Epiphenomenal Qualia
Do you know what it is like to see red?
What happens if you feel pain, smell a rose or if you simply see a colour? Are all these emotions, sensations and so on purely based on some physical structures or facts? There are philosophers who believe that there is more than physical qualities to our sensational experiences, namely certain features which they call qualia. Qualia signifies the ‘what-is-it-like’ to be e.g. in pain or to feel jealously. In his essay “Epiphenomenal Qualia“ Frank Jackson argues for the existence of such non-physical states. In the following essay I will present his thought experiment – his argument in favour of qualia – and the conclusion he draws from that, namely that physicalism must hence be false. Afterwards I am going to show that this refusal does not follow from Jackson’s Gedankenexperiment.
Imagine a female super scientist, who lived all her life in an isolated room. She is entirely healthy but does only see black-and-white because in her little world there are no other colours. Let us call her Mary. So Mary studies intensely natural sciences and has also contact with the outer world through monitors or what you else could think of except for any colour experiences. In the end she knows everything one could know about colours, e.g. their different wave lengths of light and how our eyes absorb them. That we possess cones and rods and that the former are used for colour seeing because they have the pigment rhodopsin etc. There is no physical information Mary does not know.
Then one day she is released from her black-and-white room and experiences for the first time in her life colours, e.g. a red tomato. What happens? Will Mary be surprised, excited or whatsoever because of the blaze of colour? Jackson claims, yes. But how could this be, if the pre-released Mary did know everything about colour experiences? He says that Mary lacks the fact ‘what-is-it-like’ to see red. Thus, if she has had all physical information and learns now something new, she must gain some non-physical fact. What follows out of it, Jackson maintains, is that physicalism must be false. Since physicalism assumes that all facts have a physical nature, you can show that this theory is wrong, if you show that there are non-physical facts, as Jackson apparently did.
There are a lot of philosophers who brought up many arguments against the hypothesis that Mary learns a new fact in the way Jackson thinks. Daniel Dennett for example claims that if the pre-released Mary really did know everything physical and biological about colour experiences, she will be in no way surprised. There will be nothing new for her when being released, because she would know the colours already. I find that hypothesis a bit too strict. Mary might know what it means to see a colour, but she never had the real experiences, so there must be at least something new that she gains. I am now going to discuss some of the arguments for this assumption as well as my own supposition and will show that nevertheless one does not have to refute physicalism.
A first approach is the hypothesis that Mary gains acquaintance or indexical knowledge. What is meant by this? So imagine you know all there is to know about a certain person or a certain city. But you never see him/her or it. Then one day you get to know the person or city, so you get in touch with it. Is there any non-physical fact about that experience? It is simply that you become acquainted with something.
At this point I would go a step further and ask myself, what does it mean ‘to become acquainted’ with something, e.g. with colours? What happens in me? I know everything about them, so what is going on when I see them for the first time? There is only one thing, I guess, that Mary does not have in her room and this is the experience itself.
Although she did know what happens in our eyes when a visual stimulus arrives and how our brain manipulates this information, Mary did not experience this physiological incident/activity by herself. So perhaps she could imagine in her room what it is like to see a colour but she never pass the cycle of the pigment rhodopsin in the cones of her eyes. Thus what lacks is neither a non-physical fact nor some other knowledge it is simply the biological and chemical process and this indeed is a physical event. For that I could say that physicalism is not refuted by Jackson’s Gedankenexperiment.
What brought me to this hypothesis was the question, how we can believe that all physical facts can be conveyed to someone through a black-and-white medium. How should Mary have learned all of the physical facts about colour experiences without having experienced them herself? She would have to evolve a mental capability which enables her to activate the adequate photoreceptor cells and somehow simulate the processes that are going on during a colour experience. But this is rather a future vision and not mentioned in Jackson’s experiment.
There are philosophers who think that Mary learns a new capability when released. They claim that after seeing a colour for the first time, e.g. red, she will be able in future to recognize this red, to imagine it in her mind and to bear the red in mind. The pre-released Mary does not have these abilities. Since she learns no new information or fact the Mary experiment provides no basis for doubting physicalism.
I agree with the last point but I do not think that Mary learns a new ability. She has already the ability to see a colour, to recall it in mind etc. But she does not apply or use this ability because of her imprisonment and her lack of the capability to activate the appropriate processes in her mind without the adequate stimulus (the colour). The latter she will just as little learn in the outer, colourful world as inside her room. Thus, there is no new ability that Mary learns when seeing a red tomato but she applies her innate mental capabilities, which she was not able to use inside her room, since there were no possibilities to do so.
To sum up, I do not believe that there is anything non-physical in Jackson’s Gedankenexperiment because Mary does not gain non-physical facts when being released and seeing a colour for the first time in her life. All she acquires is an involvement in the experience and therefore an application of her natural human mental capabilities, namely to differentiate different wave lengths of the light with the help of her photoreceptor cells in her eyes and a computation of these stimuli in her brain. Thus the Mary experiment does not refute physicalism.
