Mary’s scientific understanding of color is like software running inside a virtual machine. It doesn’t have direct access to the hardware sensors and the input is “sanitized” and interpreted through the abstraction layer of the VM. When she steps outside, she is able to perceive color information from the her native hardware (her eyes) for the first time. This is new information, but it is also certainly totally physical.
@@guillermoalarcon7235 The fundamental unit of information is ... > ... difference. Any kind of difference. Those differences are there whether we perceive them or not. Where there are lots of differences, there is a lot of information. Where there are few or no differences, there is correspondingly little information.
@@guillermoalarcon7235 Information is non-physical. 'Four', '4' and 'IV' are not numbers. They all represent an idea. They are just labels. The actual number is non-physical.
This is in part simply a case of mistaking the map for the place. Having a _description,_ even a complete and perfect one, of the colour red (the "map") isn't the same as a photon coming from a red surface hitting your retina and that stimulus getting 'translated' into neural impulses and sent to your brain (the "place").
Or to look at it from a different point of view, I can spend 30 years teaching you the theory behind drawing. Everything from colour theory, to how to physically move your hand to draw perfect lines. After 30 years you're the world's foremost expert on how to paint anything at all. I then put you in front of a piece of paper and tell you to draw a photorealistic horse. Can you do it? Of course not, because your brain lacks the fine muscle control required for painting. It's still "physical information", it just can not be learned through memorization but through motoric repetition. This thought experiment conflates "physical knowledge" with "memory of information" which makes it flawed all the way through.
Yes! Also I don't understand why there is a "physical information and "other " information. Information use physics to be spread and to be understand. Information coming to your brain using Photons who hit molecule in rod cells etc. Or Mary hears about the colours by cells with nano hairs in gel-like substance which sense waves in the air etc All physical. I don't understand why this"experiment " is even discussed.
@@mirostanimirov8952 "Information coming to your brain using Photons who hit molecule in rod cells etc. " Could it be more accurate to say that there's only "mental information," insofar as any information we can possibly gather about the world comes by way of subjective sensory experiences, or qualia. "Physics" is a model we've built to describe the *relationships* between one subjective experience and another (e.g., why glowing red + touch = hot), but if qualia are the building blocks of everything we know, then we cannot explain them in terms of themselves. Like the person in Seale's Chinese Room, we only map out the relationships; we cannot understand. We also can't know, for certain, that we aren't brains in jars being fed a model of reality that our operators could change at any time. If physicalism is true, then I can't understand why any part of the universe should be experiencing itself.
But if you had truly complete knowledge of the place (by virtue of a map with such complete and total detail), then the experience of an actual photon hitting your eye does not reveal new information about the place. It cannot, by definition
In her black and white room she must have had all colours hitting her retina to see white. What she had not had until leaving the room was patches of contrasting wavelengths of light (non homogenous maybe?) hitting her retina and creating a new physical experience.
@@tonic4120 It depends on where we draw the boundary between the photons and "her." The photons ceased to exist as they hit the rod and cone receptors of the retina, so that seems like a reasonable boundary. It's difficult to call this an "interpretation" however, since the rods and cones make no use of anything that could be called a model of interpretation.
I was dropped into the middle of this course by the algorithm. So I’m lacking important background like what the three types of physicalism are and prior arguments for and against it are. I think this is about the difference between objective knowledge and subjective experience. They seem to be trying to equate the two as if they’re on equal footing. But taking physicalism at face value, there are certain physical processes necessary to experience the color red. A set of photons in a specific range of wavelengths hits the right cones triggering a cascade through the the optic nerve through to the occipital lobe to be processed into the experience of color. Reading about that to any level of detail would not stimulate that part of the brain. It’s a totally different class of information arriving into the brain via different pathways. To be perfectly frank, I’m not even sure she would even be able to see red even when she first experienced it. The brain would be receiving signals it had never received before. How much of color vision is hardwired and how much is learned through experience of colors? The physical processes required for color vision may have atrophied through lack of use. Through stimulation, the physical functionality required may eventually be acquired. But while all that was happening, she would know why it was happening at every level of detail. Photon is absorbed by a molecule that changes energy state which allows it to catalyze other molecules causing ions to move an electrochemical charge down an axon to the optic nerve where neurotransmitters are released into the synaptic gap to be absorbed by dendrites of another neuron, etc. I’ve only got a vague idea what goes on. But I’m sure if I knew the molecular formulas of the molecules involved, the wavelengths, how they interact with the four color cones that a tetra-chromatic person would have, my neurological makeup would never allow me to experience the millions of extra colors tetra-chromatic people experience. That’s not how color vision works. But the experience of abstract knowledge and physical sensation happens in different parts of the brain and in different ways. I don’t think that the argument negates the possibility that all experience can be described by physical brain processes.
I think Marys’ room fails to disprove physicalism. It does a wonderful job of exploring the difference between abstract knowledge and concrete knowledge
You think, that's sweet, thanks for your thought, if you want to articulate why you think that way you can. But for now... thanks for telling us what you think :)
@@juanandresramirez4599 for example you can describe colors to someone who was born blind from birth but they will not understand what color is or what the difference between yellow or red. for Marys’ room thought experiment the only colors she can only see in black and white, and presumably in the manner that is usually understood in shades of grey as well. while she has a leg up on someone who was born blind that she has some idea what color is, albeit on on a grayscale going from white to black. for the rest of the colors, while she has been given the linguistic information about the different colors like red, yellow, green, etc. and presumably the corresponding grayscale marker for that particular color on the black and white monitor, she would not have a true understanding what red really is. when she leaves the room and sees the color red for the first time she does learn something new. it’s not because color isn’t physical, but because she is being given new information through direct experience that was impossible to obtain without direct observation/interaction, thus turning the previously abstract information into concrete information.
@@littleredpony6868 The idea you believe to be supposed doesn't exist, the original thesis doesn't proclaim that the color is not physical. The idea is that the interaction with the color is abstract to such a degree it goes beyond your physical interaction with the red wavelength.
@@littleredpony6868 Does it? One can only understand the point if one can relate to it, you see like your prior example of a blind man was taken into account, you can understand that he has no place to stand because hes even further lacking in a aspect of abstract life. So he cannot even relate or understand the point from the beginning, this point that the original author makes can be easily discredited by if you dont want to give him good grace, but you can just brush it away in any regard, because those emotions that were mentioned before are an abstraction that I cannot apply to you. As such you can dismiss the entire idea if you want, as its only point was to make you take a genuine moment where you try to come to realization of your humanity, but if you do not wish to come to terms with your consciousness and you wish to reduce it to base atoms, you may do so. But in retaliation I will call you inhuman and ignore you, as will anyone who truly feels their humanity, and their "soul" whatever that means.
An unconvincing argument. Mary just experiences a new phenomenon on a physical level that she had never experienced before. Light in the red wavelength activates rods and cones in her eyes that have never been activated before, a physical event. A signal travels from her optic nerve to her brain, a physical event that has never occurred before. And her brain registers the never-seen-before information and displays it in a never-seen before way, as the color "red" -- but it's still a matter of nerve signals traveling through the brain. Totally physical.
The problem seems to be they assume the conclusion up front. They somehow assume that somewhere in all this there is a 'and then a (nonphysical) miracle occurs.' And while the ability of brains to process and produce consciousness seems almost miraculous, there's no basis for saying it's not physical. And once you approach Mary's room as IF it's physical, it become clear why all of Mary's book learning can't substitute for her actually receiving and processing the physical outcomes of seeing blue. Like being hit with a hammer, you don't experience the effects until it happens to you. Reading about what hammers are and what they can do doesn't actually cause the physical damage they can cause.
@@JinKee And the light they reflect hits the eyes and causes a physical change that causes other physical changes until the cells in the brain experience the effects of seeing the color. It seems they confuse our ability to describe physical objects/processes/causes and to learn those descriptions...ie the academics of knowledge with actually 'experiencing' the objects.
It's a silly argument - and it can be easily defeated by defining "knowledge". The example seems to restrict itself to "that which can be written down and read". There is a proverb which says "an image says more than a 1000 words". Are there pictures in this book? And many graphs show more insight when they're colored differently. So, if images are not "knowledge" what are they doing in textbooks? If colors are not knowledge, why are there colored textbooks? It also implies - since we cannot see infrared or ultraviolet - will we always remain (literally) in the black about those wavelengths? If our knowledge is literally limited to the capabilities of our senses, that seems to be the only possible answer. What a shame. I so much wanted to see the color of my Wifi..
Yes. The key flaw is that a B&W TV is an insufficient channel for all the information on the subject. "Seeing is believing" is a simple way to express this flaw. Mary has the information parts but not the whole till she experiences color.
That could have been answered by princess Elizabeth, who was a vampire turning into a bat everey now and then to approach her prey befor she was terminated by Mary the Spartan, who broke Elizas neck with a kung fu roundhouse-kick she knew all about only by watching Chuck Norris' movies.
Assuming this was explained correctly, which seems a fair assumption, then Jackson's "Mary's Room" is self-disproving. It is based on the premise that Mary learns something when experiencing color for the first time, but this is an uncertain premise. We have no way of knowing that some piece or pieces of information that we don't have couldn't allow Mary to create a perfect thought construct of a concept she couldn't experience directly. In fact, we cannot accept this illustration at all without allowing for that possibility, as we are using this illustration as a thought construct to perfectly experience something that we cannot experience directly. To say that Mary cannot do so, requires that we cannot either, which renders the premise false.
The problem is conscious experience. It's a personal thing. You're absolutely positive that you yourself are conscious because you experience consciousness, but you can never prove it in others, or describe consciousness. Actually seeing color with your eyes is one of those conscious experiences. You see red in a certain way, there's no way to tell if you experience it in the same way as someone else. Yes, you can see if they're able to discern the color through tests, but you'll never know if the experience itself is the same. You can measure the green light wavelength hitting the eye and what information goes to the brain, but as far as what the person actually sees, that is a wholly personal experience. There are for instance, people who experience colors / words/ etc in the form of tastes, smells or sounds. How your brain actually processes information can vary widely. And these experiences can never really be shared, stored or transferred. In fact, such things are really often only described as relational to other experiences such as "tastes like chicken". So are they in fact truly a form of information? Or are they something else?
I think the problem is using the term learning as a substitute for what happens when we see light and our brains register that experience. We can call seeing light for the first time a 'learning' experience, but it's much more. The body actually under goes physical changes when we see things and those are different changes than, and can't be duplicated just by, learning what we know about color....ALL that we know...everything in the world about color. Whether human consciousness is purely physical or involves something else, just learning all we know about color and how eyes work and what happens in the brain will not duplicate the physical response of actually seeing color.
@@rizdekd3912 except the argument is to disprove that what you are describing is a physical response, as this is supposed to be disproving physicalism. Which makes it a bit nonsense.
Why do we need the whole "grew up in a colorless" room thought experiment? We have the same analogy everyone can experience - IR or UV light. We can read and learn about it all we want, but it's totally different than experiencing viewing things under blacklight or through a thermal camera for the first time. I also totally don't understand why should acquisition of new experience prove there is non-physical knowledge? I never heard of epiphenomenalism before, so thanks for that. It actuall sums up the "free will is an illusion" argument quite nicely. I'm a strict physicalist, as the computetional theory of mind explains things in terms of hardware/software analogy. Software can only do as much as the hardware allows, and ultimately, all the information (including the software itself) has to physically exist somewhere as electrical charge or written on some sort of medium.
That's hardy an analogy: You can't see UV or IR at all, only visible light. Things that "light up" under UV bulbs are fluorescent; they emit visible light in response to invisible light. An infrared camera simply shows you a greyscale map of where the invisible IR light is, with IR replaced with white, and the absence of IR represented by black. In either case, your previous experiences with visible light should absolutely quality you to fully grasp the experience beforehand, if you hear a good enough description.
If Mary has been studying everything about vision, then she would also know about color vision and how it works. When Mary leaves the room she sees the color red for the first time, but she already knows what it is. She is not "learning" anything new. She is just experiencing something for herself that she already knew about. It's like going to visit the Eiffel Tower for the first time. You already know what it is, you are just seeing for yourself for the first time.
And if she knew which parts of her brain are responsible for said "experience" and had a device to stimulate them in the right way, she could even implant said "experience" without ever making the actual "experience". Visiting the actual Eiffel tower afterwards, would be like visiting it for the second time. Thats kinda the problem of the thought experiment. Its conclusion is built upon the circle argument that the human mind is special to begin with, and that such a manipulation is not only from a practical point of view, but in principle absolutely 100% impossible. Where does this assumption come from? Frank Jackson wants it to be true.
I think we would be obliged to call the new experience of seeing a familiar scene in color for the first time a "learning experience" under any recognizable definition of learning. To be more precise, the experience itself does not constitute learning. Learning involves, at a bare minimum, producing a lasting change of some kind in the mind. Experience itself is ephemeral. We often associate additional qualities to what we mean by learning, such as extraction of features from the experience and integration of those features with existing knowledge. This is a harder test for a "learning experience" to meet than simply remembering that a particular experience took place, but even under this harder test, seeing something red for the first time and assigning the concept of redness to it would easily qualify as a learning experience. One aspect of it, certainly not the only one, could be expressed by the statement "I have seen a red object." This statement, and the information it represents, was not previously present in the memory of the subject. Now it is.
@@AliothAncalagon Or do you just not want the argument to be true? Even in your own argument, the ‘experience’ of something, is different from knowing about something. I am really struggling to see why people try to avoid that conclusion.
My view: An issue with this thought experiment is that Mary wouldn't "learn" anything new if she truly did know all "physical information" regarding the color "red." She would have already obtained the ability to "see" the color red in her mind as if she already saw it, meaning she would simply be seeing the color again when she left the room. The issue at hand is how the premise is posited: she has all knowledge of the color red. In reality, it would be closer to her having nearly all knowledge of the color, with seeing it being that last piece to complete the neurological input for her to then register that wavelength as "red," but the thought experiment assumes that she already has this input in the premise when it states she has all the physical information regarding the color. She thus wouldn't learn anything from actually seeing the color in the experiment, but would learn from seeing the color in real life. One could argue, however, that in real life she could think she had already seen the color before seeing it and gaining that last bit of information due to how our memory works. In this case, she could think she learned nothing when she actually did, making physicalism seem wrong to her despite not actually being wrong.
The thesis assumes that physical information is different from the qualia. As in Mary has all physical information about the colour and vision like wavelengths, the biology and brain functions but that all these things are entirely separate from the qualia itself which can not be understood through the physical explanation itself
Yep, it effectively amounts to an argument from ignorance. We cannot imagine that Mary could already know what red looks like, but that doesn't mean that she really can't. We simply don't know. In some way the argument is circular. If physicalism is false, then she wouldn't be able to extrapolate that experience with her knowledge. If it's true, then she would be able to do so.
My hypothesis is that Mary can't learn everything about the color red without "seeing"It. This is because your own specific cone and rod setup, your individual neural pathways and the minutia around how it stores information is unique to you at least at some level of granularity just because of the nature of organic adaptation. Therefore "seeing" something is a piece of the physical property because we are a part of the physical world. What this doesn't mean, is that she has to see the color with her eyes. Similarly to the brain in a jar hypothesis, that we could simulate the same neural pathways effectively teaching how it feels to see the color red without seeing the color red. But to Mary she has seen the color red. So it goes back to the fact that our consciousness is separate from the physical world and can only Interact with it in a second hand way. This means that we can teach anything through experience without the experience being representative of what is actually happening. So we are back to deciding between using the subjective experience of the brain, and the objective existence of the rest of everything else in the definition of teaching and whether simulated experience should be considered a real experience.
The spinny wheel is actually a pair of plunger-type cylinders, one on each side. They connect to arms which are connected, off-center, to the wheels. These turn the wheels.
@@Unfunny_Username_389 Yes, exactly. In the past, children would immitate a train by holding their arms with their elbows at their sides and their forearms straight out - then they would move them like the train pistons while making choo-choo sounds. They got it. The jet engines engines are harder to immitate and not nearly as much fun - but so much more powerful.
I have to add one other wrinkle to Mary's room. Would someone who has never seen color be able to see color when they left the room? Mary's brain has never been trained to process color, so it's possible that whatever neural circuitry does that processing was never turned on in her brain. She might still see the world in black and white, because that's all her brain is capable of at that point. Or maybe not, I don't know, but that's an interesting question to ponder.
I had a similar thought - wouldn't someone have to tell Mary she was seeing the color red? She doesn't have the capability of "self-analyzing" her brain's "reaction" to the color red, so how would she ever recognize the color as red?
1. Your physiological point is correct. Ask any ophthalmologist. 2. So, it supports physicalism. And strongly so. 3. But I can't believe Jackson did not account for this. So, we would have to read his papers. Pperhapss Professor Kaplan will. answer you. Or if you aree in USA, just ask ChatGPT's paid version
@@chrischamplin4341 Do you remember the part of the video where he said Mary learned all the "boring" info about color? Why do you suppose he bothered to mention this? And not just mention it, but spend quite a bit of time on it. Could it be that the info contains a lot of common sense notions about the color red? So Mary has enough info to recognize the color red. Like she already knows strawberries are red and then she goes in the other room and sees a strawberry, but it's not gray, it's bright red. Do you suppose a human of normal intelligence has enough sense to put two and two together? So when Mary sees something that's normally gray, but now has something extra, would she figure out what this extra property is? What if she also knows raspberries, tomatoes and santa hats are typically "red" and she sees those objects with this extra property as well?
Yes you would see colour. If you had to see a colour before being able to process it visually then you World never see any colour, or probably anything, ever. Right? See where I’m going with this?
Initial reaction after hearing the thought experiment: The problem isn't that Mary lacked non-physical information. The problem is that Jackson lacked physical information. He's missing or misunderstanding an important aspect of sight (or perhaps where information comes from?). The only known way to receive the specific information of what red looks like is to actually interact with red physically; the physical photons have to physically touch your physical eyeballs. That's exactly the same physical process required to learn all the other stuff she presumably knew about sight, that is she had to either see or hear the information somehow, both purely physical actions as far as we can tell. I don't see what's qualitatively different between reading information from a book or hearing it from a teacher vs looking at a red thing, aside from what the information specifically contains. If Mary didn't know what red looked like then she didn't have all the physical information about seeing color which means the thought experiment is breaking its own rules. Thoughts after watching the rest: Well, I stand by what I said. That isn't to say I didn't learn anything, though, and I loved this video overall. Great breakdown, easy to follow. Although if I were Jackson I think I would've tried to focus on the existence of information itself rather than the availability of the information. Because what exactly is information? To be clear, I don't think this line of thinking is going to arrive at dualism either, but I do think it would be at least a little harder to argue around. Information is a physical thing in a sense, because it's something found only through physical interactions like everything else, but also it isn't because there's no information particle or whatever (as far as we know anyway) so it isn't matter, but it also isn't energy because information doesn't behave like energy. Is it a field? That doesn't seem right either. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'm pretty sure whatever it is it's purely physical, even if I had no other reason than we've never found anything that wasn't so far. Maybe that'll change someday but I'm not about to bet against those odds.
But ultimately the question becomes if the feeling of light in your brain is actually information. I say this because it's impossible to quantify the feeling. You can't ever be sure for instance that the way I experience red is the same as you experience red. The underlying problem is consciousness, there's no actual scientific way to prove it exists or measure it.
@@taragnor That's a really good point, actually. If there's no way to use or transfer a piece of information, if it can't interact with anything in the universe outside an individual mind, is it actually information? The only point of hesitation I have with it is the fact that the outside universe does often cause your experience of color to happen. But I don't think this really solves the issue because it still only exists as a non-translatable non-transferable experience that can just as easily happen with no external influence at all via imagination, and there's still no way to externalize the experience itself.
@@ansalem12 Yeah, without a doubt the original stimulus that causes the experience can be physical. A sound reaching the ears, a wavelength of light reaching the eye, or a breeze touching the skin. All that stuff is physical information with physical properties and you can measure that. You can record the sound, check the wavelength of light, etc. The conscious experience though is how the brain actually deals with that physical information. Some people with synesthesia are known to associate sounds with colors for instance. Different individuals may find the taste of something unpleasant or great. Some may find a warmth in a room comforting, while others find it makes them uncomfortable. And how those physical events are experienced are always a personal thing. Two people can experience the exact same stimuli in very different ways. Then of course, there's some experiences that may not have any obvious physical cause, like some who have claimed to have religious experiences without any obvious physical stimuli the way seeing a color would. I tend to lean into the idea that consciousness is something special, simply because it's proven to be so difficult to quantify at all.
@@taragnor For my part I tend to think of consciousness or experiences in general as kind of like the brain's shorthand way of sorting and categorizing data. Sort of analogous to a GUI, maybe. Or like a simulated projection of its data stream. Whether that's even a little accurate or not is anybody's guess, but it's the easiest way for me to wrap my head around it so to speak. I do have a bias towards thinking about things in terms of computers, after all. But it kinda makes me wonder if some AI isn't already a little bit conscious, though, since they must have internal simulations of their operations I'd imagine. I don't actually know though. Hopefully that made sense lol. It's hard to even come up with good analogies for what consciousness might be you know?
@@ansalem12 Yeah, it's very difficult to think of any analogy for consciousness because it's a very unique phenomenon. I think it's what makes me tend to lean towards consciousness being non-physical. I generally think of it being kind of like the camera in a first-person video game. You can have two video game characters, one is an NPC run by the machine, and the other is controlled by the player. That player character is the one that's "conscious" in the game world, where you can see out it's eyes, see when it takes damage, etc. Consciousness is a perspective at seeing reality. But the game camera itself doesn't really "exist" in the same way that the walls and the game characters do. It's just a perspective to view the world, not an actual "physical" object. I see consciousness as being the reason for "well all these people have eyes and ears, but I'm specifically experiencing reality from this particular being's senses and point of view". And like consciousness in reality, the camera in a video game kind of has that ability to be both nothing and everything simultaneously. It really doesn't exist as something that can be interacted with from the player's point of view, but without it, you wouldn't be able to experience the game at all.
Here's the answer: Right before Mary is introduced to the color TV or steps into the colored world, Mary is aware that she has neural pathways and processing capabilities that she has never had activated in her own nervous system, since she knows all about those pathways and what activates them. So she knows that there are mental experiences she has never yet had because she also knows that everything she has seen up until that point was not colored. That is, she knows that there are mental events she has never experienced, but cannot "know" the experience itself because they have never been activated, because "knowing" the experience is the memory of that activation. Hence, this experiment is actually support of the physicalism interpretation of mental events and consciousness, and Mary, being omniscient, also will know she has a lot of new experiences coming up in a colored world as all those existing but never activated pathways will now be activated, and will learn a lot, coming to "know" what they are like. Her memory of the activation of the pathway is a new "physical" fact, instantiated in the changed synaptic weights of her long term memory, which she, being omniscient, knew would occur, but couldn't recall, since it hadn't occurred yet... As for the discussion about epiphenomena, it was too short; whether something is an epiphenomenon depends on the definition of the process being described. Steam would not be an epiphenomenon if the train was specified to be a "steam engine", but might be if it was just defined as a "engine", or perhaps would not even be applicable - for instance and electric train powered by batteries. In the latter case, all manner of items, would not even be applicable (apples, hair brushes) since they are not even involved in any way in the process.
Mary 'knows' that tomatoes are red, and the sky is blue. But once she experiences them, she knows that is not true at all. Tomatoes are a million variations of the colors that we conveniently categorize as 'red' and the same can be said for the clear blue sky. Uniformity is the extremely rare exception, not the rule. It is an illusion we use to 'cut to the chase' when we think of the universe in its infinite, and therefore non-physical and physical parts. Nothing wrong with that from a practical standpoint, as long as we do not delude ourselves by categorically declaring that is all there is to it. All of this can be observed with our very limited on-board senses. If we perceive beyond those senses, the entire concept of a purely physical universe becomes an absurdity.
Ive read somewhere that by electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain, or during brain surgery, people can smell or taste things which are actually not there. So if incorrect information is provided to the brain, the brain will experience things as if they were physically real. So it would seem that physical manipulation of the brain, or the information that the brain is receiving results in different experiences, so physicalism seems to hold in this case. For example if Mary never left the black and white room, but through a neural link, if the correct parts of her brain were stimulated, she would see color red, right in her room. So the experience of color red, can be reduced into information i.e. which human brain neurons fire and when. Physicalism seems to hold its ground yet.
Yeah, this is correct. I mean, all it would really take to see colors would be to rub ones eyes vigorously enough. The compression of the eyeball causes the structures to bleed phosphorescent chemicals onto other structures, stimulating them. We tben perceive these as flashes/splotches of color. This often "bedazzles" you as well. Eyes that are functioning will always see color. A black and white room wouldn't make it otherwise.
Well, this is a thought experiment, which by nature assumes certain things will or won't happen. She won't be rubbing her eyes really hard to get pigment release from the cones in the cornea, and even is she did, there's no way a third party observer would be able to say what she is seeing in her eyes because they can not see through her eyes. With regard to transcranial stimulation with, say, a solenoid cap stimulating the part of the visual cortex that encodes or enciphers the color stimulus to neural phenomenon, even if she was exposed in that fashion, she would still not know the QUALIA of any color, or the attachment of its synthesized experience, because it's all intraneural phenomenon. Even with every piece of information at her "finger tips" she would not actually be experiencing the QUALIA of red because she has no gauge or anchor to say that is red. It's cloistered wholly in her mind. The perception in either case is still akin to being aware only of all the purely technical information regarding the wedge of the electromagnetic spectrum our eyes have evolved to see. Even if she were exposed to examples of commonly red objects (except desaturated of color) on a monitor or photographs, like a bright red apple (except in grayscale), AND she had eaten apple slices before carefully prepared, so no red skin would be found anywhere on them, I strongly doubt her mind would put the discrete pieces of information together and synthesize an abstract red apple in her mind. This is not a limitation on her part, this is due to absence of direct full sense phenomenon of the color red being entangled meaningfully, semiotically, or with perceptual valence attached to the abstract "red". The critical thing here is the integral and entangled experience of sense perceptions in consciousness and how our minds construct "reality". I simply don't agree with the assertion by philosophers still trying to work out the mind-body problem whom have discarded qualia so casually to make room for a pure monist conceptualization of reality to please the biases of other academics. It's clear that qualia exist, if they did not, nothing in our shared reality would have any meaning, or evoke any distinct and individual perceptions of the given object. This doesn't mean that the private experiences each of us have are not information, they are _more_ than _mere_ information. The resulting experience of sense phenomena of the object is laden with qualia that our previous experiences and general life trajectories subconsciously synthesize and apply to the perceived object, resulting in it possessing metastatic qualia, which we then project on that object. And finally, don't forget Hume's thought experiment of the missing shade of blue. Without experiencing the "missing shade" all one can do is infer from its spectrometric neighbors what it must be, or be like to experience, but that is all one can do - make inferences based on the available sense phenomenon and the lived experience of all the other shades of blue. We can even pull the spectrometry and neurophysiological comprehension from "Mary's Room" and conclude that the missing shade has a given wavelength and can possibly be manufactured by targeted neural stimulation, but we will still now know what the missing shade is, because we are still missing the critical thing that makes it real and meaningful - individual experience based qualia of it.
I'm writing my undergraduate thesis on a key problem with The Knowledge Argument that you did not exactly point out here: the Mary thought experiment is using the informal fallacy "Begging the Question" during the reification of qualia. Even if we accept Jackson's premise of informational physicalism, this thought experiment is still fallacious, and Jackson commented on this later in his life. For instance, this is his premise: "there is a state in the thought experiment where Mary simultaneously knows all physical knowledge and there exists non-physical knowledge that Mary has yet to learn". You see, if you are a physicalist, this assumption is a contradiction in itself. In other words, If physicalism was true, this premise could not possibly accepted logically by a physicalist. And if this premise were true, then physicalism would be impossible. It is strange that a physicalist could not make the easy reply that "If Mary truly did know all physical knowledge of color, then a priori, she must have knowledge of the experience of colors as well."
The story did not say that Mary knew all physical knowledge. The story said she was studying the physics of colors, that as she was studying the physics of the color, the world was in black and white, until she went out. The story is meant to attack physicalim, not assert a world where physicalism is true.
@@123duelist Firstly, I know a lot more about this thought experiment than you do, and I don't think you actually read any of these articles. Mary does not have all physical knowledge, she has all physical knowledge of color. The story was meant to attack physicalism, but I show that the story is using a fallacy. Even the author of the story admitted that the thought experiment is inadequate.
@@gamefreak23788 Firstly saying,"Mary does not have all physical knowledge, but knowledge of color" is literally what I said." Secondly, what fallacy is it committing?
@@DerekThompson-tb2up Why? What parts did you not understand or agree with? Do you have any previous study in philosophy? All honest and genuine questions.
@@THE-X-Force 5:30 the speaker equivocates on scientific vs. physical knowledge. I can tell you how velcro feels but you will not know how it feels until you actually feel it or something similar. The definition of physical knowledge here changes based on what conclusion he is trying to draw in the moment. Would you rather be told about a delicious meal or eat a delicious meal? The experiential knowledge of eating that meal is itself physical knowledge but the problem is that humans can't learn what a meal tastes like just by looking at it. One final hypothetical: if Mary left the room and someone gave her an orange that was dyed the wrong color would she be able to know that it was the wrong color if she hadn't seen color before but knew what color was?
@@TwoForFlinchin1 "the problem is that humans can't learn what a meal tastes like just by looking at it" that isn't a problem. it's just how things are, man
@@scambammer6102 it is a problem for people that want to know what something tastes like but only have a picture. Why do you think taste samples exist? Because of the previoisly mentioned problem you didn't know existed, or deny the existence of. You're welcome for learning something new today.
The response I've always given to this problem is that: Seeing or experiencing redness IS a physical state of being. I.e. your brain or brain stuff, is IN the state of what it means to experience red. Thus in order for Mary to truly have learnt all the physical facts about redness, she would have had to read a book or watched some lecture that was able to put her mind in a state of seeing redness. Thus leaving the room she won't see red for the first time. She will have already seen it, in learning about red. There's just a category area here about what we mean about physical facts. There are some epiphenomenal arguments about how 'redness' is just a belief state and you don't 'truly' experience redness etc, but either way the criticism will still work regardless of what you hold to. I can talk about things in the abstract like 2 buildings + 2 buildings = 4 buildings. But part of the physical fact about a specific building, say the Taj Mahal is knowing what it looks like. If you can conceive of what the Taj Mahal looks like without ever seeing the Taj Mahal from descriptions then you know what it is like to experience the real Taj Mahal. Being unable to describe "redness" just means you're limited by the language we have access to to communicate such concepts. But that's not going to undermine the ontology of what 'redness' is. It's still going to be a physical mental state, that supposedly you could cause to happen by just sticking probes in Mary's brain. Much like you wouldn't think Dualism is true when someone demands a physicalist explain what it's like to smell something in terms of it's touch. It's just a completely different mode of thinking. Linguistic descriptions aren't the only physical form of communication.
And it's the same as with everyday people who first learn about blue through first hand experience then after learn about it through science in terms of wave lengths and the complex mechanisms of the eye which together sends signal to the brain to form an experience of blue, now is the physical information less physical because it the other way around from Mary's experience or because it can be more easily articulated? no. For Mary, blue was always a physical potential of the brain structure and no blue would be left lingering around the if the responsible parts of the brain are destroyed.
@@CoopAssembly Right, it's weird. Which is why it's such a good thought experiment to highlight that facts aren't all just "maths on a whiteboard". Some people lean toward pan-psychism to overcome the intuition (like there's this functional brain stuff in the universe like a subset of the fundamental forces. Some people just think it's all an illusion create by atoms. i.e. beliefs are just functional, including the belief you're experiencing stuff even though you're not. And sometimes it's just an emergent property of physical stuff. As in a different way of the physical world creating stuff like "A wheel being the optimal thing for motion".
@@CoopAssembly That's for a different reason. It's not logically possible for you to understand yourself fully-or predict yourself perfectly-because your brain has a certain size. You can't “fit” a complete model of your brain into your brain and still have room left to think about it (this is an impressionistic description of a real piece of mathematics). But at the end of the day you _do_ have the feeling, and that should be enough to establish that it's real in exactly the same way as all your other experience. Though TBH there are limits on what we can know about the “physical” world just as there are limits on what we can know about ourselves.
Yeah, this has always been my problem with this thought experiment. The only thing she has learned is her actual particular physical experience of red that she "knew" about in the extract.
The critical question left unasked here (which I assume is addressed in a later video) is: "Is experience physical?" And the answer to that is: Yes. The chain of events that allow Mary to experience (and process the experience of) seeing red for the first time involves the movement of physical things, and chemical reactions based on interactions between those moving physical things. Further, memory of experience is also physical, which is why amnesia is a thing. If memory weren't physical then there would be no way to harm a human that would induce amnesia - which can either be the loss of memory, or loss of the ability to access those memories. If memories weren't physical there wouldn't need to be a mechanism through which to access them.
There is also a conflation of experiencing with knowledge, which is to say that there is an assumption that Mary is one thing with one salient function which is higher cognition.
For me, the whole thought experiment is pure nonsense. The woman actually experience two colors -- black and white -- and it is entirely possible that she intellectually can understand that there are more colours than that. In exactly the same way as we understand there are other colours outside the spectrum of light we are able to see. Now, some nitpickers objects that black and white aren't real colors, but that is nothing else than semantics. A woman as learned as Mary should also understand that our sensory experiences of the world is not the world in itself, but a biological visualisation of the physical information that surround us, like a virtual reality in a computer that nonetheless is entirely dependent on the underlying physical information, an underlying information that you partly can change with your interactions. There you have your "mysterious" epiphenomenalism.
You say yes, experience is physical, but that can only be true if there is anything "physical". From an idealism point of view everything is mental, "physical things" are only models practical for describing what happens. 3 reasons for thinking that idealism is more true than physicalism: 1) How can physical "things" like atoms and other particles give rise to consciousness? Seems quite impossible in principle. 2) In quantum mechanics a conscious observation collapses the wave function but the physics doesn't describe this process. 3) Countless numbers of NDE experiences contain details of events that are objective but should not be possible according to materialistic science, like rendering what goes on inside other rooms inside a hospital while a patient has no brain activity. Look carefully at videos from Bruce Greyson, Pim van Lommel, Peter Fenwick, Donald Hoffman, ...
I think it conflates the academic knowledge with what the brain produces when we see things. It seems short-sighted to imagine the words, measurements, definitions, understandings of wave lengths are going to be the same as the physical output of the brain that IS the experience of seeing red. And if it is a physical output from the brain, then it is this physical output that grants us our conscious experience. I don't have a problem referring to the process and realization of the color red being, e.g., called qualia, I just don't see why it can't be something that is linked directly to, dependent on and just as physical as any other field. NOT to say consciousness is the same thing as a field, but it seems to be directly linked to and solely dependent ON a physical brain. And who is to say that eventually, when we understand more about what the brain does and the things that emanate from it that we won't be able to duplicate and actually pass on qualia from one person to another under some conditions.
I snuck into Mary's room before she was exposed to the world of color, wearing a costume of black and white. I handed her a painted, wooden block. She was mesmerized by it - she could tell it was colored, because it was fascinatingly different from her black and white existence. Mary turns the block around in her hands, enjoying her experience of this new qualia. I asked, "What is the color of the block?" She said "Ah, let me get my spectrometer to measure the light's wavelength and then I can tell you!" In addition to being color-starved, it turns out that Mary was bi-curious.
It would be interesting to have Frank Jackson re-run this thought experiment with one slight variation: Mary is an AI equipped with monochrome video inputs that get upgraded to color video inputs after Mary has been fully trained on all the knowable data about vision.
I managed the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence during the period in which we transitioned from grayscale to color cameras, so I can speak to this question. In practical terms, there are three areas where the transition would need to be made. • One obvious area is the capacity to distinguish color in hardware. There's not much to say about this except that simply changing the cameras, say, or the frame grabbers, from grayscale to color would not do much good by itself. Probably the imaging system would no longer work at all. The entire image pipeline would have to be correspondingly changed, as well as the representation of images that the AI uses internally. But we can bypass this issue without loss of generality by imagining that all this capability was already in place all along. Mary has just not exercised it with anything but grayscale image sources. • Another area is the representation or encoding of the image. Pixels in a grayscale image consist of single integer values, whereas pixels with the capacity to represent color use tuples for the color components, such as RGB. A grayscale world would appear as pixels having identical values for the RGB components. Mary could have been equipped with this color encoding all along, but would have always observed identical RGB values. • Finally we can consider the AI itself and what it does to make sense of images. For simplicity, let's assume that Mary has been used to processing color bitmaps all along, but has only seen grayscale images, meaning RGB values that are identical within any given pixel. Now your question of "training" comes in. If Mary is a neural network that has only ever been trained using grayscale images, then we would not expect that network to distinguish color at all. It would respond to pixel intensity only, at least initially. Training in a neural network is not a symbolic activity, it's exposure to training images. There's no way to represent "data ABOUT vision" such as how to interpret colorspaces and so on. There's only the visual signal. So Mary can't be primed with information that apples are red, for example, much less how color vision works. You'll have to discard that aspect of the experiment. But it turns out to be irrelevant. Now, once the visual signal has changed because color scenes are being imaged, we would expect a neural network to begin to adjust its weights to the new patterns in the data. The red components of some of the pixels are brighter than the other components, and this is potentially a meaningful signal, in other words there might be red objects in the scene doing interesting things. Mary is now in a position to start to track those pixels and try to make sense of them. The same learning mechanism that works for grayscale images can expected to learn about color all by itself. If Mary on the other hand is some kind of propositional AI, then it would have been trained with images combined with symbolic propositions or even algorithms concerning those images. The details of this hypothetical AI are unimportant. Let's be as generous as possible. But note that even in the most pessimistic case this version of Mary is still a superset of the neural network version, therefore should have at least it's capabilities. So Mary has all sorts of propositional knowledge about color vision, for example that a colored object will be represented with nonidentical RGB values in its pixel tuples. Mary has never seen such an image, until one day the scene changes to show a bowl of red and green apples. Mary knows exactly what "red" means, because it involves red pixel values, and so Mary can immediately report, as a symbolic proposition, that something in the scene is red. Mary knows as a symbolic proposition that apples are red. Since we're being generous in our assumptions about Mary, we might expect to see an inference from Mary that the red areas of the image might be apples.
@@starfishsystems There’s and added problem for MARY AI that Mary didn’t have. We can all sort of identify with Mary because we recognize each other as humans and expect a similar subjective experience. I think the argument against physicalism may involve the problems of consciousness and subjective experience. We’re in the dark about whether MARY AI even has the software to have subjective experience or consciousness. Pass that propositional knowledge through a ChatGPT output and MARY AI could probably discuss the experience of seeing a red apple for the first time without actually seeing one. The language model has that knowledge encoded from its experience of the language it was trained on. We could probably be in the dark on what the AI experience of color truly is. What’s also interesting is what happens when we get to the point that subjective experience becomes a reasonable proposition for an AI? Would we know for sure whether that threshold has been passed? It’s creepy to think about having convincing discussions about subjective experience decades before subjective experience arises and then AI has to figure out that this is different. It’s for real real this time. Especially bad if it’s capable of suffering at any point.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 We do, we just don't pre-suppose that said experience is non-physical. Which is all the evidence one would need for why the thought experiment is faulty.
One of my favorite intuition pumps. The defective premise here is that Mary knows "everything" about anything at all, let alone her brain. If she new everything, she would know exactly which sort of brain activity is the exact neural correlate of seeing red, and would say "yes just exactly like one of the colors I see when I close my eyes". There would be the same surprise as meeting your favorite author in person. Notice the drama of the payoff scene fizzles if Mary is simply knowledgeable. Finally, to drag the whole thing back down to earth, where many of us live, I do not know if there is any definitive research on whether the victim of such an evil experiment would even have functioning color vision at all after such willful and expensive torture.
What Mary doesn't 'know' for want of a better word is the cellular reactions that go along with experiencing blue. Her neural cells haven't actually shared the nerve impulses of the experience that can only happen when her eyes send a message along her optical nerves that ends up triggering chemical reactions within nerve cells. If our experiences are actually chemical reactions in cells then, like a hammer blow to someone's skull, they don't get the experience unless the hammer hits them, personally. I think that's just another way of saying what you said.
@@rizdekd3912 , only Mary can know what Mary knows, since at this point in time we don't. When I try to imagine omniscience I have to concede I have no idea how Mary will respond. I will point out that "dualism"--the thesis Jackson is supporting--ultimately explains nothing. How does the immaterial mind interact with the material world? It's an abiding mystery.
@Rizdek D I think another way of saying what you said is: Mary, nor none other than Mary, could design such an experiment. The heuristics don't permit it intrinsically. We know your red isn't my red, so I can't design a box to limit your red without risking your extinction, and thus the very experimental results. I'd actually prefer to stop upon noticing the possibility of your extinction rather than the lack of useful results.
@@johnsmoak8237 Do we know that your red isn't my red? We can only say for certain if there is some difference in narrow band or broad band colour blindness that your red and mine are different because, for one of us, that shade of red would be indistinguishable from another shade; but not for both of us. However, when we look at colours we both distinguish, equally, then there is no way to be certain that we see colours any differently although, some research suggests strongly that we see distinguishable colours the same way because the psychological impact is identical (e.g. Luscher Colour Test wouldn't get consistent results where applicable if most of us didn't see most colours the same way).
@Mercurio Morat's Bughunting Channel in fact, I do know that your red isn't my red, as if it were we would be the same person and this conversation wouldn't have happened. Sometimes the difference is not in the "color" of the red, but other facts about it that correlate directly to Mary's confinement. My point is that I cannot know her red and confine her, and similarly she cannot learn red she does not know. Tabula Rasa, yeah? Tabula Rasa, or I better hit the monastery.
Thanks for this video. I looked through the wikipedia page of objections to the thought experiment and it didn't contain what seems to me the most obvious objection: that sense experience is needed to learn the meaning of terms that appear in physical theory. The old positivist idea that theories can be "directly defined in terms of sense data" is well known to be too simplistic, but it had a kernel of truth, and this thought experiment seems to make the opposite mistake. I mean, textbooks on vision do contain sentences like "light in such and such a range of wavelengths is seen as red" and Mary would have no idea what these sentences mean. That's a "physical fact" she can't learn.
She would understand the sentence, except for what the word "red" actually meant. It would essentially just be an arbitrary label for her. So she could in fact learn the physical fact that certain wavelengths are "seen as red", she just wouldn't know what it's like to see red beyond a physical description of brain activity. That's the point, physicalism essentially boils down to an abstract description of the world in terms of physical properties (like energy, spin, etc.) but there are obviously aspects of the world which are not abstract descriptions (like the experience of redness) and indeed it seems pretty obvious to me that the world itself _cannot_ be an abstract description, because what would it be a description of? Itself?
@@APaleDot "physicalism essentially boils down to an abstract description of the world in terms of physical properties (like energy, spin, etc.) but there are obviously aspects of the world which are not abstract descriptions (like the experience of redness)" Does it...essentially boil down to an abstract description of the world in terms of physical properties? Doesn't physicalism also assume physical actions/objects cause physical effects and physical actions have physical outcomes? And until something...whether with a mind or not...experiences a physical process/effect it has not experienced it. So if we assume that the entire process is physical...from the moment the eye senses color until the body reacts to that input, then it will be clear why Mary doesn't know blue by reading abstract descriptions, she only 'knows blue' if her cells have experienced the physical effects blue causes. Like getting hit with something actually causes physical damage. The only way for someone to experience that damage is to get hit. So think of the reaction of our brains cells as a form of 'damage' where something physical changes.
But suppose Mary's complete knowledge about vision includes the knowledge of how to stimulate the visual cortex directly, through the use of mind altering chemicals or electrical probes? Then she doesn't learn anything new about the color blue when she leaves the room.
Knowledge of how to stimulate the visual cortex is not the same thing as actually stimulating the visual cortex. Until she actually does stimulate the visual cortex (thus achieving the same result as leaving the room), she does not have the direct knowledge of what it is like to see red. You're basically trying and failing to cheat the thought experiment, and in doing so proving it true; you are tacitly acknowledging that requires doing something other than knowing the physical description of red light (in this case, stimulating the physical cortex) to gain the knowledge of what it is like to see red.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 "You're basically trying and failing to cheat the thought experiment" If we assume that: -Seeing colour is information regarding that colour. -The thought experiment doesn't invalidate itself. -The person in question doesn't pre-suppose dualism. Then the proposed "cheat" is actually vital for the thought experiment to have any validity. If a physicalist states that books on their own are inadequate, but a completely physical device (say, electrodes that use electric impulses to stimulate the visual cortex) would be sufficient to achieve the thought experiment's stated goal of giving Mary all the physical information, then you would have no options besides either admitting that you're trying to use the thought experiment as a "Gotcha!" question or permitting it. Since you seem to be keen on denying the fix, you're not showing yourself in that great of a light here.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 Say Mary reads a study detailing the difference between the brains of people who have not experienced color and ones who have. It describes all the experimental steps needed to bridge the gap. What stops Mary from doing the experiment on herself?
Really enlightening videos here! This is somehow like me learning and remembering the string of Ones and Zeros that physically make the entirety of this video and having no clue what information I'm actually remembering. I would consider myself very smart and having a great memory but in reality I'd know ZILCH! I'm really enjoying pondering this and questioning the actual information I remember and if in reality it is something completeley different. Tickles my brain and I like it! Thanks!
You could in principle study streaming protocols, data compression, image and audio formats. Then decode the ones and zeros into video format chunks, …decompress the data into image blocks of key frames, … add delta information between the key frames to convert motion data to subsequent frames, … similarly decode the audio into waveforms, … analyze the waveforms to detect phonemes to decode speech,… Pretty much everything the video codec does is possible to do by a human with enough free time. So you might get there eventually-if you’re a dedicated immortal. But yes in the raw format it’s pretty indecipherable even with encryption turned off. I don’t think humans are neurologically capable of making sense of the raw data that way. It would take some kind of neurological video codec which even if one was possible it would be kinda hard to justify… Not sure where I was going with this.
The problem here is that we want to teach Mary about something without showing it, and the shortcomings of language to express all the possible ways she might feel when she eventually gets to see colors are taken as "proof" that knowledge and information and the "physical world" is not all there is. What if Mary was blind, and had an RGB sensor, that made different sounds for different colors and light intensities? She would listen to its beeping all day, and when for the first time experiencing the color red, she hears a distinctly different sound from the sensor. Compared to the original thought experiment: - she has experience with different output from the sensor - it is possible to describe or hum or even play the sound for Mary beforehand - greatly reduced emotional impact when experiencing the color red Will anyone now argue that "experiencing" a new piece of music, playing differently notes than what you've heard before, is proof that something is transcending the physical world? Jackson seems to have got hung up on emotions, thinking they can not be physical, but isn't it also so that strong emotions manifest in the physical body, as tingling, sweating, trembling, quickened puls, constriction of the chest, goose bumps, tensing or relaxing?
No this -language problems - is not what the thought experiment is about. The thought experiment is about Marry having a complete mechanical knowledge that describes how the brain creates the colour red. This knowledge will not only have the form of language but also be picture knowledge, like memorys of brain scans etc. Nevertheless all that knowledge can not really tell her what red is. So red is not mechanical and if red is not mechanical but all the world is defined as something mechanical than where does red come from?
@@dengelbrecht6428 "No this -language problems - is not what the thought experiment is about" Everyone knows that; But what you seem to fail to understand is that one of the more critical failing points of the thought experiment is that language is inadequate to convey all the information that needs to be conveyed to impart all physical information regarding colour. However, let us, for argument's sake, assume that this limitation can be overcome. At this point, the thought experiment has 3 answers. 1 - "I lean towards dualism". 2 - "I lean towards physicalism". 3 - "The thought experiment is faulty". No, seriously, those are the only things it ultimately ends up answering. To elamborate: 1 - "I lean towards dualism". - This means that you will assert that Mary, upon seeing red for the first time in her life has learned something new, thus there is more to the world than just the physical world. 2 - "I lean towards physicalism". - This means that you will assert that the experiment stated that she has had all information imparted to her regarding colour, meaning that she already has the experience of seeing colour imparted to her in some manner other than her seeing colour (assuming that is even relevant information regarding colours). Should anyone think to retort with how that isn't possible, all that would end up doing is deadlocking the experiment as a self-refuting exercise. Alternatively, your assertion will be that the experience of colour is still physical, even if it isn't necessarily imparted to Mary during her colour-deprivation time. In this case, the one resolving the thought experiment didn't catch that it was supposed to be *all* physical information - And this is where the language issue comes up, mind you. 3 - "The thought experiment is faulty". - You actually think the thought experiment through and regardless of your stance (though physicalists are more likely to be in this group), you realize that ultimately the thought experiment will simply end up as an overly wordy way of asking someone wether they lean towards dualism or physicalism, as the bias of the person resolving the thought experiment is what ultimately defines the answer, with no actual correct answer. In either case, acting like people criticizing the thought experiment are just "not getting it" outs you as a dualist throwing an apologist-tantrum.
@@OzixiThrill No I don't say that the Experiment is about language but the Guy who started the threat tries to boil it down to a pure language Problem ( because this beeping Sound that the blind Mary uses in the way he framed the Experiment is a language). But frankly I don't want to continue to discuss with someone who acuses me of throwing a tantrum Just because I am a different opinion. I tried to discuss the topic, you discuss me. That's an ad hominem Attack and a complete Red flag for If this discussion will have any value or Not.
@@dengelbrecht6428 "No I don't say that the Experiment is about language but the Guy who started the threat tries to boil it down to a pure language Problem ( because this beeping Sound that the blind Mary uses in the way he framed the Experiment is a language)." And you go out of your way to accuse people of "not getting it". The other guy's case about using a some sort of auditory device was entirely revolving around solving the problem that language is inadequate for conveying all information necessary for the thought experiment to have any validity. In short, he was trying to steel-man the thought experiment. "But frankly I don't want to continue to discuss with someone who acuses me of throwing a tantrum Just because I am a different opinion. I tried to discuss the topic, you discuss me" Sure. Ignore 93% of my comment and dismiss it in it's entirety because I pointed out that you're not engaging with the argument presented, but are trying to grasp at straws to dismiss the criticism while trying to reassert the original thought experiment as the be-all end-all of the discourse. "That's an ad hominem Attack and a complete Red flag for If this discussion will have any value or Not." An insult is neither an attack nor ad hominem. The only way my insult would classify as ad hominem is if I was using that insult as the basis of my arguments or for dismissing yours. However, as it is the conclusion of my analysis of your entire case, it does not qualify as one. You, however, might be guilty of the fallacy fallacy; Attempting to find a fallacy to dismiss everything the other party stated; Not all argument sets are completely invalid if there is one argument in them that is fallacious. In fact, even an argument that invokes a fallacy can still be correct. For example, an appeal to authority is a fallacy; "Scientists say" is a common invocation of that. However, that does not necessarily mean that the argument invoked with that preface is automatically wrong. As the example - "Scientists say that you need to breathe oxygen to live"; It does invoke an appeal to authority fallacy, yet it's also a correct statement. Meanwhile, you focusing on 7% of my case while ignoring the rest does lend credence to my insult. Therefore, my conclusion so far is that you are failing to grasp the counter arguments presented to the original thought experiment and are grasping at straws to reassert the original, even though plenty of faults have been found with it.
@@OzixiThrill I have no clue what you wrote and I will not read it. „Red flag“ means that I am not willing to talk with people who use ad hominem attacks. I am sorry that I have not made that more clear in my last post.
Thanks a lot! I actually don't get how Jackson thinks he differs from Nagel in that his argument is not epistemic. Nagel thinks if we are given all the info of natural sciences about bats, we cannot know about their qualia. Similarly, Jackson thinks if Mary is given all the info of natural sciences about human visualisation, she cannot know about their qualia. So, for both of them natural sciences are not enough to know about qualia. So, both of them talk about qualia and its epistemology. I really can't see how it could be the case that Nagel's argument is epistemic but Jackson is talking about qualia.
Because Nagel in his paper 'What is it like to be a bat' claims that we can't understand the perspective of bats because they are not like us. But we share understanding with humans because we are the same community. This is what Jackson denies. We can't even understand what it is like for Fred when he is watching an extra colour in comparison to us. We can't understand the unique experience of other people simply because we are not like them.
IIRC, the steam from the engine moves a piston back and forth. Steam is port into the cylinder on one end, which makes the piston move to the end of the cylinder. A switch flips which redirects the steam to the other end of the cylinder. This makes the piston go back and forth. Then the piston is connected to the wheel via an arm. The arm is connected to the wheel offset from center So steam makes the piston go back and forth and the arm via its connection converts that energy into rotary energy at the wheels. This turns the wheels, and by consequence, moves the train
Don't try to reason with a philosopher. Backed into a realist corner, he will challenge you to prove that you are not simply an idea in the mind of a butterfly. Philosophers have always been the greatest scam-artists on Earth, next to religious-cult leaders.
Love the knowing smile as he realises he has no idea how a steam engine works, after just describing it's paddle thing in a tube. :) Yeah, and an internal combustion engine fires hot gas out the exhaust and the equal and opposite reaction (Frank Galileo) pushes you along the road.
Seems like there's a simpler version of this thought experiment if you say that Mary is blind, learns all the things through braille, and has an operation so that she can see.
The term "all the things " is false. It as misleading. If she did, she wouldn't learn anything new. By definition. Period. Mary's Room is utter bullshit. Useless. Fallacious as can be.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 Another way to look at it is that if it were actually possible to learn everything by hearing about it or reading about it, then upon leaving the room or gaining sight she wouldn't actually be amazed by all the new experiences, because she would have learned it already.
@@joshuawhere But her system would still not have experienced the physical changes that occur when her eyes receive photons and change them into nerve pulses of a certain kind that end up triggering cellular reactions in her brain cells. She would no more have the experience of having seen blue than learning everything about hammer and hammer blows would crack her skull. Her cells undergo a physical change due to her experiences and those experiences are the only things that can cause those changes.
@@rizdekd3912 Well, either way the thought experiment doesn't prove what it was supposed to prove, but my version is a simpler way of not making that point :p
This is similar to your video on artificial intelligence, where the man in the room learns all the mechanics of putting together the Chinese symbols to participate in intelligible and coherent conversations with someone on the outside without ever learning Chinese. In this case, Mary like the man in the room, understands all of the mechanics of color vision without ever having experienced the phenomenon. Just like the man who knew all the rules for speaking Chinese without really learning Chinese, she knows all the physical processes of color vision without really understanding color.
Re 19:07 and onwards: the whole epiphenomenalism paradox is rooted in one implicit assumption. The assumption is that there exists a single and non-divisible "you" (or "I"). If we assume two subjects in one mind, one for decision making, and the other for doing the observations, the problem is gone
If part of Mary's learning is to use apparatus to stimulate the experience of color in her own brain that is identical to our retinal response to color (without any color actually being present), then she will have the complete physical "understanding" which would lead to no surprise or new learning upon going outside. Jackson's mistake is to limit his thought experiment to book learning and implicitly assume sensory learning can't be emulated.
For the purposes of the thought experiment, it doesn't matter whether her subjective experience of color is induced naturally, or whether it's emulated by some apparatus. What matters is that a subjective experience is necessary to complete her understanding. There's a categorical difference between knowledge of the physical mechanics that govern qualia and our direct experience of those qualia.
@@Acid_Viking Okay, I understand now that there are two versions of physicalism and this thought experiment attacks the more extreme one. Linguistic physicalists seem to believe that given enough information, a sufficiently brilliant person could accurately imagine any experience such that they recreate the brain state of the actual experience. I'm not sure they literally think this is true or if it is a deeper thought experiment that I don't fully grasp. It turns out I'm the other kind: a metaphysical physicalist. I believe everything is physical, but not everything is linguistically describable. So reading about music is not the same as hearing it, but if you knew my brain well enough to itch the right neurons, you could reproduce the brain state without the actual experience. I don't think that Jackson would dispute the latter, but would still reject physicalism by saying subjective experience originates in the physical but is not itself physical and has no influence on the physical. Like a TV flickering in an empty room? Anyway, I understood the thought experiment to be attempting to prove the existence of non-physical qualia, which it doesn't. If the point was instead to corner linguistic physicalists into making dubious counterclaims, I'm not sure how much help they needed.
@@briancleary6751 "So reading about music is not the same as hearing it, but if you knew my brain well enough to itch the right neurons, you could reproduce the brain state without the actual experience." What I'm having trouble grasping is why it should matter whether you produce the brain state organically or artificially. Since the outcome of both is a subjective experience, you appear to be granting that music/color cannot be fully understood by physical description alone. "Anyway, I understood the thought experiment to be attempting to prove the existence of non-physical qualia, which it doesn't. " I'm with Chalmers on this one.
@@Acid_Viking Why is it subjective? Because it involves brain states that cannot be achieved by the reception of symbolic information or because brain states are unique to each person's collection of neurons?
Thank you for another great lecture. As someone with no background in philosophy, I appreciate your clarity and detail. I find Jackson 'Mary's room" and Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat' very dissatisfying. Not the lectures -- which are terrific -- but the philosophical views. First, their attempt to distinguish between experience and information (i.e. Mary's experience of color or the bat's experience of echolocation) seem to be a trivial game of definitions. If subjective experience is the same as information, then Mary cannot know everything that there is to know about color in her black and white room because she cannot subjectively experience color. I do not see how this attacks the physicalist view or advances our understanding of the hard question of consciousness. Second, their implied intuition that experience differs from the physical proves both too much and not enough. Of course, I will never know what its like to be a bat. But then I'll never know what its like to be a brilliant and energetic philosophy professor either. Although I watch your lectures with interest and even compose this comment, I do not have access to your subjective experience by definition. I am merely an uninformed but curious person thinking about philosophy. It seems to me that Jackson and Nagel invalidate each others argument. We might agree with Nagel that the bat's subjective experience is inaccessible because -- you know -- it is a bat. But Jackson demonstrates that we would be incorrect because Mary's subjective experience is also inaccessible to us. We can assume that Mary's education included thousands of accounts of human subjective experiences of color. Mary being clever no doubt did some sort of statistical analysis of the many testimonials and made connections between the subjective experience of color and psychology. Mary's room is not a "Chinese Room", she is human, understands English, has experience new things -- the problem as I understand it permits Mary to have experienced startling beauty (in music perhaps) and to have enjoyed a physical response to a new pleasure (her first kiss perhaps). Thus when she learns from these testimonials that the reddy, redness of a red rose causes physical pleasure in many humans, she will not be surprised when she sees it for the first time. I am not convinced that she learns anything new when she emerges from her room other than her own idiosyncratic and therefore inaccessible subject experience. I imagine Mary emerging from the room and saying, "Oh yeah, that's what everyone was fussing about." I can also imagine that her reaction might disprove dualism if she says, "oh, I guess I'm like the 37% of humans who find a deep red to be invigorating" because then she will have shown that even her subjective experience is not unique. I know that this must be a naive reading of these two famous philosophers and would appreciate any comments that point me in the right direction.
thank you! I find it incredible how a comment from a casual youtube user is smarter than several Philosophy practitioners'papers on international journals. There should be a very simple rule for judging tought experiments: is this experiment theoretically possible? eg is it possible to know EVERYTHING about redness? The number of neurons and connections (responsible for that) obviously negates the possibility. Is it possible to document the rules for all possible chinese conversations? same! Is it possible to put a brain in a jar and connect it to the outside world so that it can communicate as if it has ears and mouth? Etc... If you start from an impossible pretense you can (try to) demonstrate anything.
@@LuigiSimoncini You're missing the point completely. The point of a thought experiment is not about its practical purpose or possibility. It's point is to communicate an idea to persuade. It's point is to stimulate thought towards a certain direction, so that someone can come up with a new insight on the topic. In this case, Mary's thought experiment proves that there is absolutely no language to completely describe what subjective experience or qualia really feels like.
@@arletottens6349 That’s my point. Qualia needs direct experience. There’s no way a person who has experienced nothing but black and white their whole life would be able to imagine what the colour blue or green would LOOK like without direct observation
@@arletottens6349 If red can only be known by the activation of certain neurons, that only deepens the mystery, it doesn’t solve it. How can action potentials, synapses and sodium and potassium ions cause the experience of red? It doesn’t make any sense. There is no “redness” in those neurons. In fact what makes those neurons specific for red and not blue or yellow or green? Why does the specific neurons and their arrangement only give one type of colour and not the other colour? Also, do we all see the same colour, and how would you prove it? If you see the colour red, do I see it as blue from my perspective? These are the questions that need to be answered.
It seems strange to me to expect that someone should know what something is really like by only knowing facts. Physicalism never claims that it is enough to read a book about all physical facts to imagine the color red, does it? What if there were scientific devices that would allow Mary to stimulate exactly the same neurons that are stimulated when she sees red? Then she would never have seen an actual red object and still know what it is like to see something red. Would that argue against physicalism?
Can you name even one other phenomenon besides conscious experience where complete knowledge of all the physical facts about it doesn't amount to knowing everything there is to know about it? To say that there's this one exception, experience, that you can't in principle know about that way, but then explaining this seemingly problematic exception away be saying "well, you have to experience it" seems like special pleading to me. It's basically like saying: "Well of course you can't know what the experience of seeing red is like just from knowing all the physical facts about the physical processes associated with seeing red, you have to actually experience it!" But that's exactly the problem!
@@BugRib Surely having light of a certain frequency hit her eyes is physical information as much as sounds of words? Mary was not given all the physical information. Physical information is gained through all our senses. It is like explaining red by giving you different smells.
But again, if you have all the physical information, what does it matter whether you received it verbally or through a sense organ? There's no other phenomenon known to science where you have to receive the information in a particular way to know everything about that phenomenon, so why this special and utterly unique exception for knowing about a conscious experience?
@@BugRib but she does not have all of the physical information if she doesn't have the information of what experiencing actual color coming into her retina is like. She only has the faint shadow of it that language can provide.
@@ClayRavin You're just restating the exception over and over again and not responding to his objection. The point is that it is exceptional! For every other physical process we are aware of, having "only the faint shadow of it that language can provide" is enough to completely understand the process in principle. If you learned everything about a process through words, it would be literally impossible for any new fact about the process to surprise you because you can understand literally every part of it. Consciousness is the exception, which is what you are stating over and over, and is the entire point of the argument.
I absolutely love that when hes explaining things not to do with philosophy hes like "i think thats how it works right? is this how you spell that?" and then goes off to explain in utmost clarity all these nuanced ideas haha
After absorbing hours of videos on this channel I only just realized the video is flipped horizontally and you are not in fact left-handed and writing backwards as I had foolishly come to believe. Very clever lol
Mary left her room and began to experience second order properties that she had never known before. Mary met a man named Noam at a demonstration. Noam explained that colorless green ideas can sleep furiously. Mary was stunned, Noam made reference to something no one had ever expressed before and he created it in his mind from scratch. Mary met a young man named Mark and Mark showed her is headset and virtual world he created within a computer. He has been working on non-Euclidean geometry and attempting to create a virtual experience for the participant. Mary learned a lot that day. But none of it was referential to the world that exists independent of the mind or AI. Mary stated that she can experience viewing an Escher lithograph and while she can gather sense data from her viewing, but just what is its nature and value of the data? Mary bumped into Fark Jackson in a line at a hot dog stand. In conversation, without conscious intent, Mary told Fran "you're a realist fighting a desperate fight." While grocery shopping, Mary noticed that the store was playing Radiohead's There There.
We experience Truths within the Cartesian Theater all of the time, they often do not have anything to do with the world that exists independent of the mind. I am working on trying to understand what psychologists were attempting to research, in the first decade of the 20th century, in regards to abilities. The single unite characters that many were theorizing were extensions of universals including Intelligence as an entity. They believed that seeking the correlation between 12 to 15 cognitive tasks (factor analysis) they were getting a handle on such a property. Victorians were naive @@davewaring73
Honestly, this argument surprises me that so many find it compelling. There is a distinct difference between knowing the theoretical processes of physical phenomena and experiencing it for yourself. For example: As a budding biology student, I saw many diagrams of cellular structures before I ever looked at one in the microscope. I didn't "learn" anything new when I looked at them directly. What I did was appreciate what I had learned more and found certain elements, that I struggled to understand, easier to comprehend. Next we learned to stain our own slides. This actually represents certain aspects of the viewed subject in a false way. The structures stained purple aren't purple, just as those stained pink aren't pink. They are generally clear or transparent. This is why we stain them. In these cases, we're not looking for complete accuracy with regards to our certainty about how the subject is in its totality. Rather, we're usually looking for certain structures that are hard to view without the stains. Some experiments require multiple stains of the same subject to see all of what we're looking for. None of this suggests that there are elements of my experience that are beyond the electroconductivity of my neurons or light-wave-length perceptions of the subject that react with the rods, cones, retina and the rest of my visual cortex. It's all physical, right down to whatever emotions of disgust or elation that I may exhibit while experiencing these novel occurrences. Just as such, Mary, in her life lived with black and white objects, wouldn't learn anything by seeing color for the first time. She well knows how wavelengths work. She knows very well that everything has been constructed without color. If she truly had studied the physics of the visual experience, she would know and likely would have even tested at least simple experiments where the light spectrum is altered. Another example: If she knows about friction (which she would tangentially have learned in basic physics, on her way to understanding wavelengths), even if she were never provided lighters, matches, or a flint, she could cut the legs off of a table and rub them together to see yellow, red, or orange. If she got a flame to ignite, she'd even have access to blue. Toss some white table salt on the flame and she might see shades of green. There is simply no qualia here to speak of. The wave-length of green while burning chlorine gas, as opposed to painting a green line with some water-color paints, are entirely different. The "green-ness" isn't determined by some nebulous experience in the mind. It is caused strictly by the chemical processes that cause electrons to jump through orbitals and emit varying wavelengths of photons and the speed/distance it takes for those photons to reach our eyes. Just the same, redness can be caused by iron or it can be produced through looking at far-distant objects that have red-shifted. Mary would have known all of this - and much much more. So, sure, she might react emotionally or have a profound feeling about seeing a color for the first time, but she wouldn't be surprised by it. Certainly she'd have learned nothing. She would only confirm for herself that the theories she'd been reading about were correct. That's what makes the argument so unimpressively unrealistic to me. It seems written by someone who is used to reading "facts" out of books and not understanding that science is taught, by the most part, through direct experimentation. It's possible that you could imagine that she has some odd form of only black and white color-blindness. But even then, people that are color-blind know full well that their senses are incorrect. They learn to compensate, using the theories in physics that govern the experience of color. They don't just divine that understanding from the ether. Anyway, no one's going to bother reading this. It was merely a thought exercise to walk myself through the argument. Feel free to respond if you're the odd sort that read through it and cared. This is a terrible argument from my perspective though. Bizarre that it is so famous.
The popular convincingness of the argument seems to rely on the ambiguous definition of "knowledge" that exists nebulously in the mind of the listener. It asserts that Mary has all knowledge of color before seeing a red object for herself, and then asserts that there was knowledge she was lacking. The thought experiment only makes sense at all if you assume, as a premise, that there is such a thing as non-physical knowledge, and that the _experience of redness_ is such knowledge. A person can imagine seeing the color red for the first time, and would rightly assume that, under credible conditions, this should generally result in the gaining of new knowledge. What a person *can't* do is properly imagine *perfectly* understanding every single aspect of a field of science, in its totality, and with absolute, flawless clarity. Your intuition doesn't help you tell whether or not that perfect, all-encompassing knowledge of the topic of color includes the Knowledge Of The Redness Of Red, and the thought experiment just sort of glosses it over to leave you implicitly assuming it doesn't. Really, it's just a cute little sleight-of-intuition party trick, and it's not hard to fool someone with a party trick they've never seen before.
@fieldrequired283 Yep, my suspicion is that you are correct. Classical rationalism saw brains as knowledge sponges that pulled information out of reality. Sometimes, this was experiential, and others it was a reflective process, but it was always something that happened TO the brain, as opposed to seeing that brain as an integral part of a larger system that culminated into a greater experience. My gut tells me that this is mostly done to salvage the idea of a higher power. However, I suppose that it could simply be a lack of an ability to conceptualise a larger system due to an unfamiliarity with seemingly "invisible" objects/phenomena. Perhapse both, and I suppose I shouldn't sit on this as a strict dichotomy either. Anyway, appreciate the thoughts, mate. I love a good thought experiment. Wish more people did!
I have seen some people that are convinced that the only reason why we can experience different colors is because we have been given linguistical information about them. And they believe that some tribes that do not have description of some color in their language do not experience those colors. I.e. someone has to show the color to them and say "this is magenta" and only then they would be able to experience the color of magenta as something different than just purple. I personally think this is bullshit, because I clearly remember experiencing a lot of colors in color palettes as different colors and without knowing their names. Only later did I learned their names. It is really is just a matter of paying attention to tiny differences of your perception and then recording those difference as words in a language, and to the wild tribes of Africa it may not be of any importance to record many different shades of whatever color, so they did not invent words for them. But if they had a lot of painters in their society they would invent all kind of words for all kinds of shades of different colors, because those colors would be of importance to at least some group of people.
Ways of thinking are just as important as language. I've been told that the ancient Greeks thought of colors very differently than we would, as in, they thought of shade and tone rather than color. This is why they would call the ocean "wine-dark" when the ocean is either green or blue and wine is red; the ocean and wine have similar depth of shade and tone even though the colors are different. What does this mean? I'd say that it doesn't mean that we can't see colors if we can't define them, but rather that defining colors is a value judgement, i.e., that if you define a color as red, you care that red is distinct from blue in the first place. But does it really matter that red is distinct from blue? Or does it matter more that the red of wine is similar to the blue of the ocean? Both types of information provide information useful in assessing the world around us. A culture may value one way of perceiving light over another and, at least in the ancient context before we had bar graphs and stoplights, one method isn't necessarily inherently more practical than the other.
@@MountedDragoon I agree with what you're saying, and personally I find it a little bit odd that people have fixated on Homer comparing the sea to "wine" and believing he somehow thought it was red, when he clearly said it was "wine-dark" and not "wine-red".
I find it fascinating that Europeans up until the fourteenth century were so uninterested in the colour orange that they didn't have a word for it until someone brought an orange from China. The colour was named after the fruit. And the crowd went wild. Especially the Dutch. They went mad for it. They even decided that carrots should be that great new colour instead of their natural purple.
@Mounted Dragoon on the other hand painted ancient Greek statues appear to have had blue eyes red lips and so on. So it may just be a translation issue. Or even a mistranslation issue on our part. See also: "Reconstruction of the marble funerary stele of Phrasikleia"
@@j3ffn4v4rr0 Most of the time we see wine as purple, not red. Only when we pour it into something narrower or onto a surface in a thin layer does the red component begin to become more evident. The Greeks simply had a color category that identified the spectrum from blue through purple into one named category. We could divide the color green up into many different tones (as we do in designer charts for different paint shades) and give them different names. We do not have to learn the different names to see that the various shades are different. The Greeks could see this color difference between wine and the deep shades of the sea as well as we can, but they had no color differentiating terminology to put them in.
I think experiencing something is a lot more concrete & profound than reading about it. You can’t learn _everything_ about something without seeing or interacting with it first-hand.
That's exactly the point. She can know all of the physical description of a phenomena, but until she actually experiences the phenomena, she doesn't know everything about it. Which tells us that there is something (the experience of phenomena) which cannot be described in terms of physics. No description of motion, wavelength, or energy tells you what it is like to see a color. It's not even conceivable that it's possible to bridge that gap. Which tells us that consciousness is a non-physical phenomena, at least in the sense that it is not a phenomena which can be described by the physical sciences. This can lead us either to a few beliefs, from emergence, to panpsychism, to dualism.
Taking it further to what we know about brain development, I wonder what Mary would actually "see" when everything her eyes sensed so far had never involved the cone cells. We know that in children, the ability to class colours (to merely distinguish them before even nämlich them) emerges gradually and requires some feedback to solidify. Red/pink is actually the first hue of interest in infants, probably for pattern recognition and finding the breast, after that, and the distinction between grey and brown comes very last in most kids.) What I am wondering about (in a hypothetical, but reality-bound way) is whether Mary's neuronal make-up as an adult would even be able to differenciate spontaneously, after a whole life of treating all cone cells as equal. She might be too atrophied at first and only sense diffusely that something ist off. But also, physically speaking, there is no way to filter all colour out of the light, so it would have to be only the objects that show nothing but shades of true grey. Yet still they would reflect on every slightest aberration and distortion in the lighting sources. Mary is built to see colour, and her senses would have picked up on that. She would have always had a hunch, believingly or not.
You don't need to speculate. Go watch a video of a colored blind person trying those special glasses that allow them to see color. They can recognize and name the colors immediately Even though they have never seen them in their entire life.
@stevedoetsch They don't actually see the colors they previously couldn't though. Colorblind glasses increase contrast, more. A red-green colorblind person looking at a Autumn leaves will still see the leaves in shades of yellow, green and blue with or without the glasses.
A quick, half-baked thought is, with no interest of what that implies of physicalism validity, is... Let me first use some programming terms. In programming, there is a term called a pointer or a similar one called reference. So computer's memory is pretty much like a book. Every page is analogous to a byte (which in turn is just 8 letters space that can be either 1 or 0). When we want to access any page, as humans, we conventionally use the page number as an index. Explicit indexing (i.e. using actual numbers like 1, 14 and 1200) is called using a pointer; while using an intermediary variable (like calling the page that has John's picture as j_page, instead of using 14 as an index, is called a reference. The relationship between the index and the page to which it points/refers to, is called mapping. So the page 14 maps to the page which houses John's picture. The term reference is most associated with the term variable. (int x = 5;) is a statement that creates a reference (we call it x instead of the explicit memory address like 0x739203cd), and maps it to an int value of 5. This intro wasn't programming-oriented as I want to use the term 'mapping X to Y.' instead of using numbers as indices, I'll use the words as ones. The values mapped to are the facts (or thoughts for accuracy). So when I use the term (building), the word, the 8 English characters, as a whole forming a word (or a term) is my index. The idea (form as Plato calls it) that forms inside your head, abstract or visual, is the referenced value. So I think Mary can have all the information to ever know, as a thought in her head. The ideas that she would form as she experiences new experiences, I would argue, are not new, in the sense they are not "information" per se, in the sense they don't describe reality. All she "knew" that she didn't before is merely the fact that that new qualia (experience, like that seen color or touched texture) maps to a previously known term (like wood is rough). She knew it's rough, and how rough the microsurface is for every single (smallest unit of touch sensors a human hand can sense) unit. All that's new is mapping a new qualia to a previously known term (whose all properties are known prior to this experience).
Jackson's thought experiment (or at least the summary given here) would have benefitted greatly from clarifying instead of "physical" and "non-physical" information the terms were just "objective" and "subjective" information. It's also good to point out how there are certain qualia and sensations that are impossible to describe without being recursive or relating to other qualia. For example as he was saying no matter how much objective scientific information you have regarding a sensory qualia, until you personally experience it AND attach emotional weight to it because that happens even subconsciously, you can't truly know that mental subjective information perfectly which is also unique to you.
I think "non-physical" works because it is a phenomena that cannot be described in physical terms. No description of energy state, motion, wavelength, or what have you actually describes what it is like to see a color. And it's pretty inconceivable for there to even be a way to describe it. As far as physics is concerned, subjective experiences don't even exist. We don't have any evidence of them from any scientific instrument.
[edit: The algorithm recommended this, and I appreciated it; I learned new things thanks to Mr. Kaplan! great video!] Maybe I'm just thinking too hard about it, but Jackson's description of Mary's Room seemed to be impossibly lacking to me. Nagel hit upon it with "What is it like to be a bat?" Experiences cannot be taught, by very definintion. They must be experienced to be experiences. Even when Mary saw a tomato on the tv, or in a textbook in black and white, she was not actually seeing a tomato. What we learn from Mary's Room is that whether physical or not, all knowledge cannot be codified into black and white, and that experiences are a personal form of knowledge that can be shared, but cannot be transferred. It's worse though, Jackson's thought experiment assumes that you could codify all knowedge into a subbset of all knowledge (codifying all information about the world of vision, including color into a subset of that information - leaving the actual physical colors out of it). Mary would never truly understand "red" until she finally experienced it and then this "aha" moment would occur where she finally had the description and knowledge of "red" turn into the experience and understanding of "red".
There are ways you could encode that information even in black and white. This is merely about perception. And I think that is also the flaw of the argument. It says nothing about whether Physicalism is true or not. Even if there are things you cannot perceive, Physicalism may still be true.
There is no such thing as "physical information" because information is not physical, so dualism is built into the scenario. Where is information? Show me one bit of information, digital or analog, and it is demonstrably a symbol of an immaterial idea, and not the information itself.
@@numericalcode Interesting. The idea is axiomatic. My consciousness presumes that I am far enough outside the physical world to interface with it as a user.
She _doesn't_ have all the physical information. She only has the information that could be conveyed to her by language and interpreted successfully. The experience of seeing red cannot be conveyed in such a way, and this is not at all uncommon. I always wonder why philosophers and mathematicians take words so seriously when they're so obviously incomplete. It's always word games with the philosophers.
It is like materialism and idealism were renamed as physicalism and "some other non-physical stuff", as if the whole materialism-idealism dispute never existed. And it goes without saying that the whole "physicalism-nonphysicalism" (idealism-materialism) problem has already been solved by Hegel and this whole repetition of the dispute just ignores Hegel's dialectics. Ignores the fact that the whole problem is solved.
I'm pretty sure Mary would, upon leaving the room, be just as unable to see color as she was in her previous life. I expect her color-perceiving neurons would have atrophied in all that time. 🤔
I have always thought there is a big problem with this setup. We allow Mary to have all the information physics, biology and other sciences can provide. If physicalism is true, we can assume that there is a shared common state (or certain change of state) of human brains when some specific color is seen/experienced. Mary knows that her own brain has never been in that state (maybe she wears some recording brain scanner all the time or something). However, using meditation and/or drugs she could experiment alternating her brain states - and with luck or determination eventually achieve the state of human experience of red - as verified by her brain scanner. Thus when she steps out of the room she would not learn anything new - expect perhaps how silly the whole "though experiment" was ;)
@@Returnality Indeed - if you are blind from birth your brain develops differently - because the development is a trained by inputs. That might or might not apply to Mary also - regarding the colors. However - to me this is a strong case for physicalism - if you don't have the physical apparatus for it (the potential configuration of certain states available in your brain) you can't experience it.
@@hufzte885 Might be. But as a general statement applies to much anything. So could you perhaps elaborate a bit? I would really appreciate to get better insight of the matter.
@@EneriGiilaan Your initial claim was that somebody can experience something they fundamentally haven't before (I.E. the color red) through hallucinations. Is that still your claim? Also, that second half is a non-sequitur. The only way we know of to experience vision is through the mechanisms of our brains. It simply does not follow that non-physical being couldn't also have a mechanism to experience vision. Granted, I have no earthly idea what that might be, but that doesn't mean it is impossible.
But if Mary, as said earlier, would be able to completely understand why someone would say "the sky is blue" when they see the blue sky, and is truly able to understand why and how they would see it, wouldn't she also be able to truly understand why someone would say "I have walked out of this black and white room which I have been in my whole life and have seen red" and how they also would see it and completely understand it as well? Including her? It feels like this argument requires more than just total knowledge of color vision, because to get total knowledge of "color vision" and to understand it internally, you'd need a complete and total understanding of the human brain. Which would also bring you to a complete understanding of consciousness (because if consciousness comes from the brain and you completely understand the brain, you'd completely understand consciousness, and if consciousness doesn't come from the brain, you'd completely understand the mechanism by which consciousness interacts with the brain). This answer to this argument requires total knowledge of something we don't have total knowledge of.
Yes, that's the question. If Mary knew all the physical facts about how the brain functions--perhaps we can even suppose that she knows all the facts about how consciousness if produced in the brain--would she learn something new when she stepped out of the room? It seems, prima facie, that she would learn something new. All the stuff she knew before were facts about which neurons fired in whatever sequence. But when she left the room and looked at a red rose, she would learn what red looks like--what it is like to see red, herself. But then this fact must not be a physical, fact. We can attempt to deny that conclusion, but it sure seems right, at least at first glance.
@@profjeffreykaplan > If Mary knew all the physical facts about how the brain functions … she would learn what red looks like--what it is like to see red, herself. < Well, this just sounds like a category error. "How the brain creates experiences" isn't the same sort of information as "What it's like to experience things." That doesn't imply the latter is a special, non-physical form of knowledge though. _All_ knowledge is acquired through experience. You learn what frequencies look red the same way you learn what red looks like; by being exposed to the appropriate information. 🤔
I disagree, Mary doesn't learn new information about red. She just discovers a new feeling. What it feels like to see red. But she didn't learn anything new.
What does red look like? Red looks like those certain waves hitting your color receptors. Mary had never had those waves hit her eyes, so she’s experiencing a new physical situation, I don’t see how this in any way could disprove physicalism.
You were describing a steam turbine engine. An actual steam engine uses the pressure of the steam to move a piston in a cylinder. And then you have to use a piston rod to turn the longitudinal movement of the piston into the turning of a wheel. (There have been some experimental steam turbine engines like the PRR S2 though.) The main argument against Mary's Room is that Mary actually does not get new information from seeing the blue sky. Seeing the blue color is just seeing black and white on the blue receptor. It is in no way different than seeing red on the red receptor or green on the green receptor. By itself, each color is just a black and white signal for a specific receptor. If Mary knew everything about seeing color, she would have known that she can hold a blue filter in front of her black-and-white TV screen and see only blue. So she knows how it feels to see blue before she goes outside. (If Frank Jackson would have known anything about light, he would have known that white light is a mixture of all colored lights, so seeing white implicitely means seeing blue, red and green.)
Information is the collection of symbols we experience. You can experience symbols through intellectual effort, but those symbols are not the same as those through direct experience because the observer is part of the system, and the mode of experience is part of the information and the symbols we experience.
The whistle sound is not a biproduct, it is a deliberate signal triggered by the operator engaging the mechanical whistle. the whistle sound IS the product. If you mean the valve that is used to release preassure in the boiler yes, it too makes a deliberate sound to signal the operator that the valve has engaged and the boiler is loosing preasure.
Jackson's insistence on the ability to convey a fact by description is, in my opinion, misguided. For something to be physical it has to be, at least in principle, knowable in the third-person perspective. Knowable by any means open to science. Once we get that right, the story can then be that Mary didn't know something about other people - what it was like for them to see colours. She couldn't know it until she experienced colours herself. So the point is that there is something about other people that Mary could never know whilst not experiencing it herself. Yes, Nagel got it right.
But then why doesn't that apply to any other phenomena? Can we only know everything about electrons by being electrons? Why this special exception for persons, i.e. conscious experience?
@@BugRib What you are referring to as an 'exception for persons' is not an exception imposed by us. It is (as far as we know) something peculiar to persons (conscious experience). There is in fact something we can only know about consciousness by being conscious, whereas there is nothing (as far as we know) about electrons that can only be known by being an electron. We are not imposing that difference, just noting it.
How to make this thought experiment more fun: Mary hasn't experienced an orgasm. She knows all about the anatomy, physiology, neurology, etc. of orgasm, but she hasn't had one. Then one day she buys a vibrator ...
So I'm watching this video and this guy is really excited about this girl, Mary, and this thing, "physicalism", and so I am suddenly compelled to head down to the comments to look for how long it takes to get to a comment like this one. (I'm a healthy guy, the more this guy was talking about imagining Mary with such enthusiasm, the more Mary just got hotter and hotter, sorry, but this is what we are dealing with here in Male Consciousness World. Now I have to meet Mary, sit and talk with her for 15 or 20 minutes so I can de-objectify her from my brain. It's maddening, he's still talking as I write. Stop talking about the color Red, all I can see is pink!).
Reading about orgasms from a biology textbook is not the same as physically having an orgasm - physicalism most affected... Either we proved the limitations of language for information transfer, or the existence of the human soul - and all it took was a vibrator.
@@jeronimo196 Agreed. Just as reading about the color red doesn't have much bearing on the experience of seeing it. And that non-connection is in no way a problem for a purely physical interpretation of the universe. This thought experiment, or at least this channel's description of it, is complete hogwash.
@@KarlBunker Actually... I'm pretty sure that there have been experiments specifically about electrodes stimulating the brain for orgasms, so... Might even be an easier question to resolve than the one about the colour red.
The way I would go about explaining or demonstrating difference between the two kinds of information in Mary's Room is as follows: The kind of information Mary has is like an equation that predicts, say, the movement of objects over time, as is, without any sort of specific values. The experience of colors after exiting the room is like getting specific values for her equations. This way you can very clearly see that they are different kinds of information, but they don't quite feel as distinct in their physicality then. The knowledge of how things would interact if they were in a specific configuration and the knowledge of them being in a specific configuration are different, but still very physical. You could of course further argue that Mary could already know the configuration of everything, so the only thing truly new is the experience itself. In such a case there might not be a true distinction between actually experiencing it or just knowing it is that way. This is a situation where perfect knowledge of the state of all things is assumed, and we simply have no way to imagine how such an experience would be one way or another, because we ourselves have no capacity to attain perfect knowledge. On the topic of Epiphenomenalism - I believe it was called - there is a saving grace for the idea. It is very much possible that there is one physical mechanism that goes through the same processes as the non-physical mental processes and arrives at the same conclusion, or that experience is more like a display of the process like you would have on a GUI. You could, as an outside viewer, experience the whole thought process through a display (including the experience of making the decisions) without actually being the mechanism that made those decisions. A bit far fetched, but the idea has no logical contradictions. Experiencing making a decision and actually making a decision need not be the same thing. But to apply Occam's razor, while it is possible to separate the two, without one being able to affect the other, there is little reason when you can easily explain the same phenomenon without introducing a non-physical object. A non-physical consciousness is possible, but unnecessary, and also not interactable so even if it does exist, for all intents and purposes, it might as well not.
I would argue that when Mary really understands all the physical stuff, she might be able imagine how red looks like just by knowing what happens in her brain when red is seen, just by playing this scenario through in her head. Just like a musician that has learned music theory and has only heard the piano keys, might be able to imagine higher and lower notes beyond the piano, microtones or sounds of other instruments.
I am not a physicalist, but an issue I have with this thought experiment is that, the information Mary learns through the TV is physical in terms of the changes to her neurological structure, but a single mode of information cannot create ANY and EVERY type of modification to said structure. No amount of study (that we know of) can disconnect the right and left hemispheres at the corpus callosum, but surgery can. No amount of information intake can develop the motor cortex and its capacity to trigger fine motor movement of the hand and fingers, but we do that through moving and utilizing our muscular structures. No amount of study can reproduce the chemical process of a red cone firing a signal to the visual cortex along with the subsequent structural changes caused by that sensory experience. There may be unlimited knowledge, but there are very limited ways it can manipulate brain structure. It can only influence certain aspects of memory, and perhaps some executive function.
probably the most obvious flaw in this argument right from the start is that Mary does experience red light in the black and white room because white is either producing all the wavelengths of color or is reflecting all of the wavelengths of color so her eyes are experiencing red. they just happened to be experiencing red in equilibrium with the other colors that comprise white.
Let's extend this to say Jane is following exactly in Mary's footsteps, learning information about vision in a black and white room. Jane has learned everything, but not left the room. After having experienced seeing color, could Mary return to the room and teach, or share anything new to Jane? Could Mary possibly give more information about seeing, that Jane did not have?
The explanation of how a steam engine works is absolutely priceless - 13:!5 - the thing you need to know is that, at the heart of a steam engine, is a 'wheely-doo'
when u can sit thru a 21 minute video about a subject u know absolutely know nothing about, people u never heard of, theories whose names and terms are meaningless and still be confused at the end of the video, and yet still enjoyed watching it u wish u had a teacher like this 40 yrs ago when u were still in school lol, i think this is the 3rd of ur videos iv seen and remember enjoying those as well, i prefer simplistic terms myself so i generally go by "shit happens, and sometimes we make shit happen after thinking about how to make it happen", cheers for the vid
Mary also had a little lamb. She didn't have all the physical information, she only had information about physical phenomena that she never actually experienced. Seems to me.
that's a shockingly clever thought experiment by Frank Jackson, in my view it doesn't disprove physicalism, but instead implies a hierarchy of self-contained infinite-knowledge spaces in which some are larger than others, and some are supersets, similar to how Cantor proves some infinities are larger than others in set theory, but regardless it's a really well designed argument
*Mary’s Circular Room* The argument is circular: it assumes that the mental effect of seeing red is not a physical phenomenon. If it is a physical phenomenon, then Mary does not have all the physical information about light/color, and the premises are self-contradictory.
She doesn't have all the physical information available. Her light cones didn't have access to light waves that appear red. It's like learning how to tell jokes only by reading joke books and hearing people tell jokes on tv but never having someone to try to tell a joke to.
I don't believe epiphenomenalism is that "radical"... or even that new. It's just a different way to posit the *inexistence of free will.* Meaning that the desires and intentions we form are *_physical processes,_* but just as we can *_perceive_* a physical phenomenon like the color red *_and_* feel *_what it's like,_* we can also feel what it's like to... have desires and intentions.
5:38 “it seems just obvious” must be a first warning sign in a philosophical debate that fudging is coming up. Her experience of seeing red doesn’t mean she is learning something new about the phenomena that is red light, or how the eye and brain analyse it. What she is learning, that is new, is how her mind and emotions react to receiving that information. That is a whole different area. If you want to put no bounds on areas of knowledge, then knowledge is going to be limitless - which is ok, but then you can’t create even a thought experiment with someone knowing ‘everything’. (They would have know about how they know what they know and know about how they know that and…. In an endless loop.)
Re: epiphenomenalism for consciousness What if a certain part of the brain handles all those decisions, but consciousness is just the signal from the final decision? It’s still “you” making the decisions. Would be like the situation of people with blind sight (definition: the ability to respond to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them. This condition can occur after certain types of brain damage.)
Great lecture. In my view, Mary will recognize red when she sees it. Furthermore, what she learns seeing red for the first time is simply a series of chemical reactions in her brain. Whatever it is, it is not a new property of red. All the properties of red exist independently of the observer.
@scambammer the word "red" doesn't, but the wavelengths and energy levels of the photons still do. So yes, all the properties of "red" would still exist without an observer. It just wouldn't have the name "red" attached to it.
It seems to me that when we see red in our minds, our experience is pretty much the same inside our brains. There is not a plausible reason to think otherwise. The biology of our eyes and brains is pretty much the same. Otherwise, medicine would not work.
This is exciting, or whatever, it makes me think of my old days at school, or wherever, going to classes in science or whatever. It really doesn't matter what I think or how I explain it, or whatever, since with these many instances of underdetermining things, or whatever, I'm not sure myself about what I am talking. Or whatever.
The problem with Mary's box is that knowledge of a "thing" is not the thing itself. Just as a mathematical explanation for a function is not the physical function itself, it's a description, knowledge is the brains best guess of what the description of a "thing" is and it's never going to be the thing itself, That however doesn't mean the knowledge doesn't have both a physical source and a physical description.
I believe there is a missing piece for knowing all that is physical about experiencing colour. In this argument, Mary hypothetically knows everything there is to know about colour physically. With this being said, according to a physicalist, when a human experiences colour the sensations and feelings we get from looking at this colour are coming from the brain. If Mary truly knew everything there was to know about colours physically, then she must also have understood this as well since feeling a sensation is physical since we feel these sensations thanks to our neurons (something physical that takes up space). We are arguing that Mary would learn what it is like to feel colour, that the feeling of looking at colour is not physical. If this were the case, then that would mean sensations would not come from our brains physically through neuron transfers and other scientific methods, but it would come from a separate part of ourselves. If we were to put a person under an MRI and scan his or her brain activity while looking at colours, we would notice certain areas of the brain do in fact light up and with these areas missing from our brain it would cause us to not feel what it is like to see a colour. If Mary were to have the exact same physical neurons light up as these individuals when they see any colour (a physical feeling as explained earlier) then she therefore wouldn't learn anything new since she would know the physical sensation of looking at every single colour. I am curious to know your responses, what do you guys think about this?
The Jackson Mary’s room seems a variation of the famous Kant’s room. Kant says that we can only know the World through our senses, which are like windows of the external world and we can never leave this room, we never may know the physical object itsellf (das Ding an sich). A daltonic person will always see red as green. And each brain makes a personal interpretación of what his senses send to his brain. So all knowledge comes by "sensitivity and understanding". Which means that dualism is unavoidable, and there will always be a mind-matter dualism. We can never leave Kant's room, and I think it is better for us, because it allows for each person a view of life, which means our personal liberty. Thank you Immanuel Kant for this gift of freedom.
And yet Mary’s act of saying, “I am experiencing something new, the color red” is a physical event, while it is undoubtedly caused by an alleged epiphenonemon.
I don't know if the thought experiment quite holds up. If Mary truly knew everything about color, then she would know what it's like to see red. That's one of the things she would learn. Then when she went outside of the room she'd have that marvelous experience. All this stuff she knows about color, she can suddenly see for herself. But she hasn't learned anything new. It's like doing a little science experiment to prove that the earth isn't flat. It might be fun, and you might be more certain now that the earth isn't flat, but you haven't learned anything new.
Observing color is a physical experience that gives information. She was not able to experience this in the room, therefore, her information was incomplete. Just saying that she had all the information doesn't make it so.
All of this seems more to be pointing to the difference between book learning and experiential learning and the question of "when can I say that I know something".
I don't understand why one would claim that the physical experience of seeing a color in person instead of merely learning about it is not physical. How is it not physical? She did not have all of the physical information of the color before she experienced it, because she had not experienced it. This argument's core claim is arbitrary and not proven to be factual.
When one step in your argument starts "It just seems obvious...", that's probably where you went wrong. If Mary knows EVERYTHING about color, then she knows what color will do to her brain, and how human brains react to that. Maybe the "excitement over novelty" part of the brain lights up, maybe it changes a human's life in a certain way, etc. So nothing about the experience would surprise her. Unless she doesn't know enough about the structure of her own brain, but then she would be learning something about her own brain, not about color. We could talk about what is new and different in the situation after she sees color, but did she LEARN anything? no, learning implies new understanding, and understanding means at least being able to conclude something new. (Obviously I added a few more assumptions, but that is only because these words ("all knowledge about", "learn") were not defined, which is also a flaw in the argument.) This is somewhat related to Searle's Chinese room, if at the end the person walks out of the room and learns Chinese in the context of the real world.
I'm not sure how broadly this applies: Suppose that Mary has normal physiology, and that her friend Sue, who is red-green colorblind, is part of the same process. When they come out, they will not experience red and green the same way. Therefore, whatever new knowledge we attribute to Mary can't really be considered knowledge, because it's not true for Sue. That means physicalism is not contradicted.
Hi again! Big fan - all that! Quick question: don’t you think it’s kind of tragic that Jackson’s question, after Redness is revealed to Mary, is a yes/no question (“did she learn something new” Y/N?”) directed not at her, but at a panel of philosophers willing to lock her in a B&W room for a lifetime just to prove a point? The tragic thing for me is that, had the question been different - had Jackson tried to understand what redness meant to her (*what* she learnt, rather than whether a new block of information was added to her brain stuff), then he might have solved the Hard Problem of a Consciousness instead of birthing the most instant-classic of thought experiments. On top of that, the very question he was posing (about the nature of Qualia) kind of suggested the actual question he was asking, which is: why did it feel like something for Mary to experience redness at that moment given everything she already knew about redness? What Mary learns about redness is the answer to the question of why experience is in the first place. At least that’s what it seems like to me, and the reason why I’m so addicted to your channel: I feel like you’re circling something big across the various topics you cover. 😊
Epiphenomenalism may not be quite that radical if you consider a documented medical phenomenon called "confabulation." My memory of the details is hazy, but I seem to remember learning about an experiment involving victims of brain damage with paralysis of one limb. The brain damage was such that it impaired awareness of their own paralysis and may have even caused something akin to a phantom limb. When asked to raise the healthy limb, they did so easily. When asked to raise the paralyzed limb, they signaled intent to comply but then failed to do so. When asked why, they gave seemingly sincere reasons like, "Oh, I just decided I didn't want to," or "I was more tired than I thought I was." This is presented as evidence of the brain creating motivation after the fact in order to maintain coherence. In other words, an epiphenomenon was generated and credited with causality even though the actual cause was purely physical. Confabulation might just be a pathological version of something that happens all the time even in healthy minds. Decisions like picking up an umbrella may in fact be caused just by the interaction of particles and neurons in the brain, with the epiphenomenon of conscious thought then essentially stealing the credit for causation.
@@recompile How is that an argument against it? It would mean that our 'talking about it' happens due to impulses that occur slightly before we actually sense (are conscious) that we are 'talking about it' and it is those impulses that cause us to continue talking about it...ie do iterative thinking while simultaneously giving us the perception that 'we're thinking about it. I'm not saying how much I buy into it, but I think that would be the explanation from someone convinced it is true.
There is a big assumption that's hidden in Mary's Room experiment. It's assuming that everything physical can be learned like Mary learned it. The way our brains experience reality also exists in a purely physical world and apparently Mary didn't have access to that knowledge from inside the room.
Do we not have to figure in the question as to whether, wholly deprived of colour, Mary would possibly not have developed the capacity to register colour, just as if we are deprived, say, language (famous wild human cases) during our development we have insurmountable difficulty in acquiring such? Can this thought experiment take that particular liberty? No problem with all the others. We do not quibble with Determinism because every part of it is predicated soundly on cause and effect, if it is not the very summation of cause and effect. But here cause and effect seem strained. Mary, having spent her whole time in a room would struggle with depth perception too at least to begin with.
Does Mary “learn something new” or does she *experience* something new? This is simply the hard problem of consciousness cast in a way that presupposes we can never solve (or lose interest in) it. It’s arguments like these that push academic philosophy toward irrelevance.
"All of the physical information," except, ya know, what it looks like. I can be told that sand paper is rough, but I don't know what it feels like until I touch it, but I would consider touching it an advancement of my physical understanding of sandpaper and not some mental phenomenon. Similarly, seeing red.
In regards to the last point of the video about Epiphenomenalism, does it reject causation by mental stuff, or just by subjective experience/Qualia? This seems an important distinction since a belief is perhaps representable as patterning of the brain, whereas there is still another step to take to true subjective experience. In this reading of it, it wouldn't go against our intuition, depending how we identified the agent involved. If the person picking up the umbrella is identified as the physical body including thoughts and beliefs, then it fits. It would only go haywire if we identified with the subjective experience, in which case it would indeed preclude any "one" doing anything.
He is so close and still just misses it! She doesn't know "all" of the physical information. She does not have all the physical interaction of light waves on her eye. Period. It's still physical.
I didn't understand this at all. Reading about being stabbed will never give you the same agonising pain of being stabbed. It doesn't stop being stabbed from being a physical reality though.
Well put. Much more succinctly than I have been saying it, but the point is the same. I use a hammer blow to symbolize the effects of seeing read. If we assume it's ALL physical from the time photons hit our retinas 'til a perception of red pops into our heads, then it's all physical/chemical reactions. And until someone receives the actual photons, their nerve processes NEVER experience the 'impact' of seeing read just like your hapless victim never feels the stab of a knife until they experience it, personally.
Mary sees red for the first time. Nothing changes. She merely gets to confirm all the knowledge she was given through direct observation. The physicality of the chemistry of her eyes and brain is rearranged merely to confirm the information she was given. This presupposes no emotional response. However, when we say “she finally feels what it’s like” this is simply yet another way of saying she observed what she already knew to be true. This confirmation marks changes within Mary as measured in time and space. No new “thing” was created, atoms were simply rearranged within Mary due to her exposure to colour. If we focus upon her emotional response, and suggest something new was created, as in “Mary now knows how it feels to see colour, which she did not before”, this is not something new, this is simply us looking at the same physical change through the metric of a different classification. If we imagine an alien observing Mary the whole time, and it observes her brain during the learning process she undergoes learning all there is to know about light, and then her observing colour for the first time, the alien would see nothing created, only further rearrangement of the atoms that make up the entity known as Mary. Nothing new was created, unless we decide to classify Mary’s experiences within different categories purely to give credence to the original supposition.
Mary’s scientific understanding of color is like software running inside a virtual machine. It doesn’t have direct access to the hardware sensors and the input is “sanitized” and interpreted through the abstraction layer of the VM. When she steps outside, she is able to perceive color information from the her native hardware (her eyes) for the first time. This is new information, but it is also certainly totally physical.
I would ask: what is information? is it physical or is it mental? is it both?
@@guillermoalarcon7235
The fundamental unit of information is ... > ... difference. Any kind of difference. Those differences are there whether we perceive them or not.
Where there are lots of differences, there is a lot of information. Where there are few or no differences, there is correspondingly little information.
@@guillermoalarcon7235 Information is non-physical. 'Four', '4' and 'IV' are not numbers. They all represent an idea. They are just labels. The actual number is non-physical.
@@guillermoalarcon7235 Well, your question is redundant, since the mental is physical (according to physicalism)
@@diegonicucs6954 what would you say is the ultimate definition of information? "if there is even such a thing "😃
This is in part simply a case of mistaking the map for the place. Having a _description,_ even a complete and perfect one, of the colour red (the "map") isn't the same as a photon coming from a red surface hitting your retina and that stimulus getting 'translated' into neural impulses and sent to your brain (the "place").
Or to look at it from a different point of view, I can spend 30 years teaching you the theory behind drawing. Everything from colour theory, to how to physically move your hand to draw perfect lines. After 30 years you're the world's foremost expert on how to paint anything at all. I then put you in front of a piece of paper and tell you to draw a photorealistic horse. Can you do it? Of course not, because your brain lacks the fine muscle control required for painting. It's still "physical information", it just can not be learned through memorization but through motoric repetition. This thought experiment conflates "physical knowledge" with "memory of information" which makes it flawed all the way through.
Yes! Also I don't understand why there is a "physical information and "other " information. Information use physics to be spread and to be understand. Information coming to your brain using Photons who hit molecule in rod cells etc. Or Mary hears about the colours by cells with nano hairs in gel-like substance which sense waves in the air etc All physical.
I don't understand why this"experiment " is even discussed.
I agree. This "imaginative" thought experiment is just one more example of a failure of one particular imagination.
@@mirostanimirov8952 "Information coming to your brain using Photons who hit molecule in rod cells etc. "
Could it be more accurate to say that there's only "mental information," insofar as any information we can possibly gather about the world comes by way of subjective sensory experiences, or qualia. "Physics" is a model we've built to describe the *relationships* between one subjective experience and another (e.g., why glowing red + touch = hot), but if qualia are the building blocks of everything we know, then we cannot explain them in terms of themselves. Like the person in Seale's Chinese Room, we only map out the relationships; we cannot understand. We also can't know, for certain, that we aren't brains in jars being fed a model of reality that our operators could change at any time.
If physicalism is true, then I can't understand why any part of the universe should be experiencing itself.
But if you had truly complete knowledge of the place (by virtue of a map with such complete and total detail), then the experience of an actual photon hitting your eye does not reveal new information about the place.
It cannot, by definition
mary actually received new physical items- red & blue light waves, that she did not have before.
@Kleiner she didn’t receive the red light itself, but her eyes’ interpretation of red, rather than the “textbook definition of red”
In her black and white room she must have had all colours hitting her retina to see white. What she had not had until leaving the room was patches of contrasting wavelengths of light (non homogenous maybe?) hitting her retina and creating a new physical experience.
@@tonic4120
It depends on where we draw the boundary between the photons and "her." The photons ceased to exist as they hit the rod and cone receptors of the retina, so that seems like a reasonable boundary.
It's difficult to call this an "interpretation" however, since the rods and cones make no use of anything that could be called a model of interpretation.
I was dropped into the middle of this course by the algorithm. So I’m lacking important background like what the three types of physicalism are and prior arguments for and against it are.
I think this is about the difference between objective knowledge and subjective experience. They seem to be trying to equate the two as if they’re on equal footing.
But taking physicalism at face value, there are certain physical processes necessary to experience the color red. A set of photons in a specific range of wavelengths hits the right cones triggering a cascade through the the optic nerve through to the occipital lobe to be processed into the experience of color.
Reading about that to any level of detail would not stimulate that part of the brain. It’s a totally different class of information arriving into the brain via different pathways.
To be perfectly frank, I’m not even sure she would even be able to see red even when she first experienced it. The brain would be receiving signals it had never received before. How much of color vision is hardwired and how much is learned through experience of colors? The physical processes required for color vision may have atrophied through lack of use. Through stimulation, the physical functionality required may eventually be acquired.
But while all that was happening, she would know why it was happening at every level of detail. Photon is absorbed by a molecule that changes energy state which allows it to catalyze other molecules causing ions to move an electrochemical charge down an axon to the optic nerve where neurotransmitters are released into the synaptic gap to be absorbed by dendrites of another neuron, etc. I’ve only got a vague idea what goes on. But I’m sure if I knew the molecular formulas of the molecules involved, the wavelengths, how they interact with the four color cones that a tetra-chromatic person would have, my neurological makeup would never allow me to experience the millions of extra colors tetra-chromatic people experience. That’s not how color vision works.
But the experience of abstract knowledge and physical sensation happens in different parts of the brain and in different ways. I don’t think that the argument negates the possibility that all experience can be described by physical brain processes.
I think the real paradox is using the phrase all physical information. It is used too representationally and cannot be said to be all
I think Marys’ room fails to disprove physicalism. It does a wonderful job of exploring the difference between abstract knowledge and concrete knowledge
You think, that's sweet, thanks for your thought, if you want to articulate why you think that way you can. But for now... thanks for telling us what you think :)
@@juanandresramirez4599 for example you can describe colors to someone who was born blind from birth but they will not understand what color is or what the difference between yellow or red. for Marys’ room thought experiment the only colors she can only see in black and white, and presumably in the manner that is usually understood in shades of grey as well. while she has a leg up on someone who was born blind that she has some idea what color is, albeit on on a grayscale going from white to black. for the rest of the colors, while she has been given the linguistic information about the different colors like red, yellow, green, etc. and presumably the corresponding grayscale marker for that particular color on the black and white monitor, she would not have a true understanding what red really is. when she leaves the room and sees the color red for the first time she does learn something new. it’s not because color isn’t physical, but because she is being given new information through direct experience that was impossible to obtain without direct observation/interaction, thus turning the previously abstract information into concrete information.
@@littleredpony6868 The idea you believe to be supposed doesn't exist, the original thesis doesn't proclaim that the color is not physical. The idea is that the interaction with the color is abstract to such a degree it goes beyond your physical interaction with the red wavelength.
@@juanandresramirez4599 it fails to demonstrate that the abstraction goes beyond the physical
@@littleredpony6868 Does it? One can only understand the point if one can relate to it, you see like your prior example of a blind man was taken into account, you can understand that he has no place to stand because hes even further lacking in a aspect of abstract life. So he cannot even relate or understand the point from the beginning, this point that the original author makes can be easily discredited by if you dont want to give him good grace, but you can just brush it away in any regard, because those emotions that were mentioned before are an abstraction that I cannot apply to you. As such you can dismiss the entire idea if you want, as its only point was to make you take a genuine moment where you try to come to realization of your humanity, but if you do not wish to come to terms with your consciousness and you wish to reduce it to base atoms, you may do so. But in retaliation I will call you inhuman and ignore you, as will anyone who truly feels their humanity, and their "soul" whatever that means.
An unconvincing argument. Mary just experiences a new phenomenon on a physical level that she had never experienced before. Light in the red wavelength activates rods and cones in her eyes that have never been activated before, a physical event. A signal travels from her optic nerve to her brain, a physical event that has never occurred before. And her brain registers the never-seen-before information and displays it in a never-seen before way, as the color "red" -- but it's still a matter of nerve signals traveling through the brain. Totally physical.
The problem seems to be they assume the conclusion up front. They somehow assume that somewhere in all this there is a 'and then a (nonphysical) miracle occurs.' And while the ability of brains to process and produce consciousness seems almost miraculous, there's no basis for saying it's not physical. And once you approach Mary's room as IF it's physical, it become clear why all of Mary's book learning can't substitute for her actually receiving and processing the physical outcomes of seeing blue. Like being hit with a hammer, you don't experience the effects until it happens to you. Reading about what hammers are and what they can do doesn't actually cause the physical damage they can cause.
Yes. Red things are physical objects why does he not understand see this?
@@JinKee And the light they reflect hits the eyes and causes a physical change that causes other physical changes until the cells in the brain experience the effects of seeing the color. It seems they confuse our ability to describe physical objects/processes/causes and to learn those descriptions...ie the academics of knowledge with actually 'experiencing' the objects.
It's a silly argument - and it can be easily defeated by defining "knowledge". The example seems to restrict itself to "that which can be written down and read". There is a proverb which says "an image says more than a 1000 words". Are there pictures in this book? And many graphs show more insight when they're colored differently. So, if images are not "knowledge" what are they doing in textbooks? If colors are not knowledge, why are there colored textbooks?
It also implies - since we cannot see infrared or ultraviolet - will we always remain (literally) in the black about those wavelengths? If our knowledge is literally limited to the capabilities of our senses, that seems to be the only possible answer. What a shame. I so much wanted to see the color of my Wifi..
Yes. The key flaw is that a B&W TV is an insufficient channel for all the information on the subject. "Seeing is believing" is a simple way to express this flaw. Mary has the information parts but not the whole till she experiences color.
"What's it like to be a bat biting Mary in Mary's room when Mary is a super-Spartan that doesn't express pain?"
-Princess Elizabeth
make my day lol
That could have been answered by princess Elizabeth, who was a vampire turning into a bat everey now and then to approach her prey befor she was terminated by Mary the Spartan, who broke Elizas neck with a kung fu roundhouse-kick she knew all about only by watching Chuck Norris' movies.
BRILLIANT!!!
like being a beetle in a box
there are no female spartans.
Assuming this was explained correctly, which seems a fair assumption, then Jackson's "Mary's Room" is self-disproving. It is based on the premise that Mary learns something when experiencing color for the first time, but this is an uncertain premise. We have no way of knowing that some piece or pieces of information that we don't have couldn't allow Mary to create a perfect thought construct of a concept she couldn't experience directly. In fact, we cannot accept this illustration at all without allowing for that possibility, as we are using this illustration as a thought construct to perfectly experience something that we cannot experience directly. To say that Mary cannot do so, requires that we cannot either, which renders the premise false.
So what can be proven without fact,
Can be disproven without facts.
The problem is conscious experience. It's a personal thing. You're absolutely positive that you yourself are conscious because you experience consciousness, but you can never prove it in others, or describe consciousness. Actually seeing color with your eyes is one of those conscious experiences. You see red in a certain way, there's no way to tell if you experience it in the same way as someone else. Yes, you can see if they're able to discern the color through tests, but you'll never know if the experience itself is the same. You can measure the green light wavelength hitting the eye and what information goes to the brain, but as far as what the person actually sees, that is a wholly personal experience. There are for instance, people who experience colors / words/ etc in the form of tastes, smells or sounds. How your brain actually processes information can vary widely.
And these experiences can never really be shared, stored or transferred. In fact, such things are really often only described as relational to other experiences such as "tastes like chicken". So are they in fact truly a form of information? Or are they something else?
Interesting argument, I hadn't considered that. Makes sense though
I think the problem is using the term learning as a substitute for what happens when we see light and our brains register that experience. We can call seeing light for the first time a 'learning' experience, but it's much more. The body actually under goes physical changes when we see things and those are different changes than, and can't be duplicated just by, learning what we know about color....ALL that we know...everything in the world about color. Whether human consciousness is purely physical or involves something else, just learning all we know about color and how eyes work and what happens in the brain will not duplicate the physical response of actually seeing color.
@@rizdekd3912 except the argument is to disprove that what you are describing is a physical response, as this is supposed to be disproving physicalism. Which makes it a bit nonsense.
Why do we need the whole "grew up in a colorless" room thought experiment? We have the same analogy everyone can experience - IR or UV light. We can read and learn about it all we want, but it's totally different than experiencing viewing things under blacklight or through a thermal camera for the first time. I also totally don't understand why should acquisition of new experience prove there is non-physical knowledge?
I never heard of epiphenomenalism before, so thanks for that. It actuall sums up the "free will is an illusion" argument quite nicely.
I'm a strict physicalist, as the computetional theory of mind explains things in terms of hardware/software analogy. Software can only do as much as the hardware allows, and ultimately, all the information (including the software itself) has to physically exist somewhere as electrical charge or written on some sort of medium.
That's hardy an analogy: You can't see UV or IR at all, only visible light. Things that "light up" under UV bulbs are fluorescent; they emit visible light in response to invisible light. An infrared camera simply shows you a greyscale map of where the invisible IR light is, with IR replaced with white, and the absence of IR represented by black. In either case, your previous experiences with visible light should absolutely quality you to fully grasp the experience beforehand, if you hear a good enough description.
If Mary has been studying everything about vision, then she would also know about color vision and how it works. When Mary leaves the room she sees the color red for the first time, but she already knows what it is. She is not "learning" anything new. She is just experiencing something for herself that she already knew about. It's like going to visit the Eiffel Tower for the first time. You already know what it is, you are just seeing for yourself for the first time.
And if she knew which parts of her brain are responsible for said "experience" and had a device to stimulate them in the right way, she could even implant said "experience" without ever making the actual "experience". Visiting the actual Eiffel tower afterwards, would be like visiting it for the second time.
Thats kinda the problem of the thought experiment. Its conclusion is built upon the circle argument that the human mind is special to begin with, and that such a manipulation is not only from a practical point of view, but in principle absolutely 100% impossible. Where does this assumption come from? Frank Jackson wants it to be true.
I think we would be obliged to call the new experience of seeing a familiar scene in color for the first time a "learning experience" under any recognizable definition of learning.
To be more precise, the experience itself does not constitute learning. Learning involves, at a bare minimum, producing a lasting change of some kind in the mind. Experience itself is ephemeral.
We often associate additional qualities to what we mean by learning, such as extraction of features from the experience and integration of those features with existing knowledge. This is a harder test for a "learning experience" to meet than simply remembering that a particular experience took place, but even under this harder test, seeing something red for the first time and assigning the concept of redness to it would easily qualify as a learning experience.
One aspect of it, certainly not the only one, could be expressed by the statement "I have seen a red object." This statement, and the information it represents, was not previously present in the memory of the subject. Now it is.
@@AliothAncalagon Or do you just not want the argument to be true? Even in your own argument, the ‘experience’ of something, is different from knowing about something.
I am really struggling to see why people try to avoid that conclusion.
@@utilitymonster8267 either they are intensely dense, or nobody is actually home. The latter is downright creepy, so I'd rather it be the former.
@@blackshard641 I am not sure what you are referring to precisely.
My view: An issue with this thought experiment is that Mary wouldn't "learn" anything new if she truly did know all "physical information" regarding the color "red." She would have already obtained the ability to "see" the color red in her mind as if she already saw it, meaning she would simply be seeing the color again when she left the room. The issue at hand is how the premise is posited: she has all knowledge of the color red. In reality, it would be closer to her having nearly all knowledge of the color, with seeing it being that last piece to complete the neurological input for her to then register that wavelength as "red," but the thought experiment assumes that she already has this input in the premise when it states she has all the physical information regarding the color. She thus wouldn't learn anything from actually seeing the color in the experiment, but would learn from seeing the color in real life. One could argue, however, that in real life she could think she had already seen the color before seeing it and gaining that last bit of information due to how our memory works. In this case, she could think she learned nothing when she actually did, making physicalism seem wrong to her despite not actually being wrong.
The thesis assumes that physical information is different from the qualia. As in Mary has all physical information about the colour and vision like wavelengths, the biology and brain functions but that all these things are entirely separate from the qualia itself which can not be understood through the physical explanation itself
Yep, it effectively amounts to an argument from ignorance. We cannot imagine that Mary could already know what red looks like, but that doesn't mean that she really can't. We simply don't know.
In some way the argument is circular. If physicalism is false, then she wouldn't be able to extrapolate that experience with her knowledge. If it's true, then she would be able to do so.
@@b.k.5667 Which is exactly why Mary's Room fails. Qualia are a ruse; they don't exist.
My hypothesis is that Mary can't learn everything about the color red without "seeing"It. This is because your own specific cone and rod setup, your individual neural pathways and the minutia around how it stores information is unique to you at least at some level of granularity just because of the nature of organic adaptation. Therefore "seeing" something is a piece of the physical property because we are a part of the physical world.
What this doesn't mean, is that she has to see the color with her eyes. Similarly to the brain in a jar hypothesis, that we could simulate the same neural pathways effectively teaching how it feels to see the color red without seeing the color red. But to Mary she has seen the color red.
So it goes back to the fact that our consciousness is separate from the physical world and can only Interact with it in a second hand way.
This means that we can teach anything through experience without the experience being representative of what is actually happening.
So we are back to deciding between using the subjective experience of the brain, and the objective existence of the rest of everything else in the definition of teaching and whether simulated experience should be considered a real experience.
@@lrwerewolf lmao
The spinny wheel is actually a pair of plunger-type cylinders, one on each side. They connect to arms which are connected, off-center, to the wheels. These turn the wheels.
And they turn the wheels because the steam occupies a greater volume than the water did - expanding, and pushing the rods in the cylinders.
@@Unfunny_Username_389 Yes, exactly. In the past, children would immitate a train by holding their arms with their elbows at their sides and their forearms straight out - then they would move them like the train pistons while making choo-choo sounds. They got it. The jet engines engines are harder to immitate and not nearly as much fun - but so much more powerful.
You beat me to it!
I have to add one other wrinkle to Mary's room. Would someone who has never seen color be able to see color when they left the room? Mary's brain has never been trained to process color, so it's possible that whatever neural circuitry does that processing was never turned on in her brain. She might still see the world in black and white, because that's all her brain is capable of at that point. Or maybe not, I don't know, but that's an interesting question to ponder.
I would imagine it would hurt.
Like if you have never experienced hot before.
I had a similar thought - wouldn't someone have to tell Mary she was seeing the color red? She doesn't have the capability of "self-analyzing" her brain's "reaction" to the color red, so how would she ever recognize the color as red?
1. Your physiological point is correct. Ask any ophthalmologist. 2. So, it supports physicalism. And strongly so.
3. But I can't believe Jackson did not account for this. So, we would have to read his papers. Pperhapss Professor Kaplan will. answer you. Or if you aree in USA, just ask ChatGPT's paid version
@@chrischamplin4341 Do you remember the part of the video where he said Mary learned all the "boring" info about color? Why do you suppose he bothered to mention this? And not just mention it, but spend quite a bit of time on it. Could it be that the info contains a lot of common sense notions about the color red? So Mary has enough info to recognize the color red. Like she already knows strawberries are red and then she goes in the other room and sees a strawberry, but it's not gray, it's bright red. Do you suppose a human of normal intelligence has enough sense to put two and two together? So when Mary sees something that's normally gray, but now has something extra, would she figure out what this extra property is? What if she also knows raspberries, tomatoes and santa hats are typically "red" and she sees those objects with this extra property as well?
Yes you would see colour. If you had to see a colour before being able to process it visually then you World never see any colour, or probably anything, ever. Right? See where I’m going with this?
Initial reaction after hearing the thought experiment:
The problem isn't that Mary lacked non-physical information. The problem is that Jackson lacked physical information. He's missing or misunderstanding an important aspect of sight (or perhaps where information comes from?). The only known way to receive the specific information of what red looks like is to actually interact with red physically; the physical photons have to physically touch your physical eyeballs. That's exactly the same physical process required to learn all the other stuff she presumably knew about sight, that is she had to either see or hear the information somehow, both purely physical actions as far as we can tell. I don't see what's qualitatively different between reading information from a book or hearing it from a teacher vs looking at a red thing, aside from what the information specifically contains. If Mary didn't know what red looked like then she didn't have all the physical information about seeing color which means the thought experiment is breaking its own rules.
Thoughts after watching the rest:
Well, I stand by what I said. That isn't to say I didn't learn anything, though, and I loved this video overall. Great breakdown, easy to follow. Although if I were Jackson I think I would've tried to focus on the existence of information itself rather than the availability of the information. Because what exactly is information? To be clear, I don't think this line of thinking is going to arrive at dualism either, but I do think it would be at least a little harder to argue around. Information is a physical thing in a sense, because it's something found only through physical interactions like everything else, but also it isn't because there's no information particle or whatever (as far as we know anyway) so it isn't matter, but it also isn't energy because information doesn't behave like energy. Is it a field? That doesn't seem right either. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'm pretty sure whatever it is it's purely physical, even if I had no other reason than we've never found anything that wasn't so far. Maybe that'll change someday but I'm not about to bet against those odds.
But ultimately the question becomes if the feeling of light in your brain is actually information. I say this because it's impossible to quantify the feeling. You can't ever be sure for instance that the way I experience red is the same as you experience red. The underlying problem is consciousness, there's no actual scientific way to prove it exists or measure it.
@@taragnor That's a really good point, actually. If there's no way to use or transfer a piece of information, if it can't interact with anything in the universe outside an individual mind, is it actually information?
The only point of hesitation I have with it is the fact that the outside universe does often cause your experience of color to happen. But I don't think this really solves the issue because it still only exists as a non-translatable non-transferable experience that can just as easily happen with no external influence at all via imagination, and there's still no way to externalize the experience itself.
@@ansalem12 Yeah, without a doubt the original stimulus that causes the experience can be physical. A sound reaching the ears, a wavelength of light reaching the eye, or a breeze touching the skin. All that stuff is physical information with physical properties and you can measure that. You can record the sound, check the wavelength of light, etc.
The conscious experience though is how the brain actually deals with that physical information. Some people with synesthesia are known to associate sounds with colors for instance. Different individuals may find the taste of something unpleasant or great. Some may find a warmth in a room comforting, while others find it makes them uncomfortable. And how those physical events are experienced are always a personal thing. Two people can experience the exact same stimuli in very different ways.
Then of course, there's some experiences that may not have any obvious physical cause, like some who have claimed to have religious experiences without any obvious physical stimuli the way seeing a color would.
I tend to lean into the idea that consciousness is something special, simply because it's proven to be so difficult to quantify at all.
@@taragnor For my part I tend to think of consciousness or experiences in general as kind of like the brain's shorthand way of sorting and categorizing data. Sort of analogous to a GUI, maybe. Or like a simulated projection of its data stream. Whether that's even a little accurate or not is anybody's guess, but it's the easiest way for me to wrap my head around it so to speak. I do have a bias towards thinking about things in terms of computers, after all. But it kinda makes me wonder if some AI isn't already a little bit conscious, though, since they must have internal simulations of their operations I'd imagine. I don't actually know though.
Hopefully that made sense lol. It's hard to even come up with good analogies for what consciousness might be you know?
@@ansalem12 Yeah, it's very difficult to think of any analogy for consciousness because it's a very unique phenomenon. I think it's what makes me tend to lean towards consciousness being non-physical.
I generally think of it being kind of like the camera in a first-person video game. You can have two video game characters, one is an NPC run by the machine, and the other is controlled by the player. That player character is the one that's "conscious" in the game world, where you can see out it's eyes, see when it takes damage, etc. Consciousness is a perspective at seeing reality. But the game camera itself doesn't really "exist" in the same way that the walls and the game characters do. It's just a perspective to view the world, not an actual "physical" object. I see consciousness as being the reason for "well all these people have eyes and ears, but I'm specifically experiencing reality from this particular being's senses and point of view". And like consciousness in reality, the camera in a video game kind of has that ability to be both nothing and everything simultaneously. It really doesn't exist as something that can be interacted with from the player's point of view, but without it, you wouldn't be able to experience the game at all.
Here's the answer: Right before Mary is introduced to the color TV or steps into the colored world, Mary is aware that she has neural pathways and processing capabilities that she has never had activated in her own nervous system, since she knows all about those pathways and what activates them. So she knows that there are mental experiences she has never yet had because she also knows that everything she has seen up until that point was not colored. That is, she knows that there are mental events she has never experienced, but cannot "know" the experience itself because they have never been activated, because "knowing" the experience is the memory of that activation.
Hence, this experiment is actually support of the physicalism interpretation of mental events and consciousness, and Mary, being omniscient, also will know she has a lot of new experiences coming up in a colored world as all those existing but never activated pathways will now be activated, and will learn a lot, coming to "know" what they are like.
Her memory of the activation of the pathway is a new "physical" fact, instantiated in the changed synaptic weights of her long term memory, which she, being omniscient, knew would occur, but couldn't recall, since it hadn't occurred yet...
As for the discussion about epiphenomena, it was too short; whether something is an epiphenomenon depends on the definition of the process being described. Steam would not be an epiphenomenon if the train was specified to be a "steam engine", but might be if it was just defined as a "engine", or perhaps would not even be applicable - for instance and electric train powered by batteries. In the latter case, all manner of items, would not even be applicable (apples, hair brushes) since they are not even involved in any way in the process.
Mary 'knows' that tomatoes are red, and the sky is blue. But once she experiences them, she knows that is not true at all. Tomatoes are a million variations of the colors that we conveniently categorize as 'red' and the same can be said for the clear blue sky. Uniformity is the extremely rare exception, not the rule. It is an illusion we use to 'cut to the chase' when we think of the universe in its infinite, and therefore non-physical and physical parts. Nothing wrong with that from a practical standpoint, as long as we do not delude ourselves by categorically declaring that is all there is to it. All of this can be observed with our very limited on-board senses. If we perceive beyond those senses, the entire concept of a purely physical universe becomes an absurdity.
Ive read somewhere that by electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain, or during brain surgery, people can smell or taste things which are actually not there. So if incorrect information is provided to the brain, the brain will experience things as if they were physically real. So it would seem that physical manipulation of the brain, or the information that the brain is receiving results in different experiences, so physicalism seems to hold in this case.
For example if Mary never left the black and white room, but through a neural link, if the correct parts of her brain were stimulated, she would see color red, right in her room. So the experience of color red, can be reduced into information i.e. which human brain neurons fire and when. Physicalism seems to hold its ground yet.
Yeah, this is correct. I mean, all it would really take to see colors would be to rub ones eyes vigorously enough. The compression of the eyeball causes the structures to bleed phosphorescent chemicals onto other structures, stimulating them. We tben perceive these as flashes/splotches of color. This often "bedazzles" you as well.
Eyes that are functioning will always see color. A black and white room wouldn't make it otherwise.
Well, this is a thought experiment, which by nature assumes certain things will or won't happen. She won't be rubbing her eyes really hard to get pigment release from the cones in the cornea, and even is she did, there's no way a third party observer would be able to say what she is seeing in her eyes because they can not see through her eyes.
With regard to transcranial stimulation with, say, a solenoid cap stimulating the part of the visual cortex that encodes or enciphers the color stimulus to neural phenomenon, even if she was exposed in that fashion, she would still not know the QUALIA of any color, or the attachment of its synthesized experience, because it's all intraneural phenomenon. Even with every piece of information at her "finger tips" she would not actually be experiencing the QUALIA of red because she has no gauge or anchor to say that is red. It's cloistered wholly in her mind. The perception in either case is still akin to being aware only of all the purely technical information regarding the wedge of the electromagnetic spectrum our eyes have evolved to see. Even if she were exposed to examples of commonly red objects (except desaturated of color) on a monitor or photographs, like a bright red apple (except in grayscale), AND she had eaten apple slices before carefully prepared, so no red skin would be found anywhere on them, I strongly doubt her mind would put the discrete pieces of information together and synthesize an abstract red apple in her mind. This is not a limitation on her part, this is due to absence of direct full sense phenomenon of the color red being entangled meaningfully, semiotically, or with perceptual valence attached to the abstract "red".
The critical thing here is the integral and entangled experience of sense perceptions in consciousness and how our minds construct "reality". I simply don't agree with the assertion by philosophers still trying to work out the mind-body problem whom have discarded qualia so casually to make room for a pure monist conceptualization of reality to please the biases of other academics. It's clear that qualia exist, if they did not, nothing in our shared reality would have any meaning, or evoke any distinct and individual perceptions of the given object. This doesn't mean that the private experiences each of us have are not information, they are _more_ than _mere_ information. The resulting experience of sense phenomena of the object is laden with qualia that our previous experiences and general life trajectories subconsciously synthesize and apply to the perceived object, resulting in it possessing metastatic qualia, which we then project on that object.
And finally, don't forget Hume's thought experiment of the missing shade of blue. Without experiencing the "missing shade" all one can do is infer from its spectrometric neighbors what it must be, or be like to experience, but that is all one can do - make inferences based on the available sense phenomenon and the lived experience of all the other shades of blue. We can even pull the spectrometry and neurophysiological comprehension from "Mary's Room" and conclude that the missing shade has a given wavelength and can possibly be manufactured by targeted neural stimulation, but we will still now know what the missing shade is, because we are still missing the critical thing that makes it real and meaningful - individual experience based qualia of it.
@@jules6601 If there are certain cases the thought experiment disallows, how does it refute physicalism?
I'm writing my undergraduate thesis on a key problem with The Knowledge Argument that you did not exactly point out here: the Mary thought experiment is using the informal fallacy "Begging the Question" during the reification of qualia. Even if we accept Jackson's premise of informational physicalism, this thought experiment is still fallacious, and Jackson commented on this later in his life.
For instance, this is his premise: "there is a state in the thought experiment where Mary simultaneously knows all physical knowledge and there exists non-physical knowledge that Mary has yet to learn". You see, if you are a physicalist, this assumption is a contradiction in itself. In other words,
If physicalism was true, this premise could not possibly accepted logically by a physicalist. And if this premise were true, then physicalism would be impossible. It is strange that a physicalist could not make the easy reply that "If Mary truly did know all physical knowledge of color, then a priori, she must have knowledge of the experience of colors as well."
It's a contradiction if physicalism is true, but physicalism is easily refuted by this.
@@123duelist Your argument is poorly presented. What contradiction is there that your pronoun refers to?
The story did not say that Mary knew all physical knowledge. The story said she was studying the physics of colors, that as she was studying the physics of the color, the world was in black and white, until she went out. The story is meant to attack physicalim, not assert a world where physicalism is true.
@@123duelist Firstly, I know a lot more about this thought experiment than you do, and I don't think you actually read any of these articles. Mary does not have all physical knowledge, she has all physical knowledge of color. The story was meant to attack physicalism, but I show that the story is using a fallacy. Even the author of the story admitted that the thought experiment is inadequate.
@@gamefreak23788 Firstly saying,"Mary does not have all physical knowledge, but knowledge of color" is literally what I said."
Secondly, what fallacy is it committing?
Can't stop giving this guy's videos likes.
His explanations are so good.
@@DerekThompson-tb2up Why? What parts did you not understand or agree with? Do you have any previous study in philosophy? All honest and genuine questions.
@@THE-X-Force 5:30 the speaker equivocates on scientific vs. physical knowledge. I can tell you how velcro feels but you will not know how it feels until you actually feel it or something similar.
The definition of physical knowledge here changes based on what conclusion he is trying to draw in the moment. Would you rather be told about a delicious meal or eat a delicious meal? The experiential knowledge of eating that meal is itself physical knowledge but the problem is that humans can't learn what a meal tastes like just by looking at it.
One final hypothetical: if Mary left the room and someone gave her an orange that was dyed the wrong color would she be able to know that it was the wrong color if she hadn't seen color before but knew what color was?
@@TwoForFlinchin1 "the problem is that humans can't learn what a meal tastes like just by looking at it" that isn't a problem. it's just how things are, man
@@scambammer6102 it is a problem for people that want to know what something tastes like but only have a picture. Why do you think taste samples exist? Because of the previoisly mentioned problem you didn't know existed, or deny the existence of. You're welcome for learning something new today.
@@jesterprivilege I don't know what TF you think you are replying to but it sure isn't my comment. jerk.
The response I've always given to this problem is that:
Seeing or experiencing redness IS a physical state of being. I.e. your brain or brain stuff, is IN the state of what it means to experience red.
Thus in order for Mary to truly have learnt all the physical facts about redness, she would have had to read a book or watched some lecture that was able to put her mind in a state of seeing redness. Thus leaving the room she won't see red for the first time. She will have already seen it, in learning about red.
There's just a category area here about what we mean about physical facts.
There are some epiphenomenal arguments about how 'redness' is just a belief state and you don't 'truly' experience redness etc, but either way the criticism will still work regardless of what you hold to.
I can talk about things in the abstract like 2 buildings + 2 buildings = 4 buildings. But part of the physical fact about a specific building, say the Taj Mahal is knowing what it looks like. If you can conceive of what the Taj Mahal looks like without ever seeing the Taj Mahal from descriptions then you know what it is like to experience the real Taj Mahal.
Being unable to describe "redness" just means you're limited by the language we have access to to communicate such concepts. But that's not going to undermine the ontology of what 'redness' is. It's still going to be a physical mental state, that supposedly you could cause to happen by just sticking probes in Mary's brain.
Much like you wouldn't think Dualism is true when someone demands a physicalist explain what it's like to smell something in terms of it's touch. It's just a completely different mode of thinking. Linguistic descriptions aren't the only physical form of communication.
And it's the same as with everyday people who first learn about blue through first hand experience then after learn about it through science in terms of wave lengths and the complex mechanisms of the eye which together sends signal to the brain to form an experience of blue, now is the physical information less physical because it the other way around from Mary's experience or because it can be more easily articulated? no. For Mary, blue was always a physical potential of the brain structure and no blue would be left lingering around the if the responsible parts of the brain are destroyed.
Having physical feeling is the thing I don't feel like I understand.
@@CoopAssembly Right, it's weird. Which is why it's such a good thought experiment to highlight that facts aren't all just "maths on a whiteboard".
Some people lean toward pan-psychism to overcome the intuition (like there's this functional brain stuff in the universe like a subset of the fundamental forces.
Some people just think it's all an illusion create by atoms. i.e. beliefs are just functional, including the belief you're experiencing stuff even though you're not.
And sometimes it's just an emergent property of physical stuff. As in a different way of the physical world creating stuff like "A wheel being the optimal thing for motion".
@@CoopAssembly That's for a different reason. It's not logically possible for you to understand yourself fully-or predict yourself perfectly-because your brain has a certain size. You can't “fit” a complete model of your brain into your brain and still have room left to think about it (this is an impressionistic description of a real piece of mathematics). But at the end of the day you _do_ have the feeling, and that should be enough to establish that it's real in exactly the same way as all your other experience. Though TBH there are limits on what we can know about the “physical” world just as there are limits on what we can know about ourselves.
Yeah, this has always been my problem with this thought experiment. The only thing she has learned is her actual particular physical experience of red that she "knew" about in the extract.
The critical question left unasked here (which I assume is addressed in a later video) is: "Is experience physical?" And the answer to that is: Yes. The chain of events that allow Mary to experience (and process the experience of) seeing red for the first time involves the movement of physical things, and chemical reactions based on interactions between those moving physical things.
Further, memory of experience is also physical, which is why amnesia is a thing. If memory weren't physical then there would be no way to harm a human that would induce amnesia - which can either be the loss of memory, or loss of the ability to access those memories. If memories weren't physical there wouldn't need to be a mechanism through which to access them.
There is also a conflation of experiencing with knowledge, which is to say that there is an assumption that Mary is one thing with one salient function which is higher cognition.
For me, the whole thought experiment is pure nonsense. The woman actually experience two colors -- black and white -- and it is entirely possible that she intellectually can understand that there are more colours than that. In exactly the same way as we understand there are other colours outside the spectrum of light we are able to see. Now, some nitpickers objects that black and white aren't real colors, but that is nothing else than semantics. A woman as learned as Mary should also understand that our sensory experiences of the world is not the world in itself, but a biological visualisation of the physical information that surround us, like a virtual reality in a computer that nonetheless is entirely dependent on the underlying physical information, an underlying information that you partly can change with your interactions. There you have your "mysterious" epiphenomenalism.
Poof! There goes the dualism.
You say yes, experience is physical, but that can only be true if there is anything "physical". From an idealism point of view everything is mental, "physical things" are only models practical for describing what happens. 3 reasons for thinking that idealism is more true than physicalism: 1) How can physical "things" like atoms and other particles give rise to consciousness? Seems quite impossible in principle. 2) In quantum mechanics a conscious observation collapses the wave function but the physics doesn't describe this process. 3) Countless numbers of NDE experiences contain details of events that are objective but should not be possible according to materialistic science, like rendering what goes on inside other rooms inside a hospital while a patient has no brain activity. Look carefully at videos from Bruce Greyson, Pim van Lommel, Peter Fenwick, Donald Hoffman, ...
I think it conflates the academic knowledge with what the brain produces when we see things. It seems short-sighted to imagine the words, measurements, definitions, understandings of wave lengths are going to be the same as the physical output of the brain that IS the experience of seeing red. And if it is a physical output from the brain, then it is this physical output that grants us our conscious experience. I don't have a problem referring to the process and realization of the color red being, e.g., called qualia, I just don't see why it can't be something that is linked directly to, dependent on and just as physical as any other field. NOT to say consciousness is the same thing as a field, but it seems to be directly linked to and solely dependent ON a physical brain. And who is to say that eventually, when we understand more about what the brain does and the things that emanate from it that we won't be able to duplicate and actually pass on qualia from one person to another under some conditions.
I snuck into Mary's room before she was exposed to the world of color, wearing a costume of black and white. I handed her a painted, wooden block. She was mesmerized by it - she could tell it was colored, because it was fascinatingly different from her black and white existence. Mary turns the block around in her hands, enjoying her experience of this new qualia. I asked, "What is the color of the block?" She said "Ah, let me get my spectrometer to measure the light's wavelength and then I can tell you!" In addition to being color-starved, it turns out that Mary was bi-curious.
It would be interesting to have Frank Jackson re-run this thought experiment with one slight variation: Mary is an AI equipped with monochrome video inputs that get upgraded to color video inputs after Mary has been fully trained on all the knowable data about vision.
What do you think would be the outcome of such a variation to the experiment?
I managed the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence during the period in which we transitioned from grayscale to color cameras, so I can speak to this question.
In practical terms, there are three areas where the transition would need to be made.
• One obvious area is the capacity to distinguish color in hardware. There's not much to say about this except that simply changing the cameras, say, or the frame grabbers, from grayscale to color would not do much good by itself. Probably the imaging system would no longer work at all. The entire image pipeline would have to be correspondingly changed, as well as the representation of images that the AI uses internally. But we can bypass this issue without loss of generality by imagining that all this capability was already in place all along. Mary has just not exercised it with anything but grayscale image sources.
• Another area is the representation or encoding of the image. Pixels in a grayscale image consist of single integer values, whereas pixels with the capacity to represent color use tuples for the color components, such as RGB. A grayscale world would appear as pixels having identical values for the RGB components. Mary could have been equipped with this color encoding all along, but would have always observed identical RGB values.
• Finally we can consider the AI itself and what it does to make sense of images. For simplicity, let's assume that Mary has been used to processing color bitmaps all along, but has only seen grayscale images, meaning RGB values that are identical within any given pixel.
Now your question of "training" comes in. If Mary is a neural network that has only ever been trained using grayscale images, then we would not expect that network to distinguish color at all. It would respond to pixel intensity only, at least initially.
Training in a neural network is not a symbolic activity, it's exposure to training images. There's no way to represent "data ABOUT vision" such as how to interpret colorspaces and so on. There's only the visual signal. So Mary can't be primed with information that apples are red, for example, much less how color vision works. You'll have to discard that aspect of the experiment. But it turns out to be irrelevant.
Now, once the visual signal has changed because color scenes are being imaged, we would expect a neural network to begin to adjust its weights to the new patterns in the data. The red components of some of the pixels are brighter than the other components, and this is potentially a meaningful signal, in other words there might be red objects in the scene doing interesting things. Mary is now in a position to start to track those pixels and try to make sense of them. The same learning mechanism that works for grayscale images can expected to learn about color all by itself.
If Mary on the other hand is some kind of propositional AI, then it would have been trained with images combined with symbolic propositions or even algorithms concerning those images. The details of this hypothetical AI are unimportant. Let's be as generous as possible. But note that even in the most pessimistic case this version of Mary is still a superset of the neural network version, therefore should have at least it's capabilities.
So Mary has all sorts of propositional knowledge about color vision, for example that a colored object will be represented with nonidentical RGB values in its pixel tuples. Mary has never seen such an image, until one day the scene changes to show a bowl of red and green apples. Mary knows exactly what "red" means, because it involves red pixel values, and so Mary can immediately report, as a symbolic proposition, that something in the scene is red. Mary knows as a symbolic proposition that apples are red. Since we're being generous in our assumptions about Mary, we might expect to see an inference from Mary that the red areas of the image might be apples.
@@starfishsystems
There’s and added problem for MARY AI that Mary didn’t have. We can all sort of identify with Mary because we recognize each other as humans and expect a similar subjective experience. I think the argument against physicalism may involve the problems of consciousness and subjective experience.
We’re in the dark about whether MARY AI even has the software to have subjective experience or consciousness.
Pass that propositional knowledge through a ChatGPT output and MARY AI could probably discuss the experience of seeing a red apple for the first time without actually seeing one. The language model has that knowledge encoded from its experience of the language it was trained on. We could probably be in the dark on what the AI experience of color truly is.
What’s also interesting is what happens when we get to the point that subjective experience becomes a reasonable proposition for an AI? Would we know for sure whether that threshold has been passed? It’s creepy to think about having convincing discussions about subjective experience decades before subjective experience arises and then AI has to figure out that this is different. It’s for real real this time. Especially bad if it’s capable of suffering at any point.
@@zemoxian Frankly, I'm in the dark about whether physicalists have subjective experiences 😂
@@AUniqueHandleName444 We do, we just don't pre-suppose that said experience is non-physical.
Which is all the evidence one would need for why the thought experiment is faulty.
One of my favorite intuition pumps. The defective premise here is that Mary knows "everything" about anything at all, let alone her brain. If she new everything, she would know exactly which sort of brain activity is the exact neural correlate of seeing red, and would say "yes just exactly like one of the colors I see when I close my eyes". There would be the same surprise as meeting your favorite author in person. Notice the drama of the payoff scene fizzles if Mary is simply knowledgeable. Finally, to drag the whole thing back down to earth, where many of us live, I do not know if there is any definitive research on whether the victim of such an evil experiment would even have functioning color vision at all after such willful and expensive torture.
What Mary doesn't 'know' for want of a better word is the cellular reactions that go along with experiencing blue. Her neural cells haven't actually shared the nerve impulses of the experience that can only happen when her eyes send a message along her optical nerves that ends up triggering chemical reactions within nerve cells. If our experiences are actually chemical reactions in cells then, like a hammer blow to someone's skull, they don't get the experience unless the hammer hits them, personally. I think that's just another way of saying what you said.
@@rizdekd3912 , only Mary can know what Mary knows, since at this point in time we don't. When I try to imagine omniscience I have to concede I have no idea how Mary will respond. I will point out that "dualism"--the thesis Jackson is supporting--ultimately explains nothing. How does the immaterial mind interact with the material world? It's an abiding mystery.
@Rizdek D I think another way of saying what you said is: Mary, nor none other than Mary, could design such an experiment. The heuristics don't permit it intrinsically. We know your red isn't my red, so I can't design a box to limit your red without risking your extinction, and thus the very experimental results. I'd actually prefer to stop upon noticing the possibility of your extinction rather than the lack of useful results.
@@johnsmoak8237 Do we know that your red isn't my red? We can only say for certain if there is some difference in narrow band or broad band colour blindness that your red and mine are different because, for one of us, that shade of red would be indistinguishable from another shade; but not for both of us. However, when we look at colours we both distinguish, equally, then there is no way to be certain that we see colours any differently although, some research suggests strongly that we see distinguishable colours the same way because the psychological impact is identical (e.g. Luscher Colour Test wouldn't get consistent results where applicable if most of us didn't see most colours the same way).
@Mercurio Morat's Bughunting Channel in fact, I do know that your red isn't my red, as if it were we would be the same person and this conversation wouldn't have happened. Sometimes the difference is not in the "color" of the red, but other facts about it that correlate directly to Mary's confinement. My point is that I cannot know her red and confine her, and similarly she cannot learn red she does not know.
Tabula Rasa, yeah? Tabula Rasa, or I better hit the monastery.
Thanks for this video. I looked through the wikipedia page of objections to the thought experiment and it didn't contain what seems to me the most obvious objection: that sense experience is needed to learn the meaning of terms that appear in physical theory. The old positivist idea that theories can be "directly defined in terms of sense data" is well known to be too simplistic, but it had a kernel of truth, and this thought experiment seems to make the opposite mistake. I mean, textbooks on vision do contain sentences like "light in such and such a range of wavelengths is seen as red" and Mary would have no idea what these sentences mean. That's a "physical fact" she can't learn.
Like in Mask, where he gives the blind girl a warm stone and tells her that's what red's like?
Exactly. It does not violate physicalism
She would understand the sentence, except for what the word "red" actually meant. It would essentially just be an arbitrary label for her. So she could in fact learn the physical fact that certain wavelengths are "seen as red", she just wouldn't know what it's like to see red beyond a physical description of brain activity. That's the point, physicalism essentially boils down to an abstract description of the world in terms of physical properties (like energy, spin, etc.) but there are obviously aspects of the world which are not abstract descriptions (like the experience of redness) and indeed it seems pretty obvious to me that the world itself _cannot_ be an abstract description, because what would it be a description of? Itself?
@@APaleDot "physicalism essentially boils down to an abstract description of the world in terms of physical properties (like energy, spin, etc.) but there are obviously aspects of the world which are not abstract descriptions (like the experience of redness)"
Does it...essentially boil down to an abstract description of the world in terms of physical properties? Doesn't physicalism also assume physical actions/objects cause physical effects and physical actions have physical outcomes? And until something...whether with a mind or not...experiences a physical process/effect it has not experienced it. So if we assume that the entire process is physical...from the moment the eye senses color until the body reacts to that input, then it will be clear why Mary doesn't know blue by reading abstract descriptions, she only 'knows blue' if her cells have experienced the physical effects blue causes. Like getting hit with something actually causes physical damage. The only way for someone to experience that damage is to get hit. So think of the reaction of our brains cells as a form of 'damage' where something physical changes.
reading about red is a physical act. Seeing a red object is a different physical act. Eating a banana is a different physical act. So fg what.
But suppose Mary's complete knowledge about vision includes the knowledge of how to stimulate the visual cortex directly, through the use of mind altering chemicals or electrical probes? Then she doesn't learn anything new about the color blue when she leaves the room.
Knowledge of how to stimulate the visual cortex is not the same thing as actually stimulating the visual cortex. Until she actually does stimulate the visual cortex (thus achieving the same result as leaving the room), she does not have the direct knowledge of what it is like to see red.
You're basically trying and failing to cheat the thought experiment, and in doing so proving it true; you are tacitly acknowledging that requires doing something other than knowing the physical description of red light (in this case, stimulating the physical cortex) to gain the knowledge of what it is like to see red.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 "You're basically trying and failing to cheat the thought experiment"
If we assume that:
-Seeing colour is information regarding that colour.
-The thought experiment doesn't invalidate itself.
-The person in question doesn't pre-suppose dualism.
Then the proposed "cheat" is actually vital for the thought experiment to have any validity.
If a physicalist states that books on their own are inadequate, but a completely physical device (say, electrodes that use electric impulses to stimulate the visual cortex) would be sufficient to achieve the thought experiment's stated goal of giving Mary all the physical information, then you would have no options besides either admitting that you're trying to use the thought experiment as a "Gotcha!" question or permitting it.
Since you seem to be keen on denying the fix, you're not showing yourself in that great of a light here.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 Say Mary reads a study detailing the difference between the brains of people who have not experienced color and ones who have. It describes all the experimental steps needed to bridge the gap. What stops Mary from doing the experiment on herself?
Really enlightening videos here! This is somehow like me learning and remembering the string of Ones and Zeros that physically make the entirety of this video and having no clue what information I'm actually remembering. I would consider myself very smart and having a great memory but in reality I'd know ZILCH! I'm really enjoying pondering this and questioning the actual information I remember and if in reality it is something completeley different. Tickles my brain and I like it! Thanks!
This is the stupidest thing ever. Yes, two different things are different. No fg sht.
@the school of nothing
You could in principle study streaming protocols, data compression, image and audio formats. Then decode the ones and zeros into video format chunks, …decompress the data into image blocks of key frames, … add delta information between the key frames to convert motion data to subsequent frames, … similarly decode the audio into waveforms, … analyze the waveforms to detect phonemes to decode speech,…
Pretty much everything the video codec does is possible to do by a human with enough free time. So you might get there eventually-if you’re a dedicated immortal.
But yes in the raw format it’s pretty indecipherable even with encryption turned off. I don’t think humans are neurologically capable of making sense of the raw data that way. It would take some kind of neurological video codec which even if one was possible it would be kinda hard to justify…
Not sure where I was going with this.
The problem here is that we want to teach Mary about something without showing it, and the shortcomings of language to express all the possible ways she might feel when she eventually gets to see colors are taken as "proof" that knowledge and information and the "physical world" is not all there is.
What if Mary was blind, and had an RGB sensor, that made different sounds for different colors and light intensities? She would listen to its beeping all day, and when for the first time experiencing the color red, she hears a distinctly different sound from the sensor.
Compared to the original thought experiment:
- she has experience with different output from the sensor
- it is possible to describe or hum or even play the sound for Mary beforehand
- greatly reduced emotional impact when experiencing the color red
Will anyone now argue that "experiencing" a new piece of music, playing differently notes than what you've heard before, is proof that something is transcending the physical world?
Jackson seems to have got hung up on emotions, thinking they can not be physical, but isn't it also so that strong emotions manifest in the physical body, as tingling, sweating, trembling, quickened puls, constriction of the chest, goose bumps, tensing or relaxing?
No this -language problems - is not what the thought experiment is about. The thought experiment is about Marry having a complete mechanical knowledge that describes how the brain creates the colour red. This knowledge will not only have the form of language but also be picture knowledge, like memorys of brain scans etc. Nevertheless all that knowledge can not really tell her what red is. So red is not mechanical and if red is not mechanical but all the world is defined as something mechanical than where does red come from?
@@dengelbrecht6428 "No this -language problems - is not what the thought experiment is about"
Everyone knows that; But what you seem to fail to understand is that one of the more critical failing points of the thought experiment is that language is inadequate to convey all the information that needs to be conveyed to impart all physical information regarding colour.
However, let us, for argument's sake, assume that this limitation can be overcome. At this point, the thought experiment has 3 answers.
1 - "I lean towards dualism".
2 - "I lean towards physicalism".
3 - "The thought experiment is faulty".
No, seriously, those are the only things it ultimately ends up answering.
To elamborate:
1 - "I lean towards dualism". - This means that you will assert that Mary, upon seeing red for the first time in her life has learned something new, thus there is more to the world than just the physical world.
2 - "I lean towards physicalism". - This means that you will assert that the experiment stated that she has had all information imparted to her regarding colour, meaning that she already has the experience of seeing colour imparted to her in some manner other than her seeing colour (assuming that is even relevant information regarding colours). Should anyone think to retort with how that isn't possible, all that would end up doing is deadlocking the experiment as a self-refuting exercise.
Alternatively, your assertion will be that the experience of colour is still physical, even if it isn't necessarily imparted to Mary during her colour-deprivation time. In this case, the one resolving the thought experiment didn't catch that it was supposed to be *all* physical information - And this is where the language issue comes up, mind you.
3 - "The thought experiment is faulty". - You actually think the thought experiment through and regardless of your stance (though physicalists are more likely to be in this group), you realize that ultimately the thought experiment will simply end up as an overly wordy way of asking someone wether they lean towards dualism or physicalism, as the bias of the person resolving the thought experiment is what ultimately defines the answer, with no actual correct answer.
In either case, acting like people criticizing the thought experiment are just "not getting it" outs you as a dualist throwing an apologist-tantrum.
@@OzixiThrill No I don't say that the Experiment is about language but the Guy who started the threat tries to boil it down to a pure language Problem ( because this beeping Sound that the blind Mary uses in the way he framed the Experiment is a language). But frankly I don't want to continue to discuss with someone who acuses me of throwing a tantrum Just because I am a different opinion. I tried to discuss the topic, you discuss me. That's an ad hominem Attack and a complete Red flag for If this discussion will have any value or Not.
@@dengelbrecht6428
"No I don't say that the Experiment is about language but the Guy who started the threat tries to boil it down to a pure language Problem ( because this beeping Sound that the blind Mary uses in the way he framed the Experiment is a language)."
And you go out of your way to accuse people of "not getting it".
The other guy's case about using a some sort of auditory device was entirely revolving around solving the problem that language is inadequate for conveying all information necessary for the thought experiment to have any validity.
In short, he was trying to steel-man the thought experiment.
"But frankly I don't want to continue to discuss with someone who acuses me of throwing a tantrum Just because I am a different opinion. I tried to discuss the topic, you discuss me"
Sure. Ignore 93% of my comment and dismiss it in it's entirety because I pointed out that you're not engaging with the argument presented, but are trying to grasp at straws to dismiss the criticism while trying to reassert the original thought experiment as the be-all end-all of the discourse.
"That's an ad hominem Attack and a complete Red flag for If this discussion will have any value or Not."
An insult is neither an attack nor ad hominem. The only way my insult would classify as ad hominem is if I was using that insult as the basis of my arguments or for dismissing yours. However, as it is the conclusion of my analysis of your entire case, it does not qualify as one.
You, however, might be guilty of the fallacy fallacy; Attempting to find a fallacy to dismiss everything the other party stated; Not all argument sets are completely invalid if there is one argument in them that is fallacious. In fact, even an argument that invokes a fallacy can still be correct. For example, an appeal to authority is a fallacy; "Scientists say" is a common invocation of that. However, that does not necessarily mean that the argument invoked with that preface is automatically wrong. As the example - "Scientists say that you need to breathe oxygen to live"; It does invoke an appeal to authority fallacy, yet it's also a correct statement.
Meanwhile, you focusing on 7% of my case while ignoring the rest does lend credence to my insult.
Therefore, my conclusion so far is that you are failing to grasp the counter arguments presented to the original thought experiment and are grasping at straws to reassert the original, even though plenty of faults have been found with it.
@@OzixiThrill I have no clue what you wrote and I will not read it. „Red flag“ means that I am not willing to talk with people who use ad hominem attacks. I am sorry that I have not made that more clear in my last post.
Thanks a lot! I actually don't get how Jackson thinks he differs from Nagel in that his argument is not epistemic. Nagel thinks if we are given all the info of natural sciences about bats, we cannot know about their qualia. Similarly, Jackson thinks if Mary is given all the info of natural sciences about human visualisation, she cannot know about their qualia. So, for both of them natural sciences are not enough to know about qualia. So, both of them talk about qualia and its epistemology. I really can't see how it could be the case that Nagel's argument is epistemic but Jackson is talking about qualia.
Because Nagel in his paper 'What is it like to be a bat' claims that we can't understand the perspective of bats because they are not like us. But we share understanding with humans because we are the same community. This is what Jackson denies. We can't even understand what it is like for Fred when he is watching an extra colour in comparison to us. We can't understand the unique experience of other people simply because we are not like them.
IIRC, the steam from the engine moves a piston back and forth. Steam is port into the cylinder on one end, which makes the piston move to the end of the cylinder. A switch flips which redirects the steam to the other end of the cylinder.
This makes the piston go back and forth.
Then the piston is connected to the wheel via an arm. The arm is connected to the wheel offset from center
So steam makes the piston go back and forth and the arm via its connection converts that energy into rotary energy at the wheels.
This turns the wheels, and by consequence, moves the train
Don't try to reason with a philosopher. Backed into a realist corner, he will challenge you to prove that you are not simply an idea in the mind of a butterfly. Philosophers have always been the greatest scam-artists on Earth, next to religious-cult leaders.
Love the knowing smile as he realises he has no idea how a steam engine works, after just describing it's paddle thing in a tube. :) Yeah, and an internal combustion engine fires hot gas out the exhaust and the equal and opposite reaction (Frank Galileo) pushes you along the road.
I asked Alice and Bob what they thought about Mary and it just ended up in an argument.
Seems like there's a simpler version of this thought experiment if you say that Mary is blind, learns all the things through braille, and has an operation so that she can see.
This is what I thought. Except she learns things aurally as well.
The term "all the things " is false. It as misleading. If she did, she wouldn't learn anything new. By definition. Period. Mary's Room is utter bullshit. Useless. Fallacious as can be.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 Another way to look at it is that if it were actually possible to learn everything by hearing about it or reading about it, then upon leaving the room or gaining sight she wouldn't actually be amazed by all the new experiences, because she would have learned it already.
@@joshuawhere But her system would still not have experienced the physical changes that occur when her eyes receive photons and change them into nerve pulses of a certain kind that end up triggering cellular reactions in her brain cells. She would no more have the experience of having seen blue than learning everything about hammer and hammer blows would crack her skull. Her cells undergo a physical change due to her experiences and those experiences are the only things that can cause those changes.
@@rizdekd3912 Well, either way the thought experiment doesn't prove what it was supposed to prove, but my version is a simpler way of not making that point :p
This is similar to your video on artificial intelligence, where the man in the room learns all the mechanics of putting together the Chinese symbols to participate in intelligible and coherent conversations with someone on the outside without ever learning Chinese. In this case, Mary like the man in the room, understands all of the mechanics of color vision without ever having experienced the phenomenon. Just like the man who knew all the rules for speaking Chinese without really learning Chinese, she knows all the physical processes of color vision without really understanding color.
Re 19:07 and onwards: the whole epiphenomenalism paradox is rooted in one implicit assumption. The assumption is that there exists a single and non-divisible "you" (or "I").
If we assume two subjects in one mind, one for decision making, and the other for doing the observations, the problem is gone
If part of Mary's learning is to use apparatus to stimulate the experience of color in her own brain that is identical to our retinal response to color (without any color actually being present), then she will have the complete physical "understanding" which would lead to no surprise or new learning upon going outside. Jackson's mistake is to limit his thought experiment to book learning and implicitly assume sensory learning can't be emulated.
For the purposes of the thought experiment, it doesn't matter whether her subjective experience of color is induced naturally, or whether it's emulated by some apparatus. What matters is that a subjective experience is necessary to complete her understanding.
There's a categorical difference between knowledge of the physical mechanics that govern qualia and our direct experience of those qualia.
@@Acid_Viking Okay, I understand now that there are two versions of physicalism and this thought experiment attacks the more extreme one.
Linguistic physicalists seem to believe that given enough information, a sufficiently brilliant person could accurately imagine any experience such that they recreate the brain state of the actual experience. I'm not sure they literally think this is true or if it is a deeper thought experiment that I don't fully grasp.
It turns out I'm the other kind: a metaphysical physicalist. I believe everything is physical, but not everything is linguistically describable. So reading about music is not the same as hearing it, but if you knew my brain well enough to itch the right neurons, you could reproduce the brain state without the actual experience.
I don't think that Jackson would dispute the latter, but would still reject physicalism by saying subjective experience originates in the physical but is not itself physical and has no influence on the physical. Like a TV flickering in an empty room?
Anyway, I understood the thought experiment to be attempting to prove the existence of non-physical qualia, which it doesn't. If the point was instead to corner linguistic physicalists into making dubious counterclaims, I'm not sure how much help they needed.
@@briancleary6751 "So reading about music is not the same as hearing it, but if you knew my brain well enough to itch the right neurons, you could reproduce the brain state without the actual experience."
What I'm having trouble grasping is why it should matter whether you produce the brain state organically or artificially. Since the outcome of both is a subjective experience, you appear to be granting that music/color cannot be fully understood by physical description alone.
"Anyway, I understood the thought experiment to be attempting to prove the existence of non-physical qualia, which it doesn't. "
I'm with Chalmers on this one.
@@Acid_Viking Why is it subjective? Because it involves brain states that cannot be achieved by the reception of symbolic information or because brain states are unique to each person's collection of neurons?
Thank you for another great lecture. As someone with no background in philosophy, I appreciate your clarity and detail. I find Jackson 'Mary's room" and Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat' very dissatisfying. Not the lectures -- which are terrific -- but the philosophical views. First, their attempt to distinguish between experience and information (i.e. Mary's experience of color or the bat's experience of echolocation) seem to be a trivial game of definitions. If subjective experience is the same as information, then Mary cannot know everything that there is to know about color in her black and white room because she cannot subjectively experience color. I do not see how this attacks the physicalist view or advances our understanding of the hard question of consciousness. Second, their implied intuition that experience differs from the physical proves both too much and not enough. Of course, I will never know what its like to be a bat. But then I'll never know what its like to be a brilliant and energetic philosophy professor either. Although I watch your lectures with interest and even compose this comment, I do not have access to your subjective experience by definition. I am merely an uninformed but curious person thinking about philosophy. It seems to me that Jackson and Nagel invalidate each others argument. We might agree with Nagel that the bat's subjective experience is inaccessible because -- you know -- it is a bat. But Jackson demonstrates that we would be incorrect because Mary's subjective experience is also inaccessible to us. We can assume that Mary's education included thousands of accounts of human subjective experiences of color. Mary being clever no doubt did some sort of statistical analysis of the many testimonials and made connections between the subjective experience of color and psychology. Mary's room is not a "Chinese Room", she is human, understands English, has experience new things -- the problem as I understand it permits Mary to have experienced startling beauty (in music perhaps) and to have enjoyed a physical response to a new pleasure (her first kiss perhaps). Thus when she learns from these testimonials that the reddy, redness of a red rose causes physical pleasure in many humans, she will not be surprised when she sees it for the first time. I am not convinced that she learns anything new when she emerges from her room other than her own idiosyncratic and therefore inaccessible subject experience. I imagine Mary emerging from the room and saying, "Oh yeah, that's what everyone was fussing about." I can also imagine that her reaction might disprove dualism if she says, "oh, I guess I'm like the 37% of humans who find a deep red to be invigorating" because then she will have shown that even her subjective experience is not unique. I know that this must be a naive reading of these two famous philosophers and would appreciate any comments that point me in the right direction.
thank you! I find it incredible how a comment from a casual youtube user is smarter than several Philosophy practitioners'papers on international journals. There should be a very simple rule for judging tought experiments: is this experiment theoretically possible? eg is it possible to know EVERYTHING about redness? The number of neurons and connections (responsible for that) obviously negates the possibility. Is it possible to document the rules for all possible chinese conversations? same! Is it possible to put a brain in a jar and connect it to the outside world so that it can communicate as if it has ears and mouth? Etc... If you start from an impossible pretense you can (try to) demonstrate anything.
@@LuigiSimoncini You're missing the point completely. The point of a thought experiment is not about its practical purpose or possibility. It's point is to communicate an idea to persuade. It's point is to stimulate thought towards a certain direction, so that someone can come up with a new insight on the topic.
In this case, Mary's thought experiment proves that there is absolutely no language to completely describe what subjective experience or qualia really feels like.
@@arletottens6349 That’s my point. Qualia needs direct experience. There’s no way a person who has experienced nothing but black and white their whole life would be able to imagine what the colour blue or green would LOOK like without direct observation
@@arletottens6349 If red can only be known by the activation of certain neurons, that only deepens the mystery, it doesn’t solve it. How can action potentials, synapses and sodium and potassium ions cause the experience of red? It doesn’t make any sense. There is no “redness” in those neurons. In fact what makes those neurons specific for red and not blue or yellow or green? Why does the specific neurons and their arrangement only give one type of colour and not the other colour? Also, do we all see the same colour, and how would you prove it? If you see the colour red, do I see it as blue from my perspective?
These are the questions that need to be answered.
I'll go with yours.
It seems strange to me to expect that someone should know what something is really like by only knowing facts. Physicalism never claims that it is enough to read a book about all physical facts to imagine the color red, does it?
What if there were scientific devices that would allow Mary to stimulate exactly the same neurons that are stimulated when she sees red?
Then she would never have seen an actual red object and still know what it is like to see something red.
Would that argue against physicalism?
Can you name even one other phenomenon besides conscious experience where complete knowledge of all the physical facts about it doesn't amount to knowing everything there is to know about it?
To say that there's this one exception, experience, that you can't in principle know about that way, but then explaining this seemingly problematic exception away be saying "well, you have to experience it" seems like special pleading to me.
It's basically like saying: "Well of course you can't know what the experience of seeing red is like just from knowing all the physical facts about the physical processes associated with seeing red, you have to actually experience it!"
But that's exactly the problem!
@@BugRib Surely having light of a certain frequency hit her eyes is physical information as much as sounds of words? Mary was not given all the physical information. Physical information is gained through all our senses. It is like explaining red by giving you different smells.
But again, if you have all the physical information, what does it matter whether you received it verbally or through a sense organ? There's no other phenomenon known to science where you have to receive the information in a particular way to know everything about that phenomenon, so why this special and utterly unique exception for knowing about a conscious experience?
@@BugRib but she does not have all of the physical information if she doesn't have the information of what experiencing actual color coming into her retina is like. She only has the faint shadow of it that language can provide.
@@ClayRavin
You're just restating the exception over and over again and not responding to his objection. The point is that it is exceptional! For every other physical process we are aware of, having "only the faint shadow of it that language can provide" is enough to completely understand the process in principle. If you learned everything about a process through words, it would be literally impossible for any new fact about the process to surprise you because you can understand literally every part of it. Consciousness is the exception, which is what you are stating over and over, and is the entire point of the argument.
I absolutely love that when hes explaining things not to do with philosophy hes like "i think thats how it works right? is this how you spell that?" and then goes off to explain in utmost clarity all these nuanced ideas haha
Yes, please don't think you learned anything about steam engines 🤣
He didn't know the precise term for 'visual cortex'. It's occipital lope.
@@brokenrecord3523 Definitely not about steam locomotives, at least any I've ever seen.
@@CarpeDiem-rm2vm
is it?
@@CarpeDiem-rm2vm "lobe", schmuck.
After absorbing hours of videos on this channel I only just realized the video is flipped horizontally and you are not in fact left-handed and writing backwards as I had foolishly come to believe. Very clever lol
Mary left her room and began to experience second order properties that she had never known before. Mary met a man named Noam at a demonstration. Noam explained that colorless green ideas can sleep furiously. Mary was stunned, Noam made reference to something no one had ever expressed before and he created it in his mind from scratch. Mary met a young man named Mark and Mark showed her is headset and virtual world he created within a computer. He has been working on non-Euclidean geometry and attempting to create a virtual experience for the participant. Mary learned a lot that day. But none of it was referential to the world that exists independent of the mind or AI. Mary stated that she can experience viewing an Escher lithograph and while she can gather sense data from her viewing, but just what is its nature and value of the data? Mary bumped into Fark Jackson in a line at a hot dog stand. In conversation, without conscious intent, Mary told Fran "you're a realist fighting a desperate fight." While grocery shopping, Mary noticed that the store was playing Radiohead's There There.
Just cos you think it, doesn't mean it's true.
Just cos you read it doesn't mean it's red.
There there..
We experience Truths within the Cartesian Theater all of the time, they often do not have anything to do with the world that exists independent of the mind. I am working on trying to understand what psychologists were attempting to research, in the first decade of the 20th century, in regards to abilities. The single unite characters that many were theorizing were extensions of universals including Intelligence as an entity. They believed that seeking the correlation between 12 to 15 cognitive tasks (factor analysis) they were getting a handle on such a property. Victorians were naive @@davewaring73
Honestly, this argument surprises me that so many find it compelling. There is a distinct difference between knowing the theoretical processes of physical phenomena and experiencing it for yourself. For example:
As a budding biology student, I saw many diagrams of cellular structures before I ever looked at one in the microscope. I didn't "learn" anything new when I looked at them directly. What I did was appreciate what I had learned more and found certain elements, that I struggled to understand, easier to comprehend.
Next we learned to stain our own slides. This actually represents certain aspects of the viewed subject in a false way. The structures stained purple aren't purple, just as those stained pink aren't pink. They are generally clear or transparent. This is why we stain them. In these cases, we're not looking for complete accuracy with regards to our certainty about how the subject is in its totality. Rather, we're usually looking for certain structures that are hard to view without the stains. Some experiments require multiple stains of the same subject to see all of what we're looking for.
None of this suggests that there are elements of my experience that are beyond the electroconductivity of my neurons or light-wave-length perceptions of the subject that react with the rods, cones, retina and the rest of my visual cortex. It's all physical, right down to whatever emotions of disgust or elation that I may exhibit while experiencing these novel occurrences.
Just as such, Mary, in her life lived with black and white objects, wouldn't learn anything by seeing color for the first time. She well knows how wavelengths work. She knows very well that everything has been constructed without color. If she truly had studied the physics of the visual experience, she would know and likely would have even tested at least simple experiments where the light spectrum is altered. Another example:
If she knows about friction (which she would tangentially have learned in basic physics, on her way to understanding wavelengths), even if she were never provided lighters, matches, or a flint, she could cut the legs off of a table and rub them together to see yellow, red, or orange. If she got a flame to ignite, she'd even have access to blue. Toss some white table salt on the flame and she might see shades of green.
There is simply no qualia here to speak of. The wave-length of green while burning chlorine gas, as opposed to painting a green line with some water-color paints, are entirely different. The "green-ness" isn't determined by some nebulous experience in the mind. It is caused strictly by the chemical processes that cause electrons to jump through orbitals and emit varying wavelengths of photons and the speed/distance it takes for those photons to reach our eyes. Just the same, redness can be caused by iron or it can be produced through looking at far-distant objects that have red-shifted. Mary would have known all of this - and much much more.
So, sure, she might react emotionally or have a profound feeling about seeing a color for the first time, but she wouldn't be surprised by it. Certainly she'd have learned nothing. She would only confirm for herself that the theories she'd been reading about were correct. That's what makes the argument so unimpressively unrealistic to me. It seems written by someone who is used to reading "facts" out of books and not understanding that science is taught, by the most part, through direct experimentation. It's possible that you could imagine that she has some odd form of only black and white color-blindness. But even then, people that are color-blind know full well that their senses are incorrect. They learn to compensate, using the theories in physics that govern the experience of color. They don't just divine that understanding from the ether.
Anyway, no one's going to bother reading this. It was merely a thought exercise to walk myself through the argument. Feel free to respond if you're the odd sort that read through it and cared. This is a terrible argument from my perspective though. Bizarre that it is so famous.
The popular convincingness of the argument seems to rely on the ambiguous definition of "knowledge" that exists nebulously in the mind of the listener.
It asserts that Mary has all knowledge of color before seeing a red object for herself, and then asserts that there was knowledge she was lacking.
The thought experiment only makes sense at all if you assume, as a premise, that there is such a thing as non-physical knowledge, and that the _experience of redness_ is such knowledge.
A person can imagine seeing the color red for the first time, and would rightly assume that, under credible conditions, this should generally result in the gaining of new knowledge.
What a person *can't* do is properly imagine *perfectly* understanding every single aspect of a field of science, in its totality, and with absolute, flawless clarity.
Your intuition doesn't help you tell whether or not that perfect, all-encompassing knowledge of the topic of color includes the Knowledge Of The Redness Of Red, and the thought experiment just sort of glosses it over to leave you implicitly assuming it doesn't.
Really, it's just a cute little sleight-of-intuition party trick, and it's not hard to fool someone with a party trick they've never seen before.
@fieldrequired283 Yep, my suspicion is that you are correct. Classical rationalism saw brains as knowledge sponges that pulled information out of reality. Sometimes, this was experiential, and others it was a reflective process, but it was always something that happened TO the brain, as opposed to seeing that brain as an integral part of a larger system that culminated into a greater experience.
My gut tells me that this is mostly done to salvage the idea of a higher power. However, I suppose that it could simply be a lack of an ability to conceptualise a larger system due to an unfamiliarity with seemingly "invisible" objects/phenomena. Perhapse both, and I suppose I shouldn't sit on this as a strict dichotomy either.
Anyway, appreciate the thoughts, mate. I love a good thought experiment. Wish more people did!
I have seen some people that are convinced that the only reason why we can experience different colors is because we have been given linguistical information about them. And they believe that some tribes that do not have description of some color in their language do not experience those colors. I.e. someone has to show the color to them and say "this is magenta" and only then they would be able to experience the color of magenta as something different than just purple.
I personally think this is bullshit, because I clearly remember experiencing a lot of colors in color palettes as different colors and without knowing their names. Only later did I learned their names. It is really is just a matter of paying attention to tiny differences of your perception and then recording those difference as words in a language, and to the wild tribes of Africa it may not be of any importance to record many different shades of whatever color, so they did not invent words for them. But if they had a lot of painters in their society they would invent all kind of words for all kinds of shades of different colors, because those colors would be of importance to at least some group of people.
Ways of thinking are just as important as language. I've been told that the ancient Greeks thought of colors very differently than we would, as in, they thought of shade and tone rather than color. This is why they would call the ocean "wine-dark" when the ocean is either green or blue and wine is red; the ocean and wine have similar depth of shade and tone even though the colors are different. What does this mean? I'd say that it doesn't mean that we can't see colors if we can't define them, but rather that defining colors is a value judgement, i.e., that if you define a color as red, you care that red is distinct from blue in the first place. But does it really matter that red is distinct from blue? Or does it matter more that the red of wine is similar to the blue of the ocean? Both types of information provide information useful in assessing the world around us. A culture may value one way of perceiving light over another and, at least in the ancient context before we had bar graphs and stoplights, one method isn't necessarily inherently more practical than the other.
@@MountedDragoon I agree with what you're saying, and personally I find it a little bit odd that people have fixated on Homer comparing the sea to "wine" and believing he somehow thought it was red, when he clearly said it was "wine-dark" and not "wine-red".
I find it fascinating that Europeans up until the fourteenth century were so uninterested in the colour orange that they didn't have a word for it until someone brought an orange from China. The colour was named after the fruit. And the crowd went wild. Especially the Dutch. They went mad for it. They even decided that carrots should be that great new colour instead of their natural purple.
@Mounted Dragoon on the other hand painted ancient Greek statues appear to have had blue eyes red lips and so on. So it may just be a translation issue. Or even a mistranslation issue on our part.
See also: "Reconstruction of the marble funerary stele of Phrasikleia"
@@j3ffn4v4rr0 Most of the time we see wine as purple, not red. Only when we pour it into something narrower or onto a surface in a thin layer does the red component begin to become more evident. The Greeks simply had a color category that identified the spectrum from blue through purple into one named category. We could divide the color green up into many different tones (as we do in designer charts for different paint shades) and give them different names. We do not have to learn the different names to see that the various shades are different. The Greeks could see this color difference between wine and the deep shades of the sea as well as we can, but they had no color differentiating terminology to put them in.
I think experiencing something is a lot more concrete & profound than reading about it. You can’t learn _everything_ about something without seeing or interacting with it first-hand.
i think reading or hearing about something can be more profound because it's hard to question things that are right in your face
Exactly. How do you define "all" the physical information? This so-called thought experiment is just playing with semantics, nothing more.
That's exactly the point. She can know all of the physical description of a phenomena, but until she actually experiences the phenomena, she doesn't know everything about it. Which tells us that there is something (the experience of phenomena) which cannot be described in terms of physics. No description of motion, wavelength, or energy tells you what it is like to see a color. It's not even conceivable that it's possible to bridge that gap. Which tells us that consciousness is a non-physical phenomena, at least in the sense that it is not a phenomena which can be described by the physical sciences. This can lead us either to a few beliefs, from emergence, to panpsychism, to dualism.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 pure rubbish
Taking it further to what we know about brain development, I wonder what Mary would actually "see" when everything her eyes sensed so far had never involved the cone cells. We know that in children, the ability to class colours (to merely distinguish them before even nämlich them) emerges gradually and requires some feedback to solidify. Red/pink is actually the first hue of interest in infants, probably for pattern recognition and finding the breast, after that, and the distinction between grey and brown comes very last in most kids.) What I am wondering about (in a hypothetical, but reality-bound way) is whether Mary's neuronal make-up as an adult would even be able to differenciate spontaneously, after a whole life of treating all cone cells as equal. She might be too atrophied at first and only sense diffusely that something ist off.
But also, physically speaking, there is no way to filter all colour out of the light, so it would have to be only the objects that show nothing but shades of true grey. Yet still they would reflect on every slightest aberration and distortion in the lighting sources. Mary is built to see colour, and her senses would have picked up on that. She would have always had a hunch, believingly or not.
You don't need to speculate. Go watch a video of a colored blind person trying those special glasses that allow them to see color. They can recognize and name the colors immediately Even though they have never seen them in their entire life.
@@stevedoetsch Thanks for pointing that out!
@stevedoetsch They don't actually see the colors they previously couldn't though. Colorblind glasses increase contrast, more.
A red-green colorblind person looking at a Autumn leaves will still see the leaves in shades of yellow, green and blue with or without the glasses.
A quick, half-baked thought is, with no interest of what that implies of physicalism validity, is... Let me first use some programming terms.
In programming, there is a term called a pointer or a similar one called reference. So computer's memory is pretty much like a book. Every page is analogous to a byte (which in turn is just 8 letters space that can be either 1 or 0). When we want to access any page, as humans, we conventionally use the page number as an index. Explicit indexing (i.e. using actual numbers like 1, 14 and 1200) is called using a pointer; while using an intermediary variable (like calling the page that has John's picture as j_page, instead of using 14 as an index, is called a reference. The relationship between the index and the page to which it points/refers to, is called mapping. So the page 14 maps to the page which houses John's picture. The term reference is most associated with the term variable. (int x = 5;) is a statement that creates a reference (we call it x instead of the explicit memory address like 0x739203cd), and maps it to an int value of 5.
This intro wasn't programming-oriented as I want to use the term 'mapping X to Y.' instead of using numbers as indices, I'll use the words as ones. The values mapped to are the facts (or thoughts for accuracy). So when I use the term (building), the word, the 8 English characters, as a whole forming a word (or a term) is my index. The idea (form as Plato calls it) that forms inside your head, abstract or visual, is the referenced value.
So I think Mary can have all the information to ever know, as a thought in her head. The ideas that she would form as she experiences new experiences, I would argue, are not new, in the sense they are not "information" per se, in the sense they don't describe reality. All she "knew" that she didn't before is merely the fact that that new qualia (experience, like that seen color or touched texture) maps to a previously known term (like wood is rough). She knew it's rough, and how rough the microsurface is for every single (smallest unit of touch sensors a human hand can sense) unit. All that's new is mapping a new qualia to a previously known term (whose all properties are known prior to this experience).
Thanks for this!
Jackson's thought experiment (or at least the summary given here) would have benefitted greatly from clarifying instead of "physical" and "non-physical" information the terms were just "objective" and "subjective" information. It's also good to point out how there are certain qualia and sensations that are impossible to describe without being recursive or relating to other qualia. For example as he was saying no matter how much objective scientific information you have regarding a sensory qualia, until you personally experience it AND attach emotional weight to it because that happens even subconsciously, you can't truly know that mental subjective information perfectly which is also unique to you.
I think "non-physical" works because it is a phenomena that cannot be described in physical terms. No description of energy state, motion, wavelength, or what have you actually describes what it is like to see a color. And it's pretty inconceivable for there to even be a way to describe it. As far as physics is concerned, subjective experiences don't even exist. We don't have any evidence of them from any scientific instrument.
[edit: The algorithm recommended this, and I appreciated it; I learned new things thanks to Mr. Kaplan! great video!] Maybe I'm just thinking too hard about it, but Jackson's description of Mary's Room seemed to be impossibly lacking to me. Nagel hit upon it with "What is it like to be a bat?" Experiences cannot be taught, by very definintion. They must be experienced to be experiences. Even when Mary saw a tomato on the tv, or in a textbook in black and white, she was not actually seeing a tomato. What we learn from Mary's Room is that whether physical or not, all knowledge cannot be codified into black and white, and that experiences are a personal form of knowledge that can be shared, but cannot be transferred.
It's worse though, Jackson's thought experiment assumes that you could codify all knowedge into a subbset of all knowledge (codifying all information about the world of vision, including color into a subset of that information - leaving the actual physical colors out of it). Mary would never truly understand "red" until she finally experienced it and then this "aha" moment would occur where she finally had the description and knowledge of "red" turn into the experience and understanding of "red".
Right. Or how codify everything there is to know about the feeling of bungy jumping?
There are ways you could encode that information even in black and white. This is merely about perception. And I think that is also the flaw of the argument. It says nothing about whether Physicalism is true or not. Even if there are things you cannot perceive, Physicalism may still be true.
Besides, you know, to experience white you actually need to detect red at least for most people. So the experiment starts wrong.
@@VeteranVandal it is a hypothetical scenario not something that necessarily reflects or has to reflect reality.
There is no such thing as "physical information" because information is not physical, so dualism is built into the scenario. Where is information? Show me one bit of information, digital or analog, and it is demonstrably a symbol of an immaterial idea, and not the information itself.
An idea related to your line of thinking is John Wheeler’s Participatory Universe.
@@numericalcode Interesting. The idea is axiomatic. My consciousness presumes that I am far enough outside the physical world to interface with it as a user.
She _doesn't_ have all the physical information. She only has the information that could be conveyed to her by language and interpreted successfully. The experience of seeing red cannot be conveyed in such a way, and this is not at all uncommon. I always wonder why philosophers and mathematicians take words so seriously when they're so obviously incomplete. It's always word games with the philosophers.
It is like materialism and idealism were renamed as physicalism and "some other non-physical stuff", as if the whole materialism-idealism dispute never existed. And it goes without saying that the whole "physicalism-nonphysicalism" (idealism-materialism) problem has already been solved by Hegel and this whole repetition of the dispute just ignores Hegel's dialectics. Ignores the fact that the whole problem is solved.
This channel may be about to blow up.
I'm pretty sure Mary would, upon leaving the room, be just as unable to see color as she was in her previous life. I expect her color-perceiving neurons would have atrophied in all that time. 🤔
I have always thought there is a big problem with this setup. We allow Mary to have all the information physics, biology and other sciences can provide. If physicalism is true, we can assume that there is a shared common state (or certain change of state) of human brains when some specific color is seen/experienced. Mary knows that her own brain has never been in that state (maybe she wears some recording brain scanner all the time or something).
However, using meditation and/or drugs she could experiment alternating her brain states - and with luck or determination eventually achieve the state of human experience of red - as verified by her brain scanner. Thus when she steps out of the room she would not learn anything new - expect perhaps how silly the whole "though experiment" was ;)
yeah no lol, you are (epically) wrong
You can't hallucinate things you fundamentally have never experienced before. A man born blind can't hallucinate vision.
@@Returnality Indeed - if you are blind from birth your brain develops differently - because the development is a trained by inputs. That might or might not apply to Mary also - regarding the colors.
However - to me this is a strong case for physicalism - if you don't have the physical apparatus for it (the potential configuration of certain states available in your brain) you can't experience it.
@@hufzte885 Might be. But as a general statement applies to much anything.
So could you perhaps elaborate a bit? I would really appreciate to get better insight of the matter.
@@EneriGiilaan Your initial claim was that somebody can experience something they fundamentally haven't before (I.E. the color red) through hallucinations. Is that still your claim?
Also, that second half is a non-sequitur. The only way we know of to experience vision is through the mechanisms of our brains. It simply does not follow that non-physical being couldn't also have a mechanism to experience vision. Granted, I have no earthly idea what that might be, but that doesn't mean it is impossible.
But if Mary, as said earlier, would be able to completely understand why someone would say "the sky is blue" when they see the blue sky, and is truly able to understand why and how they would see it, wouldn't she also be able to truly understand why someone would say "I have walked out of this black and white room which I have been in my whole life and have seen red" and how they also would see it and completely understand it as well? Including her?
It feels like this argument requires more than just total knowledge of color vision, because to get total knowledge of "color vision" and to understand it internally, you'd need a complete and total understanding of the human brain. Which would also bring you to a complete understanding of consciousness (because if consciousness comes from the brain and you completely understand the brain, you'd completely understand consciousness, and if consciousness doesn't come from the brain, you'd completely understand the mechanism by which consciousness interacts with the brain). This answer to this argument requires total knowledge of something we don't have total knowledge of.
Yes, that's the question. If Mary knew all the physical facts about how the brain functions--perhaps we can even suppose that she knows all the facts about how consciousness if produced in the brain--would she learn something new when she stepped out of the room? It seems, prima facie, that she would learn something new. All the stuff she knew before were facts about which neurons fired in whatever sequence. But when she left the room and looked at a red rose, she would learn what red looks like--what it is like to see red, herself. But then this fact must not be a physical, fact.
We can attempt to deny that conclusion, but it sure seems right, at least at first glance.
@@profjeffreykaplan "at first glance" does this imply that a thorough look would prove that this is not correct?
@@alittax apparently professor Kaplan doesn't like to take sides :)
@@LuigiSimoncini perhaps :)
@@profjeffreykaplan > If Mary knew all the physical facts about how the brain functions … she would learn what red looks like--what it is like to see red, herself. <
Well, this just sounds like a category error. "How the brain creates experiences" isn't the same sort of information as "What it's like to experience things." That doesn't imply the latter is a special, non-physical form of knowledge though. _All_ knowledge is acquired through experience. You learn what frequencies look red the same way you learn what red looks like; by being exposed to the appropriate information. 🤔
I disagree, Mary doesn't learn new information about red. She just discovers a new feeling. What it feels like to see red. But she didn't learn anything new.
What does red look like? Red looks like those certain waves hitting your color receptors. Mary had never had those waves hit her eyes, so she’s experiencing a new physical situation, I don’t see how this in any way could disprove physicalism.
You were describing a steam turbine engine. An actual steam engine uses the pressure of the steam to move a piston in a cylinder. And then you have to use a piston rod to turn the longitudinal movement of the piston into the turning of a wheel. (There have been some experimental steam turbine engines like the PRR S2 though.)
The main argument against Mary's Room is that Mary actually does not get new information from seeing the blue sky. Seeing the blue color is just seeing black and white on the blue receptor. It is in no way different than seeing red on the red receptor or green on the green receptor. By itself, each color is just a black and white signal for a specific receptor. If Mary knew everything about seeing color, she would have known that she can hold a blue filter in front of her black-and-white TV screen and see only blue. So she knows how it feels to see blue before she goes outside.
(If Frank Jackson would have known anything about light, he would have known that white light is a mixture of all colored lights, so seeing white implicitely means seeing blue, red and green.)
I suppose, if Mary wanted to see red, she could have simply cut herself and bled on the screen a bit. Bingo, red.
OK, that got real dark real fast...
Maybe, she would not be able to see colours as her brain wouldn't be wired up to see it.
"So, physicalism is false, that's it, we're done" XD
Information is the collection of symbols we experience. You can experience symbols through intellectual effort, but those symbols are not the same as those through direct experience because the observer is part of the system, and the mode of experience is part of the information and the symbols we experience.
The whistle sound is not a biproduct, it is a deliberate signal triggered by the operator engaging the mechanical whistle. the whistle sound IS the product. If you mean the valve that is used to release preassure in the boiler yes, it too makes a deliberate sound to signal the operator that the valve has engaged and the boiler is loosing preasure.
Jackson's insistence on the ability to convey a fact by description is, in my opinion, misguided. For something to be physical it has to be, at least in principle, knowable in the third-person perspective. Knowable by any means open to science. Once we get that right, the story can then be that Mary didn't know something about other people - what it was like for them to see colours. She couldn't know it until she experienced colours herself. So the point is that there is something about other people that Mary could never know whilst not experiencing it herself. Yes, Nagel got it right.
But then why doesn't that apply to any other phenomena? Can we only know everything about electrons by being electrons? Why this special exception for persons, i.e. conscious experience?
@@BugRib What you are referring to as an 'exception for persons' is not an exception imposed by us. It is (as far as we know) something peculiar to persons (conscious experience). There is in fact something we can only know about consciousness by being conscious, whereas there is nothing (as far as we know) about electrons that can only be known by being an electron. We are not imposing that difference, just noting it.
I'm profoundly offended that Mary donned blackface to facilitate this experiment. - Michal Eric Dyson
Did she don blackface or whiteface? I think she was stripped.
Mary never existed.
Lol
Lol
How to make this thought experiment more fun:
Mary hasn't experienced an orgasm. She knows all about the anatomy, physiology, neurology, etc. of orgasm, but she hasn't had one. Then one day she buys a vibrator ...
So I'm watching this video and this guy is really excited about this girl, Mary, and this thing, "physicalism", and so I am suddenly compelled to head down to the comments to look for how long it takes to get to a comment like this one. (I'm a healthy guy, the more this guy was talking about imagining Mary with such enthusiasm, the more Mary just got hotter and hotter, sorry, but this is what we are dealing with here in Male Consciousness World. Now I have to meet Mary, sit and talk with her for 15 or 20 minutes so I can de-objectify her from my brain. It's maddening, he's still talking as I write. Stop talking about the color Red, all I can see is pink!).
Reading about orgasms from a biology textbook is not the same as physically having an orgasm - physicalism most affected...
Either we proved the limitations of language for information transfer, or the existence of the human soul - and all it took was a vibrator.
@@jeronimo196 Agreed. Just as reading about the color red doesn't have much bearing on the experience of seeing it. And that non-connection is in no way a problem for a purely physical interpretation of the universe. This thought experiment, or at least this channel's description of it, is complete hogwash.
@@KarlBunker Actually... I'm pretty sure that there have been experiments specifically about electrodes stimulating the brain for orgasms, so... Might even be an easier question to resolve than the one about the colour red.
The way I would go about explaining or demonstrating difference between the two kinds of information in Mary's Room is as follows:
The kind of information Mary has is like an equation that predicts, say, the movement of objects over time, as is, without any sort of specific values.
The experience of colors after exiting the room is like getting specific values for her equations. This way you can very clearly see that they are different kinds of information, but they don't quite feel as distinct in their physicality then.
The knowledge of how things would interact if they were in a specific configuration and the knowledge of them being in a specific configuration are different, but still very physical.
You could of course further argue that Mary could already know the configuration of everything, so the only thing truly new is the experience itself. In such a case there might not be a true distinction between actually experiencing it or just knowing it is that way. This is a situation where perfect knowledge of the state of all things is assumed, and we simply have no way to imagine how such an experience would be one way or another, because we ourselves have no capacity to attain perfect knowledge.
On the topic of Epiphenomenalism - I believe it was called - there is a saving grace for the idea. It is very much possible that there is one physical mechanism that goes through the same processes as the non-physical mental processes and arrives at the same conclusion, or that experience is more like a display of the process like you would have on a GUI. You could, as an outside viewer, experience the whole thought process through a display (including the experience of making the decisions) without actually being the mechanism that made those decisions. A bit far fetched, but the idea has no logical contradictions. Experiencing making a decision and actually making a decision need not be the same thing. But to apply Occam's razor, while it is possible to separate the two, without one being able to affect the other, there is little reason when you can easily explain the same phenomenon without introducing a non-physical object. A non-physical consciousness is possible, but unnecessary, and also not interactable so even if it does exist, for all intents and purposes, it might as well not.
I would argue that when Mary really understands all the physical stuff, she might be able imagine how red looks like just by knowing what happens in her brain when red is seen, just by playing this scenario through in her head.
Just like a musician that has learned music theory and has only heard the piano keys, might be able to imagine higher and lower notes beyond the piano, microtones or sounds of other instruments.
I am not a physicalist, but an issue I have with this thought experiment is that, the information Mary learns through the TV is physical in terms of the changes to her neurological structure, but a single mode of information cannot create ANY and EVERY type of modification to said structure. No amount of study (that we know of) can disconnect the right and left hemispheres at the corpus callosum, but surgery can. No amount of information intake can develop the motor cortex and its capacity to trigger fine motor movement of the hand and fingers, but we do that through moving and utilizing our muscular structures. No amount of study can reproduce the chemical process of a red cone firing a signal to the visual cortex along with the subsequent structural changes caused by that sensory experience.
There may be unlimited knowledge, but there are very limited ways it can manipulate brain structure. It can only influence certain aspects of memory, and perhaps some executive function.
probably the most obvious flaw in this argument right from the start is that Mary does experience red light in the black and white room because white is either producing all the wavelengths of color or is reflecting all of the wavelengths of color so her eyes are experiencing red. they just happened to be experiencing red in equilibrium with the other colors that comprise white.
Let's extend this to say Jane is following exactly in Mary's footsteps, learning information about vision in a black and white room. Jane has learned everything, but not left the room. After having experienced seeing color, could Mary return to the room and teach, or share anything new to Jane? Could Mary possibly give more information about seeing, that Jane did not have?
The explanation of how a steam engine works is absolutely priceless - 13:!5 - the thing you need to know is that, at the heart of a steam engine, is a 'wheely-doo'
when u can sit thru a 21 minute video about a subject u know absolutely know nothing about, people u never heard of, theories whose names and terms are meaningless and still be confused at the end of the video, and yet still enjoyed watching it u wish u had a teacher like this 40 yrs ago when u were still in school lol, i think this is the 3rd of ur videos iv seen and remember enjoying those as well, i prefer simplistic terms myself so i generally go by "shit happens, and sometimes we make shit happen after thinking about how to make it happen", cheers for the vid
Mary also had a little lamb. She didn't have all the physical information, she only had information about physical phenomena that she never actually experienced. Seems to me.
that's a shockingly clever thought experiment by Frank Jackson, in my view it doesn't disprove physicalism, but instead implies a hierarchy of self-contained infinite-knowledge spaces in which some are larger than others, and some are supersets, similar to how Cantor proves some infinities are larger than others in set theory, but regardless it's a really well designed argument
*Mary’s Circular Room*
The argument is circular: it assumes that the mental effect of seeing red is not a physical phenomenon.
If it is a physical phenomenon, then Mary does not have all the physical information about light/color, and the premises are self-contradictory.
She doesn't have all the physical information available. Her light cones didn't have access to light waves that appear red. It's like learning how to tell jokes only by reading joke books and hearing people tell jokes on tv but never having someone to try to tell a joke to.
I don't believe epiphenomenalism is that "radical"... or even that new.
It's just a different way to posit the *inexistence of free will.* Meaning that the desires and intentions we form are *_physical processes,_* but just as we can *_perceive_* a physical phenomenon like the color red *_and_* feel *_what it's like,_* we can also feel what it's like to... have desires and intentions.
5:38 “it seems just obvious” must be a first warning sign in a philosophical debate that fudging is coming up.
Her experience of seeing red doesn’t mean she is learning something new about the phenomena that is red light, or how the eye and brain analyse it. What she is learning, that is new, is how her mind and emotions react to receiving that information. That is a whole different area.
If you want to put no bounds on areas of knowledge, then knowledge is going to be limitless - which is ok, but then you can’t create even a thought experiment with someone knowing ‘everything’. (They would have know about how they know what they know and know about how they know that and…. In an endless loop.)
Re: epiphenomenalism for consciousness
What if a certain part of the brain handles all those decisions, but consciousness is just the signal from the final decision? It’s still “you” making the decisions. Would be like the situation of people with blind sight (definition: the ability to respond to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them. This condition can occur after certain types of brain damage.)
Hehe, thanks for another nice of study of how crazy places are reached with fuzzy thinking combined with confidence.
Great lecture. In my view, Mary will recognize red when she sees it. Furthermore, what she learns seeing red for the first time is simply a series of chemical reactions in her brain. Whatever it is, it is not a new property of red. All the properties of red exist independently of the observer.
lol wut? red doesn't exist at all without an observer.
@scambammer the word "red" doesn't, but the wavelengths and energy levels of the photons still do. So yes, all the properties of "red" would still exist without an observer. It just wouldn't have the name "red" attached to it.
Yes, thank you. Light is an electromagnetic wave where frequency is equal to color.
It seems to me that when we see red in our minds, our experience is pretty much the same inside our brains. There is not a plausible reason to think otherwise. The biology of our eyes and brains is pretty much the same. Otherwise, medicine would not work.
This is exciting, or whatever, it makes me think of my old days at school, or wherever, going to classes in science or whatever. It really doesn't matter what I think or how I explain it, or whatever, since with these many instances of underdetermining things, or whatever, I'm not sure myself about what I am talking. Or whatever.
The problem with Mary's box is that knowledge of a "thing" is not the thing itself. Just as a mathematical explanation for a function is not the physical function itself, it's a description, knowledge is the brains best guess of what the description of a "thing" is and it's never going to be the thing itself, That however doesn't mean the knowledge doesn't have both a physical source and a physical description.
I believe there is a missing piece for knowing all that is physical about experiencing colour. In this argument, Mary hypothetically knows everything there is to know about colour physically. With this being said, according to a physicalist, when a human experiences colour the sensations and feelings we get from looking at this colour are coming from the brain. If Mary truly knew everything there was to know about colours physically, then she must also have understood this as well since feeling a sensation is physical since we feel these sensations thanks to our neurons (something physical that takes up space). We are arguing that Mary would learn what it is like to feel colour, that the feeling of looking at colour is not physical. If this were the case, then that would mean sensations would not come from our brains physically through neuron transfers and other scientific methods, but it would come from a separate part of ourselves. If we were to put a person under an MRI and scan his or her brain activity while looking at colours, we would notice certain areas of the brain do in fact light up and with these areas missing from our brain it would cause us to not feel what it is like to see a colour. If Mary were to have the exact same physical neurons light up as these individuals when they see any colour (a physical feeling as explained earlier) then she therefore wouldn't learn anything new since she would know the physical sensation of looking at every single colour.
I am curious to know your responses, what do you guys think about this?
The Jackson Mary’s room seems a variation of the famous Kant’s room. Kant says that we can only know the World through our senses, which are like windows of the external world and we can never leave this room, we never may know the physical object itsellf (das Ding an sich). A daltonic person will always see red as green. And each brain makes a personal interpretación of what his senses send to his brain. So all knowledge comes by "sensitivity and understanding". Which means that dualism is unavoidable, and there will always be a mind-matter dualism. We can never leave Kant's room, and I think it is better for us, because it allows for each person a view of life, which means our personal liberty. Thank you Immanuel Kant for this gift of freedom.
And yet Mary’s act of saying, “I am experiencing something new, the color red” is a physical event, while it is undoubtedly caused by an alleged epiphenonemon.
I don't know if the thought experiment quite holds up. If Mary truly knew everything about color, then she would know what it's like to see red. That's one of the things she would learn. Then when she went outside of the room she'd have that marvelous experience. All this stuff she knows about color, she can suddenly see for herself. But she hasn't learned anything new.
It's like doing a little science experiment to prove that the earth isn't flat. It might be fun, and you might be more certain now that the earth isn't flat, but you haven't learned anything new.
The thought experiment excludes some sense experience until she goes out of the room. It has a fundamental flaw, thus it is invalid.
The thought experiment excludes some sense experience until she goes out of the room. It has a fundamental flaw, thus it is invalid.
Observing color is a physical experience that gives information. She was not able to experience this in the room, therefore, her information was incomplete. Just saying that she had all the information doesn't make it so.
Agreed, also nice flotsam & jetsam pfp
All of this seems more to be pointing to the difference between book learning and experiential learning and the question of "when can I say that I know something".
I don't understand why one would claim that the physical experience of seeing a color in person instead of merely learning about it is not physical. How is it not physical? She did not have all of the physical information of the color before she experienced it, because she had not experienced it. This argument's core claim is arbitrary and not proven to be factual.
When one step in your argument starts "It just seems obvious...", that's probably where you went wrong. If Mary knows EVERYTHING about color, then she knows what color will do to her brain, and how human brains react to that. Maybe the "excitement over novelty" part of the brain lights up, maybe it changes a human's life in a certain way, etc. So nothing about the experience would surprise her. Unless she doesn't know enough about the structure of her own brain, but then she would be learning something about her own brain, not about color.
We could talk about what is new and different in the situation after she sees color, but did she LEARN anything? no, learning implies new understanding, and understanding means at least being able to conclude something new.
(Obviously I added a few more assumptions, but that is only because these words ("all knowledge about", "learn") were not defined, which is also a flaw in the argument.)
This is somewhat related to Searle's Chinese room, if at the end the person walks out of the room and learns Chinese in the context of the real world.
I'm not sure how broadly this applies: Suppose that Mary has normal physiology, and that her friend Sue, who is red-green colorblind, is part of the same process. When they come out, they will not experience red and green the same way. Therefore, whatever new knowledge we attribute to Mary can't really be considered knowledge, because it's not true for Sue. That means physicalism is not contradicted.
Hi again! Big fan - all that! Quick question: don’t you think it’s kind of tragic that Jackson’s question, after Redness is revealed to Mary, is a yes/no question (“did she learn something new” Y/N?”) directed not at her, but at a panel of philosophers willing to lock her in a B&W room for a lifetime just to prove a point? The tragic thing for me is that, had the question been different - had Jackson tried to understand what redness meant to her (*what* she learnt, rather than whether a new block of information was added to her brain stuff), then he might have solved the Hard Problem of a Consciousness instead of birthing the most instant-classic of thought experiments. On top of that, the very question he was posing (about the nature of Qualia) kind of suggested the actual question he was asking, which is: why did it feel like something for Mary to experience redness at that moment given everything she already knew about redness? What Mary learns about redness is the answer to the question of why experience is in the first place. At least that’s what it seems like to me, and the reason why I’m so addicted to your channel: I feel like you’re circling something big across the various topics you cover. 😊
Epiphenomenalism may not be quite that radical if you consider a documented medical phenomenon called "confabulation." My memory of the details is hazy, but I seem to remember learning about an experiment involving victims of brain damage with paralysis of one limb. The brain damage was such that it impaired awareness of their own paralysis and may have even caused something akin to a phantom limb. When asked to raise the healthy limb, they did so easily. When asked to raise the paralyzed limb, they signaled intent to comply but then failed to do so. When asked why, they gave seemingly sincere reasons like, "Oh, I just decided I didn't want to," or "I was more tired than I thought I was." This is presented as evidence of the brain creating motivation after the fact in order to maintain coherence. In other words, an epiphenomenon was generated and credited with causality even though the actual cause was purely physical. Confabulation might just be a pathological version of something that happens all the time even in healthy minds. Decisions like picking up an umbrella may in fact be caused just by the interaction of particles and neurons in the brain, with the epiphenomenon of conscious thought then essentially stealing the credit for causation.
The simplest argument against epiphenomenalism is the fact that we can talk about it.
@@recompile How is that an argument against it? It would mean that our 'talking about it' happens due to impulses that occur slightly before we actually sense (are conscious) that we are 'talking about it' and it is those impulses that cause us to continue talking about it...ie do iterative thinking while simultaneously giving us the perception that 'we're thinking about it. I'm not saying how much I buy into it, but I think that would be the explanation from someone convinced it is true.
There is a big assumption that's hidden in Mary's Room experiment. It's assuming that everything physical can be learned like Mary learned it. The way our brains experience reality also exists in a purely physical world and apparently Mary didn't have access to that knowledge from inside the room.
Do we not have to figure in the question as to whether, wholly deprived of colour, Mary would possibly not have developed the capacity to register colour, just as if we are deprived, say, language (famous wild human cases) during our development we have insurmountable difficulty in acquiring such? Can this thought experiment take that particular liberty? No problem with all the others. We do not quibble with Determinism because every part of it is predicated soundly on cause and effect, if it is not the very summation of cause and effect. But here cause and effect seem strained. Mary, having spent her whole time in a room would struggle with depth perception too at least to begin with.
Does Mary “learn something new” or does she *experience* something new? This is simply the hard problem of consciousness cast in a way that presupposes we can never solve (or lose interest in) it. It’s arguments like these that push academic philosophy toward irrelevance.
"All of the physical information," except, ya know, what it looks like.
I can be told that sand paper is rough, but I don't know what it feels like until I touch it, but I would consider touching it an advancement of my physical understanding of sandpaper and not some mental phenomenon. Similarly, seeing red.
In regards to the last point of the video about Epiphenomenalism, does it reject causation by mental stuff, or just by subjective experience/Qualia? This seems an important distinction since a belief is perhaps representable as patterning of the brain, whereas there is still another step to take to true subjective experience. In this reading of it, it wouldn't go against our intuition, depending how we identified the agent involved. If the person picking up the umbrella is identified as the physical body including thoughts and beliefs, then it fits. It would only go haywire if we identified with the subjective experience, in which case it would indeed preclude any "one" doing anything.
He is so close and still just misses it! She doesn't know "all" of the physical information. She does not have all the physical interaction of light waves on her eye. Period. It's still physical.
I didn't understand this at all. Reading about being stabbed will never give you the same agonising pain of being stabbed. It doesn't stop being stabbed from being a physical reality though.
Well put. Much more succinctly than I have been saying it, but the point is the same. I use a hammer blow to symbolize the effects of seeing read. If we assume it's ALL physical from the time photons hit our retinas 'til a perception of red pops into our heads, then it's all physical/chemical reactions. And until someone receives the actual photons, their nerve processes NEVER experience the 'impact' of seeing read just like your hapless victim never feels the stab of a knife until they experience it, personally.
Mary sees red for the first time. Nothing changes. She merely gets to confirm all the knowledge she was given through direct observation. The physicality of the chemistry of her eyes and brain is rearranged merely to confirm the information she was given. This presupposes no emotional response. However, when we say “she finally feels what it’s like” this is simply yet another way of saying she observed what she already knew to be true. This confirmation marks changes within Mary as measured in time and space. No new “thing” was created, atoms were simply rearranged within Mary due to her exposure to colour. If we focus upon her emotional response, and suggest something new was created, as in “Mary now knows how it feels to see colour, which she did not before”, this is not something new, this is simply us looking at the same physical change through the metric of a different classification. If we imagine an alien observing Mary the whole time, and it observes her brain during the learning process she undergoes learning all there is to know about light, and then her observing colour for the first time, the alien would see nothing created, only further rearrangement of the atoms that make up the entity known as Mary. Nothing new was created, unless we decide to classify Mary’s experiences within different categories purely to give credence to the original supposition.