Mary (thought experiment)

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Marys Zimmer is a philosophical thought experiment presented by Frank Cameron Jackson in 1982 in his article Epiphenomenal Qualia and expanded in 1986 in his treatise What Mary Didn't Know . The argument that is supposed to be underpinned by this thought experiment is often referred to as the knowledge argument against physicalism , i.e. against the view that everything that exists, even spiritual, is purely physical.

The thought experiment

The thought experiment was originally formulated by Frank Jackson as follows:

“ 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? ”
“Mary is a brilliant scientist who, for whatever reason, is forced to examine the world from a black and white room using a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and, we shall assume, appropriates all the physical information that is available about what happens when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and terms like 'red', 'blue' etc. . to use. She discovers, for example, which wavelength combinations emanating from the sky stimulate the retina and how exactly this causes the vocal cords to contract with the help of the central nervous system and expel air from the lungs, which leads to the utterance of the sentence 'The sky is blue'. […] What will happen if Mary is let out of her black and white room or if you give her a color TV? Will she learn something or not? "( Lit .: Jackson 1982, p. 130)

In other words, imagine a scientist who knows everything there is to know in the science of color perception, but who has never experienced color . The interesting question Jackson poses is: does this scientist learn something new the first time she sees color outside of her black and white prison?

Inferences

Should Mary learn something new when she has her first color perception, this has two important consequences: the existence of phenomenal (spiritually experienced), qualitative properties, aspects or levels of consciousness that can only be experienced , so-called qualia . Since qualia are so closely related to spiritual experience and, according to Jackson, cannot be reduced to physical explanations (otherwise Mary's optical specialization would be sufficient to "really know" colors), this would also be an argument for the existence of the mental (more precisely for knowledge of mental facts ) and thus against physicalism (the sometimes so-called knowledge argument ).

Qualia

First, if Mary learns something new after a color experience, qualia (the subjective, qualitative properties of experiences) exist. If we hold the thought experiment valid, we believe that Mary is gaining something - that she is acquiring knowledge of a particular entity that she did not previously have. That knowledge, Jackson argues, is knowledge of the qualia of red vision. It should therefore be recognized that qualia are real qualities, as there is a difference between a person who has access to certain qualia and one who does not have that access.

The knowledge argument

Second, if Mary learns something new after experiencing color, the physicalism is wrong. In particular, the knowledge argument is an attack on the claim of the physicalists that a physical explanation of mental states is complete. Mary may know all about color perception that science can know about it, but does she know what it's like to see the color red when she has never seen that color? Jackson claims that she learns something new through experience, and thus that physicalism is wrong.

“ It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is 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. ”
“It seems obvious that she will learn something new about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inevitable that their previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. So there is more than just having this, and physicalism is wrong. "( Lit .: Jackson 1982, p. 130)

It is important to note, however, that in Jackson's article, physicalism denotes the epistemological doctrine that all knowledge is knowledge of physical facts , rather than the metaphysical doctrine that all things are physical things.

Reactions

Frank Jackson

Frank Jackson himself initially supported the antiphysicalist implications of the thought experiment of Marys Zimmer. Jackson believed in the full explanatory power of physiology , that all of our behavior is caused by some physical force. The thought experiment, on the other hand, seems to show the existence of qualia, non-physical mental entities. So if, Jackson argued, both of these are true, then epiphenomenalism is true, that is, mental states are caused by physical states but, conversely, they have no causal influence on the physical world. ( Lit .: Jackson 1982 & 1986)

So when he designed the thought experiment, Jackson was an epiphenomenalist. He later rejected epiphenomenalism against it. ( Lit .: Jackson 2003) This is because, as he explains, Mary says "Wow" when she sees red for the first time, which is why it must be Mary's qualia that makes her say "Wow". This contradicts epiphenomenalism. Since the thought experiment of Mary's room provokes this contradiction, something must be wrong with him. This position is often referred to as "'there must be a reply' reply".

At the end of Mind and Illusion (2003) Jackson suggests that it is only under false assumptions about sensory perception that Mary acquires new knowledge. This does not follow with the correct theory, namely a representational one . In addition, only if representationalism is adopted can the most convincing response to the example be developed: the u. a. suggested by Nemirow and D. Lewis that Mary acquire a new ability. This allows physicalism to be maintained.

Daniel Dennett

The philosopher Daniel Dennett describes Mary's thought experiment as an “intuition pump”, a thought experiment that is easy to understand and intuitively accessible and that encourages us to misunderstand its assumptions all too easily and simply to fall into our intuition that the result of the thought experiment "Obviously" is that Mary will learn something new on her first color experiment. Dennett writes in his monograph "Consciousness explained":

"The crucial premise is that 'She has all the physical information.' That is not readily imaginable, so no one bothers. They just imagine that she knows lots and lots - perhaps they imagine that she knows everything that anyone knows today about the neurophysiology of color vision. But that's just a drop in the bucket, and it's not surprising that Mary would learn something if that were all she knew. "
“The key premise is that 'it has all the physical information.' It's not easy to imagine, which is why nobody bothered. They just imagine that she knows a great deal - maybe they imagine that she knows everything that anyone today knows about the neurophysiology of color vision. But that's just a drop in the bucket and it's not surprising that Mary would learn something new if that were all she knew. "( Lit .: Dennett 1991, p. 399)

So, according to Dennett, we must not dismiss the knowledge of Mary based on our current knowledge and our need in closing the explanatory gap. At the moment we cannot imagine what such knowledge looks like, but if we really allow Mary to know everything that can be available in physical knowledge, we must not think of someone who has absolutely everything there is to be imagined as someone who is “just” damn rich. Dennett strongly opposes that it is "obvious" that Mary is learning something new the first time she sees color; this would be suggested to one by the way the thought experiment is usually presented. Instead, he suggests that the viewer imagine Mary being presented with a yellow and a blue banana to test after her release, and that she passes this test with flying colors. It is less important how it does this in detail, but rather that it does it. This alternative outcome of the experiment, Dennett said, would not prove that Mary was learning nothing new, but that the usually suggested outcome of the experiment would not necessarily show that she had to learn something new. For Dennett, therefore, Jackson's thought experiment is a

"Classic provoker of Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of imagination for insight into necessity."
"Classic trigger of the philosophy syndrome: a failure of the imagination to be confused with an insight into necessity." ( Lit .: Dennett 1991, p. 401)

This position was supported by Dennett in "What RoboMary Knows" ( Ref : presented Dennett 2003).

The debate sparked by this thought experiment was most recently the subject of a collection of essays - There's Something About Mary (2004) - with responses from leading philosophers such as Daniel Dennett , David Lewis , and Paul Churchland . The thought experiment can also be found in the film Ex Machina . Here Caleb introduces the thought experiment to the android Ava. It is indirectly related to artificial intelligence and adds a further component: Can machines ever experience colors if all the knowledge they have is only programmed into it? Will humans always be superior to AI if they are not?

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Mary's room  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files