Knowledge Argument From Qualia
From personal experience of the philosophy readings what I can derive is that there is a conceivable dispute to almost every theory, maybe except to the highly structured metaphysical ones which disables us to use the rules of physics, our physical experiences which are the most, if not all, of what we can know about the world and happenings in it in order to disagree with or falsify it. In this paper, I will explain the knowledge argument from qualia and several possible objections from physicalists to it. Because of the reason I have mentioned above, I will be critical rather than supportive to these theories and I will do my critique from an independent point of view of physicalism. My thesis will be also standing for a critique of physicalism.
After that, I will handle Jackson’s modal argument from his paper “Epiphenomenal qualia” and make a critique based on my main thesis against the knowledge argument from qualia. In short we will be witnessing physicalism versus non-physicalism and something else versus these two. That something else will be the argument I will bring in the story.
Knowledge argument from qualia aims to prove the incompleteness of physicalism. This means that there are truths expressible in the system or implied by the system which can not be explained by the system. (Heil, page# 756). This argument will try to prove that there is something- qualia- that can be experienced in the physical world but can not be reduced to any other physical thing. Therefore physicalism will be incomplete and so will be disproved. First let’s see the example of Mary: Mary is a neuroscientist who is an expert about vision and she has been observing the life from a black and white TV screen since she was born. She knows everything about light, its differing wave-lengths and human-beings’ optical system which lets them distinguish lights of different wave-length and experience the qualia of vision. On the other hand she has no experience of colors and all she is given is the whole physical information of vision process. One day Mary is released from her room or her TV screen is replaced with a color one. The problem is: after being released does she gain any new information from her personal experience of colors? Certainly she gets to know what it is like to see the colors, but is this some new information related to our world? Knowledge argument from qualia says that this is some new knowledge that can only be gained from qualia and was not previously there although there was all physical knowledge about vision. If all premises and their consequences are true this will imply that physical picture is not complete so that physicalism fails to be valid. A good response from physicalist point of view might be that; there is not any knowledge coming from qualia and therefore this example fails to work as an anti-thesis to physicalism. I would also ask for a proof that the qualia, which is subjective component of conscious experience, brings some new knowledge about our world. Unfortunately for a proof, one should first understand or be able to talk about qualia, but it exactly gives trouble at this point, since we do not have any tool to talk about or describe the way we experience colors, tastes, feelings and so on…Moreover, knowing how it feels to see a ripe tomato might not even be the same feeling for every human-being. If it is the case: Is this very subjective feeling knowledge? I feel that main point here is that some of the things that seem to be loaded with the knowledge of world might be failing to carry any information. Like the qualia of experiencing a specific color… Since there is no evidence that this is a shared qualia or whether this experience is essential or contingent, we do not get to know much about it. The feeling of seeing red and feeling of tasting hot pepper might have switched and we do not know much until we know why these experiences feel in the way they do. This is what I mean with the contingency of the qualia. In short, if we do not know why we feel the pain in the way we feel it and if it is the same feeling for anybody who is claiming to be in pain then we do not know enough to say that we gained some information from personal experience of pain.
My main objection to knowledge argument from qualia is that I can not agree with the first premise. First premise says that you can give all physical information about the vision via a white and black screen. Can we translate all the information gained through a sensation into an argument with words or into another sensation that can be perceived by the sensual organs which are not blocked? What if there are physical knowledge’s that can be gained only through eyes and for that physical information to be known to human being it should be able to reach the right part of the brain and the only way for that to go to there is to follow a specific path. For example for a complete physical knowledge of vision the light should follow the path through eyes with the specific destination in the brain. Therefore Mary might be deprived of some physical information because of the TV screen which filters the colors. Another thing is: The information of qualia of colors might be a totally physical one although yet we do not have the words to describe it, and Mary was not given it since the only way to know them might be through seeing and experiencing them as we just discussed. Then this means that her knowledge about physical things was not complete before her release either. On the other hand if there is possibility for qualia to be something physical, at the last step of argumentation one can not claim that there is a non-pyhsical knowledge acquired. Therefore Mary’s example will not prove incompleteness of the phsicalism. We had mentioned our doubts about the nature of qualia and we concluded that if it is a physical one which could not be given to Mary because the only way to attain it was through experience and she was not let to do so, the knowledge argument from qualia fails to say anything. To see the other possibilities, I will let qualia be a new knowledge about vision but then I will insist that there is a possibility that Mary could not get all the knowledge about the physical aspects of vision since she could not use some parts of the brain which are responsible for making that specific knowledge . Moreover it can be the case that this knowledge can not be achieved via any other way but only from the experience that lets the physical input follow the only path that arrives the point where it will be processed in brain. I also want to argue that things might or might not be totally physical but it is possible that they have a physical component or they initiate something physical. For example, qualia of color might not be totally physical but there might be a physical component of it which makes it essential to be experienced for the whole physical knowledge of vision. Or it might be taking role in a physical process which will bring some new knowledge about vision. I am saying this since it seems to me that there are lots of events where obviously physical things seem to be correlated with other things which are doubted to be physical, e.g., mind-body correlations. To conclude, we do not know if qualia has a physical component or not and also we do not know if it is taking role in a physical process and helping the completeness of physical picture. That is why, by preventing Mary to have subjective experience of colors, we might be interrupting some physical knowledge formation processes in her mind. Frank Jackson gives the following objection to knowledge argument from qualia and it is mainly a summary of the doubts that I gave above in this paper,: “..qualia is left out of physicalist story. The polemical strength of the knowledge argument is that it is so hard to deny the central claim that one can have all the physical information without having all the information to have”.
However this is not a defense of physicalism. As it can be seen, we let physical non- physical (mysterious) interactions by letting qualia, which is possibly non-physical, to take a role in a physical process. In the physicalist frame-work we would not be able to do that. On the other hand as it was pointed out in Heil Introduction of chapter nine, physical explanation of most “physical events” still include contingency and can not answer the “why?” question. Physics lets us reduce vey complex truths to less complex ones, but there is a bed-rock where the physic stops contemplation and leaves those less complex relations as brute facts without further explanation (for example, we can reduce lots of things to level of cells and atoms and see how they behave but we do not know why they behave in the way they do). This means that there are also mysteries in the physical frame work. Then, how can we talk about completeness of physicalist story. Despite all these mysterious things going on for physical objects which the physics can not solve, it takes them solved since the objects are physical and the correlations between them or their behavior is likely to be physical. What I want to say is; before coming to qualia problem, physicalists should ask themselves how they can attempt to explain mind body problem without giving reasons why most of the physical objects are behaving in the way they are. It means that physicalist can only claim that mind-body correlation problem can be reduced to interaction of atoms or small physical objects which are easier to observe and understand, but still we will not know why they are behaving so since these are still brute facts for physics. Even after reducing this big problem to level of atoms, we have no clue to believe in physicalism since there is no theory to disable something non-physical to be acting on the most basic level that the physical events are reduced to.
My thesis is that physical things and metaphysical ones might be intervening with each other at different levels. They might be intervened in the qualia so that one can not get the all physical knowledge without experiencing qualia, or even if this is not the case there is still room for metaphysics in the level of atoms. As we said science has been too busy to understand how things happen and now still far away from answering the “why?” question.
As the last thing I want to examine Jackson’s the modal argument. The Modal argument is another argument that aims to disprove the claim that consciousness is something physical. The underlying idea is similar to Kripke’s logic, where we keep every physical thing fixed but construct a world where people have no consciousness. This will imply that consciousness is not physical. However the problem here is whether it is possible for such a world to exist. This is a useful model but unfortunately it does not decrease the difficulty level of our problem. We can not know whether such a world, where human-beings who are physically same as us live but they do not have conscious mental lives, without knowing that consciousness is independent of physicality. However we should note that this kind of transformation helps one to be able to use intuition. But being intuitive does not make it more reliable. I think these arguments are more useful when you want to disprove the possibility of it rather than proving possibility of such a world. This is because it is always easier to find something out of order than to check whether everything is all right. After saying that it is possible for a world to exist with unconscious copies of us, one should prove the possibility by showing that such a world can exist. That is why modal argument can not go beyond intuition if we aim to prove the existence non-physical dimension of consciousness.
References
heil, phil. of mind
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