Mary's Room Is a Bad Argument (with the right conclusion)
I believe that our thoughts and feelings are not physical. But I think it is important to give the alternative view. Bentham’s Bulldog (Matthew Adelstein) has recently stated an argument for the non-physical nature of feelings and thoughts that I do not believe passes muster - as I will show below.
Although I risk using Adelstein as a bit of a punching bag lately (depending on how successful you judge my arguments), he’s great for quick accounts of philosophy of religion arguments and related fields, so I will continue using his articles as prompts for now. He makes the Mary’s Room argument that thoughts and feelings are nonphysical roughly as follows:
P1) Suppose that Mary is an excellent mind with all the data of the world at her fingertips on a black and white screen, stuck in a black and white room;
P2) She does not have a mirror, has pale skin and never draws blood (so has never seen red, nor ever could);
C1) [P1->] Mary could know every physical fact;
C2) Since Mary could know every physical fact (C1) and cannot know the experience of seeing red (P2), the experience of seeing red cannot be physical.
Adelstein makes short work of various objections and pseudo-objections to this argument, many of which miss the point of the argument. The point isn’t just that Mary couldn’t see red - but that she couldn’t know what it is like to see red. The physicalist maintains that even our mental experiences are physical. There’s a contradiction in maintaining that Mary could know everything physical fact yet not know the physical fact of the mental experience of red (if it is indeed a physical fact). Therefore, better to reject that mental experience is a physical fact - or so runs the argument.
Objections to which Adelstein replies object to P2, claiming that Mary could know what it is to see red. But whilst she may know what happens physiologically in the brain at the sight of red, how the eye receives red light and the properties of red light, she would at no point know what it is to experience seeing red - because she had not seen it and is presumably not telepathic.
I happen to think that mental experiences are not physical, but not because of this argument. That’s because, whilst P2 is on pretty strong footing (Mary cannot know what it is like to experience seeing red), I find it odd that Adelstein merely asserts the strength of P1.
Why should one commit to the idea that Mary could learn every physical fact? To accept this seems to require accepting that every physical fact can be learnt from reading and reasoning. That strikes me as a very bold claim unless one reasons that it is a consequence of how we define the physical. But it’s very difficult to make a clear definition of what the physical is in a grand sense! It makes one tempted to swallow the AJ Ayer philosophy-is-nonsense pill.
For now, I will merely maintain that it is a very strong claim that we should not assume to be true. Given we should not posit that Mary could know every physical fact, we should reject P1. At that point, there is no contradiction with her not being able to know what it is like to experience seeing red and all things being physical - after all, there are a lot of physical facts she could not know. At this point, I can conclude that the Mary’s Room argument does not refute materialism in the form in which I’ve presented it.
All the same, I’ve not provided any particular reason to actively disbelieve that Mary could learn all physical facts. To argue for this, I will take a bolder line of argumentation below in which I try to show from the nature of scientific inquiry that there are plenty of physical facts no one could know - and thus that gaps in Mary’s knowledge shouldn’t be surprising. I’m unsure as it's not stated, but I think Nathan Ormond may have been thinking the same as me in this note.
Could it be possible to know all physical facts? A big method by which we discover physical facts is scientific inquiry. But this is not without its pitfalls. In Popper’s view, science done properly is a continuous process of testing falsifiable ideas to get ever closer to the true, complete model of the physical world. In Kuhn’s view, science is a process of building a worldview/paradigm of how the physical world is that gets revolutionised when its creaking under the weight of its own limitations annoys scientists more than their commitment to their prior theories. Under both views, science is model building and will likely never completely and fully accurately describe the physical world.
In that case, scientific inquiry most likely will never uncover some physical facts. More exactly to my argument, there are [I claim] physical facts that could not be discovered. All I really need to claim for this argument is that there is at least one physical fact that cannot be found in human inquiry. If these physical facts, such as what happens on the quantum scale, cannot be otherwise discovered, then these are physical facts that no one could know.
That Mary could not know what it is like to experience red when trapped in her room is not - at present in my analysis - compelling evidence that that experience is not physical, since there is at least one definitely-physical fact she could not know from her room.
PS I have seen one counter piece to Adelstein which I take to be thoroughly unfair. Lance S. Bush claims that we could not know whether Mary gains knowledge upon seeing red through merely reasoning about the thought experiment, since we cannot observe the outcome. This relies on a very odd and bold claim that only through observing can we know things.
It also sidesteps the reality that we do gain new knowledge of what an experience is like when we experience it - and not before. For Bush, this refers to some ‘intuition’ of what we think about knowledge. I share his scepticism about overreliance on intuition, but I don’t see how that’s the case in this situation. We know from our own life (and observation of how we gain knowledge) that we only gain knowledge of what an experience is like upon doing it. Hence teenage girls huddling around the friend who’s had sex with questions instead of reading a book about it.
Bush also, later in his piece, rejects P1 (as I do). However, I do not think his rationale passes muster in the context of a philosophical thought experiment. He focuses on Mary’s inability to learn everything (given the physiological limitations of her brain), but misses her ability to learn anything. I think the Mary’s Room Argument only needs Mary to have the capacity to learn any physical fact and the inability to learn what it is like to experience seeing red to show that what it is like to experience seeing red is not physical.
Bush then attacks Adelstein’s formulation of referring to ‘what it’s like’ to experience red, deeming this imprecise and undefined. But Adelstein is clear. He is referring to the sensations of seeing red - the qualia. Fixating on his terms would be good if it was carried out in good faith, but at present I’m left with the impression Bush wasn’t reading Adelstein with a keenness to infer what he meant. In denying that ‘what it’s like’ to experience something is meaningful, Bush seems to imply we don’t have sensations. I do anyway! I don’t know whether you possible-zombies do.
Bush goes off a bit about Adelstein using the phrase ‘biting the bullet’, although I’m unsure what relevance this has to the logical structure of either party’s case (I lied, it has none). In short, Bush fired off a piece annoyed by the braggadocio of Adelstein’s exposition of the Mary’s Room Argument, inadvertently irking me in the process. I may have just given myself doubts over the worth of writing these last couple of paragraphs with that sentence, but I’ve done it now and I shan’t admit to large doubts.