achromatic mary

I haven't blogged recently. It's because I'm mostly hung up on varsity work, or procrastination due to freaking out about how much varsity work I have to do (this is not helpful). This year I'm doing my Honours in Philosophy at Wits University - it's really interesting but super difficult, especially this semester as I've got to get cracking on my thesis (or long research essay). Even though it's much more complicated than it appears at first, my topic has some intuitive appeal. Read the following story and think about it yourself.


It's proper name is Frank Jackson's "Knowledge Argument", first published in his 1982 paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia":

“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 combination from the sky stimulates the retina, and exactly how this produces via the ventral 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’.

“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 experiences 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.”

Interesting, no? Physicalism is a well-held position in contemporary philosophy that says everything is physical, or can be explained in "science-y" terms (like when people say happiness is nothing more than endorphin A or whatever being released into such-and-such system). Jackson wants to say that there's something more. Something you can't explain to someone - they have to experience it for themselves in order to really know and understand it. Reminds me so much of Pleasantville! 

So here's the trailer. Maybe I'll watch the movie again to feel a bit better about philosophy, and life :)