Jackson's Mary

At a recent talk at BU about Consciousness, Steven Horst, a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan advanced an apparently well-known argument by Frank Jackson. The argument uses the thought experiment of a woman named Mary, kept in a controlled environment of black, white and grey, and at the same time made to know everything that the most advanced future (omni)science of the physical world can possibly tell her about the brain. Now, argues Frank, when she is made to see something red at last, she learns something new that could not be contained in such knowledge. And thus, concludes Horst with Frank, there is something beyond the physical world that is necessary for this experience to happen.

Of course this vulgar mystical argument is based on a typical confusion between object and representation -- the ultimate source of insanity according to Korzybski.

If Mary does have only a theoretical knowledge of her own brain, any information she has is about a model of her brain, a representation disconnected from knowledge of herself; making her see something red is then a new experience indeed, by which Mary may relate her representation (of her brain) to the object. On the other hand, if Mary's scientific source of knowledge really allows her to know everything about the physical state of her own brain, then amongst that "everything" is the ability to inspect the effect of observing the effect of actually firing her own red neurons. In other words, the interactive knowledge of her own physical state indeed includes her being able to simulate and register the effect of seeing red by manipulating her own brain. The absurdity of the situation is entirely due to Frank and Horst using a fallacious semantic shift between knowledge of the object and knowledge of a disconnected representation in the everything that Mary knows or doesn't know. No argument for or against physicality is actually present in this fallacy.

In fact, when we go to the bottom of the argument, we find not an indictment of the scientific experimental method, but a glorious vindication of it. Indeed, experiencing is something essential that goes beyond abstract knowledge: it is only by experimenting with physical phenomena that we can tie any non-tautological theoretical proposition to reality. Theoretical knowledge is not knowledge before it is somehow made to map actual physical interactions with the world. Certainly, theory, deductive logic, praxeology, induction, are necessary tools to allow for any kind of understanding of facts that would otherwise be but meaningless sound and fury. But only interaction with reality may allow to distinguish which amongst consistent theories are to prevail and which are to be rejected.

In the end, Horst is correct of course in his further claim that physicalism isn't an experimental scientific statement: it is an epistemological statement. But it isn't a matter of faith or revelation like mystics would have it, it is a provable epistemological truth. If we can know a phenomenon through interactions with the physical world, then it's physical indeed, and not supernatural. And if we can't, then any claim that it exists and that we know of it are preposterous. It is precisely the experimental method that may allow us to tie representation to the world: can you or can you not interact with the phenomenon and thus experimentally establish any reproducibly predictable regularity about it? If yes, then it is anything but supernatural, it is the valid subject of scientific knowledge. Show us the reproducible experiment, and we'll include this regularity amongst the known physical laws of nature. If you can't, then how can you speak of a phenomenon to begin with?

The utterly unspeakable is utterly irrelevant. And whatever speakable claim there is that mystics make of phenomena that would exist beyond knowable nature and may override or contradict the laws of nature, is actually the claim that random assertions by them must be accepted despite the lack of supporting evidence and the availability of contradicting evidence. These are but lazy and dishonest claims by which some pseudo intellectuals draped in pompous academic or religious titles try to smuggle unjustified and unjustifiable claims without having to pass any elementary test of validity. Rejecting such claims is not even a question of reason and science. It's a matter of basic intellectual honesty.

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