properties from physical substances. Churchland even goes as far as to state something along these lines. He argues that Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism is so strong that if it defeated physicalism, it would subsequently defeat substance dualism. Churchland views this as an indication that something is wrong with the knowledge argument. Finally, even Jackson no longer endorses the knowledge argument. His more recent amendments state that what happens to Mary when she leaves her colorless world is not to learn new nonphysical truths, but to be in a new kind of representational state. She acquires, instead of knowledge, the ability to recognize, imagine, and remember the new representational state.
I would agree that there is an “explanatory gap” between qualia and the physical world, in so much as it is not possible to explain the nature of qualia by reference to any facts about the physical world. However, qualia do depend on an interpretation, or conscious awareness, of the physical world. The connection between the physical world and qualia, or mental representations, is very intertwined, in my opinion. However, I agree with the knowledge argument in the point that qualia is essential to understanding and physical facts cannot take the place of, or constitute entirely, subjective experience.
The property dualist view holds that the world is made up of one substance, which is the physical kind of substance. This substance can have two kinds of properties, physical properties and mental properties. The mental properties are necessarily connected to a physical substance, in this case the brain.
It is helpful to redefine what we mean by “substance” in the context of philosophy of the mind. A substance is a particular entity which a) is a bearer of properties b) is capable of existing independently of other substances c) persists through time.
The knowledge argument can be illustrated with the thought experiment of Mary in the black and white room. She knows all the physical facts there is to know. When she enters the outside world of color, she gains new knowledge in the form of qualia. She learns what the subjective experience of seeing color is like. This is something that she had to experience first hand, these non-physical facts about what it is like to see color were learned when she left the black and white room. Qualia are part of the category of mental properties that are necessarily connected to the brain, a physical substance. Without her brain, Mary couldn’t have this subjective experience. This is in contrast to the substance dualism view that the non-physical mind is a substance separate from the physical kind of substance.
The knowledge argument is not completely convincing to me, because I am more drawn to Lewis’s response to this argument. Lewis’s ability hypothesis challenges the idea that qualia are the non-physical facts that are part of the mental property of the substance that the world is made up of. This argument says that qualia, the way things seem to us, which we gain through our own subjective experience, are actually a set of abilities. To me, it seems logical that when Mary walks out of the room, she already has knowledge of what set of reactions the color red triggers in her cortex responding to optical stimuli, she is missing the ability to distinguish red from other colors. It makes sense that the “way red seems to us” is inherently dependent on how it is different from other colors. The abilities argument is more convincing to me than the knowledge argument towards property dualism.
As first glance, the knowledge argument seems to provide sufficient evidence for property dualism, which claims that there is no immaterial substance, physcial, and mental properties. In addition, the argument also seems to successfully reject the reductive physicalist theories. However, I am not convince that the the thought experiment on Mary’s case is logical. There are some evidence from past literature in cognition and perception, which suggest that it might not be possible for someone like Mary to be able to perceive a number of different types of stimuli after her release. In one past study, a cat was raised in a closed space, where the only type of visual stimulus it was exposed to was vertical lines. After an extend period of time, the cat was released to a normal environment, and the researches found that the cat was not able to perceive lines with any other orientations apart from the vertical lines (90 degree). The neuroral data demonstrated that the neurons that are selective for other orientations, e.g. horizontal lines, were not activated for a long time (due to the lack of horizontal line’s representations in the experimental room) and thus, either lost their sensitivity to horizontal lines or shift their selectivity range to bias the vertical lines. Mary’s case is very similar to this study, and thus I do not believe that it will be logically possible for Mary to exist.
I have been wrestling with the concept of property dualism for a while now and have gone from agreeing to disagreeing and back again, to me thus suggests there may be something innately, viscerally true about the concepts, even though all of the physical facts I have learned are screaming at me to explain it away. In terms of Jackson’s argument, I have found several points about the argument itself which I think fail to accurately convey what I see as the main point, which, despite all of the recent scientific evidence that altering physical brain states will lead to alterations in mental states, I have not yet been able to “explain away.” The fundamental idea conceives that even with a full understanding of the physical-causal processes that give rise to perception, color discrimination, hearing different instrumental tones, the touch of a feather versus sandpaper etc., a person cannot understand the actual first-person experience of a feeling until they have had that experience occur in themselves. Some philosophers call it what “it is like,” Jackson describes it as “information learned” in the case of Mary.
This is where I find fault in his argument for what I believe is a fundamentally inexplicable, undefinable part of what it is to be a linguistically-capable, rational human. His argument that she “learns” some new “information” does not line up with my conception of what it feels like internally to experience bright colors or the rumbling sounds of a cello melody: experience is akin to understanding, not learning new information. Even our everyday language suggests that we perceive a difference between the two. There is something much more deeply personal, innate and indescribably about understanding something than just “learnng.” As others have identified, learning makes experiential qualia seem like facts. This is where I believe that Jackson’s argument is weak in its explanatory powers for convincing others of the “something else” quality of qualia.
However, his ultimate premise is something I can’t shake off. The inherent subjectivity of experience- that it must be first person in order for a true ‘understanding’ of a feeling and all of its related mental states and sensations- is so innate to human life that we often can’t define it. The entire idea is flustering and, as rational beings who find logical patterns in much of our everyday lives, we try our hardest to explain it away. But there is something to say about the fact that no matter how much we all try find possible scientific, causal-physical explanations for experience, I keep getting a general feeling of discontent with every explanation offered, which I think others share. No explanation is quite enough. That “something else” sits deeply rooted in our mental conception of the world— so much so that we may not be aware of why the incomplete explanations bother us—maybe we’re trying to explain away ourselves and our most intrinsic piece of our felt existence.
For this reason— this logically-unsatisfying feeling of discontent alone— I find myself supporting the idea of the “explanatory gap.” I do not think that the knowledge argument alone is good enough argument for property dualism, as the argument itself sports too many linguistic and conceptual discontinuities. I think it is a valuable piece of a wider conglomeration of evidence that is still being gathered to make people more aware of the deep value we all may place in some sort of distinct, yet irreducible, mental property.
I’m still having a lot of trouble accepting Jackson’s knowledge argument and its implications. When I go through his argument on a step-by-step basis, it seems logical, but after stepping back I feel like Jackson isn’t approaching qualia from the right direction. If Mary can truly know every physical fact about the world, then she ought to also have access to the minute details of her brain state at any given time. If this is the case, then she would be able to memorize the neural pathways that are activated upon seeing a certain color, upon differentiating between two colors etc. She should also be able to gauge the wavelength of light being reflected off of certain objects at any given time. This goes to say, that if Jackson let Mary know all the physical facts about the world she would be able to tell red from green without anyone giving her any guidance as long as we accept that she would be capable of color vision after seeing black and white for so long. Of course, this version of Mary would not to know, before she left the room, what the color “blue” looked like, but I have trouble seeing what Mary would gain upon leaving the room as knew “information”. I would almost be tempted to defer to the Ability Hypothesis here. What Mary gains is the ability to intuitively differentiate various colors. I have trouble accepting the idea that the intrinsic “yellowness” of the color “yellow” is a physical fact and therefore am skeptical that Mary could ever learn “what yellow looks like”.
The knowledge argument presented by Jackson has great potential in differentiating what are known as qualia from other physical substances. However, it does not convincingly demonstrate that experiences involving qualia are composed of non-physical properties.
In its respectable but flawed attempt to support property dualism, the knowledge argument presents a thought experiment about a neuroscientist that apparently has obtained all possible information there is to know of the color red, although she has never experienced the color red itself. She has lived in a black and white room for all of her life, and when she finally experiences the color red, the question remains: Does she learn something new? I would have to say yes. However, I would not go as far as to say that the experience is nonphysical just as I would not agree that any transitive action, such as running or sleeping, are nonphysical because they ultimately are all derivatives of physical properties. I understand that vision was used in this experience for its intangible qualities. However, visual experience is not much different from experiences involving taste, touch, and smell. Qualia cannot be experienced without the inclusion of sensory receptors, and even though she has never experienced the color red, she still has the capability to do so once her eyes are fully developed. One could argue from a physiological standpoint that depriving someone of color may lead to not developing color vision, though I would say that that this is a product of physiological deficiency, which contains a physical component, which lies more along the lines of externalism.
I do agree with the notion mentioned in class that qualia are “just in for the ride” and even though qualia are not as concrete as other physical properties, they can still be deduced to merely parts of a whole that is inherently physical.
Although I do feel that the knowledge argument is a good argument for property dualism, I’m not sure that I agree with it. Jackson argues that qualia cannot be physical properties and that physicalism is false on the basis of his two thought experiments. However, I am inclined to disagree. First, I feel that the thought experiments involving Fred and Mary are flawed because of the way physicalism is defined. In the experiments, Jackson claims that we know all the physical information about Fred and the world, and that Mary knows all the physical facts about the world and other people. Jackson then claims that even with this information, we wouldn’t know what Red1 and Red2 look like, while Mary still wouldn’t know what red was like. Yet, I find there is something unfair about the way Jackson is defining physicalism for his own purposes. To me, if one knows all the physical facts about the world and other people, then one has knowledge of what “redness” is like. To me, redness is merely the activation of a particular circuit of neurons, and thus it is physical information that Mary would understand. I suppose my argument somewhat falls into line with Dennett’s idea of an explanatory gap that will be closed in the future. I feel that if, in the future, it may be possible to isolate the exact areas of brain activation that lead to a perception of redness. Thus, given sufficiently advanced technology and techniques, it would be possible to induce a state of redness in someone merely through brain stimulation. Given this, Mary’s knowledge of all physical facts would already include the experience of “redness”, and thus she would not learn anything upon leaving the room to which she was confined.
In “Epiphenomenal qualia,” Jackson presents two cases of the knowledge argument for property dualism. One is the case of Fred, an individual who is able to discriminate between two different shades of red between which normal humans cannot discriminate. According to Frank, although we can know all the possible information about the physical world (i.e. wavelengths of light, the color processing system in the eye and the brain), we still would not know what these different shades of red look like to Frank. We must then accept that there is some information which is not physical information and that physicalism is false. Similarly, Mary is a neuroscientist who knows all the physical facts about red (i.e. wavelengths of light, the color processing system in the eye and the brain) but she is locked in a black and white room. When she leaves the room and sees red for the first time, we must say that she learns something new. But since we assumed that she already knew all the physical facts, what she learns must not be a physical fact; therefore, physicalism is false.
Both these arguments are founded upon the premise that physicalism is the view that all facts are physical facts, or all information is physical information. But is it a necessary corollary of physicalism that it must be possible to know all the physical facts? Of course, Frank is free to create whatever terms he likes in his thought experiment involving Mary (i.e. that she knows all the physical facts), but what if it were impossible to know all the physical facts? Perhaps qualia are indeed a physical fact, but one which humans can never know about physically, though we know about them experientially. Although this view seems unlikely and unsatisfying, it is not logically excluded.
Contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennet have argued that eventually cognitive science will reach a complete understanding of all the physical facts, allowing Mary to understand qualia such as color. This is a highly doubtful argument as it seems to miss the central point that qualia is a first-person subjective experience that cannot be experienced by simply knowing the facts about it. Although one can imagine what it would be like to be a snake with infrared vision, in no way is this equivalent to being a snake with infrared vision.
Basically, I think that the knowledge argument seems plausible, but I feel tricked by it somehow. It’s hard to figure out exactly why though. I take most trouble with the premise that Mary knows all the physical facts about the world. Perhaps there is something about human nature that precludes this possibility. This would then allow for qualia to be a physical property even if we did not know how or why.
In general, my inclination would be towards physicalism, since I see no good reason (other than religious or spiritual hunches) that there must be a non-material soul. Given the various failings of both type and token physicalist accounts of the mental we have seen in this course, however, a reductive physicalism seems at odds with reality and it would seem wise to adopt a kind of property dualism. And yet,I don’t completely understand how property dualism is a dualism if the only objects that exist are physical objects. If mental properties exist, as property dualism claims, then are they physical objects? This doesn’t seem right, since then property dualism would essentially be equivalent with type or token physicalism. If mental properties are not physical objects, then what are they? It is tempting to describe them as consisting of a mental substance, but this would lead to Cartesian substance dualism.
Jackson’s Knowledge Argument is, at first glance, very convincing. In the case of Fred, it seems obvious that knowing all of the physical facts would still not give us any knowledge of Fred’s experience. Jackson therefore concludes that knowledge of qualia is not physical knowledge, and therefore qualia are not physical properties, but rather fall under the completely separate category of mental properties. Upon further reflection, I began to ask myself exactly what the difference between a physical fact and a non-physical fact would be. What is physical information, and why do qualia not qualify as such?
It seems that we identify as physical information, all things that can be described in language, and using the fundamental properties of the universe. For example, the wavelength of red light is physical information because it can be described using language. But then, how do you explain wavelength to a person? Such an explanation would necessitate that they be able to see a visual representation of a wave, and visualize and understand the concept of length. Both of these things require knowledge from perception, and cannot be explained simply through words. You could try to describe length as the distance from one point to another, but a person who has never experienced/perceived distance in a 2 or 3-dimensional space would not be able to understand distance, and would therefore be unable to understand length. In the same way, you can say that something is red and a person who has never seen the color would be unable to comprehend it or visualize it. As such, it seems that obtaining physical facts relies on our ability to perceive properties, the same way that obtaining information about qualia does. Maybe qualia can be considered physical facts. Maybe, at the very least, the differences between them and physical facts are not as important as they seem.
The knowledge argument provides ample support for property dualism, as it remains consistent with its proposed claims (no immaterial substances and the existence of both physical and mental properties) and does not imply agreement with reductive physicalist theories. The main points of the argument conclude that, even though one might know all the physical facts about something, he/she would still lack an understanding of the subjective experience, or what it is like to experience that thing. In this way, qualia are different from physical facts, and physicalism is flawed.
The proposed thought experiments do a good job of supporting this argument. In the first experiment, we understand that Fred’s color perception (that is capable of discerning between colors labeled red1 and red2) cannot be understand experientially by merely dissecting his brain – though we can claim to “know” all there is to know about his behavior and physiology, we would still not have a subjective understanding of what it is like. The thought experiment Mary’s Room further exemplifies this concept. Mary, upon leaving the black and white room, would “learn” something new – she would see color for the first time, and thus, learn the subjective experience of seeing color.
These two thought experiments (Mary’s Room perhaps more obviously) can be answered with the objectives we discussed in class – Dennett’s eventual bridging of the explanatory gap and Lewis’ ability hypothesis. I find both to be plausible: the first in that we can never be confident about how scientifically and technologically advanced we are, so that perhaps we will one day figure out why qualia and consciousness are such mysteries to us, and the second in that (especially in the case of Mary), she would not acquire new information upon leaving the room, but a new ability (to perceive color). Furthermore, perhaps the inherent nature of these thought experiments is flawed – does Mary really know everything? If she did know EVERYTHING, wouldn’t she know what it’s like to see color?
With the topic of qualia it is always easy to wonder if what we take to be experience is the same as what others take to be experience. In other words, who is to say that my experience of seeing redness is the same (or different) as someone else’s? We simply do not know, at least in a scientific, empirical way. Flaws arise from the lack of first-person privilege, and making inferences about another’s mental states is further complicated by the imperfect nature of language. All in all, I think the knowledge argument, despite its objections, still stands as a strong logical basis for describing the nature of consciousness. Based on what we know right now about perception and awareness and the properties these processes give rise to, separating between physical and mental properties (analogous to the division between say, neurophysiological processes and thoughts/beliefs) is the best we can do.
Jackson’s thought experiment in support of the knowledge argument makes sense to me, that is, if it is actually possible. According to the thought experiment, Mary knows all the physical facts about the world and other people—for example, how light is processed in the eye and brain. But when she is released, she learns something new—what it is like to see colors, aka qualia. Jackson thus concludes that there are facts that are non-physical facts, so physicalism is false. There is the explanatory gap in physicalism, as it cannot account for what it is like to have a sensory experience. This is logical—there is no way that Mary could have known what it was like to experience the color red when in the black and white room. However, I do question Mary’s actual ability to process color and experience color when released from the room. I believe she will have missed the “critical period” to develop the proper mechanisms in the brain to process color. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of this critical period in proper development of certain neural mechanisms. For example, a study on cats showed that when they were only exposed to horizontal lines, they later could not discriminate between horizontal and vertical lines when exposed to both. This suggests they did not have the ability physically in the brain to even process this new stimulus of a vertical line. However, if Mary actually did have the neural mechanisms to process/see color, the experiment makes sense to me. On a side note, similar to Lewis’ “Ability Hypothesis”, I am hesitant to say that qualia are “facts”. Rather, I see them as subjective experience/awareness, as phenomenal consciousness is defined. Lewis proposes that qualia are “abilities” to recognize and discriminate color. I agree with an explanation more along these lines, as it seems strange to me to define qualia as facts. But at the same time, I’m not sure “abilities” is quite right. It also seems that according to Lewis, you must gain the ability of seeing color by seeing it—since Mary never saw color, would her neurons even be able to fire in such a way to give rise to the qualia of seeing red? (according to the cat experiment, no.)
In terms of how the argument works with property dualism, I think it makes sense. Property dualism posits that there are both physical and mental properties of physical substances, and that some physical substances are complex enough to give rise to mental properties. This makes sense, given that the neural mechanisms of the brain are so complex that they can give rise to mental experience, i.e. qualia, even though these are non-physical– and this scenario is shown through the Mary thought experiment.
I think Jackson’s Knowledge argument for property dualism is flawed. In general, there are a few ‘givens’ and ‘conceivables’ that he employs as the foundation for his argument that I’m having a bit of trouble with.
First of all, I don’t buy the “explanatory gap” component of the argument. The way I interpreted it, Jackson is saying that there are properties of mental content that make it fundamentally different from the physical, in spite of the fact that they may also arise from physical substances. In other words, mental consciousness is a ‘physical’ phenomenon, but there are properties of mental content that set it apart from other physical substances.
This argument – that the mental and the physical have foundations in physical substances but have unique properties that set them apart from each other – doesn’t sit well with me. I think Daniel Dennett’s argument comes the closest to putting my issue to words: he states that even though there might exist an explanatory gap between the mental and the physical today, it is conceivable that in the future this gap will be closed (i.e. Mary could be able to experience the color red without ever actually seeing it). Building off of that idea, I think it is indeed very conceivable that at some point in the future consciousness may be better explained in physical terms. At present, we can’t explain it neurologically, but the speed at which the field of neuroscience is growing leads me to believe that a physical explanation is imminent. Or at least, it is highly conceivable. So why put stock in a philosophical theory of the mind whose arguments are in direct opposition to the progress that popular science is making today? It strikes me as more similar to Cartesian dualism than it does to many of the theories that have incorporated more modern scientific developments.
Furthermore, I think it is inaccurate for Jackson to conclude that mental content is inherently different from other physical phenomena. Another of my major problems with the knowledge argument is exemplified in Mary’s case. Namely, I don’t think it’s trivial that even though she has never seen color before, she obviously has the physical capacity to see color and black and white (i.e. rods and cones). In Jackson’s argument, should it not follow that her ‘learning experience’ of seeing color for the first time is directly linked to a physical experience (her cones being excited for the first time)? And moreover, to bring up the issue of trying to explain color to a blind person, I think it is important to point out that the reason some people lack vision are all physical – they have dysfunctional optical or other brain pathways.
To conclude, I would bring up the cliche, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Or, alternatively, there is color in the outside world but Mary isn’t there to see it, who’s to say that there is actually color? Birds of prey have infrared vision and bats have ultrasonic sensors, but we humans have neither of these faculties. And so, we will probably never be able to know “what it’s like” to pick up these types of information without filtering them to fit our own senses. I guess I agree with Jackson that there is a learning experience to be had that isn’t gained by merely learning facts, but my main issue with his argument is that the hindrance to acquiring this knowledge is entirely physical – thus representing an argument for physicalism rather than against it. The physical and the mental seem so inextricably intertwined that Jackson’s argument just doesn’t hold water for me.
When I first read the knowledge argument, I felt compelled to agree with Jackson about property dualism. I find it hard to believe that a woman who is specializes in vision and knows all the physical facts about vision could distinguish red from another color. Even if she knows the wavelengths, we as humans cannot pinpoint which wavelengths we are seeing. Therefore, I agree that physicalism does not paint the full picture. So therein lies the explanatory gap and property dualism. I think that this may be the best picture we can have given our limited understanding of the brain and consciousness. Since we have never studied a woman who was in Mary’s scenario, I cannot say with certainty what would happen, I can only say what my gut tells me to say.
In fact, perhaps we unconsciously know what wavelengths we are seeing and by knowing the wavelengths consciously, Mary would be able to say that the rose was red. I think that Jackson has defined physical and mental states as irreducible because we do not yet have enough knowledge. We once thought elements were irreducible, but then we discovered atoms and protons etc. I digress. But what I am trying to get at is that, there must be more that we are missing. I intrinsically believe that there must be some connection between our mental, physical, and experiential (ie. qualia) aspects of life that foster our beliefs and consequently our actions. I think that saying something is a phenomena is a cop-out, and that our questioning should lead to further research and understanding. So I leave this open ended, but I think that the knowledge argument effectively makes way for property dualism, but I think this is an interim theory and like Dennett, I think that we will have the tools one day to fill the gaps.
I believe that the knowledge argument is a good argument for property dualism. I agree with the view the knowledge argument presents. I don’t think it is possible to know everything about the color red without experiencing the color red. You can know all the physical properties and know everything about the color red, but you truly won’t know what red is until you see it with your own eyes. You can apply this idea to other situations. You may know all of the physical properties of a burger and know how it should taste, but you will not completely know until you take that first bite. This argument agrees with the idea property dualism. Qualia is especially important in the knowledge argument. She may have known all the physical facts previously, but the experience of seeing red was not one. When Mary is released, the experience of seeing red is a new non-physical fact. The qualia of seeing red for the first time is something that is learned after she leaves her room of black and white, allowing for the distinction between the physical and the mental in the physical world.
The knowledge argument says physicalism is false because even after learning everything that is reportable about a certain substance /event, it is impossible to complete understand what that experience is without actually having gone through it/sensed it. So in the example of Fred, the knowledge argument says that despite being given all possible physical information about the color red, he still does not have all the information about what red is or feels like. The example with Mary takes the argument a step further by claiming that this information is actually a fact, and there are non-physical facts about the color red that she does not understand until she actually sees it. For this reason Jackson supports property dualism, which says that all things have a physical existence in the world but consist of both physical and irreducible mental properties.
I personally think that, as Chalmers mentions in his article, property dualism is like many other theories of consciousness in that it doesn’t actually achieve its goal in completely distinguishing between the functional and phenomenal aspects of a mental state. Jackson offers the knowledge argument to show how there must be irreducible mental properties that exist separate from the underlying physical substances that cause them. However, he never makes mention of what these mental properties are or what makes them distinctly different from their physical counterparts. If physical information does not adequately explain the color red than what type of information can explain red to someone that has experienced it. Property dualism seems like a cop-out theory that provides no alternate to physicalism other than saying that an alternate must exist.
Despite these failings of property dualism as a theory, the knowledge argument in the case of Fred at the very least does seem to support the idea that physical information is not enough. Even looking at something that is more abstract than the description of a physical substance, like love, we frequently say that you can’t understand until you have actually experienced it first-hand. Despite being told what love is time and time again, until you have been through the process all your previous encounters with the concept are moot. However, while I would agree that this indescribable aspect of the color red or love or any other experience is non-physical information, I would not describe it as a non-physical fact. By labeling qualia or phenomenal qualities as facts, we are claiming that different people have different facts about what we refer to as the “same” experience. You would know different facts about pain than I do. Can we actually call the qualia that make up our experience a fact, if the basis of a fact lies in its absolute truth? Are our experiences absolute truths, and if all of our experiences are facts then is there an absolute relativism concerning qualia? While it may not be crazy to claim that what we are feeling is absolute true to each one of us individual, it seems unnecessary to even have to label qualia as facts, when we know there an infinite number of ways we can describe an experience. For this reason, I would support the argument with Fred, while remaining unconvinced about the idea of qualia as a fact.
My response to this argument, I think, is “well, yeah, I guess that makes sense…”. The thing is, that’s been my response to basically every single thought experiment we’ve looked at this year. Each one takes a situation (a situation, it is worth noting, that is always conceivable but never realistic) and uses it to make tremendously broad and sweeping statements that don’t really seem to follow given the specificity of the circumstances. Here, for instance, we’re asked to picture a case in which Mary somehow knows all the physical facts about the world (all of them? really?) and yet has only been exposed to shades of black and white… and then we’re asked to accept a tremendously broad statement like “physicalism is false” based on that? For such an important idea, can’t we find a better example? During class, I jokingly stated a counterargument that runs as follows: “P1: physicalism is true. C: physicalism is true.” Again, that particular statement was supposed to be absurd, but the frustration is real. How can we really accept a theory when its main arguments revolve around such specific hypothetical examples?
General tirades about philosophy aside, I do honestly find this argument to be intriguing, if not 100% convincing. On an intuitive level, it makes sense to think that qualia cannot be defined in terms of physical states, especially in light of the videos that I mentioned in class (regarding trying to explain colors to a blind person). The thought examples (while kind of stupid, I think) definitely do illustrate their point, in that it does seem unlikely that a person who has never seen color would be able to experience the qualia of color, even if they’ve been given sufficient information about the physical world. However, when I say this, I’m working off a gut feeling, and I get the sense that the thought examples are as well. After all, how can we possibly be sure that Mary (with all the physical facts about the world at her disposal) can’t know what color feels like? If we’re allowing the possibility of her knowing everything there is to know about the world, how can we possibly make a statement like “Mary doesn’t know… what it is like for them to see red”? I mean, yes, it seems unlikely that she could (and my intuition would agree that she couldn’t), but where’s the actual evidence? We are already deep in the realm of the absurd, so can’t we simply say – with just as much validity – that she actually could feel the qualia of color (and thus that physicalism could be true)?
I keep getting sidetracked by how much I hate these thought examples. Again, the basic idea here – that there are both mental and physical properties, and that the two are not the same – makes sense to me, and I actually find this whole theory quite appealing on a certain level. It’s really intriguing to think of mental states as fundamental ‘factors’ in the universe, and to compare them with things like mass and charge and spin. I’m certainly not sure I buy it yet (the scientist in me is screaming “no! mental states must come out of physical states”), but it’s definitely a cool and novel way of thinking about the world.
Also, on an unrelated note, I very much don’t agree that mental states are just sort of “along for the ride” (that is, that they cannot impact physical states at all). Such a statement seems contrary to everything I’ve ever known, and I refuse to accept without overwhelming evidence to back it up (and the evidence CANNOT be a thought experiment!).
Like many of my classmates below, I at first glance I do believe that Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism is a well- structured argument for property dualism. First off, as soon as property dualism was introduced, I felt as if the piece of the puzzle to Descartes’ theory of substance dualism that I was looking for but could never quite define myself was put in place. Property dualism is the view that all substances are physical objects, but there are two irreducibly different kinds of properties of which they consist, physical and mental properties. Some physical objects (i.e. brains) reach a level of complexity at which they give rise to a distinct mental property (i.e. qualia). I really like this idea of property dualism, as I do take strongly to physicalism, but believe that there is something more, something mental, that we will never be able to explain.
Jackson explains the knowledge argument with the use of a thought experiment of a woman named Mary. I agree with many of the previous posts in that the experiment is rather straightforward. Mary lives in a black and white room, and knows all of the physical facts about the world and other people, but doesn’t truly know what it feels like to see red once she leaves this black and white room and experiences the color herself. The argument then states that because of this, these facts or “qualia” must not be physical facts, and physicalism is false. Here I have to say that although the thought experiment makes sense, I can hardly see it as sound. I agree with Nathan that we cannot build an argument based on the premise that Mary knows all of the physical facts of the world. This claim seems out of reach, because as we as a human race do not know all of these facts yet, who is to say this knowledge would not give Mary insight into the experience of red? In short, I am debating whether this thought experiment truly undermines physicalism. This new knowledge, or experience of qualia that Mary gains could conceivably be physical information. To lay the claim that this new information is fundamentally not physical is making a big assumption – especially because no one yet knows what we would really know if we knew everything physical there was to know in the world.
With this said, this newly introduced theory of property dualism is still my new favorite, though I am still working out the kinks in my minds. I am partial to the physicalist theory, but have always believed that there is something more, something we cannot and maybe will never be able to explain. The idea of physical objects reaching a level of complexity that create these complex mental states is believable – at least more than Descartes idea of a soul, which he is unable to back up.
The knowledge argument is a good argument for property dualism as it suggests a necessary separation between phenomena and the physical. There is something “that it is like” to smell roses, beyond just the trigger in your brain. Because of this, phenomena cannot be physically reduced and we are left with the explanatory gap. This is exactly where I think property dualism come in. It says that there is a mind and a body and does not try to explain the link between them. From a physicalist point of view, if phenomena cannot be reduced, then they have no causality in our lives. We have experience of qualia, but it does give rise to any action or belief.
Something inside me says this cannot be the case. I absolutely want to believe that qualia and my experience and interpretation, my beliefs and desires, have some kind of agency in my life. Agreeing to an explanatory gap and leaving phenomena powerless (although they’re powerless either way, as reduced to the physical and therefore deterministic, or irreducible and therefore with no causal power) is quite unsettling. The fact that this gap exists leads me to believe there must be some dualist view to explain it. Either we have to throw away qualia, and the experience that feels like it defines our lives, or else agree to a dualist view. I prefer the latter, even though it does not give a concrete definition of how it works, I think our phenomenal experience is real and has bearing on our lives, and therefore gives a dualist picture reason to take root.
The knowledge argument seems strong enough to beg some significant questions regarding physicalism, but it hasn’t quite sold me on the idea of property dualism. I agree with Jackson’s assertion that, without having experienced the color red, Mary does not have all the facts of red. If, as the thought experiment requires, we accept the idea that Mary has all the physical facts of red prior to seeing it for the first time, and she, upon seeing red for the first time, learns something new, then the experience of red (and other qualia) must be of a non-physical nature. This is the conclusion Jackson asks us to come to, and I am on board for the most part.
Where the argument loses me is the idea that Mary can have all the physical facts in the first place. I take issue with the way the argument uses the term knowledge (important to the knowledge argument!), because it assumes that to know something is to have conscious awareness of that knowledge. Seeing red or tasting coffee may be indescribable and irreducible to universal facts among people, but I don’t think the same can be said of the brain. A physicalist might argue that knowledge is just storage of information in plastic synapses, made stronger or weaker according to synapse activation. From this standpoint, if Mary’s red network has never been activated, those synapses have never stored the sensory information of red, and it can be argued that her brain lacks that knowledge.
As far as property dualism is concerned, the knowledge argument isn’t so much the issue because the theory in itself seems problematic to me. Property dualism claims that mental properties (like consciousness, experience, qualia etc.) arise when physical entities reach a certain level of complexity. I don’t understand how a physicalist could possibly support this idea because at its core, the theory claims that what a substance dualist might call non-physical ‘stuff’ exists. I understand that a property dualist would argue that, in fact, property dualism avoids doing just that by calling the mental properties of the physical, but that feels like slippery logic to me.
Is the knowledge argument a good argument for property dualism? Why or why not?
To start, I want to clarify both the argument for property dualism and the knowledge argument. From my understanding, property dualism goes beyond physicalism and claims that, while all objects are physical objects, they can be reduced even further to subcategories of physical properties and mental properties. The knowledge argument, on the other hand, places more emphasis on qualia; the subjective view of how an individual’s consciousness is experienced. It defends the statement that although a person may have complete physical knowledge about an experience, such as seeing red, they would still not have any knowledge about what it is like to actually experience seeing red.
To address Mary’s situation, I am going to agree with Alexandra’s point. I too feel that it is contradictory and circular to claim that physical knowledge can have mental properties, although they consist mainly of physical properties. If mental properties are physical properties, then what distinguishes them from other physical properties? I feel that mental and physical properties of consciousness are very separate and the overlap of the mental and the physical could be deemed unnecessary. The knowledge argument hones in on the non-physical component of knowledge. It argues that all knowledge cannot be physical because it addresses the non-physical elements of some types of knowledge, but it fails to address the overlap of physical and mental properties that arise from the argument for property dualism. Therefore, I cannot defend the knowledge argument as a good argument for property dualism. These two proposals have different objectives in addressing the physical and mental properties of knowledge, and therefore don’t provide enough direct opposition for me.
If I had to choose which argument I agreed with more, I can definitely say I side with the knowledge argument over the argument for property dualism. I feel strongly that a qualitative experience, qualia, is strictly a mental experience and is definitely comprised of non-physical properties. I feel that knowledge about a mental experience cannot fit into the same category as physical knowledge if it is impossible to acquire this type of knowledge without ever having that experience before. For example, it is impossible for a blind person to acquire knowledge on what it feels like to see or what a color looks like, even if they have other physical and scientific knowledge about sight. On another note, Jackson’s proposal of epiphenomenalism is very enticing. While I do not believe mental knowledge and physical knowledge can both be considered physical knowledge, I feel as though there is a stronger link between them than the knowledge argument accounts for. Epiphenomenalism claims that the qualitative properties of experience are not physical properties; they are a category of their own call epiphenomena. Jackson believes epiphenomena are caused by physical properties, but do not themselves cause any other physical properties or events, though they may cause other mental properties. I have the most affinity for the aspect of this proposal that claims the physical properties of knowledge cause the mental properties, but the mental properties are not physical. I like the idea that the mental is still connected to our physical properties in some causal way. However, the mental is a category of its own, separate from the physical. This seems like a compromise of both the knowledge argument and property dualism that is satisfying enough for me.
Is the knowledge argument a good argument for property dualism? Why or why not?
Property dualism is a strong non-reductivist view that rejects both type and token identity. It claims that all substances/objects are physical, but there are two irreducibly different kinds of properties they can exhibit—physical and mental. For example, physical brains have a higher level of complexity which gives rise to distinct types of mental properties. According to Jackson’s Knowledge argument, qualia facts and physical facts are different, therefore qualia are non-physical facts.
In the case of the thought-experiment of Mary, it is plausible that before Mary leaves the dreary B&W room to experience the vibrant colors she’s been denied, yes she could know all the physical facts about the world and people, about the different wavelengths of light, and about the color processing system in the eye and brain. And yes when she steps out of that room she learns something new upon experiencing color. This implies (1) our subjective and qualitative properties of experiences (aka qualia) exists, and (2) physicalism is false because there are facts that exist that are not physical. I generally find this as a pretty sound argument, but I definitely question it because qualia seems so ambiguous to me. Lewis’ “ability” hypothesis which essentially is a functionalist account against qualia saying that to have qualia is just to have abilities that allow us to discriminate between things is also somewhat convincing. When I think of tasting coffee, is qualia just the ability to allow me to differentiate coffee from anything else with no subjective and qualitative experience. I don’t know. Is my qualia for tasting coffee the same as other peoples? All in all I think this argument supports property dualism because it gives a reasonably example of how experiences (this works also for beliefs and emotions and desires) are properties to a physical substance (such as the brain).
Really, every part of me wants to believe that consciousness is nonphysical. What a great discovery it would be if we could somehow learn that the “specialness” that constitutes human consciousness is somehow apart from physical reality, that it is some essential element that cannot be expressed in terms of concreteness or dimensionality. The knowledge argument offers strong support for this nonphysicalist view of the universe. If we know everything about the physical, yet we lack knowledge about consciousness, doesn’t that imply that consciousness is nonphysical? Unfortunately, I think this argument amounts to little more than wishful thinking. It is a valid argument, but I’m hard pressed to say that it is sound. How can we possibly build an argument on the premise that we (or someone/some being) actually has complete knowledge of the physical? Who knows everything about the brain? When will we actually know everything about the brain? And when we do, who’s to say that we won’t also uncover some physical explanation for consciousness (like what Churchland’s after).
I want to believe that consciousness transcends the physical, but absent a religion or a spirituality, I am guided by science and by knowledge, and nothing in science suggests that the knowledge argument supports property dualism. Until proven otherwise, I have to assume that what matters is matter.
Consciousness as a physical phenomenon does not by itself suggest that qualia are out. I don’t necessarily believe that knowledge of consciousness’ grounding in the physical will allow us to understand what an experience is like for another person. I think the issue of consciousness as a physical/nonphysical phenomenon is a topic separable from the debates surrounding qualia. I would love to explore this more fully.
I do believe that the knowledge argument is a good argument for a qualia like based argument such as property dualism. In the though experiment, Jackson describes Mary, a brilliant scientist who lives in a room without color, watching shows on her black and white screen. She only knows what color is, such as red blue and yellow from textbooks, research and others. When she goes out into the real world and experiences it for the first time, the knowledge that she gained previously missed something completely, the experience of it.
I completely agree with Jackson. It seems that we live in a world where everything that we assign meaning to has to be defined in some form or another. We have to quantify everything with language and signs and symbols. Everything has to be coated in a layer of concrete to be significant and in order for it to relate to other physical objects in the world, when this is not true. Things have an intrinsic essence that I think can never be explained or defined, objects, chairs, tables and dogs, just are. They just exist. Our experience of them may be very different to someone else’s. Though the feeling of petting a dog, running your hands through their thick coat, , something thick yet soft, can be described, the feeling of it and the experience is completely different.
I do believe that science is good, but not even the most brilliant scientist, could create a certain qualia in someone if no one has ever experienced it, or at least not yet. A big reason may be because we see things differently, my perception of red may be different to yours, the inverted spectrum argument can be used as an example. Where even though photo-pigments may serve the functional role, the qualia is ultimately different.
Another example is the translation of language, where many meanings may be lost in transcription. For example there is a German word, one word, that is translated in English to mean “standing on top of a mountain and watching your shadow across the land.” Clearly without being a native German speaker, one will loose the essence of this word.
Overall I believe that this is a solid argument, and that Jackson’s thought experiment of Mary conveys his beliefs thoroughly.
While I do agree with many aspects of the knowledge argument, I do still have hesitations to accepting how Jackson connects the argument to proving property dualism and epiphenomenalism. The knowledge argument itself is fairly straightforward. Mary can have a basic understanding of what the color red is based on literature and scientific data, but does not have true understanding of red until she leaves her black and white house and is exposed to a red tomato. Mary learns something new about the color red by experiencing it firsthand. This seems very logical and intuitive: we cannot have a true understanding of something until we experience it ourselves – be it how a color looks, or how a food tastes, or what a flower smells like. We can learn all the scientific facts and have all the information about these sensations but we will not have a complete picture of what they are until we have been exposed to them ourselves. This is where I am in complete concordance with Jackson. However, I am not sure if this completely debunks physicalism as a possibility.
Physicalism holds that all facts are physical facts, or all information is physical information. I would argue that while Mary may know a vast amount of the physical information regarding the color red, she could not possibly know all of the physical information without having experienced it. Therefore, I find the second point of Jackson’s argument, that Mary “knows all of the physical facts about the world,” to be quite problematic. I would argue that processing sensory information, like seeing the color red, is still physical information. Therefore Mary could not have had complete physical knowledge about the color while living in a world without the color red. While I do disagree with this aspect of Jackson’s argument, I would certainly agree with his penultimate point that there are facts that are not physical facts; that the experience of qualia must be more than just something physical. I would also even agree with epiphenomenalism and property dualism as well, because it seems to make sense that qualia and consciousness come along with our physical experience. Property dualism appears to be a great compromise between the PNI theory and other, more abstract theories of the mind. It is certainly true that there are some aspects of human behavior and consciousness that cannot be exactly mapped to a certain area of the brain or body yet must still be connected to our physical beings in some way (at least, I would argue that they must still originate from something physical). Property dualism allows for this sort of connection to be made without being so restricting; namely, it states that the mental must somehow come from the physical and that the two are irreducible. I would absolutely agree with this. The only problem is that the knowledge argument itself seems to be flawed, and there perhaps needs to be more to it in order to fully disprove physicalism and introduce epiphenomenalism and property dualism as viable theories.
Chalmer’s Conceivability Argument involves a “zombie” creature that is physically identical to us, but lacks conscious experience. His argument goes as follows:
1. It’s conceivable that a being (zombie) is physically identical to us (beings t hat have consciousness) but lacks conscious experience
2. It’s logically possible that there could be zombies (though not probable)
3. Thus, consciousness does not logically supervene on physical properties
4. Physicalism requires logical Supervenience of consciousness on physical properties
5. Physicalism is false.
I would argue that premises 1 and/or 2 may be false, depending on how we define consciousness. In class we used the example of a square circle as something that is logically impossible and inconceivable. Other similar example that we mentioned in another philosophy class is a currently married bachelor. These examples contradict themselves, because the definition of one term must necessary exclude the other. For example, a circle by definition has one side, while a square must by definition have 4 sides. Considering how little we know about how consciousness comes about, it seems entirely possible that consciousness and certain physical states (ie the exact state of the brain of a conscious person) could be defined so as to necessarily include the other (like bachelor and unmarried). If this were the case, then certain physical states without consciousness would be logically impossible and unconceivable, and the first two premises of the argument would not hold. Because of the possibility of defining consciousness different ways, this argument seems a bit circular, because it assumes that certain physical properties are not necessary and sufficient for consciousness.
It might be possible to extend this counterargument to the similar argument involving the inverted spectrum. You could say that since there is a difference between the exact cone structures in the inverted person, they are not physically identical. Then, if qualia is defined so that it requires a certain physical state, and vice versa, it would be logically impossible to conceive of that state without the same qualia. However, there probably would be more room to argue against this compared to the presence of consciousness in general.
Intuitively, I find knowledge arguments of the Mary-the-color-scientist type, as well as the conceivability arguments that Chalmers offers against physicalism, to be fairly compelling. I am not absolutely sure that they disprove physicalism, but I think they do indicate that any imaginably successful physicalism would have to involve a thoroughgoing revision of our concepts of the mental and the physical: namely, a revision that would make it no longer conceivable for two beings to be physically identical yet differ in qualia in the same way that it is inconceivable for two substances to both be H2O and yet not both be water. I can’t really conceive of how such a revision might occur, or what sorts of experiences/evidence might lead to it, but to rule out the possibility completely seems a bit epistemically arrogant. I guess what this amounts to is that I’m not absolutely sure an explanatory gap entails an ontological gap, although if there were an ontological gap we would certainly expect to see an explanatory one accompanying it.
If, however, our concepts of physical information and of the phenomenal qualities of our own experience are not completely off-base (it’s kind of hard to imagine how the latter might be, but perhaps worries about privileged access come in here?) then I think his argument follows pretty ineluctably. The concept we have of physical information pertaining to wavelengths of light radiation, the way this radiation reacts with the human retina, and the way this signal gets transduced into neural activity doesn’t seem to contain anything that could explain what is like to see red. If this concept is accurate, then I think Chalmers and Jackson are right: Mary would learn a further fact upon her actual experience of the colour red, and if she had all the physical information beforehand, this fact would seem to lie outside the realm of physical facts, and be unaccounted for by physicalism.
The one thing I have lingering doubts about is whether the accuracy of these concepts is part of what the argument is trying to prove, and thus whether it risks certain circularity in this respect. However, I think physicalist arguments against it are pretty much in the same boat: denials of the basic premise (that the conceptual territories of the mental and physical are two irreconcilably different realms) have something of a feel of tug-of-war to me. Perhaps it merely comes down to an intuition. I’m trying to think of a way in which the accuracy of these concepts could be tested/falsified/verified, and the only thing I can come up with is something like phenomenological experimentation. For instance, I wonder whether it might be a valuable test (for intuitions about qualia-switching) to try to determine what conscious experience divorced its functional accoutrements would be like, or whether such a thing is even possible. Of course, it would be very difficult to report the results of these experiments, seeing as non-functional elements of consciousness are pretty much by definition outside the scope of our language games. I’m still not quite sure what I think about this. It seems like it’ll have to wait for future investigation.
I agree with Chalmers ideas regarding qualia and property dualism based on the readings and what we discussed in class. The explanation of qualia as a basic property that is essentially irreducible to anything else is an appealing concept and fits within our framework without saying that qualia are too difficult to explain, but rather explaining qualia as the simplest portion of consciousness. The thought experiment regarding Mary’s existence and knowledge is particularly believable. This is based on the idea that consciousness cannot supervene physical properties, an idea that is demonstrated in Mary’s thought experiment.
Qualia cannot be defined as a physical property because it is inherent in consciousness. How can something as complex as consciousness truly be reduced to anything purely physical? The explanatory gap that results in the idea of physicalism being “false” is correct. David Lewis’ argument convinces us of this with his vegemite example. This example merely solidifies and clarifies the same information received from Mary’s thought experiment in a different way. Viewing consciousness as something physical seems overly simplistic; despite Ockam’s Razor, it seems like something more complex is going on than what has been suggested with various physicalist theories that have yet been unable to fully explain and defend their positions on why their physicalist philosophies of mind are accurate.
Without consciousness Mary would not be able to interpret anything.
The mind allows for interpretation of the signals the body senses.
It makes no sense, to say that Mary without a conscious would be able sense anything. How could she see red if a mind is not interpreting it.
Sure she has eyes, receptive cones, but without a mind, she would just be a drone: all exposed to the unknown.
Where was this mind born?
Give me the absolute, most true physical information.
Without a mind, it will be pure information, like the signals behind the computer screen. The computer knows physical facts, but it has not developed consciousness.
It has no soul. Mary does. Mary can see. Mary can perceive.
Mary’s mind arose from a base of her soul and a physical body. Without the soul, she would have no mind, for she would have nothing to interpret; she would not see the universe: that which is her soul. Her soul is composed of the universe, without one, she would neither understand the inside nor the out.
Dualism, of the substance sort, explains why Mary has a mind, that which has been allowed through her physical body, yes. But all the physical body is physical stuff of course, the firing of neutrons, the stimulation of c-fibers, the movement of things. But the mind, that is of a much more valuable kind.
A mind, is the second level to interpretation. It takes the movement of things, and interprets them to cause mental states. Yes, it is necessary for the body to sense in order for the mind to interpret.
Epiphenomenalism sees that the mind receives
physical stimuli. Yet, when the mind interprets, the body reacts. My mind was stressed, so a few pimples grew. I became depressed, so a few twitches ensued.
It is like recycling, each arrow follows another in an endless circle. That is how the mind and body interact. With Mary not ever seeing red, her body has no way to contact her mind, and her mind can’t contact her body, so she is left in a bind, because physicalism has failed her, and there is something more she is not seeing.
The knowledge argument is demonstrated by the “Mary” thought experiment. There are two versions of the knowledge argument that vary in strength. The weaker argument states that Mary has complete physical knowledge of facts about human color vision before leaving the room, but there is some kind of knowledge about color vision that she does hot have before her release. Therefore, there is some kind of knowledge about color vision that is non-physical knowledge. The stronger version states that Mary knows all the physical facts about color vision, but there are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release. Therefore, there are non-physical facts concerning human color vision. (Nida-Rumelin 2010).
I agree with the weaker argument of the knowledge experiment, which states that Mary gains a new type of descriptive knowledge, but does not gain new facts that she did not know in some other way. In this argument, qualia are viewed as fundamental, basic properties of the universe. Mary may know all of the physical facts about color vision, but she does not know the phenomenal properties of color that can only be acquired through experience. Once outside the room, Mary gains a new type of propositional knowledge about physical facts that she already knew about (she does not learn entirely new facts about color vision).
This argument is able to circumvent the mind-body interaction problem because according to Chalmers, phenomenal properties are intrinsic properties of our bodies and play a causal role in our actions. Phenomenal properties are physical, but they can only be learned through experience rather than factual knowledge.
Although Chalmers’ naturalistic property dualism makes sense intuitively, the backing for the argument can use some improvement. Chalmers somewhat arbitrarily makes a new category of fundamental properties (phenomenal properties) to explain qualia. His argument is very theoretical and lacks evidence. In many ways, it reminds me of how Descartes solves substance dualism by saying: something happens with the pineal gland! Both theories can use some more thorough thinking over.
References:
Nida-Rümelin, Martine, “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
At first read, I am sympathetic to property dualism. In my metaphysical conception of myself, something within me outwardly denies that my experience, my rationality, can be reduced completely to the physical. Now, I am not a substance dualist, I don’t believe that my mind merely interacts with my body, so I am also sympathetic to physicalism. Therefore, property dualism seems like a nice compromise, it allows me to elevate my mind over my body without insinuating a rationalistic picture, while also running away from having to explain that elevation, citing ontological differences between the two.
John Locke once wrote “It is of great use of the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.” The knowledge argument has a short line. It says that there is a difference between qualia and the physical, yes, but we’re not going to try to explain it because, meh, we just can’t. Since when did the philosophical spirit get so tired? If we truly believe something, like I do about my rationality, we ought to investigate it, and the development of neuroscience is allowing us that opportunity for the first time.
So, at the end of the day, my view represents one more akin to Dennett’s. At some point, with further evolution of science and philosophy, we will close the explanatory gap with physical evidence of experience, and that future Mary would not learn anything about sight when she left the room. However, the current Mary would learn something, and perhaps the nature of that statement, the feeling that something about it is wrong, will be enough to inspire someone to do the research and disprove it.
I before I give my response to the question, let me openly state my bias: I like physicalism. Perhaps I’m too stone-headed or close-minded to see any other argument. While I think that Jackson’s rationale is well thought out and reasonable, I believe that his claims are too grandiose and also ignore some potential counterarguments.
It’s true that Mary has all of the information about the color red from a neurological perspective. She understands precisely how it interacts with our retina to produce the perception of red. But because she has never seen red, her previous information was “incomplete.” Jackson’s argument is pretty persuasive. Can we really say that Mary has a complete understanding of the color red if she has never experienced it? I think Jackson has posited a brilliant simplification, but one that tends to become less potent when applied to other fields.
Going off potency—let’s talk about snakes. Let’s say that I am a renown herpetologist, a reptile and amphibian specialist. I know damn near everything that there’s to know about snakes. Certain snakes, however, have facial pits that allow them to sense infrared light. Despite the fact that I understand everything that there’s to know about how the snake processes this information, how infrared light works, and even looked at infrared photos, Jackson argues that I have an incomplete picture of snakes and infrared light. I don’t buy that jump. Humans cannot, unassisted, see infrared light. This doesn’t mean that we have an incomplete picture of infrared light, but simply that our perceptions are limited to the visual spectrum. Mary’s example is persuasive purely because we all know what seeing red is like and cannot imagine a gray tone world. I believe that Mary does have all the information and the actual experience of red is insignificant. Furthermore, because we cannot be sure that our experience of red is identical to our neighbor’s, qualia have less of a place in a Physicalist stance.
Jackson proposes that qualia should be viewed as fundamental and basic. This is an incredibly bold claim and it declares that human perception is a fundamental part of the universe. While experiments to determine spin, electromagnetic charge, and so forth can be duplicated around the globe, qualia cannot quantitatively analyzed in such a manner.
Property dualism suggests that all substances are physical, yet within these physical substances there exists physical properties and mental properties. This concept in itself seems contradictory. If mental properties are made of physical substances, why are they not physical properties themselves? The knowledge argument does not address this issue and for that reason is not a good argument for property dualism.
I disagree with the premise of the argument that states Mary (or Fred in Jackson’s case) have all the physical knowledge about color, prior to seeing color. The thought experiment fails in general as a convincing framework because of this initial assumption. If someone has not had an experience, they cannot possibly know all of the facts or have all of the knowledge about it. Just because they lack this experience, does not make the experiential knowledge a property different than physical knowledge, i.e. “mental.”
Recent cognitive psychology and neuroscience research strongly supports the hypothesis that our mental representations share many characteristics with the things we are actually seeing (and hearing, smelling, tasting, touching). Researchers have found through fMRI studies that the same areas of the brain are active when we sense something as when we imagine sensing something. This evidence suggests that there is no difference between physical and mental properties because it supports the idea that sensing and or imaging that same thing result in the firing of neurons, a clearly physical property. To frame this argument in another way, it is possible that because Mary/Fred have not seen color they are not able to willfully produce the pattern of neural firing/brain activation that result in the experience of seeing a color. However, just because they haven’t learned to do so does not mean that they are unable to do so. Furthermore, because it is possible to physically create the experience of seeing a color via specific neural firing, the property is no difference from the property of knowing a fact. (It is physical as well.) Just as someone cannot know the visible spectrum of light and the wavelengths that correspond to its colors until they have been taught (and consequently their neurons learn to fire in a way that retrieves that fact), they also cannot know what it looks like to see color if they have not experienced it (their neurons have not been ”taught” to fire in such a manner). These two pieces of knowledge (knowing wavelength and seeing color) are not two different properties. One piece of knowledge maybe factual, while one is experiential; however, this distinction does not provide support for the idea that there exist two type of properties in the world, mental and physical. For these reasons, I believe that the knowledge argument is not a good argument for property dualism; the argument does not effectively distinguish between physical properties and mental properties.
April 18, 2014 at 11:29 pm
Initially, I struggled a bit with Jackson’s knowledge argument because it didn’t quite click with me but I was not sure why. At first, it seems to makes sense- someone who has never seen red before has no way of knowing what that color looks like. It is impossible for us as humans to understand what infrared or ultraviolet would look like, what it would be to experience those colors. This leads to the argument that not all information about an object is physical, there must be some mental property, just as property dualism states. But I think the problem with Jackson’s argument and property dualism is that they take experience, which is a very individual thing, and map it onto the object as a “property”. An individual’s experience of a color is not a fact about the color, but rather how the individual perceives it, which I believe is a result of their physical brain structure. Because of this, I would agree more with Lewis’ ability theory, that instead of seeing red being some sort of “knowledge” that they lack if they have not experienced it before, but rather that the perception of red is an ability of the individual. And this perception is due to the physical nature of their brain. So, I suppose this is an argument in favor of physicalism. Which although can be scary to think about because it kind of reduces humans to solely physical beings that really do not have free will, kind of makes sense. In neuro, we talk about the physiological underpinnings of emotions, motivations, cognition, and other aspects of human experience and consciousness. In neuro classes I accept that neurons firing in certain patterns are the causes of these feelings. So why is it hard to accept that we are completely physical beings? It is because consciousness and thought and imagination seem so intangible. But I think the more we discover about how the brain works, the more we will accept the physical nature of human life and experience.
April 18, 2014 at 8:45 am
The knowledge argument put forth by Frank Jackson is based on an interesting thought experiment that attempts to argue against pure physicalism.
The thing that jumps out immediately to me is the premise of the thought experiment itself. As Daniel Dennet argues, if Mary really knew everything about colour and how it works, she would also know what to expect when she was exposed to a colour such as red in the outside world. The concept of the ‘qualia’ that is a visual experience of redness would be explained in terms of neurological functions as well, and therefore she would not be gaining any new knowledge when she was released to the outside world.
However, another fact of the outcome would be that upon being released, Mary would experience all these new colours for the first time. And it is extremely possible that she would elicit a cry of surprise or some other such behaviour. Although she has prior knowledge of the neurophysiological underpinnings of what this experience is, her surprise would come from actual, real-time neural connections and activations in the brain that occur upon her seeing red for the first time. The difference here is that although she has the knowledge that does not mean that she has had the impact of the experience before. Neural connections and changes in the brain that take place as soon as she sees something red allow for her to receive the representation of the qualia of redness, despite her knowledge of how these neural changes allow her to do so. This is what would elicit her reaction of surprise.
Another issue I found with the thought experiment itself- the experiment is conceivable, but without sufficient or compelling evidence or reason to believe in the real-world possibility of it, I see the argument as being not as strong as it is made out to be.
April 18, 2014 at 12:01 am
At first glance, the knowledge argument as presented by Jackson seems to make sense. If Mary knew every physical fact about light and the way the brain perceives color then she would still not know what the actual experience of seeing red was like until she did. If we take this to be true, then we must concede that physicalism is not correct in its purest form. This is also known as the explanatory gap because there is a gap in our ability to explain qualia within the physicalist definition that all facts and information are physical in nature.
Although logically this must be the conclusion, I still find physicalism to be a more compelling point of view than property dualism. Therefore I am forced to deal with the problem of qualia. Over the years there have been several attempts to find a way to maintain physicalism. One such way comes from a qualm I have with one of the central premises of the knowledge argument. Since I believe in physicalism, I can’t quite believe that Mary could know every physical fact without knowing what it was like to see red. Dennet wrote a convincing arugment that complied with this idea. He said that, while there is an explanatory gap right now, eventually we will have the technology and understanding of the physical world that we will be able to define qualia in a physical manner. This could be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years in the future, but it is just as conceivable as the second premise of Jackson’s argument. Where there are two contradictory but conceivable ideas, I choose to accept the one that I find more comforting, which is a physicalist view of the world.
April 17, 2014 at 11:31 pm
The knowledge argument seems to be logical at first glance. However, I think it is sound but not valid. For I remain doubtful of the second premise in Jackson’s argument. First, it seems impossible and implausible that Mary knows all of the physical facts about the world. This is simply too good to be true. How can one know that he knows every single physical fact about the world that could possibly be known? Second, if it is (hypothetically) possible that Mary knows all of the physical facts about the world, why couldn’t she imagine the visual experience – that is, what it is like to see red – based on all the physical facts she has? So I think the question at stake is: Must experience be experienced? Is it possible to imagine (or deduce) an experience? Here is a rough example that might shed some light on this idea: no one has ever seen the whole universe, yet by mapping, imagining and deducing, I think we can confidently claim to know what this vast universe looks like.
April 17, 2014 at 10:41 pm
I have a more general doubt about the whole debate whether consciousness is physical or mental. I think the physical and mental dichotomy is an ontological dichotomy. That means, we use this distinction to understand the existing entities. However, “consciousness” just doesn’t seem to belong to the ontological realm. I understand “consciousness” as a concept coined by human beings to describe their experiences. Consciousness is not a word like “chair” which refers to a specific object. It makes sense to discuss if a chair is physical or mental, but to ask if consciousness is physical or mental is like asking whether “red” is salty or spicy.
I feel “consciousness” aligns more with the group of words such as “justice.” Is justice physical or mental? This question sounds weird, because we don’t talk about justice in such a way as if it were a substance in our world. It is an intellectual abstraction that we use to better describe and understand our world. And so is the word consciousness. Again to quote Wittgenstein roughly, it is an illegitimate use of our language when we ask whether consciousness is physical or mental.
April 17, 2014 at 10:24 pm
Like many of the comments posted beforehand, I too am conflicted about my feelings towards Jackson’s knowledge argument – on the one hand, the argument provides some evidence towards the incompleteness of physicalism; however, it does so within the (extremely wide/hypothetical) parameters of its own thought experiment. For me, basing the conclusions (and fairly drastic conclusions, at that) of this experiment on such an extreme hypothetical situation both detracts from of its overall points and conviction. Sure, I can imagine some world in which a person such as Fred exists, however this is not (at least as far as I am aware) a possibility on Earth. Why then should I say that Physicalism is false on Earth as opposed to on this hypothetical world that obeys the parameters of the experiment? For example, I could imagine a retort to this argument against property dualism in which, after examining Fred’s rods and cones and eventually identifying a gene that encodes for the additional rods/cones, scientists become able to and do implant this gene into the next generation of humans and thus they, too, are able to distinguish between Red1 and Red2. If this were the case, Sure, this argument seems like a stretch of the imagination, but I don’t find it it much more ridiculous than the world presented in Jackson’s own argument.
A supporter of Jackson’s argument might retort that even implanting the genes for the additional rods and cones would not allow for the next generation to distinguish their descriptions of seeing the two colors, as it is perceived by something non-physical. Yet, how are we to accept that (according to the thought experiment) physical entities such as rods and cones are responsible for Fred’s discriminatory ability, but that his ability to describe them does not relate to a physical property whatsoever? Perhaps there is a connection between the optic nerve and a seat in the brain for qualia and consciousness. Would it still be correct to say then that not all facts are explainable through physical properties? This all being said, Jackson is far from rare in his usage of particularly hypothetical thought experiments – in fact, the very notion of physicalism that he attempts to disprove utilizes them quite effectively for its own support- and if one is to accept the world presented in his hypothetical, then his conclusion follows not only clearly, but logically.
April 17, 2014 at 10:00 pm
I wish we had a distinction in English like the difference in French between savoir (understanding facts) and connaitre (being more intimately familiar with someone/place/concept) which both translate to “know.” Jackson’s trying to prove that the conceptual understanding is different than the intimate knowledge and intuitively this makes sense, especially when you take into account individual differences in sensory perception and that the same stimuli can evoke a large range of emotional responses in different people. But one of the aspects of the knowledge argument that I don’t agree with is the idea that it is impossible for Mary to understand or know red by teaching with language. We are perhaps just at a place of unsophisticated communication. If we can imagine zombies, why not better linguists? Also, I don’t see why the ability to verbally explain something is necessarily the way in which we should differentiate physical from non-physical phenomena. I am still a fan of the idea supplies by Kant in one of the previous readings, that perhaps the meta-view of our minds isn’t representative of its actual cognitive processes or organizations. Maybe this leans away from physicalism, but there really should be more options to chose from when trying to pinpoint consciousness.. The intangibility of qualia by current language is motivation enough.
April 17, 2014 at 9:27 pm
The knowledge argument seems sound on paper for property dualism (you can know everything about how humans perceive color without knowing what it’s like to see color), but I still am not convinced for a couple reasons. To me, the argument basically boils down to saying that experience and knowledge are fundamentally different. Fine. I haven’t read any physicalist text that argues against that. In fact, I would guess most scientists (whose job it is to study the physical nature of the world in some form or another) would agree. Sure, all facts are physical facts, and all information is physical information. In the “Mary” thought experiment, Jackson argues that Mary learns all the physical facts and information about seeing, but still can not know what the experience of seeing red is like. So, he concludes there is some fundamental property of seeing red that is not physical. But when Mary sees red, she is still receiving physical information, just of a new kind. How could she predict this input of physical information without having experienced it? She could not, just as she would not be able to guess all the physical facts about human perception of color unless she learned them.
There is also a distinct component of these thought experiments that seems circular to me. They begin by saying the situations of Mary and Fred are conceivable, which seems to me like a contradiction of physicalism. This would make the argument circular.
I suppose I don’t think the knowledge argument for property dualism is a good one for these reasons.
April 17, 2014 at 9:24 pm
The knowledge argument for property dualism is simultaneously compelling and frustratingly lacking. It seems almost unobjectionable that Mary could know all the facts about the color red without really understanding the experience of seeing red (what it’s like to see red). That this experience gap could ever be closed by future scientific understanding seems unconvincing to me. At the same time, the argument seems lacking on some level, precisely because it relies so heavily on qualia, which seem to evade any type of actual definition. It strikes me as unsatisfactory to say simply that qualia are what experiences “seem like” or “are like,” because this definition does not offer any reason to believe that qualia are even remotely similar in different individuals. This idea seems bizarre: every person could have a radically novel qualia experience in the world, which seems counterintuitive.
Furthermore, Jackson’s knowledge argument begins with a rather weird-sounding definition of physicalism. Physicalism is most frequently referred to as the idea that there is nothing “over and above” the physical. It’s not clear to me that this is equivalent to “all facts are physical facts” or “all information is physical information.” These definitions seem to be used specifically because the terminology lends itself to a convenient argument.
Ultimately, I find it extremely hard to argue about qualia. Arguments for and against property dualism seem incomplete or fatally vague, probably because our definition of qualia is similarly painfully vague. It feels like trying to debate a topic about which we don’t even have a sufficiently basic understanding to talk about with any meaning. I believe that, linguistically and conceptually, we have work to do before we can meaningfully discuss qualia.
April 17, 2014 at 9:24 pm
Property dualism is the idea that all substances are physical, but there exists two different kinds of physical substances in the world, physical and mental properties. Therefore, the qualia you are experiencing is a type of physical substance—it is a mental property of a physical substance. The basis of the knowledge argument states that knowledge is subdivided into separate mental and physical components. In this argument, there exists no reducible physical basis, contradicting the theory of property dualism. A supporter of the knowledge argument would say that a complete physical description of everything happening within us during something like a visual experience, for example, is destined to exclude the qualitative nature of that experience.
Jackson, in the knowledge argument, places Mary in the situation of visually experiencing a rose for the first time after only having known everything about color perception, but living in a colorless environment. He holds that Mary is learning something new upon this exposure to the rose that she was unable to grasp through physical knowledge about color perception. Using this conclusion, Jackson goes on to argue that physicalism is false—due to the fact that physicalism theorizes that “all facts are physical facts.” However, philosophers that believe in a non-reductive physicalist view of the mind might claim that all that physicalism requires is that every specific mental state is identical to some specific physical state; therefore, allowing not all mental properties to necessarily have to be reducible to physical properties.
In assessing the knowledge argument, I question whether it is strong enough to support property dualism. I come to the conclusion that the knowledge argument is a solid argument against physicalism. However, I would object to the statement that it is that strong of an argument for property dualism. The knowledge argument holds that knowledge boils down to the mental and the physical. However, property dualism stresses the origin of mental properties from physical substances. Churchland even goes as far as to state something along these lines. He argues that Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism is so strong that if it defeated physicalism, it would subsequently defeat substance dualism. Churchland views this as an indication that something is wrong with the knowledge argument. Finally, even Jackson no longer endorses the knowledge argument. His more recent amendments state that what happens to Mary when she leaves her colorless world is not to learn new nonphysical truths, but to be in a new kind of representational state. She acquires, instead of knowledge, the ability to recognize, imagine, and remember the new representational state.
I would agree that there is an “explanatory gap” between qualia and the physical world, in so much as it is not possible to explain the nature of qualia by reference to any facts about the physical world. However, qualia do depend on an interpretation, or conscious awareness, of the physical world. The connection between the physical world and qualia, or mental representations, is very intertwined, in my opinion. However, I agree with the knowledge argument in the point that qualia is essential to understanding and physical facts cannot take the place of, or constitute entirely, subjective experience.
April 17, 2014 at 9:21 pm
The property dualist view holds that the world is made up of one substance, which is the physical kind of substance. This substance can have two kinds of properties, physical properties and mental properties. The mental properties are necessarily connected to a physical substance, in this case the brain.
It is helpful to redefine what we mean by “substance” in the context of philosophy of the mind. A substance is a particular entity which a) is a bearer of properties b) is capable of existing independently of other substances c) persists through time.
The knowledge argument can be illustrated with the thought experiment of Mary in the black and white room. She knows all the physical facts there is to know. When she enters the outside world of color, she gains new knowledge in the form of qualia. She learns what the subjective experience of seeing color is like. This is something that she had to experience first hand, these non-physical facts about what it is like to see color were learned when she left the black and white room. Qualia are part of the category of mental properties that are necessarily connected to the brain, a physical substance. Without her brain, Mary couldn’t have this subjective experience. This is in contrast to the substance dualism view that the non-physical mind is a substance separate from the physical kind of substance.
The knowledge argument is not completely convincing to me, because I am more drawn to Lewis’s response to this argument. Lewis’s ability hypothesis challenges the idea that qualia are the non-physical facts that are part of the mental property of the substance that the world is made up of. This argument says that qualia, the way things seem to us, which we gain through our own subjective experience, are actually a set of abilities. To me, it seems logical that when Mary walks out of the room, she already has knowledge of what set of reactions the color red triggers in her cortex responding to optical stimuli, she is missing the ability to distinguish red from other colors. It makes sense that the “way red seems to us” is inherently dependent on how it is different from other colors. The abilities argument is more convincing to me than the knowledge argument towards property dualism.
April 17, 2014 at 9:15 pm
As first glance, the knowledge argument seems to provide sufficient evidence for property dualism, which claims that there is no immaterial substance, physcial, and mental properties. In addition, the argument also seems to successfully reject the reductive physicalist theories. However, I am not convince that the the thought experiment on Mary’s case is logical. There are some evidence from past literature in cognition and perception, which suggest that it might not be possible for someone like Mary to be able to perceive a number of different types of stimuli after her release. In one past study, a cat was raised in a closed space, where the only type of visual stimulus it was exposed to was vertical lines. After an extend period of time, the cat was released to a normal environment, and the researches found that the cat was not able to perceive lines with any other orientations apart from the vertical lines (90 degree). The neuroral data demonstrated that the neurons that are selective for other orientations, e.g. horizontal lines, were not activated for a long time (due to the lack of horizontal line’s representations in the experimental room) and thus, either lost their sensitivity to horizontal lines or shift their selectivity range to bias the vertical lines. Mary’s case is very similar to this study, and thus I do not believe that it will be logically possible for Mary to exist.
April 17, 2014 at 9:12 pm
I have been wrestling with the concept of property dualism for a while now and have gone from agreeing to disagreeing and back again, to me thus suggests there may be something innately, viscerally true about the concepts, even though all of the physical facts I have learned are screaming at me to explain it away. In terms of Jackson’s argument, I have found several points about the argument itself which I think fail to accurately convey what I see as the main point, which, despite all of the recent scientific evidence that altering physical brain states will lead to alterations in mental states, I have not yet been able to “explain away.” The fundamental idea conceives that even with a full understanding of the physical-causal processes that give rise to perception, color discrimination, hearing different instrumental tones, the touch of a feather versus sandpaper etc., a person cannot understand the actual first-person experience of a feeling until they have had that experience occur in themselves. Some philosophers call it what “it is like,” Jackson describes it as “information learned” in the case of Mary.
This is where I find fault in his argument for what I believe is a fundamentally inexplicable, undefinable part of what it is to be a linguistically-capable, rational human. His argument that she “learns” some new “information” does not line up with my conception of what it feels like internally to experience bright colors or the rumbling sounds of a cello melody: experience is akin to understanding, not learning new information. Even our everyday language suggests that we perceive a difference between the two. There is something much more deeply personal, innate and indescribably about understanding something than just “learnng.” As others have identified, learning makes experiential qualia seem like facts. This is where I believe that Jackson’s argument is weak in its explanatory powers for convincing others of the “something else” quality of qualia.
However, his ultimate premise is something I can’t shake off. The inherent subjectivity of experience- that it must be first person in order for a true ‘understanding’ of a feeling and all of its related mental states and sensations- is so innate to human life that we often can’t define it. The entire idea is flustering and, as rational beings who find logical patterns in much of our everyday lives, we try our hardest to explain it away. But there is something to say about the fact that no matter how much we all try find possible scientific, causal-physical explanations for experience, I keep getting a general feeling of discontent with every explanation offered, which I think others share. No explanation is quite enough. That “something else” sits deeply rooted in our mental conception of the world— so much so that we may not be aware of why the incomplete explanations bother us—maybe we’re trying to explain away ourselves and our most intrinsic piece of our felt existence.
For this reason— this logically-unsatisfying feeling of discontent alone— I find myself supporting the idea of the “explanatory gap.” I do not think that the knowledge argument alone is good enough argument for property dualism, as the argument itself sports too many linguistic and conceptual discontinuities. I think it is a valuable piece of a wider conglomeration of evidence that is still being gathered to make people more aware of the deep value we all may place in some sort of distinct, yet irreducible, mental property.
April 17, 2014 at 9:08 pm
I’m still having a lot of trouble accepting Jackson’s knowledge argument and its implications. When I go through his argument on a step-by-step basis, it seems logical, but after stepping back I feel like Jackson isn’t approaching qualia from the right direction. If Mary can truly know every physical fact about the world, then she ought to also have access to the minute details of her brain state at any given time. If this is the case, then she would be able to memorize the neural pathways that are activated upon seeing a certain color, upon differentiating between two colors etc. She should also be able to gauge the wavelength of light being reflected off of certain objects at any given time. This goes to say, that if Jackson let Mary know all the physical facts about the world she would be able to tell red from green without anyone giving her any guidance as long as we accept that she would be capable of color vision after seeing black and white for so long. Of course, this version of Mary would not to know, before she left the room, what the color “blue” looked like, but I have trouble seeing what Mary would gain upon leaving the room as knew “information”. I would almost be tempted to defer to the Ability Hypothesis here. What Mary gains is the ability to intuitively differentiate various colors. I have trouble accepting the idea that the intrinsic “yellowness” of the color “yellow” is a physical fact and therefore am skeptical that Mary could ever learn “what yellow looks like”.
April 17, 2014 at 9:02 pm
The knowledge argument presented by Jackson has great potential in differentiating what are known as qualia from other physical substances. However, it does not convincingly demonstrate that experiences involving qualia are composed of non-physical properties.
In its respectable but flawed attempt to support property dualism, the knowledge argument presents a thought experiment about a neuroscientist that apparently has obtained all possible information there is to know of the color red, although she has never experienced the color red itself. She has lived in a black and white room for all of her life, and when she finally experiences the color red, the question remains: Does she learn something new? I would have to say yes. However, I would not go as far as to say that the experience is nonphysical just as I would not agree that any transitive action, such as running or sleeping, are nonphysical because they ultimately are all derivatives of physical properties. I understand that vision was used in this experience for its intangible qualities. However, visual experience is not much different from experiences involving taste, touch, and smell. Qualia cannot be experienced without the inclusion of sensory receptors, and even though she has never experienced the color red, she still has the capability to do so once her eyes are fully developed. One could argue from a physiological standpoint that depriving someone of color may lead to not developing color vision, though I would say that that this is a product of physiological deficiency, which contains a physical component, which lies more along the lines of externalism.
I do agree with the notion mentioned in class that qualia are “just in for the ride” and even though qualia are not as concrete as other physical properties, they can still be deduced to merely parts of a whole that is inherently physical.
April 17, 2014 at 8:59 pm
Although I do feel that the knowledge argument is a good argument for property dualism, I’m not sure that I agree with it. Jackson argues that qualia cannot be physical properties and that physicalism is false on the basis of his two thought experiments. However, I am inclined to disagree. First, I feel that the thought experiments involving Fred and Mary are flawed because of the way physicalism is defined. In the experiments, Jackson claims that we know all the physical information about Fred and the world, and that Mary knows all the physical facts about the world and other people. Jackson then claims that even with this information, we wouldn’t know what Red1 and Red2 look like, while Mary still wouldn’t know what red was like. Yet, I find there is something unfair about the way Jackson is defining physicalism for his own purposes. To me, if one knows all the physical facts about the world and other people, then one has knowledge of what “redness” is like. To me, redness is merely the activation of a particular circuit of neurons, and thus it is physical information that Mary would understand. I suppose my argument somewhat falls into line with Dennett’s idea of an explanatory gap that will be closed in the future. I feel that if, in the future, it may be possible to isolate the exact areas of brain activation that lead to a perception of redness. Thus, given sufficiently advanced technology and techniques, it would be possible to induce a state of redness in someone merely through brain stimulation. Given this, Mary’s knowledge of all physical facts would already include the experience of “redness”, and thus she would not learn anything upon leaving the room to which she was confined.
April 17, 2014 at 8:56 pm
In “Epiphenomenal qualia,” Jackson presents two cases of the knowledge argument for property dualism. One is the case of Fred, an individual who is able to discriminate between two different shades of red between which normal humans cannot discriminate. According to Frank, although we can know all the possible information about the physical world (i.e. wavelengths of light, the color processing system in the eye and the brain), we still would not know what these different shades of red look like to Frank. We must then accept that there is some information which is not physical information and that physicalism is false. Similarly, Mary is a neuroscientist who knows all the physical facts about red (i.e. wavelengths of light, the color processing system in the eye and the brain) but she is locked in a black and white room. When she leaves the room and sees red for the first time, we must say that she learns something new. But since we assumed that she already knew all the physical facts, what she learns must not be a physical fact; therefore, physicalism is false.
Both these arguments are founded upon the premise that physicalism is the view that all facts are physical facts, or all information is physical information. But is it a necessary corollary of physicalism that it must be possible to know all the physical facts? Of course, Frank is free to create whatever terms he likes in his thought experiment involving Mary (i.e. that she knows all the physical facts), but what if it were impossible to know all the physical facts? Perhaps qualia are indeed a physical fact, but one which humans can never know about physically, though we know about them experientially. Although this view seems unlikely and unsatisfying, it is not logically excluded.
Contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennet have argued that eventually cognitive science will reach a complete understanding of all the physical facts, allowing Mary to understand qualia such as color. This is a highly doubtful argument as it seems to miss the central point that qualia is a first-person subjective experience that cannot be experienced by simply knowing the facts about it. Although one can imagine what it would be like to be a snake with infrared vision, in no way is this equivalent to being a snake with infrared vision.
Basically, I think that the knowledge argument seems plausible, but I feel tricked by it somehow. It’s hard to figure out exactly why though. I take most trouble with the premise that Mary knows all the physical facts about the world. Perhaps there is something about human nature that precludes this possibility. This would then allow for qualia to be a physical property even if we did not know how or why.
In general, my inclination would be towards physicalism, since I see no good reason (other than religious or spiritual hunches) that there must be a non-material soul. Given the various failings of both type and token physicalist accounts of the mental we have seen in this course, however, a reductive physicalism seems at odds with reality and it would seem wise to adopt a kind of property dualism. And yet,I don’t completely understand how property dualism is a dualism if the only objects that exist are physical objects. If mental properties exist, as property dualism claims, then are they physical objects? This doesn’t seem right, since then property dualism would essentially be equivalent with type or token physicalism. If mental properties are not physical objects, then what are they? It is tempting to describe them as consisting of a mental substance, but this would lead to Cartesian substance dualism.
April 17, 2014 at 8:52 pm
Jackson’s Knowledge Argument is, at first glance, very convincing. In the case of Fred, it seems obvious that knowing all of the physical facts would still not give us any knowledge of Fred’s experience. Jackson therefore concludes that knowledge of qualia is not physical knowledge, and therefore qualia are not physical properties, but rather fall under the completely separate category of mental properties. Upon further reflection, I began to ask myself exactly what the difference between a physical fact and a non-physical fact would be. What is physical information, and why do qualia not qualify as such?
It seems that we identify as physical information, all things that can be described in language, and using the fundamental properties of the universe. For example, the wavelength of red light is physical information because it can be described using language. But then, how do you explain wavelength to a person? Such an explanation would necessitate that they be able to see a visual representation of a wave, and visualize and understand the concept of length. Both of these things require knowledge from perception, and cannot be explained simply through words. You could try to describe length as the distance from one point to another, but a person who has never experienced/perceived distance in a 2 or 3-dimensional space would not be able to understand distance, and would therefore be unable to understand length. In the same way, you can say that something is red and a person who has never seen the color would be unable to comprehend it or visualize it. As such, it seems that obtaining physical facts relies on our ability to perceive properties, the same way that obtaining information about qualia does. Maybe qualia can be considered physical facts. Maybe, at the very least, the differences between them and physical facts are not as important as they seem.
April 17, 2014 at 8:45 pm
The knowledge argument provides ample support for property dualism, as it remains consistent with its proposed claims (no immaterial substances and the existence of both physical and mental properties) and does not imply agreement with reductive physicalist theories. The main points of the argument conclude that, even though one might know all the physical facts about something, he/she would still lack an understanding of the subjective experience, or what it is like to experience that thing. In this way, qualia are different from physical facts, and physicalism is flawed.
The proposed thought experiments do a good job of supporting this argument. In the first experiment, we understand that Fred’s color perception (that is capable of discerning between colors labeled red1 and red2) cannot be understand experientially by merely dissecting his brain – though we can claim to “know” all there is to know about his behavior and physiology, we would still not have a subjective understanding of what it is like. The thought experiment Mary’s Room further exemplifies this concept. Mary, upon leaving the black and white room, would “learn” something new – she would see color for the first time, and thus, learn the subjective experience of seeing color.
These two thought experiments (Mary’s Room perhaps more obviously) can be answered with the objectives we discussed in class – Dennett’s eventual bridging of the explanatory gap and Lewis’ ability hypothesis. I find both to be plausible: the first in that we can never be confident about how scientifically and technologically advanced we are, so that perhaps we will one day figure out why qualia and consciousness are such mysteries to us, and the second in that (especially in the case of Mary), she would not acquire new information upon leaving the room, but a new ability (to perceive color). Furthermore, perhaps the inherent nature of these thought experiments is flawed – does Mary really know everything? If she did know EVERYTHING, wouldn’t she know what it’s like to see color?
With the topic of qualia it is always easy to wonder if what we take to be experience is the same as what others take to be experience. In other words, who is to say that my experience of seeing redness is the same (or different) as someone else’s? We simply do not know, at least in a scientific, empirical way. Flaws arise from the lack of first-person privilege, and making inferences about another’s mental states is further complicated by the imperfect nature of language. All in all, I think the knowledge argument, despite its objections, still stands as a strong logical basis for describing the nature of consciousness. Based on what we know right now about perception and awareness and the properties these processes give rise to, separating between physical and mental properties (analogous to the division between say, neurophysiological processes and thoughts/beliefs) is the best we can do.
April 17, 2014 at 8:42 pm
Jackson’s thought experiment in support of the knowledge argument makes sense to me, that is, if it is actually possible. According to the thought experiment, Mary knows all the physical facts about the world and other people—for example, how light is processed in the eye and brain. But when she is released, she learns something new—what it is like to see colors, aka qualia. Jackson thus concludes that there are facts that are non-physical facts, so physicalism is false. There is the explanatory gap in physicalism, as it cannot account for what it is like to have a sensory experience. This is logical—there is no way that Mary could have known what it was like to experience the color red when in the black and white room. However, I do question Mary’s actual ability to process color and experience color when released from the room. I believe she will have missed the “critical period” to develop the proper mechanisms in the brain to process color. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of this critical period in proper development of certain neural mechanisms. For example, a study on cats showed that when they were only exposed to horizontal lines, they later could not discriminate between horizontal and vertical lines when exposed to both. This suggests they did not have the ability physically in the brain to even process this new stimulus of a vertical line. However, if Mary actually did have the neural mechanisms to process/see color, the experiment makes sense to me. On a side note, similar to Lewis’ “Ability Hypothesis”, I am hesitant to say that qualia are “facts”. Rather, I see them as subjective experience/awareness, as phenomenal consciousness is defined. Lewis proposes that qualia are “abilities” to recognize and discriminate color. I agree with an explanation more along these lines, as it seems strange to me to define qualia as facts. But at the same time, I’m not sure “abilities” is quite right. It also seems that according to Lewis, you must gain the ability of seeing color by seeing it—since Mary never saw color, would her neurons even be able to fire in such a way to give rise to the qualia of seeing red? (according to the cat experiment, no.)
In terms of how the argument works with property dualism, I think it makes sense. Property dualism posits that there are both physical and mental properties of physical substances, and that some physical substances are complex enough to give rise to mental properties. This makes sense, given that the neural mechanisms of the brain are so complex that they can give rise to mental experience, i.e. qualia, even though these are non-physical– and this scenario is shown through the Mary thought experiment.
April 17, 2014 at 8:41 pm
I think Jackson’s Knowledge argument for property dualism is flawed. In general, there are a few ‘givens’ and ‘conceivables’ that he employs as the foundation for his argument that I’m having a bit of trouble with.
First of all, I don’t buy the “explanatory gap” component of the argument. The way I interpreted it, Jackson is saying that there are properties of mental content that make it fundamentally different from the physical, in spite of the fact that they may also arise from physical substances. In other words, mental consciousness is a ‘physical’ phenomenon, but there are properties of mental content that set it apart from other physical substances.
This argument – that the mental and the physical have foundations in physical substances but have unique properties that set them apart from each other – doesn’t sit well with me. I think Daniel Dennett’s argument comes the closest to putting my issue to words: he states that even though there might exist an explanatory gap between the mental and the physical today, it is conceivable that in the future this gap will be closed (i.e. Mary could be able to experience the color red without ever actually seeing it). Building off of that idea, I think it is indeed very conceivable that at some point in the future consciousness may be better explained in physical terms. At present, we can’t explain it neurologically, but the speed at which the field of neuroscience is growing leads me to believe that a physical explanation is imminent. Or at least, it is highly conceivable. So why put stock in a philosophical theory of the mind whose arguments are in direct opposition to the progress that popular science is making today? It strikes me as more similar to Cartesian dualism than it does to many of the theories that have incorporated more modern scientific developments.
Furthermore, I think it is inaccurate for Jackson to conclude that mental content is inherently different from other physical phenomena. Another of my major problems with the knowledge argument is exemplified in Mary’s case. Namely, I don’t think it’s trivial that even though she has never seen color before, she obviously has the physical capacity to see color and black and white (i.e. rods and cones). In Jackson’s argument, should it not follow that her ‘learning experience’ of seeing color for the first time is directly linked to a physical experience (her cones being excited for the first time)? And moreover, to bring up the issue of trying to explain color to a blind person, I think it is important to point out that the reason some people lack vision are all physical – they have dysfunctional optical or other brain pathways.
To conclude, I would bring up the cliche, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Or, alternatively, there is color in the outside world but Mary isn’t there to see it, who’s to say that there is actually color? Birds of prey have infrared vision and bats have ultrasonic sensors, but we humans have neither of these faculties. And so, we will probably never be able to know “what it’s like” to pick up these types of information without filtering them to fit our own senses. I guess I agree with Jackson that there is a learning experience to be had that isn’t gained by merely learning facts, but my main issue with his argument is that the hindrance to acquiring this knowledge is entirely physical – thus representing an argument for physicalism rather than against it. The physical and the mental seem so inextricably intertwined that Jackson’s argument just doesn’t hold water for me.
April 17, 2014 at 8:06 pm
When I first read the knowledge argument, I felt compelled to agree with Jackson about property dualism. I find it hard to believe that a woman who is specializes in vision and knows all the physical facts about vision could distinguish red from another color. Even if she knows the wavelengths, we as humans cannot pinpoint which wavelengths we are seeing. Therefore, I agree that physicalism does not paint the full picture. So therein lies the explanatory gap and property dualism. I think that this may be the best picture we can have given our limited understanding of the brain and consciousness. Since we have never studied a woman who was in Mary’s scenario, I cannot say with certainty what would happen, I can only say what my gut tells me to say.
In fact, perhaps we unconsciously know what wavelengths we are seeing and by knowing the wavelengths consciously, Mary would be able to say that the rose was red. I think that Jackson has defined physical and mental states as irreducible because we do not yet have enough knowledge. We once thought elements were irreducible, but then we discovered atoms and protons etc. I digress. But what I am trying to get at is that, there must be more that we are missing. I intrinsically believe that there must be some connection between our mental, physical, and experiential (ie. qualia) aspects of life that foster our beliefs and consequently our actions. I think that saying something is a phenomena is a cop-out, and that our questioning should lead to further research and understanding. So I leave this open ended, but I think that the knowledge argument effectively makes way for property dualism, but I think this is an interim theory and like Dennett, I think that we will have the tools one day to fill the gaps.
April 17, 2014 at 7:45 pm
I believe that the knowledge argument is a good argument for property dualism. I agree with the view the knowledge argument presents. I don’t think it is possible to know everything about the color red without experiencing the color red. You can know all the physical properties and know everything about the color red, but you truly won’t know what red is until you see it with your own eyes. You can apply this idea to other situations. You may know all of the physical properties of a burger and know how it should taste, but you will not completely know until you take that first bite. This argument agrees with the idea property dualism. Qualia is especially important in the knowledge argument. She may have known all the physical facts previously, but the experience of seeing red was not one. When Mary is released, the experience of seeing red is a new non-physical fact. The qualia of seeing red for the first time is something that is learned after she leaves her room of black and white, allowing for the distinction between the physical and the mental in the physical world.
April 17, 2014 at 7:28 pm
The knowledge argument says physicalism is false because even after learning everything that is reportable about a certain substance /event, it is impossible to complete understand what that experience is without actually having gone through it/sensed it. So in the example of Fred, the knowledge argument says that despite being given all possible physical information about the color red, he still does not have all the information about what red is or feels like. The example with Mary takes the argument a step further by claiming that this information is actually a fact, and there are non-physical facts about the color red that she does not understand until she actually sees it. For this reason Jackson supports property dualism, which says that all things have a physical existence in the world but consist of both physical and irreducible mental properties.
I personally think that, as Chalmers mentions in his article, property dualism is like many other theories of consciousness in that it doesn’t actually achieve its goal in completely distinguishing between the functional and phenomenal aspects of a mental state. Jackson offers the knowledge argument to show how there must be irreducible mental properties that exist separate from the underlying physical substances that cause them. However, he never makes mention of what these mental properties are or what makes them distinctly different from their physical counterparts. If physical information does not adequately explain the color red than what type of information can explain red to someone that has experienced it. Property dualism seems like a cop-out theory that provides no alternate to physicalism other than saying that an alternate must exist.
Despite these failings of property dualism as a theory, the knowledge argument in the case of Fred at the very least does seem to support the idea that physical information is not enough. Even looking at something that is more abstract than the description of a physical substance, like love, we frequently say that you can’t understand until you have actually experienced it first-hand. Despite being told what love is time and time again, until you have been through the process all your previous encounters with the concept are moot. However, while I would agree that this indescribable aspect of the color red or love or any other experience is non-physical information, I would not describe it as a non-physical fact. By labeling qualia or phenomenal qualities as facts, we are claiming that different people have different facts about what we refer to as the “same” experience. You would know different facts about pain than I do. Can we actually call the qualia that make up our experience a fact, if the basis of a fact lies in its absolute truth? Are our experiences absolute truths, and if all of our experiences are facts then is there an absolute relativism concerning qualia? While it may not be crazy to claim that what we are feeling is absolute true to each one of us individual, it seems unnecessary to even have to label qualia as facts, when we know there an infinite number of ways we can describe an experience. For this reason, I would support the argument with Fred, while remaining unconvinced about the idea of qualia as a fact.
April 17, 2014 at 7:01 pm
My response to this argument, I think, is “well, yeah, I guess that makes sense…”. The thing is, that’s been my response to basically every single thought experiment we’ve looked at this year. Each one takes a situation (a situation, it is worth noting, that is always conceivable but never realistic) and uses it to make tremendously broad and sweeping statements that don’t really seem to follow given the specificity of the circumstances. Here, for instance, we’re asked to picture a case in which Mary somehow knows all the physical facts about the world (all of them? really?) and yet has only been exposed to shades of black and white… and then we’re asked to accept a tremendously broad statement like “physicalism is false” based on that? For such an important idea, can’t we find a better example? During class, I jokingly stated a counterargument that runs as follows: “P1: physicalism is true. C: physicalism is true.” Again, that particular statement was supposed to be absurd, but the frustration is real. How can we really accept a theory when its main arguments revolve around such specific hypothetical examples?
General tirades about philosophy aside, I do honestly find this argument to be intriguing, if not 100% convincing. On an intuitive level, it makes sense to think that qualia cannot be defined in terms of physical states, especially in light of the videos that I mentioned in class (regarding trying to explain colors to a blind person). The thought examples (while kind of stupid, I think) definitely do illustrate their point, in that it does seem unlikely that a person who has never seen color would be able to experience the qualia of color, even if they’ve been given sufficient information about the physical world. However, when I say this, I’m working off a gut feeling, and I get the sense that the thought examples are as well. After all, how can we possibly be sure that Mary (with all the physical facts about the world at her disposal) can’t know what color feels like? If we’re allowing the possibility of her knowing everything there is to know about the world, how can we possibly make a statement like “Mary doesn’t know… what it is like for them to see red”? I mean, yes, it seems unlikely that she could (and my intuition would agree that she couldn’t), but where’s the actual evidence? We are already deep in the realm of the absurd, so can’t we simply say – with just as much validity – that she actually could feel the qualia of color (and thus that physicalism could be true)?
I keep getting sidetracked by how much I hate these thought examples. Again, the basic idea here – that there are both mental and physical properties, and that the two are not the same – makes sense to me, and I actually find this whole theory quite appealing on a certain level. It’s really intriguing to think of mental states as fundamental ‘factors’ in the universe, and to compare them with things like mass and charge and spin. I’m certainly not sure I buy it yet (the scientist in me is screaming “no! mental states must come out of physical states”), but it’s definitely a cool and novel way of thinking about the world.
Also, on an unrelated note, I very much don’t agree that mental states are just sort of “along for the ride” (that is, that they cannot impact physical states at all). Such a statement seems contrary to everything I’ve ever known, and I refuse to accept without overwhelming evidence to back it up (and the evidence CANNOT be a thought experiment!).
April 17, 2014 at 7:00 pm
Like many of my classmates below, I at first glance I do believe that Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism is a well- structured argument for property dualism. First off, as soon as property dualism was introduced, I felt as if the piece of the puzzle to Descartes’ theory of substance dualism that I was looking for but could never quite define myself was put in place. Property dualism is the view that all substances are physical objects, but there are two irreducibly different kinds of properties of which they consist, physical and mental properties. Some physical objects (i.e. brains) reach a level of complexity at which they give rise to a distinct mental property (i.e. qualia). I really like this idea of property dualism, as I do take strongly to physicalism, but believe that there is something more, something mental, that we will never be able to explain.
Jackson explains the knowledge argument with the use of a thought experiment of a woman named Mary. I agree with many of the previous posts in that the experiment is rather straightforward. Mary lives in a black and white room, and knows all of the physical facts about the world and other people, but doesn’t truly know what it feels like to see red once she leaves this black and white room and experiences the color herself. The argument then states that because of this, these facts or “qualia” must not be physical facts, and physicalism is false. Here I have to say that although the thought experiment makes sense, I can hardly see it as sound. I agree with Nathan that we cannot build an argument based on the premise that Mary knows all of the physical facts of the world. This claim seems out of reach, because as we as a human race do not know all of these facts yet, who is to say this knowledge would not give Mary insight into the experience of red? In short, I am debating whether this thought experiment truly undermines physicalism. This new knowledge, or experience of qualia that Mary gains could conceivably be physical information. To lay the claim that this new information is fundamentally not physical is making a big assumption – especially because no one yet knows what we would really know if we knew everything physical there was to know in the world.
With this said, this newly introduced theory of property dualism is still my new favorite, though I am still working out the kinks in my minds. I am partial to the physicalist theory, but have always believed that there is something more, something we cannot and maybe will never be able to explain. The idea of physical objects reaching a level of complexity that create these complex mental states is believable – at least more than Descartes idea of a soul, which he is unable to back up.
April 17, 2014 at 6:49 pm
The knowledge argument is a good argument for property dualism as it suggests a necessary separation between phenomena and the physical. There is something “that it is like” to smell roses, beyond just the trigger in your brain. Because of this, phenomena cannot be physically reduced and we are left with the explanatory gap. This is exactly where I think property dualism come in. It says that there is a mind and a body and does not try to explain the link between them. From a physicalist point of view, if phenomena cannot be reduced, then they have no causality in our lives. We have experience of qualia, but it does give rise to any action or belief.
Something inside me says this cannot be the case. I absolutely want to believe that qualia and my experience and interpretation, my beliefs and desires, have some kind of agency in my life. Agreeing to an explanatory gap and leaving phenomena powerless (although they’re powerless either way, as reduced to the physical and therefore deterministic, or irreducible and therefore with no causal power) is quite unsettling. The fact that this gap exists leads me to believe there must be some dualist view to explain it. Either we have to throw away qualia, and the experience that feels like it defines our lives, or else agree to a dualist view. I prefer the latter, even though it does not give a concrete definition of how it works, I think our phenomenal experience is real and has bearing on our lives, and therefore gives a dualist picture reason to take root.
April 17, 2014 at 6:48 pm
The knowledge argument seems strong enough to beg some significant questions regarding physicalism, but it hasn’t quite sold me on the idea of property dualism. I agree with Jackson’s assertion that, without having experienced the color red, Mary does not have all the facts of red. If, as the thought experiment requires, we accept the idea that Mary has all the physical facts of red prior to seeing it for the first time, and she, upon seeing red for the first time, learns something new, then the experience of red (and other qualia) must be of a non-physical nature. This is the conclusion Jackson asks us to come to, and I am on board for the most part.
Where the argument loses me is the idea that Mary can have all the physical facts in the first place. I take issue with the way the argument uses the term knowledge (important to the knowledge argument!), because it assumes that to know something is to have conscious awareness of that knowledge. Seeing red or tasting coffee may be indescribable and irreducible to universal facts among people, but I don’t think the same can be said of the brain. A physicalist might argue that knowledge is just storage of information in plastic synapses, made stronger or weaker according to synapse activation. From this standpoint, if Mary’s red network has never been activated, those synapses have never stored the sensory information of red, and it can be argued that her brain lacks that knowledge.
As far as property dualism is concerned, the knowledge argument isn’t so much the issue because the theory in itself seems problematic to me. Property dualism claims that mental properties (like consciousness, experience, qualia etc.) arise when physical entities reach a certain level of complexity. I don’t understand how a physicalist could possibly support this idea because at its core, the theory claims that what a substance dualist might call non-physical ‘stuff’ exists. I understand that a property dualist would argue that, in fact, property dualism avoids doing just that by calling the mental properties of the physical, but that feels like slippery logic to me.
April 17, 2014 at 6:36 pm
Is the knowledge argument a good argument for property dualism? Why or why not?
To start, I want to clarify both the argument for property dualism and the knowledge argument. From my understanding, property dualism goes beyond physicalism and claims that, while all objects are physical objects, they can be reduced even further to subcategories of physical properties and mental properties. The knowledge argument, on the other hand, places more emphasis on qualia; the subjective view of how an individual’s consciousness is experienced. It defends the statement that although a person may have complete physical knowledge about an experience, such as seeing red, they would still not have any knowledge about what it is like to actually experience seeing red.
To address Mary’s situation, I am going to agree with Alexandra’s point. I too feel that it is contradictory and circular to claim that physical knowledge can have mental properties, although they consist mainly of physical properties. If mental properties are physical properties, then what distinguishes them from other physical properties? I feel that mental and physical properties of consciousness are very separate and the overlap of the mental and the physical could be deemed unnecessary. The knowledge argument hones in on the non-physical component of knowledge. It argues that all knowledge cannot be physical because it addresses the non-physical elements of some types of knowledge, but it fails to address the overlap of physical and mental properties that arise from the argument for property dualism. Therefore, I cannot defend the knowledge argument as a good argument for property dualism. These two proposals have different objectives in addressing the physical and mental properties of knowledge, and therefore don’t provide enough direct opposition for me.
If I had to choose which argument I agreed with more, I can definitely say I side with the knowledge argument over the argument for property dualism. I feel strongly that a qualitative experience, qualia, is strictly a mental experience and is definitely comprised of non-physical properties. I feel that knowledge about a mental experience cannot fit into the same category as physical knowledge if it is impossible to acquire this type of knowledge without ever having that experience before. For example, it is impossible for a blind person to acquire knowledge on what it feels like to see or what a color looks like, even if they have other physical and scientific knowledge about sight. On another note, Jackson’s proposal of epiphenomenalism is very enticing. While I do not believe mental knowledge and physical knowledge can both be considered physical knowledge, I feel as though there is a stronger link between them than the knowledge argument accounts for. Epiphenomenalism claims that the qualitative properties of experience are not physical properties; they are a category of their own call epiphenomena. Jackson believes epiphenomena are caused by physical properties, but do not themselves cause any other physical properties or events, though they may cause other mental properties. I have the most affinity for the aspect of this proposal that claims the physical properties of knowledge cause the mental properties, but the mental properties are not physical. I like the idea that the mental is still connected to our physical properties in some causal way. However, the mental is a category of its own, separate from the physical. This seems like a compromise of both the knowledge argument and property dualism that is satisfying enough for me.
April 17, 2014 at 6:13 pm
Is the knowledge argument a good argument for property dualism? Why or why not?
Property dualism is a strong non-reductivist view that rejects both type and token identity. It claims that all substances/objects are physical, but there are two irreducibly different kinds of properties they can exhibit—physical and mental. For example, physical brains have a higher level of complexity which gives rise to distinct types of mental properties. According to Jackson’s Knowledge argument, qualia facts and physical facts are different, therefore qualia are non-physical facts.
In the case of the thought-experiment of Mary, it is plausible that before Mary leaves the dreary B&W room to experience the vibrant colors she’s been denied, yes she could know all the physical facts about the world and people, about the different wavelengths of light, and about the color processing system in the eye and brain. And yes when she steps out of that room she learns something new upon experiencing color. This implies (1) our subjective and qualitative properties of experiences (aka qualia) exists, and (2) physicalism is false because there are facts that exist that are not physical. I generally find this as a pretty sound argument, but I definitely question it because qualia seems so ambiguous to me. Lewis’ “ability” hypothesis which essentially is a functionalist account against qualia saying that to have qualia is just to have abilities that allow us to discriminate between things is also somewhat convincing. When I think of tasting coffee, is qualia just the ability to allow me to differentiate coffee from anything else with no subjective and qualitative experience. I don’t know. Is my qualia for tasting coffee the same as other peoples? All in all I think this argument supports property dualism because it gives a reasonably example of how experiences (this works also for beliefs and emotions and desires) are properties to a physical substance (such as the brain).
April 17, 2014 at 6:03 pm
Really, every part of me wants to believe that consciousness is nonphysical. What a great discovery it would be if we could somehow learn that the “specialness” that constitutes human consciousness is somehow apart from physical reality, that it is some essential element that cannot be expressed in terms of concreteness or dimensionality. The knowledge argument offers strong support for this nonphysicalist view of the universe. If we know everything about the physical, yet we lack knowledge about consciousness, doesn’t that imply that consciousness is nonphysical? Unfortunately, I think this argument amounts to little more than wishful thinking. It is a valid argument, but I’m hard pressed to say that it is sound. How can we possibly build an argument on the premise that we (or someone/some being) actually has complete knowledge of the physical? Who knows everything about the brain? When will we actually know everything about the brain? And when we do, who’s to say that we won’t also uncover some physical explanation for consciousness (like what Churchland’s after).
I want to believe that consciousness transcends the physical, but absent a religion or a spirituality, I am guided by science and by knowledge, and nothing in science suggests that the knowledge argument supports property dualism. Until proven otherwise, I have to assume that what matters is matter.
Consciousness as a physical phenomenon does not by itself suggest that qualia are out. I don’t necessarily believe that knowledge of consciousness’ grounding in the physical will allow us to understand what an experience is like for another person. I think the issue of consciousness as a physical/nonphysical phenomenon is a topic separable from the debates surrounding qualia. I would love to explore this more fully.
April 17, 2014 at 5:57 pm
I do believe that the knowledge argument is a good argument for a qualia like based argument such as property dualism. In the though experiment, Jackson describes Mary, a brilliant scientist who lives in a room without color, watching shows on her black and white screen. She only knows what color is, such as red blue and yellow from textbooks, research and others. When she goes out into the real world and experiences it for the first time, the knowledge that she gained previously missed something completely, the experience of it.
I completely agree with Jackson. It seems that we live in a world where everything that we assign meaning to has to be defined in some form or another. We have to quantify everything with language and signs and symbols. Everything has to be coated in a layer of concrete to be significant and in order for it to relate to other physical objects in the world, when this is not true. Things have an intrinsic essence that I think can never be explained or defined, objects, chairs, tables and dogs, just are. They just exist. Our experience of them may be very different to someone else’s. Though the feeling of petting a dog, running your hands through their thick coat, , something thick yet soft, can be described, the feeling of it and the experience is completely different.
I do believe that science is good, but not even the most brilliant scientist, could create a certain qualia in someone if no one has ever experienced it, or at least not yet. A big reason may be because we see things differently, my perception of red may be different to yours, the inverted spectrum argument can be used as an example. Where even though photo-pigments may serve the functional role, the qualia is ultimately different.
Another example is the translation of language, where many meanings may be lost in transcription. For example there is a German word, one word, that is translated in English to mean “standing on top of a mountain and watching your shadow across the land.” Clearly without being a native German speaker, one will loose the essence of this word.
Overall I believe that this is a solid argument, and that Jackson’s thought experiment of Mary conveys his beliefs thoroughly.
April 17, 2014 at 5:29 pm
While I do agree with many aspects of the knowledge argument, I do still have hesitations to accepting how Jackson connects the argument to proving property dualism and epiphenomenalism. The knowledge argument itself is fairly straightforward. Mary can have a basic understanding of what the color red is based on literature and scientific data, but does not have true understanding of red until she leaves her black and white house and is exposed to a red tomato. Mary learns something new about the color red by experiencing it firsthand. This seems very logical and intuitive: we cannot have a true understanding of something until we experience it ourselves – be it how a color looks, or how a food tastes, or what a flower smells like. We can learn all the scientific facts and have all the information about these sensations but we will not have a complete picture of what they are until we have been exposed to them ourselves. This is where I am in complete concordance with Jackson. However, I am not sure if this completely debunks physicalism as a possibility.
Physicalism holds that all facts are physical facts, or all information is physical information. I would argue that while Mary may know a vast amount of the physical information regarding the color red, she could not possibly know all of the physical information without having experienced it. Therefore, I find the second point of Jackson’s argument, that Mary “knows all of the physical facts about the world,” to be quite problematic. I would argue that processing sensory information, like seeing the color red, is still physical information. Therefore Mary could not have had complete physical knowledge about the color while living in a world without the color red. While I do disagree with this aspect of Jackson’s argument, I would certainly agree with his penultimate point that there are facts that are not physical facts; that the experience of qualia must be more than just something physical. I would also even agree with epiphenomenalism and property dualism as well, because it seems to make sense that qualia and consciousness come along with our physical experience. Property dualism appears to be a great compromise between the PNI theory and other, more abstract theories of the mind. It is certainly true that there are some aspects of human behavior and consciousness that cannot be exactly mapped to a certain area of the brain or body yet must still be connected to our physical beings in some way (at least, I would argue that they must still originate from something physical). Property dualism allows for this sort of connection to be made without being so restricting; namely, it states that the mental must somehow come from the physical and that the two are irreducible. I would absolutely agree with this. The only problem is that the knowledge argument itself seems to be flawed, and there perhaps needs to be more to it in order to fully disprove physicalism and introduce epiphenomenalism and property dualism as viable theories.
April 17, 2014 at 4:20 pm
Chalmer’s Conceivability Argument involves a “zombie” creature that is physically identical to us, but lacks conscious experience. His argument goes as follows:
1. It’s conceivable that a being (zombie) is physically identical to us (beings t hat have consciousness) but lacks conscious experience
2. It’s logically possible that there could be zombies (though not probable)
3. Thus, consciousness does not logically supervene on physical properties
4. Physicalism requires logical Supervenience of consciousness on physical properties
5. Physicalism is false.
I would argue that premises 1 and/or 2 may be false, depending on how we define consciousness. In class we used the example of a square circle as something that is logically impossible and inconceivable. Other similar example that we mentioned in another philosophy class is a currently married bachelor. These examples contradict themselves, because the definition of one term must necessary exclude the other. For example, a circle by definition has one side, while a square must by definition have 4 sides. Considering how little we know about how consciousness comes about, it seems entirely possible that consciousness and certain physical states (ie the exact state of the brain of a conscious person) could be defined so as to necessarily include the other (like bachelor and unmarried). If this were the case, then certain physical states without consciousness would be logically impossible and unconceivable, and the first two premises of the argument would not hold. Because of the possibility of defining consciousness different ways, this argument seems a bit circular, because it assumes that certain physical properties are not necessary and sufficient for consciousness.
It might be possible to extend this counterargument to the similar argument involving the inverted spectrum. You could say that since there is a difference between the exact cone structures in the inverted person, they are not physically identical. Then, if qualia is defined so that it requires a certain physical state, and vice versa, it would be logically impossible to conceive of that state without the same qualia. However, there probably would be more room to argue against this compared to the presence of consciousness in general.
April 17, 2014 at 4:18 pm
Intuitively, I find knowledge arguments of the Mary-the-color-scientist type, as well as the conceivability arguments that Chalmers offers against physicalism, to be fairly compelling. I am not absolutely sure that they disprove physicalism, but I think they do indicate that any imaginably successful physicalism would have to involve a thoroughgoing revision of our concepts of the mental and the physical: namely, a revision that would make it no longer conceivable for two beings to be physically identical yet differ in qualia in the same way that it is inconceivable for two substances to both be H2O and yet not both be water. I can’t really conceive of how such a revision might occur, or what sorts of experiences/evidence might lead to it, but to rule out the possibility completely seems a bit epistemically arrogant. I guess what this amounts to is that I’m not absolutely sure an explanatory gap entails an ontological gap, although if there were an ontological gap we would certainly expect to see an explanatory one accompanying it.
If, however, our concepts of physical information and of the phenomenal qualities of our own experience are not completely off-base (it’s kind of hard to imagine how the latter might be, but perhaps worries about privileged access come in here?) then I think his argument follows pretty ineluctably. The concept we have of physical information pertaining to wavelengths of light radiation, the way this radiation reacts with the human retina, and the way this signal gets transduced into neural activity doesn’t seem to contain anything that could explain what is like to see red. If this concept is accurate, then I think Chalmers and Jackson are right: Mary would learn a further fact upon her actual experience of the colour red, and if she had all the physical information beforehand, this fact would seem to lie outside the realm of physical facts, and be unaccounted for by physicalism.
The one thing I have lingering doubts about is whether the accuracy of these concepts is part of what the argument is trying to prove, and thus whether it risks certain circularity in this respect. However, I think physicalist arguments against it are pretty much in the same boat: denials of the basic premise (that the conceptual territories of the mental and physical are two irreconcilably different realms) have something of a feel of tug-of-war to me. Perhaps it merely comes down to an intuition. I’m trying to think of a way in which the accuracy of these concepts could be tested/falsified/verified, and the only thing I can come up with is something like phenomenological experimentation. For instance, I wonder whether it might be a valuable test (for intuitions about qualia-switching) to try to determine what conscious experience divorced its functional accoutrements would be like, or whether such a thing is even possible. Of course, it would be very difficult to report the results of these experiments, seeing as non-functional elements of consciousness are pretty much by definition outside the scope of our language games. I’m still not quite sure what I think about this. It seems like it’ll have to wait for future investigation.
April 17, 2014 at 4:14 pm
I agree with Chalmers ideas regarding qualia and property dualism based on the readings and what we discussed in class. The explanation of qualia as a basic property that is essentially irreducible to anything else is an appealing concept and fits within our framework without saying that qualia are too difficult to explain, but rather explaining qualia as the simplest portion of consciousness. The thought experiment regarding Mary’s existence and knowledge is particularly believable. This is based on the idea that consciousness cannot supervene physical properties, an idea that is demonstrated in Mary’s thought experiment.
Qualia cannot be defined as a physical property because it is inherent in consciousness. How can something as complex as consciousness truly be reduced to anything purely physical? The explanatory gap that results in the idea of physicalism being “false” is correct. David Lewis’ argument convinces us of this with his vegemite example. This example merely solidifies and clarifies the same information received from Mary’s thought experiment in a different way. Viewing consciousness as something physical seems overly simplistic; despite Ockam’s Razor, it seems like something more complex is going on than what has been suggested with various physicalist theories that have yet been unable to fully explain and defend their positions on why their physicalist philosophies of mind are accurate.
April 17, 2014 at 3:37 pm
Without consciousness Mary would not be able to interpret anything.
The mind allows for interpretation of the signals the body senses.
It makes no sense, to say that Mary without a conscious would be able sense anything. How could she see red if a mind is not interpreting it.
Sure she has eyes, receptive cones, but without a mind, she would just be a drone: all exposed to the unknown.
Where was this mind born?
Give me the absolute, most true physical information.
Without a mind, it will be pure information, like the signals behind the computer screen. The computer knows physical facts, but it has not developed consciousness.
It has no soul. Mary does. Mary can see. Mary can perceive.
Mary’s mind arose from a base of her soul and a physical body. Without the soul, she would have no mind, for she would have nothing to interpret; she would not see the universe: that which is her soul. Her soul is composed of the universe, without one, she would neither understand the inside nor the out.
Dualism, of the substance sort, explains why Mary has a mind, that which has been allowed through her physical body, yes. But all the physical body is physical stuff of course, the firing of neutrons, the stimulation of c-fibers, the movement of things. But the mind, that is of a much more valuable kind.
A mind, is the second level to interpretation. It takes the movement of things, and interprets them to cause mental states. Yes, it is necessary for the body to sense in order for the mind to interpret.
Epiphenomenalism sees that the mind receives
physical stimuli. Yet, when the mind interprets, the body reacts. My mind was stressed, so a few pimples grew. I became depressed, so a few twitches ensued.
It is like recycling, each arrow follows another in an endless circle. That is how the mind and body interact. With Mary not ever seeing red, her body has no way to contact her mind, and her mind can’t contact her body, so she is left in a bind, because physicalism has failed her, and there is something more she is not seeing.
April 17, 2014 at 12:41 pm
The knowledge argument is demonstrated by the “Mary” thought experiment. There are two versions of the knowledge argument that vary in strength. The weaker argument states that Mary has complete physical knowledge of facts about human color vision before leaving the room, but there is some kind of knowledge about color vision that she does hot have before her release. Therefore, there is some kind of knowledge about color vision that is non-physical knowledge. The stronger version states that Mary knows all the physical facts about color vision, but there are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release. Therefore, there are non-physical facts concerning human color vision. (Nida-Rumelin 2010).
I agree with the weaker argument of the knowledge experiment, which states that Mary gains a new type of descriptive knowledge, but does not gain new facts that she did not know in some other way. In this argument, qualia are viewed as fundamental, basic properties of the universe. Mary may know all of the physical facts about color vision, but she does not know the phenomenal properties of color that can only be acquired through experience. Once outside the room, Mary gains a new type of propositional knowledge about physical facts that she already knew about (she does not learn entirely new facts about color vision).
This argument is able to circumvent the mind-body interaction problem because according to Chalmers, phenomenal properties are intrinsic properties of our bodies and play a causal role in our actions. Phenomenal properties are physical, but they can only be learned through experience rather than factual knowledge.
Although Chalmers’ naturalistic property dualism makes sense intuitively, the backing for the argument can use some improvement. Chalmers somewhat arbitrarily makes a new category of fundamental properties (phenomenal properties) to explain qualia. His argument is very theoretical and lacks evidence. In many ways, it reminds me of how Descartes solves substance dualism by saying: something happens with the pineal gland! Both theories can use some more thorough thinking over.
References:
Nida-Rümelin, Martine, “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
April 17, 2014 at 11:55 am
At first read, I am sympathetic to property dualism. In my metaphysical conception of myself, something within me outwardly denies that my experience, my rationality, can be reduced completely to the physical. Now, I am not a substance dualist, I don’t believe that my mind merely interacts with my body, so I am also sympathetic to physicalism. Therefore, property dualism seems like a nice compromise, it allows me to elevate my mind over my body without insinuating a rationalistic picture, while also running away from having to explain that elevation, citing ontological differences between the two.
John Locke once wrote “It is of great use of the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.” The knowledge argument has a short line. It says that there is a difference between qualia and the physical, yes, but we’re not going to try to explain it because, meh, we just can’t. Since when did the philosophical spirit get so tired? If we truly believe something, like I do about my rationality, we ought to investigate it, and the development of neuroscience is allowing us that opportunity for the first time.
So, at the end of the day, my view represents one more akin to Dennett’s. At some point, with further evolution of science and philosophy, we will close the explanatory gap with physical evidence of experience, and that future Mary would not learn anything about sight when she left the room. However, the current Mary would learn something, and perhaps the nature of that statement, the feeling that something about it is wrong, will be enough to inspire someone to do the research and disprove it.
April 17, 2014 at 11:20 am
I before I give my response to the question, let me openly state my bias: I like physicalism. Perhaps I’m too stone-headed or close-minded to see any other argument. While I think that Jackson’s rationale is well thought out and reasonable, I believe that his claims are too grandiose and also ignore some potential counterarguments.
It’s true that Mary has all of the information about the color red from a neurological perspective. She understands precisely how it interacts with our retina to produce the perception of red. But because she has never seen red, her previous information was “incomplete.” Jackson’s argument is pretty persuasive. Can we really say that Mary has a complete understanding of the color red if she has never experienced it? I think Jackson has posited a brilliant simplification, but one that tends to become less potent when applied to other fields.
Going off potency—let’s talk about snakes. Let’s say that I am a renown herpetologist, a reptile and amphibian specialist. I know damn near everything that there’s to know about snakes. Certain snakes, however, have facial pits that allow them to sense infrared light. Despite the fact that I understand everything that there’s to know about how the snake processes this information, how infrared light works, and even looked at infrared photos, Jackson argues that I have an incomplete picture of snakes and infrared light. I don’t buy that jump. Humans cannot, unassisted, see infrared light. This doesn’t mean that we have an incomplete picture of infrared light, but simply that our perceptions are limited to the visual spectrum. Mary’s example is persuasive purely because we all know what seeing red is like and cannot imagine a gray tone world. I believe that Mary does have all the information and the actual experience of red is insignificant. Furthermore, because we cannot be sure that our experience of red is identical to our neighbor’s, qualia have less of a place in a Physicalist stance.
Jackson proposes that qualia should be viewed as fundamental and basic. This is an incredibly bold claim and it declares that human perception is a fundamental part of the universe. While experiments to determine spin, electromagnetic charge, and so forth can be duplicated around the globe, qualia cannot quantitatively analyzed in such a manner.
April 17, 2014 at 11:07 am
Property dualism suggests that all substances are physical, yet within these physical substances there exists physical properties and mental properties. This concept in itself seems contradictory. If mental properties are made of physical substances, why are they not physical properties themselves? The knowledge argument does not address this issue and for that reason is not a good argument for property dualism.
I disagree with the premise of the argument that states Mary (or Fred in Jackson’s case) have all the physical knowledge about color, prior to seeing color. The thought experiment fails in general as a convincing framework because of this initial assumption. If someone has not had an experience, they cannot possibly know all of the facts or have all of the knowledge about it. Just because they lack this experience, does not make the experiential knowledge a property different than physical knowledge, i.e. “mental.”
Recent cognitive psychology and neuroscience research strongly supports the hypothesis that our mental representations share many characteristics with the things we are actually seeing (and hearing, smelling, tasting, touching). Researchers have found through fMRI studies that the same areas of the brain are active when we sense something as when we imagine sensing something. This evidence suggests that there is no difference between physical and mental properties because it supports the idea that sensing and or imaging that same thing result in the firing of neurons, a clearly physical property. To frame this argument in another way, it is possible that because Mary/Fred have not seen color they are not able to willfully produce the pattern of neural firing/brain activation that result in the experience of seeing a color. However, just because they haven’t learned to do so does not mean that they are unable to do so. Furthermore, because it is possible to physically create the experience of seeing a color via specific neural firing, the property is no difference from the property of knowing a fact. (It is physical as well.) Just as someone cannot know the visible spectrum of light and the wavelengths that correspond to its colors until they have been taught (and consequently their neurons learn to fire in a way that retrieves that fact), they also cannot know what it looks like to see color if they have not experienced it (their neurons have not been ”taught” to fire in such a manner). These two pieces of knowledge (knowing wavelength and seeing color) are not two different properties. One piece of knowledge maybe factual, while one is experiential; however, this distinction does not provide support for the idea that there exist two type of properties in the world, mental and physical. For these reasons, I believe that the knowledge argument is not a good argument for property dualism; the argument does not effectively distinguish between physical properties and mental properties.