POPc Participant Lucy’s First Post:
So it looks like Adam did a version of the ‘Mary’s room thought experiment’ on William, except with bananas instead of the color red (which is kinda weird because bananas aren’t ‘quales’ but I guess the overall effect is the same). I never really got how anyone could possibly claim that Mary didn’t learn something new. I think the whole thing really hinges on the ambiguity of the word ‘learn’ though. We tend to think of learning as acquiring data or facts, like Mary does. And then we think about it more and we realize learning also involves developing skills (probably more than acquiring facts). If someone just watched movies and read books about riding bikes they wouldn’t be able to ride a bike. But, now it seems weird to think of color-perception as a skill like riding a bike; but it seems more like a skill than an acquired piece of information. So maybe it’s not about ‘learning’ or ‘knowledge’. Mary definitely has a new experience. But was this ever in question? I just don’t see how learning all the physical facts that constitute an experience can be considered a substitute for the experience itself. They’re just two different things….And I also don’t see why any of this has to be such a huge problem for materialism.
POPc Participant Lucy’s 2nd Post:
I think I learned what nominalism was at POPc, but now that I’m thinking about it again, I’m getting confused. So there’s no such thing as ‘red’, understood as an essential property of things, it’s just a predicate we apply to things. We point to things and call them red and so then they’re red (there’s probably a bunch of things wrong with this crude description). So maybe Mary doesn’t know that what she sees is red. In fact she probably doesn’t. But regardless things would be different for Mary (I think) if she saw blue. So, there’s something in the world by virtue of which whatever Mary sees is either red or blue. There’s a reason we apply certain predicates to certain things. What is this reason?
POPc Participant Lucy’s 3rd Post:
So, I don’t know if the ‘being” or consciousness or some particular phenomenal experience is gotten rid of just because we (or someone) give a material explanation of it. We can give a physical explanation of the process of perceiving red (I think?...it has something to do with light-wave, and retinas and cones and rods and stuff), and yea, the explanation itself isn’t going to be ‘red’. But that’s like opening a cookbook and expecting to find the food itself in there. I have no idea if this makes sense…
Shottenkirk’s Response to Lucy
Dear Lucy,
This Mary thing is actually an old debate that’s dressed up to look like a new one. Actually, it’s two debates: a metaphysical one and an epistemological one. The metaphysical one is of course the “what’s real” question, with the opposing teams being the materialists and the – what we should call for present purposes – the “non-materialists” as they are not quite idealists (though probably related in a cousin-type fashion). The epistemological one is, again, the old question: what constitutes knowledge? In this particular version of the debate the question is whether knowledge is completely constituted by the information that is characterized as “third-person” – that information that we call “scientific”. This would then leave out of the so-called knowledge category all first-person subjective experience, even subjective experience of (scientific) third-person perceptual phenomena.
“Qualia” is a term that has been used by various people, with varying definitions. For Goodman, it was the presented particular quality specifying color, place, and time. It was a phenomenalist definition of the basic unit of reality instead of a physicalist definition (which would have been an object or something like the Logical Positivists’ “the given”). Even though people are often using the term “qualia” to refer to a subjective part of perception that seems cleaved from the third-person, scientific, or “physicalist” part of perception, Goodman was not really using the term in this way. He did not mean for qualia (or in my own non-pretension version, “quales”) to be an argument for mental, non-physical entities. In fact, he did not countenance abstract objects.
Having made that disclaimer regarding the term, the main question(s) still remain: What’s real? And, What constitutes knowledge? Is it just the things that form the basis of third-person, objective experience that we thus share with others? Or is it the things that are part of our own sense-experience; the things we hold tight within our own worlds, our own private experience? I’m not sure it’s a skill vs. knowledge distinction that you made; that would be a distinction between information stored in the declarative part (in the neocortical) of the brain and the non-declarative part (in the basil ganglia). Aristotle noticed these basic distinctions in his Ethics… The distinction is really more along the lines of whether knowledge is constituted by materialist facts, or whether knowledge incorporates mental (e.g., non-physical) data that is subjectivist, private, and non-public in nature.
The historical difficulty with [private] sense data (cf. Hume’s famous difficulty with this issue) is that even if it serves as the basis for a physicalist “given” (i.e. physical object, not just a phenomenal sense experience), that “given” has an odd way of evaporating. We think it’s solid but it’s not. For my sensing of something is always my sensing, and if scientific experience is to have a footing in empirical data, that data must always have its footing in private sensing. So the problem becomes: where is this objective reality and is it still objective? A mind-independent reality (e.g. the kind the materialist wants) has a tendency to easily slip over into a mind-dependent one.
There has to be a line that is drawn between the inner and the outer. We want the physical object to be real, we want it to be shared data, we want it to be objective. But how do we obtain it? Through sensing. But ah, here’s the difficulty. For most, we want a shared experience, a shared world; we want the joint mushrooming of the phenomenon that we call “knowledge.” And so, if that’s true – which is the world science has promised us – what happens to that subjective, ineluctably private world we each call “my experience”?
I think you’re right to say that the problem is, in many ways, one of definition. If the notion of “learning” is confined something that is isomorphic with third-person knowledge, such as a materialist description of the world – one that is always a description of things from the third-person, e.g., “objective” perspective – then we seem puzzled at the idea that our own subjective experience is somehow not a part of what’s called “knowledge”. I mean, how my experience of red (or a banana) not count as knowledge; or, to move up a level in the linguistic confusion, how does my knowledge of red not count as knowledge?
In short, it is a problem for materialism because materialism wants reality to be defined in terms of third-person descriptions. This is Russell’s motive in distinguishing knowledge by description (e.g., third-person) with knowledge by acquaintance (e.g., experience). This problem dovetails with the traditional idealism/materialism debate, where the latter can’t countenance mental, non-physical entities. Goodman, despite his use of the term “quale”, was adamantly opposed to idealism, though didn’t really want to join the opposing team either. Both forks have prongs that impale themselves.
So, yes, it is about what we call “knowledge”. But, now, what do we think that is?