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238,337 Views ⢠Sep 4, 2020 ⢠Click to toggle off description
Princess Elisabeth's attack on Descartes:    â˘Â Princess Elisabeth's attack on Descar... Â
This is a video lecture about Frank Jackson's Mary's Room thought experiment, which is designed as an argument against physicalism. Mary is a vision scientist who spends her whole life in a back-and-white room. It is stipulated that she knows all the correct physical information. But when she emerges from the room and sees a red object for the first time, it very much seems like she learns something new: what red looks like. So, if she learns something new, then she must not have known everything. So there must be non-physical information. So physicalism is false. That's the argument. Also, this video goes in to a discussion and explanation of Epiphenomenalism, the view that conscious mental events are byproducts of physical events that do not themselves causally act on the physical world. This is part of an introductory level philosophy course.
Views : 238,337
Genre: Education
Date of upload: Sep 4, 2020 ^^
Rating : 4.956 (57/5,153 LTDR)
RYD date created : 2022-02-15T15:16:39.741238Z
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YouTube Comments - 2,578 Comments
Top Comments of this video!! :3
Maryâs scientific understanding of color is like software running inside a virtual machine. It doesnât have direct access to the hardware sensors and the input is âsanitizedâ 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.
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mary actually received new physical items- red & blue light waves, that she did not have before.
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I think Marysâ room fails to disprove physicalism. It does a wonderful job of exploring the difference between abstract knowledge and concrete knowledge
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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.
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"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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Can't stop giving this guy's videos likes.
His explanations are so good.
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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.
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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!
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@Wolf-ln1ml
1 year ago
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").
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