Mary's Room
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- Galen Strawson discusses consciousness and Frank Jackson's knowledge argument, the famous thought experiment involving the brilliant scientist Mary, who has acquired all the physical information about experiencing color, despite being confined to a black-and-white room and never having experienced color herself. This comes from a 1996 program called Brainspotting.
#Philosophy #Consciousness
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This is a great topic in philosophy of mind and epistemology in general. Many aren't open to it. But, a virgin can study all the data and science about sex and they would still be missing what sex really is without experiencing it. We could say the same about war and many other things. All the physical facts alone would leave us without fully knowing.
Theory versus experience. Great thought experiment.
Back in the day they really had the budget to blow on enacting stuff!
The first ten seconds of this video reminded me of Notes From the Underground, for some reason. I read that book in college, and I suppose it was the snow on such a crisp day in the video that reminded me of the second part of the book.
A general rule to keep in mind for thought experiments: be wary of the unimaginable. Can you really imagine what it's like to know everything there is to know about color perception? Of course you can't. Can you then be sure about the intuitions you get here? Frank Jackson has since changed his mind about his knowledge argument, and for a good reason.
@maclinkastex3059 Exactly the mistake I warned against. You imagine that you know where physics can get you, and with this you assume the conclusion of this thought experiment.
@maclinkastex3059 Trust me, I understand it just fine. There's nothing difficult about it. Understanding how you can fool yourself into circular reasoning with a misuse of intuition is a bit harder.
@maclinkastex3059 I'm not trying to insult you. You have everything you need already, you just need to think harder. I can't do it for you.
@maclinkastex3059We cannot have a physicalist account of experience. This is both your "self-evident" assumption and your conclusion. It's unwarranted and it's circular. There are no arguments here, just an intuition. Putting it into different exercises in conceivability only serves to obscure this. Your analogies don't apply, because experience is not a subject of some established discipline distinct from physics, you only have an intuition that it has to be the case. Intuit harder and you may not be so sure anymore. I did and I'm not, and so did Jackson.
Your intuition is what everyone gets at first. The fact that it's more popular is worthless. What matters is that it dissipates with reflection. It happened to me and it happened to the one who invented this thought experiment. This process goes in one direction, because it goes from uninformed assuredness to informed doubt.
You cannot possibly imagine how experience can be explained by physics, so you deem it impossible. You reflect some more and you're not so certain anymore. That's why my intuition is "better" than yours, I simply recognize my old thinking in what you write. And I really can't give better advice than just "think harder", because that's what it took for me.
The way you exclude experience as an explanandum of physics, comparing phenomenology and physics to astronomy and economics is blatant sophistry. Your problem is that you think you know that explanandum better than you really do. That's why your assumption is completely unwarranted and mine isn't.
And I obviously mean the same physics that you do, you just cannot wrap your head around it. If you can't get there by thinking harder, maybe find out what changed Jackson's mind. SEP has the references.
nice to see them chatting on the mound at new college
As the Gnostics would posit, that some of us are conscious and some of us are exactly as though we are conscious, but are not.
Nightmare fuel
Yeah, Galen’s pretty gnarly looking…
Asking questions and admitting he won't understand is not an argument but an expression of his possible shortcomings.
Isn't this just the plot of Good Will Hunting?
Lol, the ideology that sees humanity as just another resource, has an invested interest in reducing consciousness to information processing
This is just bad reasoning. If you were to go into the black and white room and use electrodes to stimulate the neuronal circuit for colour perception, then she would sense the colours, when everything around her is still black and white to a third person. Consciousness is just neurons firing in the brain. Colours ARE nothing more than neurons firing. There is nothing "extra" that requires explanation. Neurons fire giving a direct colour perception, and there's a separate part of the brain that can be activated and reason about it. Why don't you spend your time worrying about not "experiencing" digestion or cellular respiration?
The problem only arises because you start from the wrong premise of an isolated conscious subject, the concrete "I" which "experiences" things, and you demand an "explanation" for what an "experience" is. The framing IS the problem. Both logical reasoning and the experience of separate senses are just different sets of neurons firing. They are the fundamental elements which together make up "consciousness" and what you call "I'. You might as well ask for a definition of colour in terms of the sense of touch. What is this mysterious wondrous thing called colour which you cannot touch with your hands? It is in exactly the same way that colour and any other sensation is impervious to reason. The brain is capable of carrying out more than one task and does them separately. How is that surprising?
the thing that is the main problem is the subjectivity of the mind. even you fire it all up the neuron with the same electrics charge in term of quantity and type. the argument stand in can still say that why people can say something green and other say yellow.
if physicalism (aka. all of thing in universe made out of physical stuff as you explain that consciousness is just neuron firing) is a thing. can you explain me how just some physical stuff build up something to the "redness", "happiness", "pain", "lemonade smell" or put it simply "subjective experience".
because if it really just all of that. why can't it interpreted the same? or it just small different set of brain function that make it distinct?
You're misunderstanding the argument! You say "If you were to go into the black and white room and use electrodes to stimulate the neuronal circuit for colour perception, then she would sense the colours, when everything around her is still black and white to a third person." That's true, everyone is in agreement about that much. But that's very different from saying "Colours ARE nothing more than neurons firing." If they are literally the same thing, then knowing everything about neurons firing is the same thing as knowing everything about color. And yet Mary cannot learn everything there is to know about color by studying everything there is to now about neurons firing.
@@danz1661 Read my whole comment. What you're trying to bring up has already been addressed. The question is how is it mysterious or surprising that you cannot know colour through logic, which is what you are demanding.
@@talkingkangaroo4934 Of course I read your whole comment before responding, I'm not a monster. Maybe the conclusion is not surprising to you, but it is surprising to people who think that everything in reality is physical. If Mary knows all the physical truths about color vision, and yet there are still truths about color vision that she does not know, then it follows that there are non-physical truths.
@@danz1661Your problem only arises when you divide the world arbitrarily into that which is "physical" and that which is not. It is application of a concept beyond the context in which it is useful, or just a badly defined concept. Is gravity "physical"?