Putting these episodes together takes a lot of research and a ton of time. If you enjoy my high effort philosophy and theology podcast episodes, consider supporting me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/parkers_pensees
The change in meaning that the term 'representationalism' underwent in the analytical tradition around 25 years ago continues to be a source of misunderstanding among people who hear this word in its older senses. Many in other traditions don't realize that this word came to mean almost the opposite of what it used to mean in debates about perception and the nature of mind. I think it would have been better if the expression 'new intentionalism' had caught on instead. I still think it's silly to deny that Mary knows all the facts of one sort prior to having color experiences and gains knowledge of facts of another sort once she has these experiences. In condition 1, she knows everything that can be known about color vision without experiencing it one's self. In condition 2, she knows what she knew before plus some facts about what it's like for subjects to undergo the relevant visual intentional states, thanks to discriminatory visual capacities that enable her to be in those states and, thereby, to represent the relevant objective colour properties in the normal way. The problem remains of how exactly to characterize the difference between the facts known in condition 1 and those known only in condition 2, even if one doesn't think the truth or falsity of physicalism hinges on the answer. Everybody should have been able to agree that she knows all the third-person facts in condition 1 and gains knowledge of certain first-person or phenomenological facts in condition 2. The real reason they didn't was that the argument was framed as a case against physicalism. The intentionality of conscious color vision should have been clear from the beginning. The issue is how to understand it. Different participants in the debate may mean different things by 'physical' and 'non-physical'. People lost sight of the forest greenery for the grey tree bark.
What fascinated me about the Mary's Room thought experiment, was that even though Frank Jackson disowned it later, several philosophers persisted with it...and it is still taught, often without question, on my university philosophy courses.
Sounds like Jackson has gotten there the long way around, but from the "physicalist" perspective the refutation of the Mary argument is fairly straightforward. Some discuss this by saying "knowledge of is different and distinct from knowledge about", and that's certainly valid but suffers greatly from the ambiguities of language. The clearest refutation is simply that no matter how great Mary's knowledge of color prior to actual experience, there is physical information she does not possess because it simply doesn't exist anywhere in the universe. And that information IS her personal explicit experience of color. When she finally experiences colors, there is new information that comes into existence ... her particular experience of color. She does gain new knowledge (aka information). The problem with painting this as a refutation of physicalism is that information IS physical. Mary's brain physically changes as she gains experience of color. No matter how much knowledge she had of color before her own experience, she could not "know" the knowledge of *her* experience of color, because it never physically existed in the universe. Positing superhuman technologies and know how, she might have known exactly how her brain would change, perhaps down to what new neurons would generate where, which previously quiescent axons and dendrites would become active, what new proteins and RNA's would be created in what clusters of cells. But she could not make those changes in her own brain except by experience of color ... and if there were some super tech that could make those changes to her brain prior to regular experience of color, then subsequently no she wouldn't have learned anything new upon experience (actually she would, just as we learn something new with each and every experience, but it would be something other than "mere" knowledge of her own color experience". For those who complain that there could be such knowledge she might have possessed before, that's wrong. ""Mary" as a conscious agent is a unique entity in her universe, and she has a unique and distinct perspective. Think about it, No two cameras can take exactly the same picture. (presuming they had infinite resolution and granularity). Because at any instant the subject of the photograph is changing ... taken a microsecond later by the same camera at the same time at some level the pictures will be different.... and at any instant, no two cameras can have exactly the same perspective on the subject as the cameras cannot occupy exactly the same position to have the same POV of the subject during the instant of taking the image. Information is a physical thing. The Mary argument, understood from this perspective, is a strong argument FOR physicalism.
I completely agree with you. I think the most senseful choice is to conceive Physicalism as a theory that considers information as a full fledged physical entity, though this could lead to controversies with respect to concepts like "Naturalism" and "matter", so we should then specify further what we mean by "Physicalism" (there's a beautiful paper on this topic, "Post-physicalism" by Barbara Montero). The only thing I would point out is that one of the tenets of Physicalism, specifically the one which Mary's argument focuses on, is that all relevant knowledge about reality is ultimately reducible to a third person objective point of view over quantifiable entities that are characterised by quantifiable properties - the key concept here is "third person pov". What you are stating about information is the informativity of phenomenological experience. I totally agree with you that new experiences are met with new brain events through which new (physical) information is exchanged between the world and the subject, since of course it would be crazy to conclude that a posteriori knowledge is completely reducible to a priori knowledge. But I want to point out that this is problematic (to say the least) for a physicalist thesis, since we are left with a picture of the world where having a representation from the inside-out entails a type of information different from the one entailed by a representation from the outside-in. This means that even if we knew everything there is to know about bats, their biology, their behaviours, their evolutionary history, etc. we still wouldn't be able to know how a bat perceives the world, because we would still be missing that first person pov. And this epistemological gap is what Chalmers calls the "Explanatory gap" and, to me, is what suggests not only an ontological distinctiveness of qualia, but also their causal relevance: let's not forget that epiphenomenalism of qualia makes sense only if we disregard the evolution of our species, but since we don't want to assume that the human species appeared on Earth few centuries ago, we should just eliminate it with Occam's razor. That is, why should qualia be transmitted genetically through millennia if they are epiphenomal? Why should they be there in the first place if they play no role at all? Needless to say that in the current Physicalist account of the world there isn't much space for ontological questioning about the nature of qualia or the nature of consciousness, because it eludes a third person description of reality.
@@teofurlanetto1686Two ponts .... information IS physical. Period. For a century though there was no doubt of the truth of that statement, physicists couldn't conclusively demonstrate it. With some very subtle refinements of quantum theory, it is now demonstrated that there is a physical minimum of energy expenditure to manifest information (about 10^-60 Joule/bit ... though of course most real world cases are vastly greater).
@@terrencezellers9105 Well, I didn't write nor meant to imply in my comment that information is not physical, I actually said the opposite but ok, thanks for the clarification.
@@teofurlanetto1686 Well the "... as a theory that CONSIDERS information as a full fledged physical entity..." imputes that as one er meta-theory which one may or may not agree with, and that it "considers" rather than acknowledges as demonstrable fact sounds a bit ambivalent about it, hence my elaboration that modern physics now has a hard physical quantity to hang on the minimal unit of information. Somehow the latter part of my content got truncated. I noted that in "Character of Consciousness" Chalmers is subtly disingenuous in many of his presentations. There is only an "explanatory gap" if you refuse to acknowledge that there are plausible explanatory frameworks which may be demonstrated as valid and their structure completed as our knowledge of how our brains manifest consciousness is elaborated by ongoing research. In point of fact I think that while some practical details will await empirical validation, some of the "illusion" theories are in fact adequate as a broad explanation. (I would characterize them more accurately as "speculative projection" theories rather than "illusion" ... they do not assert that consciousness - as a process, or a reflexive perception of experience, is illusory; merely that the contents of such perceived reflection and experience are often illusions as speculative projections of reality rather than a reality itself. In point of fact commonplace illusions could not happen were it not so.) In particular the bats in Nagel's belfry have a "what it's like to be a bat" which, despite Nagel's protestations to the contrary, his question is rather easily and adequately answered with the rather simple elaboration that "what it's like to be a bat" is the accessible and comparable memory of being a bat. IMO that's the larger part of the mechanism of consciousness at any level - having accessible memories of experiences which can be compared and contrasted with more immediate experiences. That we don't have memories of the experience of being a bat and thus cannot know or meaningfully imagine "what it's like to be a bat" does not render consciousness and its mechanisms inscrutable. I'll never know what it's like to be a camshaft, but there are hundreds of millions of real working camshafts out there.... there is something "it is like" to be a camshaft - to wit a mechanism for converting reciprocal motion to circular motion. Nagel's plaint is demonstrably a vacuous word game. Chalmers' citation of it as an "explanatory gap" is a simple refusal to acknowledge that there can be an explanation, not to mention that there is a rather simple explanation.
@@teofurlanetto1686 Additional thoughts about your reply. "Epiphenomenal" is a word with a meaning in search of something to be meaningful about. IMO an experience is an experience only to the extent that some pat of it is memorially accessible. If something is a memory, then by definition it can have physical consequence (and we now know at least some of the mechanisms by which they are stored in our brains; their analogs of data structures in computers are commonplace. (IMO again) qualia can (and should) be defined as a materially real entity To whit the minimally distinguishable, comparable and re-compositable element of a (memorially accessible) experience', That is I know something is "red": because in it is comparably similar to other things in my memory also tagged "red". And I can distinguish a a red ball from a blue ball even if they are presented in otherwise identical circumstances.. A quale then is a materially real thing in that it has real material consequences in that my memories and their comparison may affect my contemporary decision process. Though inarticulate we can empirically demonstrate qualia in animals by experiments where they can be trained to respond differently to stimulae of different shapes or colors or complex aggregates of them. You see, philosophers delight in making rather simple ideas that can be rendered obviously demonstrable seem obscure and intractable to empirical investigation. But all that is required to resist their incantations of ignorance is to ignore them and think through what the ideas mean in practice.
The confusion arises from the use of the word FACT, a better word would be KNOWLEDGE. Mary gains new knowledge about the colour Red and not a new fact. What's usually meant by facts are quantifiable knowledge, while experiential knowledge is a different type of knowledge. All experiential knowledge can be thought of as abilities (to perceive).
Putting these episodes together takes a lot of research and a ton of time. If you enjoy my high effort philosophy and theology podcast episodes, consider supporting me on Patreon:
www.patreon.com/parkers_pensees
Dear Lord Parker, you get the best guests
🤝🤝🤝
thanks a lot Parker! Great opportunity to hear Mary argument from Jackson himself :)
He’s alive!
Haha yep!! So we didn't get to demonstrate that substance dualism is true. But still awesome to talk with him!
The change in meaning that the term 'representationalism' underwent in the analytical tradition around 25 years ago continues to be a source of misunderstanding among people who hear this word in its older senses. Many in other traditions don't realize that this word came to mean almost the opposite of what it used to mean in debates about perception and the nature of mind. I think it would have been better if the expression 'new intentionalism' had caught on instead.
I still think it's silly to deny that Mary knows all the facts of one sort prior to having color experiences and gains knowledge of facts of another sort once she has these experiences. In condition 1, she knows everything that can be known about color vision without experiencing it one's self. In condition 2, she knows what she knew before plus some facts about what it's like for subjects to undergo the relevant visual intentional states, thanks to discriminatory visual capacities that enable her to be in those states and, thereby, to represent the relevant objective colour properties in the normal way. The problem remains of how exactly to characterize the difference between the facts known in condition 1 and those known only in condition 2, even if one doesn't think the truth or falsity of physicalism hinges on the answer. Everybody should have been able to agree that she knows all the third-person facts in condition 1 and gains knowledge of certain first-person or phenomenological facts in condition 2. The real reason they didn't was that the argument was framed as a case against physicalism. The intentionality of conscious color vision should have been clear from the beginning. The issue is how to understand it. Different participants in the debate may mean different things by 'physical' and 'non-physical'. People lost sight of the forest greenery for the grey tree bark.
What fascinated me about the Mary's Room thought experiment, was that even though Frank Jackson disowned it later, several philosophers persisted with it...and it is still taught, often without question, on my university philosophy courses.
Sounds like Jackson has gotten there the long way around, but from the "physicalist" perspective the refutation of the Mary argument is fairly straightforward.
Some discuss this by saying "knowledge of is different and distinct from knowledge about", and that's certainly valid but suffers greatly from the ambiguities of language.
The clearest refutation is simply that no matter how great Mary's knowledge of color prior to actual experience, there is physical information she does not possess because it simply doesn't exist anywhere in the universe. And that information IS her personal explicit experience of color.
When she finally experiences colors, there is new information that comes into existence ... her particular experience of color. She does gain new knowledge (aka information). The problem with painting this as a refutation of physicalism is that information IS physical. Mary's brain physically changes as she gains experience of color. No matter how much knowledge she had of color before her own experience, she could not "know" the knowledge of *her* experience of color, because it never physically existed in the universe.
Positing superhuman technologies and know how, she might have known exactly how her brain would change, perhaps down to what new neurons would generate where, which previously quiescent axons and dendrites would become active, what new proteins and RNA's would be created in what clusters of cells. But she could not make those changes in her own brain except by experience of color ... and if there were some super tech that could make those changes to her brain prior to regular experience of color, then subsequently no she wouldn't have learned anything new upon experience (actually she would, just as we learn something new with each and every experience, but it would be something other than "mere" knowledge of her own color experience".
For those who complain that there could be such knowledge she might have possessed before, that's wrong. ""Mary" as a conscious agent is a unique entity in her universe, and she has a unique and distinct perspective. Think about it, No two cameras can take exactly the same picture. (presuming they had infinite resolution and granularity). Because at any instant the subject of the photograph is changing ... taken a microsecond later by the same camera at the same time at some level the pictures will be different.... and at any instant, no two cameras can have exactly the same perspective on the subject as the cameras cannot occupy exactly the same position to have the same POV of the subject during the instant of taking the image.
Information is a physical thing. The Mary argument, understood from this perspective, is a strong argument FOR physicalism.
I completely agree with you. I think the most senseful choice is to conceive Physicalism as a theory that considers information as a full fledged physical entity, though this could lead to controversies with respect to concepts like "Naturalism" and "matter", so we should then specify further what we mean by "Physicalism" (there's a beautiful paper on this topic, "Post-physicalism" by Barbara Montero).
The only thing I would point out is that one of the tenets of Physicalism, specifically the one which Mary's argument focuses on, is that all relevant knowledge about reality is ultimately reducible to a third person objective point of view over quantifiable entities that are characterised by quantifiable properties - the key concept here is "third person pov". What you are stating about information is the informativity of phenomenological experience. I totally agree with you that new experiences are met with new brain events through which new (physical) information is exchanged between the world and the subject, since of course it would be crazy to conclude that a posteriori knowledge is completely reducible to a priori knowledge. But I want to point out that this is problematic (to say the least) for a physicalist thesis, since we are left with a picture of the world where having a representation from the inside-out entails a type of information different from the one entailed by a representation from the outside-in. This means that even if we knew everything there is to know about bats, their biology, their behaviours, their evolutionary history, etc. we still wouldn't be able to know how a bat perceives the world, because we would still be missing that first person pov. And this epistemological gap is what Chalmers calls the "Explanatory gap" and, to me, is what suggests not only an ontological distinctiveness of qualia, but also their causal relevance: let's not forget that epiphenomenalism of qualia makes sense only if we disregard the evolution of our species, but since we don't want to assume that the human species appeared on Earth few centuries ago, we should just eliminate it with Occam's razor. That is, why should qualia be transmitted genetically through millennia if they are epiphenomal? Why should they be there in the first place if they play no role at all?
Needless to say that in the current Physicalist account of the world there isn't much space for ontological questioning about the nature of qualia or the nature of consciousness, because it eludes a third person description of reality.
@@teofurlanetto1686Two ponts .... information IS physical. Period. For a century though there was no doubt of the truth of that statement, physicists couldn't conclusively demonstrate it. With some very subtle refinements of quantum theory, it is now demonstrated that there is a physical minimum of energy expenditure to manifest information (about 10^-60 Joule/bit ... though of course most real world cases are vastly greater).
@@terrencezellers9105 Well, I didn't write nor meant to imply in my comment that information is not physical, I actually said the opposite but ok, thanks for the clarification.
@@teofurlanetto1686 Well the "... as a theory that CONSIDERS information as a full fledged physical entity..." imputes that as one er meta-theory which one may or may not agree with, and that it "considers" rather than acknowledges as demonstrable fact sounds a bit ambivalent about it, hence my elaboration that modern physics now has a hard physical quantity to hang on the minimal unit of information.
Somehow the latter part of my content got truncated.
I noted that in "Character of Consciousness" Chalmers is subtly disingenuous in many of his presentations. There is only an "explanatory gap" if you refuse to acknowledge that there are plausible explanatory frameworks which may be demonstrated as valid and their structure completed as our knowledge of how our brains manifest consciousness is elaborated by ongoing research. In point of fact I think that while some practical details will await empirical validation, some of the "illusion" theories are in fact adequate as a broad explanation. (I would characterize them more accurately as "speculative projection" theories rather than "illusion" ... they do not assert that consciousness - as a process, or a reflexive perception of experience, is illusory; merely that the contents of such perceived reflection and experience are often illusions as speculative projections of reality rather than a reality itself. In point of fact commonplace illusions could not happen were it not so.)
In particular the bats in Nagel's belfry have a "what it's like to be a bat" which, despite Nagel's protestations to the contrary, his question is rather easily and adequately answered with the rather simple elaboration that "what it's like to be a bat" is the accessible and comparable memory of being a bat. IMO that's the larger part of the mechanism of consciousness at any level - having accessible memories of experiences which can be compared and contrasted with more immediate experiences. That we don't have memories of the experience of being a bat and thus cannot know or meaningfully imagine "what it's like to be a bat" does not render consciousness and its mechanisms inscrutable. I'll never know what it's like to be a camshaft, but there are hundreds of millions of real working camshafts out there.... there is something "it is like" to be a camshaft - to wit a mechanism for converting reciprocal motion to circular motion. Nagel's plaint is demonstrably a vacuous word game. Chalmers' citation of it as an "explanatory gap" is a simple refusal to acknowledge that there can be an explanation, not to mention that there is a rather simple explanation.
@@teofurlanetto1686 Additional thoughts about your reply. "Epiphenomenal" is a word with a meaning in search of something to be meaningful about. IMO an experience is an experience only to the extent that some pat of it is memorially accessible. If something is a memory, then by definition it can have physical consequence (and we now know at least some of the mechanisms by which they are stored in our brains; their analogs of data structures in computers are commonplace.
(IMO again) qualia can (and should) be defined as a materially real entity To whit the minimally distinguishable, comparable and re-compositable element of a (memorially accessible) experience', That is I know something is "red": because in it is comparably similar to other things in my memory also tagged "red". And I can distinguish a a red ball from a blue ball even if they are presented in otherwise identical circumstances.. A quale then is a materially real thing in that it has real material consequences in that my memories and their comparison may affect my contemporary decision process.
Though inarticulate we can empirically demonstrate qualia in animals by experiments where they can be trained to respond differently to stimulae of different shapes or colors or complex aggregates of them.
You see, philosophers delight in making rather simple ideas that can be rendered obviously demonstrable seem obscure and intractable to empirical investigation. But all that is required to resist their incantations of ignorance is to ignore them and think through what the ideas mean in practice.
The confusion arises from the use of the word FACT, a better word would be KNOWLEDGE. Mary gains new knowledge about the colour Red and not a new fact. What's usually meant by facts are quantifiable knowledge, while experiential knowledge is a different type of knowledge. All experiential knowledge can be thought of as abilities (to perceive).