I'm having real trouble deciding on what to write today. I started to make a list, but after getting to about 20 different topics, I thought I should just start typing and see what comes out.
Not that there are many people reading my posts yet, but if you have any suggestions for what I could or should think/write about, please make suggestions in a comment.
I thought I'd go with a short post on consciousness (as I know @psychphilosopher is interested in this): why there might be more to it than just atoms and electrons etc. Before we get any further, I should insert a disclaimer: I'm not sure if I believe what follows, nor is this super comprehensive - it's just a sketch of an influential idea.
Our experiences have qualities like texture, colour (e.g.: redness), pressure, pain etc. Because philosophers like to make things difficult for everyone, we made up a word for those sort of qualities: qualia. This refers to the subjective quality of a sensation or experience, 'from the inside'. If someone wanted to argue for physicalism - that there's nothing more to our mental states than physical explanations because there's nothing more in the universe than physical stuff, then they must be able to explain (at least potentially) everything about us and our experiences in those terms.
Trouble is, there's a simple thought experiment that caused, and continues to cause, a lot of grief for those who think there's nothing more to life than what physics describes. It's known variously as the 'Knowledge Argument' or 'Mary's Room', and it was developed in the 1980s by Australian philosopher Frank Jackson in his article, Epiphenomenal Qualia. The key bit is in a couple of paragraphs on p130:
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 cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue".
So, Mary knows everything there is to know about the physics of coloured light and the neuro-biology of how we see it. She has never actually seen colour though.
Here's the key question: If we let her out of the room, and she sees a red appleđ in colour for the first time, does she learn something new? Does she know something she didn't know before?
Intuitively, it's hard to say 'no' - because she didn't know what red looked like, and now she does! But if that's true, then her supposedly complete knowledge was actually incomplete. But, as Jackson says: "...she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false." (1982, p130).
People have been arguing about this ever since, so there's a lot more to it than this - but the core idea is there. Something to think about, eh?
Thanks for reading. Feel free to leave a comment - including suggestions for future posts (or maybe to beg me to never write about this again).
Photo by MichaĆ Grosicki on Unsplash