Tag Archives: Mary

Mary and the Secret Stones

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Adam Pautz has a new argument to show that consciousness is irreducible (that is, it can’t be analysed down into other terms like physics or functions). It’s a relatively technical paper – a book length treatment is forthcoming, it seems – but at its core is a novel variant on the good old story of Mary the Colour Scientist. Pautz provides several examples in support of his thesis, and I won’t address them all, but a look at this new Mary seems interesting.

Pautz begins by setting out a generalised version of how plausible reductive accounts must go. His route goes over some worrying territory – he is quite Russellian, and he seems to take for granted the old and questionable distinction between primary and secondary qualities. However, if the journey goes through some uncomfortable places, the destination seems to be a reasonable place to be. This is a  moderately externalist kind of reduction which takes consciousness of things to involve a tracking relation to qualities of real things out there. We need not worry about what kinds of qualities they are for current purposes, and primary and secondary qualities must be treated in a similar way. Pautz thinks that if he can show that reductions like this are problematic, that amounts to a pretty good case for irreducibility.

So in Pautz’s version, Mary lives on a planet where the outer surfaces of everything are black, grey, or white. However, on the inside they are brilliantly coloured, with red, reddish orange, and green respectively. All the things that are black outside are red inside, and so on, and this is guaranteed by a miracle ‘chemical’ process such that changes to the exterior colour are instantly reflected in appropriate changes inside. Mary only sees the outsides of things, so she has never seen any colours but black, white and grey.

Now Mary’s experience of black is a tracking relation to black reflectances, but in this world it also tracks red interiors. So does she experience both colours? If not, then which? A sensible reductionist will surely say that she only experiences the external colour, and they will probably be inclined to refine their definitions a little so that the required tracking relation requires an immediate causal connection, not one mediated through the oddly fixed connection of interior and exterior colours. But that by no means solves the problem, according to Pautz. Mary’s relation to red is only very slightly different to her relation to black. Similar relations ought to show some similarity, but in this case Mary’s relation to black is a colour experience, whereas her relation to red, intrinsically similar, is not a colour experience – or an experience of any kind! If we imagine Martha in another world experiencing a stone with a red exterior, then Martha’s relation to red and Mary’s are virtually identical, but have no similarity whatever. Suppose you had a headache this morning, suggests Pautz, could you then say that you were in a nearly identical state this afternoon, but that it was not the state of experiencing a headache; in fact it was no experience at all (not even, presumably, the experience of not having a headache).

Pautz thinks that examples of this kind show that reductive accounts of consciousness cannot really work, and we must therefore settle for non-reductive ones. But he is left offering no real explanation of the relation of being conscious of something; we really have to take that as primitive, something just given as fundamental. Here I can’t help but sympathise with the reductionists; at least they’re trying! Yes, no doubt there are places where explanation has to stop, but here?

What about Mary? The thing that troubles me most is that remarkable chemical connection that guarantees the internal redness of things that are externally black. Now if this were a fundamental law of nature, or even some logical principle, I think we might be willing to say that Mary does experience red – she just doesn’t know yet (perhaps can never know?) that that’s what black looks like on the inside. If the connection is a matter of chance, or even guaranteed by this strange local chemistry, I’m not sure the similarity of the tracking relations is as great as Pautz wants it to be. What if someone holds up for me a series of cards with English words on one side? On the other, they invariably write the Spanish equivalent. My tracking relation to the two words is very similar, isn’t it, in much the same way as above? So is it plausible to say I know what the English word is, but that my relation to the Spanish word is not that of knowing it – that in fact that relation involves no knowledge of any kind? I have to say I think that is perfectly plausible.

I can’t claim these partial objections refute all of Pautz’s examples, but I’m keeping the possibility of reductive explanations open for now.

 

Abilities don’t matter

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Picture: bike. Sam Coleman returned in a recent paper (JCS vol 16, n0 2-3) to the old perennial of Mary the colour scientist.  As you may know, Frank Jackson’s story about Mary was intended to establish that there was something important – qualia – which the simple physical account of the world omitted. Mary, we’re told, knows everything that could possibly be known about colour from a scientific point of view (far more than any living scientist knows, or could know).  She knows all the physical facts. But she has never experienced colour; when she sees a red rose for the first time, doesn’t she learn something new – ie what red looks like? If you agree, then, it is argued, you must agree that there are things in heaven and earth not dreamt of in physicalist philosophy.

One standard riposte to this line of argument is to deny that Mary learns any new facts when she sees red for the first time:  instead, she merely acquires a new ability. Now she can recognise red, when she couldn’t do before; but she doesn’t actually know any new facts about redness or the human optical system. (After all, the phrase ‘she knows what red is like’ literally suggests that she can give a list of things which are like a red object, and say whether the colour of a given object resembles red or not – which sounds a lot like recognition.) We might mention other abilities; the ability to remember or imagine redness, in particular – but none of these involve new knowledge in the ordinary sense, any more than acquiring the ability to ride a bike involves learning new facts. You can read as many books about bicycles as you like: you’ll still fall off the first time you get on one.

Coleman aims to knock this line of argument on the head, not by refuting it but by showing it to be irrelevant. Most attacks on the Ability Hypothesis, he says, address what he calls its inner face directly. They seek to show that what happens to Mary cannot be boiled down to the gaining of an ability – perhaps because all such abilities involve factual knowledge – or they set out to show directly that Mary does indeed learn new facts.  These strategies tend, he says with some justice, to end up mired in a clash of intuitions with no clear way forward.

Instead, then, he concedes that if we wish, we can see what happens to Mary as the acquisition of some new abilities; he addresses instead what he calls the outer face of the problem. What about the analogy of bike-riding? Proponents of the Ability Hypothesis say it does not depend on factual knowledge, and it’s true it doesn’t come from academic book-reading. But what does it involve? Surely it’s all about keeping our balance? That’s a matter of teaching your muscles how to respond quickly and appropriately to certain sensations of tipping over.  So hang on, it actually involves knowledge of what it feels like to wobble – what certain kinds of phenomenal experience are.  Is this kind of knowledge factual knowledge?  Never mind the answer for the moment – all we need do is notice that this is exactly the kind of question we were asking about Mary’s experience of redness in the first place. The Ability Hypothesis has merely taken us back to where we started – so we need not waste our time on it.

A neat piece of footwork, I think, and Coleman’s analysis of the phenomenal element in abilities such as bike-riding, ear-waggling, and the use of chopsticks provides an interesting new insight, worth having in its own right. (Readers may be interested in the Phenomenal Qualities Project, whose three-year mission is due to begin next month; Coleman is co-investigator to Paul Coates and the list of project members includes some stellar names.)

Where are we left with Mary meanwhile, though? Should we now accept the refutation of physicalism she represents? No, I would say, but then again yes.

One thing that’s sure about Mary is that if she does acquire new knowledge, it is knowledge of some special kind. It isn’t the sort we can write down and transmit in words – that much is true ex hypothesi, because if it were that kind of knowledge, it would be among the things Mary already knows. It’s tempting to denounce this kind of knowledge as metaphorical or worse, but let’s merely ask whether it’s fair to expect the theory of physicalism to include it.  Theories, after all, are expressed in words, and typically written down; if we’re dealing with facts that can’t be dealt with that way it seems only reasonable to conclude that no theory could deal with them and that they must remain extra-theoretical.  Physicalism might then be incomplete in some sense, but we have no reason to think it isn’t as complete as any theory could be.  How much is it reasonable to ask?

And yet, and yet…  We’re talking here about what things are like;  this somehow still feels like a problem where more could be said after all. We can’t expect that our theories should deliver ineffable reality itself, but doesn’t it seem that there is some tantalising last elucidation obtainable here, if only we knew how to go about it?