Physicalism Essay, Research Paper

And In This Corner…

Levine Vs. Jackson

To Be Or Not To Be a Physicalist

A physicalist is one who believes that all information is physical. This is a view that sees all factual knowledge as that which can be formulated as a statement about physical objects and activities. Thus, the language of science can be reduced to third

Person descriptions. Philosopher Frank Jackson, an anti-physicalist, proposes the knowledge argument against physicalism, which goes as follows:

Suppose that there is a brilliant neuroscientist, let’s call her Mary, who for her whole life has lived in a black and white room. Now Mary has learned every physical fact about everything there is to know in life. She’s observed the outside world and learned these physical facts by watching other people’s experiences and reactions yet all in black and white. One day she is let out of the colorless room and sees a red rose for the first time. Despite the fact that she knows everything physical there is to know about roses and people’s reactions to roses, she still learns something new at the instant she sees the color red for the first time.

This knowledge argument can be summed up as so:

P1: If physicalism is true, then one can know all the facts there are just by knowing all the physical facts.

P2: Mary knows all physical information.

P3: When she experiences red she learns something new

C: Therefore, physicalism is false because the experience of red thing is a fact one cannot know just by knowing all the physical facts.

Jackson’s argument is pretty convincing in supporting the anti-physicalist view. However, philosopher Levine comes back with a strong argument declaring the knowledge argument as true in one sense yet false in another. Levine’s problem stems from the way Mary supposedly “learns” the new information. He agrees that perhaps Mary doesn’t learn any new facts, yet argues that she learns old facts in new ways. He believes that the reaction a person has when seeing red for the first time can be explained purely using physical information. Therefore Mary, knowing all physical information, would learn nothing new. However he agrees that Mary could learn something in a new way.

A good example of learning something in a new way is the example of the Morning/Evening star. When a person finds out that the Morning star is the same as the Evening star, this person does not learn any new physical information that the star might encompass. He only finds out that they are the same. Another example of learning something in a new way is the Clark Kent/Superman analogy. Lois Lane, who is in love with Superman, is also in love with Clark Kent because they are the same person. When she finds out that they are the same person, she does not suddenly learn some new physical data that she didn’t know before. A physicalist would use this argument to show that no new information was learned, thereby enforcing their theory that all information is physical.

There seems to be a problem with the second premis of the knowledge argument. The second premis, which states that “Mary knows all physical information”, uses the term “knows”. The problem with using words like “knows” is that it seems as if for one to “know red” it would entail actually seeing it. In other words, the problem with Mary is the fact that she is “hooked up” to her environment in a different way. The same argument can be said about being a bat. Researchers may be able to know the entire neurological sequencing of events that a bat’s brain might go through when navigating through the dark, and still would never truly know the feeling of flying by radar. In order for a researcher to say that he “knows” what its like to navigate by radar, he would have to actually be an organism with a radar in his head. Without having this, it would be impossible for him to say that he “knows” what its like to be a bat even though he may know all physical aspects of bat life. The researcher and the bat are simply hooked up in different ways. The same can be said for Mary. She is hooked up in a different manner by not seeing color her whole life, but will not learn any unknown information when experiencing red.

Levine claims that Jackson’s problem is that he trying to make an epistemological issue into a metaphysical one without an adequate explanation. This explanatory gap makes Jackson’s knowledge argument not completely sound. By saying that Mary “learns something new”, Jackson is implying that phenomenal properties are physical ones. Yet Levine points out that although Jackson shows that they could be identical, there is no explanation to back it up. Since we can’t know that phenomenal properties are equated with physical properties, there is an explanatory gap which devaluates the knowledge argument.