According to Frank Jackson [1982, 127-136], we can know all about the inner workings of the brain, its functions, states and all the physical information about an experience through science, yet not know about what it’s like to feel pain or smell a rose or see a sunset; that there is a quality and aspect to our experiences and sensory perceptions which cannot be reduced to the physical alone.
To support his theory of this phenomenal aspect, Jackson presents the Knowledge Argument and gives the example of Mary, a super scientist, who is an expert in color vision and knows all there is to know about the science of color, but who has also had a purely black and white existence literally trapped inside a room without ever seeing color except shades of gray on a TV screen. And even though she has been confined to this room since birth without ever seeing color, she has learned everything about the physiology, mechanics and neural activity of color perception and vision. Then at some point, when Mary happens to leave her room and encounter color for the first time, her experience includes a phenomenal aspect that was never known to her before with all the physical knowledge she possessed about color vision. Her surprised reaction upon seeing color first hand is at the basis of the following argument. 1) Mary has all the physical and scientific facts about color vision and perception before leaving the room. 2) Mary learns a new fact about color perception upon leaving her room and seeing color for the first time. Therefore, physical information and facts cannot constitute all the facts there is to know and physical knowledge is incomplete. Logically the conclusion has to follow, if the premises are true, which makes the argument valid.
This presents a serious challenge to physicalism. If physical knowledge does not give us all the facts about our experiences, there are aspects to our experiences, mind and consciousness that are not accounted for by physicaism. And even though Jackson calls himself a “qualia freak” and cannot deny the existence of some states besides the physical, he also does not consider these mental states or qualia to be productive in any physical sense and to have any physical effects. Qualia might cause other qualia, he states, but that is far as he is willing to go. And although it might seem (intuitively obvious to some) that mental states and qualia are responsible for certain actions and reactions we seem to have, Jackson thinks that the Knowledge Argument has to indicate that qualia are epiphenomenal, i.e., physically ineffective and gives some (three) reasons why they cannot be otherwise. In his defense of epiphenomenalism, he suggests that even if it may appear that our behavior stems from experiencing some quale such as the feeling of pain, for example, both the pain and the behavior are in fact caused by some process in the brain; they are correlated effects of the same underlying cause, which is physical, neural activity.
One objection to this argument and to the Hypothesis of Phenomenal Information (HPI) is given by David Lewis [Chalmers, 281-294]. According to Lewis, acceptance of HPI is refutation of physicalism, so he tries to unravel the Knowledge Argument by making the second premise wrong and presenting the Ability Hypothesis instead, which states that Mary did not learn a new fact about color vision, but rather gained a new ability – ability to recognize, imagine and remember. The Ability Hypothesis emphasizes the procedural knowledge (“knowing-how”) vs. the propositional knowledge (“knowing-that”).
Gertler [1997], on the other hand, doesn’t think that epiphenomenalism is true. Neither does she think that the truth of HPI and physics has to lead to epiphenomenalism, which she thinks would depend on what physics claims as its domain and if physical effects are attributed only to physical causes. She argues for a possibility of multiple causes (including the non-physical) for the same effect, and against exclusive causes. She also suggests that any non-physical causes are outside the domain of physics for it to make any assertions as to their effects.
Gertler does not think that the Ability Hypothesis (AH) denies HPI. Where AH claims that recognizing color and knowing what it’s like are identical, she sees a distinction between the two; you have the ability to recognize color because of knowing what it’s like to see color, and not that you know what it’s like to see color because of the ability to recognize color.
I agree with Gertler in the points above. It seems to me that the ability to recognize and remember a color comes after and from the knowledge and experience of knowing what that color looks like, i.e., the ability follows the knowledge. And even though Lewis states that we gain the ability when we learn about what it’s like, he equates the ability with the perceptual experience of seeing color in order to reject the Knowledge Argument and anything that might make physicalism false or incomplete. He gives some examples of “knowing-how” to distinguish it from propositional or pure knowledge to suggest that regardless of how much information you might gather, it will not help you in your ability to use a chopstick or recognize something by sight. [Chalmers, 293] But I do not think you can gain an ability to recognize something by sight unless you have already gained some information about its appearance. Ability assumes knowledge and the ability here is built on having gained some information – the information being what the thing (red) looks like. And unless you have that perceptual fact about its appearance, you cannot gain the ability to remember, imagine, or recognize it when seeing it next time. Perhaps the knowledge stage here is overlooked because the process seems instantaneous leading quickly to the ability. But the knowledge or fact about what it’s like to see red or what red looks like, is not the same as the ability you gain regarding and because of that fact. The latter is based on the former. The very word recognition implies something has been known before (re-cognized) – an identification based on knowledge already possessed.
References
To get rid of these problems levitra generika http://djpaulkom.tv/crakd-see-how-this-bike-crew-takes-revenge-on-reckless-driver/ researchers, physicians and sexologists have found several types of treatment including meditation, therapies, counseling or surgery. When the physical discomfort occurs, the diagnosis and treatment should be Clicking Here generic viagra online carried out as soon as possible. Though this condition is not a disease, it can also be a cheap super cialis disease which has complex symptoms, and leads to urinary tract infections, sexual dysfunction, infertility and other diseases.The most common and traditional treatment of it involves antibiotics, but using antibiotics is not the only way for treating prostatitis. Males encountering health conditions like heart challenges, diabetes, kidney and liver problems and who are consuming drugs with nitrate substance are prohibited to take http://djpaulkom.tv/im-dat-raw-remix-ft-snow-tha-product-download/ cialis prices is before the dinner and other thing is 30 minutes to one hour before sexual intercourse with his partner during a sexual intercourse. Chalmers, David J. Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press, NY, 2002, 281-294.
Gertler, Brie. A Defense of the Knowledge Argument. Philosophical Studies 93: 317–336, 1999.
Jackson, Frank. Epiphenomenal Qualia. The Philosophical Quarterly. April 1992, Vol. 32, No. 27, 127-136.