What does Mary actually know?

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world or so they say.

I believe it was while watching Ex Machina that I first became aware of Mary’s Room. The thought experiment stuck with me—partly because the movie was so well done, but also because it struck me as quite unintuitive. I had a lingering suspicion that the thought experiment failed to establish its intended conclusion in a way that should have been trivial to refute. However, at the time, I found it difficult to pinpoint the exact problem.

I've heard, and been told, that for many people—even many physicalists—the thought experiment initially feels highly intuitive. As a result, the argument can seem quite seductive unless it is thoroughly examined and dismantled.

I suspect this is partly because, when I first encountered the so-called knowledge argument, I wasn’t yet thinking in strictly analytic philosophy terms. Instead, I had my own preconceived notions about consciousness and materialism. I leaned strongly toward physicalism at the time, as I still do today even after reading heaps of pages on consciousness, this has hardly changed.

This post then, is an exercise in trying to formulate, and argue coherently, with respect to the domain of philosophy of mind. I am making this post, in order to grasp a better understanding of my own views, and my own arguments, as such, I think the knowledge argument is a great place to start.

To be clear in this article I will be arguing against the so called knowledge argument as proposed by frank jackson. Specifically, mary’s room, as it’s normally concived of.

But, first let’s begin with formulating with what it is, and what it isn’t.

Does Mary know everything?

The knowledge argument aims to demonstrate that conscious experience includes non-physical aspects by showing that a complete understanding of physical facts still leaves something unexplained.

The most well-known formulation comes from Frank Jackson’s thought experiment, famously depicted in Ex Machina and likely referenced in other media that I haven’t bothered to check.

It goes something like this;

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 specializes 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 wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central 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 color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it 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.

-SEP, Qualia: The Knowledge Argument

Iterating this thought experiment to my friends who were all, more or less, disinterested in the topic, gave me a few interesting responses that I’d like to share here.

For most of them, they were convinced that mary did learn something new by seeing the colour red, but they were not wholly sure that it disproved materalism, atleast, as they understood it.

One of my friends who was slightly more patient with me, and my ramblings, asked me on what *exactly* mary learned, and how she learned it.

If you take this question to it’s logical entailment, you will get the type of objection as endorsed by denett or lance independent;

To quote lance here;

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. What are we supposed to do? Simulate the situation she’s in and then “observe” the outcome? We can’t do that. Whether one thinks she learns something or not tells us something about your inclinations to reach one or another conclusion. It’s not at all clear it tells us anything about what the world is like.

- Mary's Room does not refute physicalism

Daniel denett referred to mary’s room, and other thought experiments like it, as intuition pumps;

The most influential thought experiments in recent philosophy of mind have all involved inviting the audience to imagine some specially contrived or stipulated state of affairs, and then — without properly checking to see if this feat of imagination has actually been accomplished — inviting the audience to “notice” various consequences in the fantasy. These “intuition pumps,” as I call them, are often fiendishly clever devices. They deserve their fame if only for their seductiveness.

- Consciousness explained

Alas, I know I’ve wandered in my writing. To those still reading, I know you’re probably thinking how utterly incapable I am of sticking to a task—namely, formulating a coherent argument about Mary’s Room. But I implore you to stick around; this was a necessary detour. Hopefully, I won’t stray further down the line in this article—at least, I hope not.

I took this detour because I believe it presents the easiest and perhaps even the most effective line of attack for the physicalist. Whatever issues you may have with the objections I raise later, they won’t change the force of this simple observation: what Mary does and learns is an empirical question, one that can’t be answered merely by thinking about it.

I could stop here, but that would feel intellectually lazy. More than that, I have my own issues with this experiment that go beyond its reliability. I think it rests on deeper assumptions about "physicalism" that are deeply problematic.

So from here on out, I will try to assume maxmuim charitablity. Mary is a person, who mostly ressembles a human, she is something of a genuis, and her genuis level intellect allows her to learn, and retain, vast swathes of information with regards to the physics, and the neurophysiology of all but different colours. We are going to assume, that this is within the bounds of human intelligence, and every physical fact that mary supposedly learns, can be found in textbooks, and or the internet.

With that, here is my attempt to formulate a coherent argument out of mary’s room.

1. Mary knows all the physical facts relating to human color vision before her release.

2. But there are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release.

   Therefore

3. There are non-physical facts concerning human color vision.
   

In my experience, a lot of proponents of this argument seem to think that premise 1 is on ‘firm footing, and universally accepted’. Yet, to me, this has to be the most contentious premise of them all. I think all the problems stems from premise 1.

A lot of the work being done by the first premise is through under-specified conceptions of knowledge and facts. For the first premise to be true, it requires that all facts about physical events are discursively learnable, drop this assumption, and mary’s room looses much of it’s force.

True, mary does know everything physical that can be learned via a textbook, but learning something via preception is still wholly physical.

Harman (1990) lays out a functionalist account of conscious experience. In it, he lays bare the idea that in order to have the concept, of say, the colour red, a person needs to be able to;

1. Connect the concept to sensory input (recognize red things when seeing them)

2. Link it to other related concepts (like color, stop signs, blood, etc.)

3. Use it to guide behavior (sort red objects from non-red ones, for instance)

In the case of mary, she lacks the concept of something being red, since she doesn’t have the crucial perceptual connection- she can't link the concept to actual visual experiences of red things. Therefore, mary doesn’t have all the physical knowledge while in the black and white room.

One way to avoid this problem is to, as Flanagan (1992) points out, make a distinction between what can be termed “metaphysical physicalism” and “linguistic physicalism”;

Metaphysical physicalism simply asserts that what there is, and all there is, is physical stuff and its relations. Linguistic physicalism is the thesis that everything physical can be expressed or captured in the languages of the basic sciences: "completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology." Linguistic physicalism is stronger than metaphysical physicalism and less plausible (Fodor 1981). Jackson gives Mary all knowledge expressible in the basic sciences, and he stresses that for physicalism to be true all facts must be expressed or expressible in "explicitly physical language." This is linguistic physicalism. It can be false without metaphysical physicalism being false.

If you’ve never seen a cube in your life, you could still try to envision what it looks like if I gave you a sufficient description. I could tell you that a cube is a three-dimensional object, meaning it has height, width, and depth. It consists of six squares joined together, forming six faces, and so on.

But I can’t do the same with color—mainly because the words to describe it don’t quite exist in the dictionary. However, it would be fallacious to conclude from this that color is somehow ineffable or mystical.

The key difference isn't that color is mysterious or transcendent – rather, it reflects the fundamental nature of how our sensory experiences are structured and communicated. The challenge with describing colors doesn't arise from their metaphysical status, but from the limitations of language in conveying direct sensory experiences.

"Physicalists must hold that complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge simpliciter" (1986, 392). Yes and no. Physicalists must hold that complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge simpliciter in the sense that they must hold that when Mary finds out what red is like, she has learned something about the physical world. But this hardly implies that complete knowledge in the basic sciences can express or capture this item of knowledge without the relevant causal interchange between perceiver and perceived. Mary might know everything that can be expressed in the languages of completed physics, chemistry, and neuroscience, but this hardly entails that she knows "all there is to know." What else there is to know is nothing mysterious. It is physical. And it can be expressed in certain ways. It is simply that it cannot be perspicuously expressed in the vocabulary of the basic sciences.

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At the beginning of this article, I mentioned how I initially found the thought experiment not just unintuitive but also based on faulty assumptions—assumptions that, once recognized, make dismantling the whole thing an easy task.

I might just be letting my hubris speak here, but sometimes you have to let the devil out. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, or something like that. So, I’m going to let my hubris run wild. Now, I see in so many ways how Mary’s Room is flawed. Not only is it an incoherent mess that offers no meaningful insight into empirical reality, but it also stumbles over itself by failing to explain how direct experience supposedly disproves physicalism. Ultimately, it just begs the question against the physicalist, assuming that seeing red is some ineffable, quasi-mystical experience—and I’m having none of it.

I’m honestly getting sick of dualists—and some religious people—telling me that consciousness is somehow the last stand for the materialist, as if the physicalist is desperately clinging to some powerful materialist dogma. I have yet to see a convincing argument for the supposed falsity of physicalism. I plan to show, articulate my reasons proper, for the basis of my naturalistic dogma, and mary’s room seems like a trivial first step.