As you probably know, this is almost exactly how Dennett approaches Mary's Room. It's frustrating that this idea managed to lodge itself into the canon of supposedly great philosophical thought experiments from the 20th century, and the remarkable overconfidence it seems to produce in people who see it as decisive against physicalism. But it's perhaps the best single major example of, as Dennett says, mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity.
Mary’s Room is trivially flawed, because it simply assumes its desired conclusion. Specifically, it (implicitly) assumes that the "visual experience [of red]" is NOT part of "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" -- and then proceeds to triumphantly claim that the "visual experience [of red]" must be non-physical, because, after all, we've just excluded it from "all the physical information there is to obtain". But it's of course tautologically true that if we assume <the visual experience of red isn't part of all the physical information there is to obtain> it follows that <the visual experience of red isn't part of all the physical information there is to obtain>. So the thought experiment demonstrates nothing except that then-dualist Frank Jackson had a preexisting belief that "all the physical information there is to obtain about the color red" did not include the "visual experience of red".
A physicalist, by contrast, would believe that "all the physical information there is to obtain about the color red" MUST include the "visual experience of red" -- so the thought experiment would basically boil down to a proof by contradiction purporting to show that the initial premise ("Assume Mary can get all the physical information about the color red without ever visually experiencing the color red") was false. And it would still be just as vacuous and would demonstrate nothing other than the preexisting belief of the person offering it.
The fact that this thought experiment is still taken seriously rather than being dismissed out of hand based on its obvious flaws is a perfect example of the lack of intellectual rigor in academic philosophy.
omg thank you. you didn't dismiss it out of hand, though. you said why it sucks in two paragraphs, which is all that's necessary. philosophers are sooooo wordy.
I think the proponents of the thought experiment would insist it doesn't presuppose this, it's prompting us to have an intuition about whether this is the case. But I just don't have any such "intuition" and then this kind of intuition talk is highly questionable. I think as a matter of how it actually functions in practice it does either reaffirm existing nonphysicalist inclinations or at best dupes people into thinking it somehow reveals problems for physicalism. It does not.
In retrospect I'm not sure if I communicated my point as clearly as I'd like, so if you don't mind I'll state it another way. Here's what Jackson does in Mary's Room:
1) Posits that Mary has never had the physical experience of red
2) Claims that Mary nonetheless has "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]"
The two of these things together would necessarily mean that the physical experience of red is NOT part of "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" -- but that's precisely the desired conclusion of the thought experiment. So by asserting that Mary already has "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" despite never having seen red, the thought experiment is simply presupposing its desired conclusion -- i.e., smuggling its conclusion into its premises.
The clearest appeal to intuition enters into it when Jackson asks "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?" -- and at that point the battle is essentially over, because regardless of how they answer that question, the reader has already been led to grant Jackson's presupposition of his desired conclusion. The trick is getting them to grant that conclusion without realizing it's happened, and then misdirecting them toward a misleading question that's all but irrelevant at that point since the hidden presupposition has already been granted. (And again, though I don't think Jackson was doing this intentionally, this is why I said the thought experiment itself is not intellectually honest.)
Regarding that appeal to intuition, by the way, I fully agree with Jackson that "it seems just obvious that [Mary] will learn something new" -- but if physicalism is true, then that thing she obviously learned was PHYSICAL INFORMATION. So for a physicalist this really just boils down to a proof by contradiction demonstrating that Jackson's initial assertion that Mary already possessed "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" was false.
I actually sent a version of this comment to Jackson a few days ago, by the way, though I don't expect a response (and of course Jackson has long since renounced his dualism, though in reading various interviews with him I don't get the sense that he's ever recognized the fundamental flaws in his thought experiment).
> ...it's prompting us to have an intuition about whether this is the case.
Exactly: it's encouraging us to share/adopt their intuition, and pretend that it's a logical *conclusion* of the thought experiment, when it's actually just a presupposition.
This wasn't Jackson's only obvious error, by the way, even just in that paragraph. For example, he said "It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information [about color] from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television" -- which is just beyond ridiculous. The fact that a huge range of lessons can be taught over black and white television about math, geography, language, politics etc is hardly evidence that you can teach anything about "the visual experience of red" from a black and white television; and obviously the Open University wasn't having to teach people what the color red was, since all the students would have experienced it innumerable times themselves. This is just another example of how philosophers are so often incapable of constructing intellectually honest thought experiments.
I'm not a fan of suggesting the thought experiment isn't "intellectually honest" but I otherwise share these sentiments. I don't attribute it to dishonesty, but to lack of imagination and a deep desire to solve problems from the armchair. My god, why can't philosophers just actually, genuinely, seriously appreciate that gathering empirical data is important and that they should just shut up and do it themselves?
I'd originally written "intellectually rigorous" but changed it because that doesn't quite capture the depth of it. I don't mean to suggest that Jackson was consciously dishonest (I actually think he was quite sincere throughout based on what I've read from him elsewhere), but that the thought experiment itself is so deeply flawed that its main function is to confuse and mislead rather than adding any clarity to the concept under discussion. I think Jackson should have been able to exercise the perspective to see these glaring flaws for himself, but I think he couldn't do that because he was just so tied to his desired conclusions -- and I think that (and worse) generalizes to many other philosophical thought experiments as well.
There are all sorts of facts we can know in advance of experiencing them, and that includes facts about what things are like. We have no reason to think that what it’s like to see red should be a special case. In short, premise 2 is false. Mary’s hypothesized omniscience is a big red (haha) herring. The real questions concern whether we’ll have a completed scientific theory of e.g. visual consciousness. We have a way to go to go, but we don’t need superhumans to get there. Once there, it wouldn’t matter whether you’re blind, colorblind, or whatever: you could know lots and lots about what seeing red is like in advance of having seen it yourself.
I think I might be confused about what physicalism means. If it means that the mind is created by/identical to brain states then that's probably my position but if it means that the sensation of seeing red can be fully captured by the language of modern physics, then I'm sceptical.
I think I would have no way of fully describing that sensation (in language) such that it would trigger seeing the color red in another person, all I could do would be point to a red object and trust that the other person has a similar brain to my own brain. I thought that that's what's meant by those states being "ineffable" but I might be mistaken about that.
I feel that the second version is something of a straw man. It has been quite widely disseminated by Philip Goff in his nonspecialist book "Galileo's Error", but as far as I know, no-one actually strongly believes that the sensation of seeing red could be fully captured (or communicated or deduced from first principles, for that matter) by any language, whether that of physics or metaphysics or just human language in general (note that we can substitute any or all of these alternatives into the Mary's Room argument, and anyone claiming that some language would succeed where that of physics fails bears a considerable burden of justifying that distinction.)
As far as I know, the closest any widely-recognized philosopher has come to suggesting that "what it is like" could be communicated or deduced from first principles in the right circumstances was Daniel Dennett, in "What RoboMary Knows." In this paper, he argues that a conscious robot, with sufficiently fine-grained read and write access to the bits of its electronic brain, could potentially "colorize" its vision, even if its cameras were monochrome.
Personally, I strongly suspect (though I know I cannot prove) that our minds are the result of physical processes. As far as I know, that makes me a physicalist, but if it does not, I am not going to change my opinion just to conform with someone else's definition of the term.
"... all I could do would be point to a red object and trust that the other person has a similar brain to my own brain"
I think physicalists generally would not disagree with this, and would say that their concern is whether the event you call 'seeing a red object' is reducible to physical events, not with whether the description of those physical events succeeds in evoking comparable states in others.
>Simply put, whether Mary learns anything when seeing red isn’t something we’re in a position to reach any reasonable conclusions about simply by thinking about it.
I agree with a lot of this post, but not this. Thinking about things is not the same as trusting intuitions. Consider for example a version of Marys Room where we use chirality instead of the colour red. You can work out very clearly what a room and observer could be like to never experience chirality, in what ways such an observer could go on to interact with the ordinary world, and what would happen to it. I dont see why the colour example would be impossible, as opposed to just more difficult.
I am not saying "It's impossible to figure out these sorts of things out by thinking about them." I'm saying our current epistemic standing, given the information we have and the cognitive resources available to us, isn't up to this specific task. So I am not sure if we disagree.
Personally, I suspect that the Monism v Dualism debate already starts with a category error. I have no idea why mass, energy, interactive fields, spacetime, or whatever components one must fit under the presumably monist label of "physicalism," are somehow meaningfully "singular." Why is counting even relevant at this scale, and even if it is, then why am I not allowed to count the Higgs field as 1 thing and the electromagnetic field as 1 thing, which when added together makes 2 things? Because they can be calculated under one law of conservation of energy?
Also, why "physicalist?" Why not "energist?" Not wanting to look "woo"? At least it wouldn't invite instant reification that begs all the questions. The rhetorical posturing by physicalists and monists is as obnoxious to me as by intuitionists and Dualists. There's no "right way" to set the damn table. The point is to be agreeable when setting it so that you might say things that mean something to the parties involved and maybe everyone learns something, yippee & also hooray!
This is a great argument and I think it works well against many Chalmerian thought experiments which so often leave one saying, "Is it really imaginable though?" I also think, from a physics perspective, you can argue simply that while Mary can learn a great deal _about_ physics in the room, once she leaves the room and sees the rose outside she learns "the signal generated in her optic nerve when her rods and cones are stimulated by photons with a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm". Having never been exposed to those wavelengths her brain was never stimulated in that particular way, never generating the unique brain states associated with photons of those wavelengths. So sure, she learns something new but it is certainly still a physical fact.
I'm reminded of Popper's universal vs singular statements. She learned universal "facts" about physics and upon exiting the room learned singular facts about particular red photons.
I feel like I'm being gaslit with Mary's Room, told I'm on the side of the obfuscators and flailers just for pointing out about the most obvious point in analytic philosophy: that an argument which depends upon an equivocation in terms is invalid.
In order for P2 to work, "Mary" needs to mean someone recognizably human with means of acquiring and retaining knowledge that are pretty familiar to me. Sure, I grant that the world's smartest physicist with the world's best physics library wouldn't know what seeing a red thing will be like for them.
But P1 depends upon "Mary" being some godlike mind that I cannot remotely fathom. If "Mary" is instead a human relatable to myself, then P1 is easy to reject. We have excellent empirical grounds to believe that human brains like ours cannot retain and access all of the physical facts relevant to color perception. To put it mildly.
Well said! Thought experiments can be useful conversation generators. And as you discuss, can reveal people's intuitions. But that's about it. Daniel Dennett called them "intuition pumps", which I think is an improvement, but I like "intuition clarifiers". As long as we understand how this works, they can be useful devices.
But putting them forth as evidence for a proposition only highlights the lack of real evidence, at least unless the proposition is specifically about intuitions. (Even then, it should only be viewed as hypothetical until there's an actual scientific survey conducted.)
Did you hear about Mary the scientist who spent her whole life in a room learning about how the body works? Then one day she came outside and someone gave her a bicycle and she couldn’t ride it. So there I just proved that riding a bike isn’t a physical activity.
This is not a counter-argument, you're using an ambiguity in the word "physical" here. But let's grant it, and still it would be the case that Mary would have a new qualitative experience of bicycling riding (joy mingled with apprehension, the rush of wind on her cheeks etc) and that experience wouldn't be reducible to the physical facts she already knew about the body or whatever else.
The ambiguity is not over the adjective "physical" (I would like to know in what sense Ian's reply is using that word ambiguously), it is over the verb "to know", and this ambiguity is present in all three arguments (Jackson's original, Ian's parody, and your version.)
We have, on the one hand, knowledge of facts (i.e. having a justified belief in a true proposition), while on the other, we have (at least in ordinary usage) the ability to respond to stimuli in ways that do not involve believing in propositions. If knowing what it is like to see red is a matter of believing some propositions, how come no-one can state them?
Furthermore, if you suppose that knowing what it is like is a matter of coming to believe certain propositions, but we just have not figured out what those propositions are yet, how can you be sure that no future Mary could learn these propositions and, thanks to having done so, come to know what it is like prior to her release?
I took there to be an ambiguity being exploited here between physical-as-material i.e., the stuff of physicalism, non-mental, monist matter; and physical-as-bodily-exertion, excercise, "physical activity".
Anyway, to your point: isn't the proposition that Mary learns "red is *this*", where *this* is a private sense experience?
Ah - I think I see where you are coming from, though what you are saying seems to hark back to the days of substance dualism versus materialism. These days, most of the action seems to be between some form of panpsychism on one side and some form of functionalism on the other. Cycling is uncontroversially regarded as a physical process, and today's mind-body question is about whether the same can be said of minds [1].
Regardless of that, as Ian's argument so closely follows the form of Jackson's "Mary's Room" (deliberately so, of course), it is difficult for me to see how, if he is exploiting an ambiguity in the use of the word 'physical', the same would not be equally true, mutatis mutandis, of Jackson's original argument. I take Ian's argument to posit (or it can be trivially rephrased to do so) that Mary knows everything that could possibly be learned from the most complete possible compendium of written knowledge about not just cycling-as-physical-exertion but also of non-mental monist matter (however that is construed, so long as it is not in a question-begging way) - and yet we can still plausibly posit that she still has to learn how to ride a bicycle.
Your second point is, I think, a response to my question "if knowing what it is like to see red is a matter of believing some propositions, how come no-one can state them?", and it brings up a point that I left out for brevity. "Red is this" is indeed a proposition, but it is not complete in itself, as the "this" is what is known in the literature as an indexical - roughly speaking, a linguistic expression whose reference can shift from context to context [2], and in this case would be referring to an experience she is having at the time she thinks the phrase. Mary, while confined to her room, could read this sentence, but it would not mean anything to her at that point, and therefore would not add to her knowledge - unless the "that" is referring to something she has already learned from what she has read. This brings us back to a specific version of my original question: if knowing what the "that" in the sentence "that is red" refers to is a matter of believing some propositions, how come no-one can state them?
[1] There is a complication here, in that some anti-physicalists are trying to reorient the discussion to be about what "the language of physics" can express. For an explanation of why I think this is a straw man, see my reply to Patrick elsewhere in these responses.
We can have indexical beliefs, so I'm not yet seeing what the objection here is. If Mary met her mother for the first time when she left that room, she would know for the first time what her mother looked like, which she could express as a proposition like "that is my mother's face". I must have missed something here, or do you think knowing your mother's face is just a matter of "respond[ing] to stimuli"?
Exactly. The core argument is that any direct experience not felt in the room is something new. But in my opinion, this argument does not ,strictly speaking, prove that Physicalism is false. It may instead prove that that it's simply impossible for a consciousness with direct-experience ability to gather knowledge fully through reading.
As you probably know, this is almost exactly how Dennett approaches Mary's Room. It's frustrating that this idea managed to lodge itself into the canon of supposedly great philosophical thought experiments from the 20th century, and the remarkable overconfidence it seems to produce in people who see it as decisive against physicalism. But it's perhaps the best single major example of, as Dennett says, mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity.
I do know! Unfortunately, it persists. Dennett was one of my professors at Tufts and I took as many courses as I could with him.
Mary’s Room is trivially flawed, because it simply assumes its desired conclusion. Specifically, it (implicitly) assumes that the "visual experience [of red]" is NOT part of "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" -- and then proceeds to triumphantly claim that the "visual experience [of red]" must be non-physical, because, after all, we've just excluded it from "all the physical information there is to obtain". But it's of course tautologically true that if we assume <the visual experience of red isn't part of all the physical information there is to obtain> it follows that <the visual experience of red isn't part of all the physical information there is to obtain>. So the thought experiment demonstrates nothing except that then-dualist Frank Jackson had a preexisting belief that "all the physical information there is to obtain about the color red" did not include the "visual experience of red".
A physicalist, by contrast, would believe that "all the physical information there is to obtain about the color red" MUST include the "visual experience of red" -- so the thought experiment would basically boil down to a proof by contradiction purporting to show that the initial premise ("Assume Mary can get all the physical information about the color red without ever visually experiencing the color red") was false. And it would still be just as vacuous and would demonstrate nothing other than the preexisting belief of the person offering it.
The fact that this thought experiment is still taken seriously rather than being dismissed out of hand based on its obvious flaws is a perfect example of the lack of intellectual rigor in academic philosophy.
omg thank you. you didn't dismiss it out of hand, though. you said why it sucks in two paragraphs, which is all that's necessary. philosophers are sooooo wordy.
Sure! Glad you found it worthwhile.
> philosophers are sooooo wordy.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance....
I think the proponents of the thought experiment would insist it doesn't presuppose this, it's prompting us to have an intuition about whether this is the case. But I just don't have any such "intuition" and then this kind of intuition talk is highly questionable. I think as a matter of how it actually functions in practice it does either reaffirm existing nonphysicalist inclinations or at best dupes people into thinking it somehow reveals problems for physicalism. It does not.
In retrospect I'm not sure if I communicated my point as clearly as I'd like, so if you don't mind I'll state it another way. Here's what Jackson does in Mary's Room:
1) Posits that Mary has never had the physical experience of red
2) Claims that Mary nonetheless has "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]"
The two of these things together would necessarily mean that the physical experience of red is NOT part of "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" -- but that's precisely the desired conclusion of the thought experiment. So by asserting that Mary already has "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" despite never having seen red, the thought experiment is simply presupposing its desired conclusion -- i.e., smuggling its conclusion into its premises.
The clearest appeal to intuition enters into it when Jackson asks "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?" -- and at that point the battle is essentially over, because regardless of how they answer that question, the reader has already been led to grant Jackson's presupposition of his desired conclusion. The trick is getting them to grant that conclusion without realizing it's happened, and then misdirecting them toward a misleading question that's all but irrelevant at that point since the hidden presupposition has already been granted. (And again, though I don't think Jackson was doing this intentionally, this is why I said the thought experiment itself is not intellectually honest.)
Regarding that appeal to intuition, by the way, I fully agree with Jackson that "it seems just obvious that [Mary] will learn something new" -- but if physicalism is true, then that thing she obviously learned was PHYSICAL INFORMATION. So for a physicalist this really just boils down to a proof by contradiction demonstrating that Jackson's initial assertion that Mary already possessed "all the physical information there is to obtain [about the color red]" was false.
I actually sent a version of this comment to Jackson a few days ago, by the way, though I don't expect a response (and of course Jackson has long since renounced his dualism, though in reading various interviews with him I don't get the sense that he's ever recognized the fundamental flaws in his thought experiment).
> ...it's prompting us to have an intuition about whether this is the case.
Exactly: it's encouraging us to share/adopt their intuition, and pretend that it's a logical *conclusion* of the thought experiment, when it's actually just a presupposition.
This wasn't Jackson's only obvious error, by the way, even just in that paragraph. For example, he said "It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information [about color] from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television" -- which is just beyond ridiculous. The fact that a huge range of lessons can be taught over black and white television about math, geography, language, politics etc is hardly evidence that you can teach anything about "the visual experience of red" from a black and white television; and obviously the Open University wasn't having to teach people what the color red was, since all the students would have experienced it innumerable times themselves. This is just another example of how philosophers are so often incapable of constructing intellectually honest thought experiments.
I'm not a fan of suggesting the thought experiment isn't "intellectually honest" but I otherwise share these sentiments. I don't attribute it to dishonesty, but to lack of imagination and a deep desire to solve problems from the armchair. My god, why can't philosophers just actually, genuinely, seriously appreciate that gathering empirical data is important and that they should just shut up and do it themselves?
I'd originally written "intellectually rigorous" but changed it because that doesn't quite capture the depth of it. I don't mean to suggest that Jackson was consciously dishonest (I actually think he was quite sincere throughout based on what I've read from him elsewhere), but that the thought experiment itself is so deeply flawed that its main function is to confuse and mislead rather than adding any clarity to the concept under discussion. I think Jackson should have been able to exercise the perspective to see these glaring flaws for himself, but I think he couldn't do that because he was just so tied to his desired conclusions -- and I think that (and worse) generalizes to many other philosophical thought experiments as well.
That's fair, thanks for clarifying.
There are all sorts of facts we can know in advance of experiencing them, and that includes facts about what things are like. We have no reason to think that what it’s like to see red should be a special case. In short, premise 2 is false. Mary’s hypothesized omniscience is a big red (haha) herring. The real questions concern whether we’ll have a completed scientific theory of e.g. visual consciousness. We have a way to go to go, but we don’t need superhumans to get there. Once there, it wouldn’t matter whether you’re blind, colorblind, or whatever: you could know lots and lots about what seeing red is like in advance of having seen it yourself.
I think I might be confused about what physicalism means. If it means that the mind is created by/identical to brain states then that's probably my position but if it means that the sensation of seeing red can be fully captured by the language of modern physics, then I'm sceptical.
I think I would have no way of fully describing that sensation (in language) such that it would trigger seeing the color red in another person, all I could do would be point to a red object and trust that the other person has a similar brain to my own brain. I thought that that's what's meant by those states being "ineffable" but I might be mistaken about that.
I feel that the second version is something of a straw man. It has been quite widely disseminated by Philip Goff in his nonspecialist book "Galileo's Error", but as far as I know, no-one actually strongly believes that the sensation of seeing red could be fully captured (or communicated or deduced from first principles, for that matter) by any language, whether that of physics or metaphysics or just human language in general (note that we can substitute any or all of these alternatives into the Mary's Room argument, and anyone claiming that some language would succeed where that of physics fails bears a considerable burden of justifying that distinction.)
As far as I know, the closest any widely-recognized philosopher has come to suggesting that "what it is like" could be communicated or deduced from first principles in the right circumstances was Daniel Dennett, in "What RoboMary Knows." In this paper, he argues that a conscious robot, with sufficiently fine-grained read and write access to the bits of its electronic brain, could potentially "colorize" its vision, even if its cameras were monochrome.
Personally, I strongly suspect (though I know I cannot prove) that our minds are the result of physical processes. As far as I know, that makes me a physicalist, but if it does not, I am not going to change my opinion just to conform with someone else's definition of the term.
"... all I could do would be point to a red object and trust that the other person has a similar brain to my own brain"
I think physicalists generally would not disagree with this, and would say that their concern is whether the event you call 'seeing a red object' is reducible to physical events, not with whether the description of those physical events succeeds in evoking comparable states in others.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ may be helpful as a reference.
>Simply put, whether Mary learns anything when seeing red isn’t something we’re in a position to reach any reasonable conclusions about simply by thinking about it.
I agree with a lot of this post, but not this. Thinking about things is not the same as trusting intuitions. Consider for example a version of Marys Room where we use chirality instead of the colour red. You can work out very clearly what a room and observer could be like to never experience chirality, in what ways such an observer could go on to interact with the ordinary world, and what would happen to it. I dont see why the colour example would be impossible, as opposed to just more difficult.
I am not saying "It's impossible to figure out these sorts of things out by thinking about them." I'm saying our current epistemic standing, given the information we have and the cognitive resources available to us, isn't up to this specific task. So I am not sure if we disagree.
Personally, I suspect that the Monism v Dualism debate already starts with a category error. I have no idea why mass, energy, interactive fields, spacetime, or whatever components one must fit under the presumably monist label of "physicalism," are somehow meaningfully "singular." Why is counting even relevant at this scale, and even if it is, then why am I not allowed to count the Higgs field as 1 thing and the electromagnetic field as 1 thing, which when added together makes 2 things? Because they can be calculated under one law of conservation of energy?
Also, why "physicalist?" Why not "energist?" Not wanting to look "woo"? At least it wouldn't invite instant reification that begs all the questions. The rhetorical posturing by physicalists and monists is as obnoxious to me as by intuitionists and Dualists. There's no "right way" to set the damn table. The point is to be agreeable when setting it so that you might say things that mean something to the parties involved and maybe everyone learns something, yippee & also hooray!
This is a great argument and I think it works well against many Chalmerian thought experiments which so often leave one saying, "Is it really imaginable though?" I also think, from a physics perspective, you can argue simply that while Mary can learn a great deal _about_ physics in the room, once she leaves the room and sees the rose outside she learns "the signal generated in her optic nerve when her rods and cones are stimulated by photons with a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm". Having never been exposed to those wavelengths her brain was never stimulated in that particular way, never generating the unique brain states associated with photons of those wavelengths. So sure, she learns something new but it is certainly still a physical fact.
I'm reminded of Popper's universal vs singular statements. She learned universal "facts" about physics and upon exiting the room learned singular facts about particular red photons.
I feel like I'm being gaslit with Mary's Room, told I'm on the side of the obfuscators and flailers just for pointing out about the most obvious point in analytic philosophy: that an argument which depends upon an equivocation in terms is invalid.
In order for P2 to work, "Mary" needs to mean someone recognizably human with means of acquiring and retaining knowledge that are pretty familiar to me. Sure, I grant that the world's smartest physicist with the world's best physics library wouldn't know what seeing a red thing will be like for them.
But P1 depends upon "Mary" being some godlike mind that I cannot remotely fathom. If "Mary" is instead a human relatable to myself, then P1 is easy to reject. We have excellent empirical grounds to believe that human brains like ours cannot retain and access all of the physical facts relevant to color perception. To put it mildly.
Well said! Thought experiments can be useful conversation generators. And as you discuss, can reveal people's intuitions. But that's about it. Daniel Dennett called them "intuition pumps", which I think is an improvement, but I like "intuition clarifiers". As long as we understand how this works, they can be useful devices.
But putting them forth as evidence for a proposition only highlights the lack of real evidence, at least unless the proposition is specifically about intuitions. (Even then, it should only be viewed as hypothetical until there's an actual scientific survey conducted.)
Did you hear about Mary the scientist who spent her whole life in a room learning about how the body works? Then one day she came outside and someone gave her a bicycle and she couldn’t ride it. So there I just proved that riding a bike isn’t a physical activity.
This is not a counter-argument, you're using an ambiguity in the word "physical" here. But let's grant it, and still it would be the case that Mary would have a new qualitative experience of bicycling riding (joy mingled with apprehension, the rush of wind on her cheeks etc) and that experience wouldn't be reducible to the physical facts she already knew about the body or whatever else.
The ambiguity is not over the adjective "physical" (I would like to know in what sense Ian's reply is using that word ambiguously), it is over the verb "to know", and this ambiguity is present in all three arguments (Jackson's original, Ian's parody, and your version.)
We have, on the one hand, knowledge of facts (i.e. having a justified belief in a true proposition), while on the other, we have (at least in ordinary usage) the ability to respond to stimuli in ways that do not involve believing in propositions. If knowing what it is like to see red is a matter of believing some propositions, how come no-one can state them?
Furthermore, if you suppose that knowing what it is like is a matter of coming to believe certain propositions, but we just have not figured out what those propositions are yet, how can you be sure that no future Mary could learn these propositions and, thanks to having done so, come to know what it is like prior to her release?
I took there to be an ambiguity being exploited here between physical-as-material i.e., the stuff of physicalism, non-mental, monist matter; and physical-as-bodily-exertion, excercise, "physical activity".
Anyway, to your point: isn't the proposition that Mary learns "red is *this*", where *this* is a private sense experience?
Ah - I think I see where you are coming from, though what you are saying seems to hark back to the days of substance dualism versus materialism. These days, most of the action seems to be between some form of panpsychism on one side and some form of functionalism on the other. Cycling is uncontroversially regarded as a physical process, and today's mind-body question is about whether the same can be said of minds [1].
Regardless of that, as Ian's argument so closely follows the form of Jackson's "Mary's Room" (deliberately so, of course), it is difficult for me to see how, if he is exploiting an ambiguity in the use of the word 'physical', the same would not be equally true, mutatis mutandis, of Jackson's original argument. I take Ian's argument to posit (or it can be trivially rephrased to do so) that Mary knows everything that could possibly be learned from the most complete possible compendium of written knowledge about not just cycling-as-physical-exertion but also of non-mental monist matter (however that is construed, so long as it is not in a question-begging way) - and yet we can still plausibly posit that she still has to learn how to ride a bicycle.
Your second point is, I think, a response to my question "if knowing what it is like to see red is a matter of believing some propositions, how come no-one can state them?", and it brings up a point that I left out for brevity. "Red is this" is indeed a proposition, but it is not complete in itself, as the "this" is what is known in the literature as an indexical - roughly speaking, a linguistic expression whose reference can shift from context to context [2], and in this case would be referring to an experience she is having at the time she thinks the phrase. Mary, while confined to her room, could read this sentence, but it would not mean anything to her at that point, and therefore would not add to her knowledge - unless the "that" is referring to something she has already learned from what she has read. This brings us back to a specific version of my original question: if knowing what the "that" in the sentence "that is red" refers to is a matter of believing some propositions, how come no-one can state them?
[1] There is a complication here, in that some anti-physicalists are trying to reorient the discussion to be about what "the language of physics" can express. For an explanation of why I think this is a straw man, see my reply to Patrick elsewhere in these responses.
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/
We can have indexical beliefs, so I'm not yet seeing what the objection here is. If Mary met her mother for the first time when she left that room, she would know for the first time what her mother looked like, which she could express as a proposition like "that is my mother's face". I must have missed something here, or do you think knowing your mother's face is just a matter of "respond[ing] to stimuli"?
Exactly. The core argument is that any direct experience not felt in the room is something new. But in my opinion, this argument does not ,strictly speaking, prove that Physicalism is false. It may instead prove that that it's simply impossible for a consciousness with direct-experience ability to gather knowledge fully through reading.