Sep 21, 2020 07:54 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 22, 2020 03:09 PM by C C.)
...And have a complete scientific understanding or knowledge (as description) of colour?
INTRO: Can we ever know everything about something we can’t experience? The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson pondered this question in a thought experiment in 1982, which imagined a neuroscientist named Mary who understood everything there was to understand about colour vision, without ever having experienced it herself. If, in an instant, her black-and-white experience of sight shifted into colour, would she glean any new insight?
Detailed with stylish, shapeshifting animation in this short from TED-Ed, Jackson’s thought experiment ponders felt subjective experience (or ‘qualia’, for all the past and current philosophy students) and its relationship to knowledge. The questions raised by ‘Mary’s Room’ – including whether anything about experience transcends physical facts – remain some of the most perennial and unsettled in philosophy, even if Jackson himself actually reversed his position, concluding that the experience of colour vision does indeed correspond to a brain state, albeit one we don’t yet fully understand.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mGYmiQkah4o
COMMENT ABOUT THE MARY'S ROOM ARGUMENT OR RATHER PHYSICALISM ITSELF, PERHAPS:
The cart pulling the horse. Description does not carry the properties and causal powers of what it represents. Knowledge as description is passive or at best a trigger -- in and of itself it cannot output the shown, qualitative significance of color.
The meanings of description rely upon their own brand of symbol grounding (memory of past experiences). Defining words and symbols in terms of other words and symbols is a circular venture that never leaps out of that lexicon domain to the original world which they represent (which consists of sensory experiences -- phenomenal properties, objects, and events).
It's wayward to treat the technical descriptions of physics and other sciences as the way a non-mental world would exist, since they are wholly artificial. What they deal with was originally abstracted from perceptions and experiments. Thus, they are a product of reasoning/formulation which is traditionally classed as mental, just like phenomena or manifestations of experience are mental.
How consciousness arises from non-phenomenal "physical stuff" (the hard problem of consciousness) is not the difficulty or enigma it seems since there are no useful portrayals of a non-mental world that have literally eliminated manifestation and its qualitative properties or escaped dependence upon such. (IOW, any model or conception devoid of appearances and consisting of "nothingness" is an impotent tool.) The technical descriptions of physics and other sciences do not accomplish this since the descriptions themselves consist of images or sounds or felt sensations (braille) which are accordingly of experiential character.
A "non-mental" world is a myth that has never been produced as fact -- a universal pretending among thinkers and experts that a speculative, ontological condition of inherently "invisible" (to itself) material and changes has been demonstrated which actually has not.
People who can't even understand the "hard problem of consciousness" suffer from that missing apprehension due to the fact that they are default panpsychists (but verbally unaware of their non-critical realism about phenomenal and rational objects). If you have never imagined material things and occurrences existing without appearances (as nothingness), then of course you would find it baffling why the materializations exhibited in consciousness would be puzzling in terms of arising from "stuff" that lacks phenomenal properties. Because in everyday practice and thought you never realized that characteristics like that were excluded from matter -- you didn't even know that you were a (subliminal) panpsychist, pan-phenomenalist, Russellian monist, etc.
INTRO: Can we ever know everything about something we can’t experience? The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson pondered this question in a thought experiment in 1982, which imagined a neuroscientist named Mary who understood everything there was to understand about colour vision, without ever having experienced it herself. If, in an instant, her black-and-white experience of sight shifted into colour, would she glean any new insight?
Detailed with stylish, shapeshifting animation in this short from TED-Ed, Jackson’s thought experiment ponders felt subjective experience (or ‘qualia’, for all the past and current philosophy students) and its relationship to knowledge. The questions raised by ‘Mary’s Room’ – including whether anything about experience transcends physical facts – remain some of the most perennial and unsettled in philosophy, even if Jackson himself actually reversed his position, concluding that the experience of colour vision does indeed correspond to a brain state, albeit one we don’t yet fully understand.
COMMENT ABOUT THE MARY'S ROOM ARGUMENT OR RATHER PHYSICALISM ITSELF, PERHAPS:
The cart pulling the horse. Description does not carry the properties and causal powers of what it represents. Knowledge as description is passive or at best a trigger -- in and of itself it cannot output the shown, qualitative significance of color.
The meanings of description rely upon their own brand of symbol grounding (memory of past experiences). Defining words and symbols in terms of other words and symbols is a circular venture that never leaps out of that lexicon domain to the original world which they represent (which consists of sensory experiences -- phenomenal properties, objects, and events).
It's wayward to treat the technical descriptions of physics and other sciences as the way a non-mental world would exist, since they are wholly artificial. What they deal with was originally abstracted from perceptions and experiments. Thus, they are a product of reasoning/formulation which is traditionally classed as mental, just like phenomena or manifestations of experience are mental.
How consciousness arises from non-phenomenal "physical stuff" (the hard problem of consciousness) is not the difficulty or enigma it seems since there are no useful portrayals of a non-mental world that have literally eliminated manifestation and its qualitative properties or escaped dependence upon such. (IOW, any model or conception devoid of appearances and consisting of "nothingness" is an impotent tool.) The technical descriptions of physics and other sciences do not accomplish this since the descriptions themselves consist of images or sounds or felt sensations (braille) which are accordingly of experiential character.
A "non-mental" world is a myth that has never been produced as fact -- a universal pretending among thinkers and experts that a speculative, ontological condition of inherently "invisible" (to itself) material and changes has been demonstrated which actually has not.
People who can't even understand the "hard problem of consciousness" suffer from that missing apprehension due to the fact that they are default panpsychists (but verbally unaware of their non-critical realism about phenomenal and rational objects). If you have never imagined material things and occurrences existing without appearances (as nothingness), then of course you would find it baffling why the materializations exhibited in consciousness would be puzzling in terms of arising from "stuff" that lacks phenomenal properties. Because in everyday practice and thought you never realized that characteristics like that were excluded from matter -- you didn't even know that you were a (subliminal) panpsychist, pan-phenomenalist, Russellian monist, etc.