"To argue that conscious experience goes beyond ordinary knowing, we are told
the story of Mary, a scientist of the future who knows all there is to know
abut the perception of color. But she has never been outside a room where
everything is black or white. One day she is shown something red. For the
first time, Mary _experiences_ red. Her experience of red is something
_beyond_ her complete knowledge of red. Or is it? You can no doubt generate
for yourself the pro and con arguments that the Mary story provokes." (Quantum
Enigma, p.180)
Excited by this quote, Marsha said:
Somehow this represents the difference between 'probabilities' and
'possibilities,' but don't ask me to explain.
dmb says:
Hmmm, I don't see what this hypothetical scientist of perception has to do with
probabilities, possibilities or the difference between them.
As I understand it, Mary's case represents what Chalmers calls "the hard
problem" in the philosophy of consciousness. This scenario is meant to
challenge the view that consciousness is just what brains do. There are
neurologists who like to think that brains and minds are identical so that if
you understand all the physiological processes involved in perception and
thought then you understand consciousness. Our hypothetical scientist knows all
the facts ABOUT the perception of red (and she understands what red means in
terms of physics too) but that knowledge is distinctly different from actually
seeing red as a direct and concrete experience. Mary the scientist is meant to
illustrate the limits of such neurological explanations. Her case is supposed
to show that consciousness cannot be reduced to physiology in this way. Back in
the day, William James had a name for this kind of reductionism: medical
materialism. He begins his "Varieties of Religious Experience with a chapter
titled "Religion and Neurology", where he says:
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting
states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in
criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when
other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them
'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and
hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental
states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we
wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded
system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up
Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion
of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as
an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's
discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it
treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it
accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it
says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis
(auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various
glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such
personages is successfully undermined. * -
* For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an article on
'les Varietes du Type devot,' by Dr. Binet-Sangle, in the Revue de
l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern
psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes
as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily
conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt the assumption,
then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general
way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if
not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was
undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which,- and the
rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of
mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?
According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not
a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has
not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories ar
e organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we
only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver'
determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of
the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one
way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we
get the atheist form of mind. So of all our rapturer, and our drynesses, our
longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically
founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in
refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical
and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some
psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate
sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not
even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value
as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from
the state of their possessor's body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such
sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure,
that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more
truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It
has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by
which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it
dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting
them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and
inconsistent.
And this is a psychologist talking! A hundred years ago!!!
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