Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (Epiphenomenal Qualia)

mzungu

Nagel (1974) suggested that what we know of and experience of the world and objects within it is somewhat limited to 'subjective perspective'. In doing so he uses the example of a bat. We may know the facts about the biology of bats and how their sonar operates, but we will never actually know what it feels like to be a bat or to experience objects via a bats sonar.

Frank Jackson (1982) devloped this anti-physicalist argument further and uses the example of a scientist called Mary:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white
television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red," "blue," and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue." (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television.)

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

It would appear Jackson's refutation of physicalism holds merit. Although an interesting counter comes from Nemirow (1990) who believes Mary does not learn anymore outside the room than she does in it. He says she gains the ability to see red, but this is not new knowledge, although it is a new discovery.

Thoughts?

Jackson, F., 1982, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.

Nagel, T. 1974, “What is it like to be a bat?”, Philosophical Review 83: 435–50.

Nemirow, L., 1990, “Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance,” in Lycan: 490–499.

diamind

Their arguments point out the existence of an epistemic gap between our knowledge of physical and mental facts. If P is the complete index of all physical facts about reality, can facts about consciousness be deduced from it? I would say no - empirical studies of the brain, such as scans and surgery, cannot give me any sort of information on how the subject is feeling or what it is like being them. This subjective aspect of experience can only be directly grasped by introspection, and never by third parties (search "problem of other minds" for more details). This seems to be intuitive to a lot of people.

One way the physicalist can retort to both Nagel and Jackson (as well as David Chalmers' zombies) is by pointing out that the premise that physical facts alone cannot account for qualitative conscious experience begs the question against physicalism - it assumes immediately that physicalism cannot be true. However, I think this objection is mistaken since the premise in question is not proposed in an ad hoc manner. The anti-physicalist is not proposing it before the fact, just to eliminate physicalism for the sake of their own agenda, but rather proposing it after the fact, i.e. after seeing that physicalism failed to provide a complete account of consciousness.

Torakx

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

When "Mary" was in the black and white room receiving information from a black and white television, she was not receiving all the information to be had, via her other senses.

Which tells me that there is subjective facts and shared subjective facts; and no other real/grounded facts outside of this.
The famous "double slit test" seems to show that nothing in the universe exists until it is measured.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsxA7OU7fR0 Skip to around 6 minutes if you are familiar with the experiment.
I would also advise to ignore the person(uploader) who interjects near the beginning.

These measurements create those shared subjective facts as well as our individual subjective facts(senses and original thoughts if such thoughts exist).
Edit: I might also use "things in themselves" instead of shared subjective facts and "things" instead of subjective facts.

Black Swan

Applied to approaches taken in research, there are quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods of both quantitative and qualitative (i.e., triangulation). More often than not, although not exclusively, quantitative research has been associated with measuring things "physical," and qualitative research measuring things that were subjective. Attempts have been frequently made to measure things subjective by quantitative methods (e.g., subjective survey of opinions with quantitative Likert scales), which was essentially a form of mixed methods that have been often considered problematic by those researchers that focus on the quantitative measurement of things "physical." Whereupon, the distinction has often been made between the two major approaches by labeling "physical" as hard sciences and "subjective" as soft sciences, the latter lacking rigour by their hard science critics.