Skip to main content

thought experiment: what's the color of Mary's brain

There's the famous thought experiment in which a scientist named Mary is said to know everything about the color blue that can be conveyed through science.... but she has never seen the color blue (either because she lives in a black and white world or because she's color-blind)... until that blessed day when she sees blue for the first time: does she know something that she didn't know before?  Why yes.

That's the famous thought experiment.  Now here's my own variation on that theme.

Suppose someone is able to do a complete physical analysis of Mary's brain while she is either looking at or remembering blue.  Will they find any blue in there?  Why no, unless your talking about a part that was blue already.

Soooooooooooo. That thought experiment + question shows that it's just fanciful  to say that Mary has an image of blue in her brain: how can you have an image of a color that is not itself the color that it's supposed to represent? You can't!

The lack of a blue thing underscores how the material constituents of the knower need not be at all like the thing known.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....