Marsha --
The story that you attribute to Rosenblum & Kuttner coincidentally appears
in Dinesh D'Souza's essay 'Mind over Matter' which is archived on my
website. D'Sousa, who is highly insightful in his own right [you would
enjoy his bestselling "Life after Death"], mentions that philosopher Thomas
Nagel wrote a famous essay in 1974 with the provocative title "What Is It
Like to Be a Bat?"
Neither that question nor the question of whether Mary adds anything to her
"complete knowledge" of color by actually seeing red has anything to do with
"probability" that I can see. D'Souza explains the point of both
propositions in this essay. (You'll note that the author refers to the
"Mary problem" as an argument introduced by Frank Jackson to refute
"materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely physical terms").
"Nagel's point was that there is something that it is like to be human, or
male, or a dog; by the same token, there must also be something that it is
like to be a bat. But however much we learn about bat physiology, bat
brains, and echolocation, Nagel says we can never fully understand what it
is like to be a bat. The clear implication is that an objective physical
understanding is necessarily incomplete, apparently because there is
something to living organisms that transcends the physical.
In 1986, philosopher Frank Jackson broadened Nagel's argument into a
refutation of all materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely
physical terms. In what has come to be called the "Mary problem," Jackson
envisioned a brilliant scientist named Mary who is locked in a
black-and-white room from which she investigates the world by way of a
black-and-white television monitor. As a specialist in the neurophysiology
of vision, Mary knows everything there is to know about color. She
understands how different wavelengths of light stimulate the retina, and how
those are channeled to the visual areas in the brain, resulting in such
statements as 'The sky is blue' and 'Tomatoes are red.'
"Now here's Jackson's question: Suppose Mary finally gets a color TV monitor
or is released from her black-and-white room into the outside world. Will
Mary learn something that she didn't know before? Jackson says she
obviously would. She would for the first time know what it's like to see
the blue sky or red tomatoes. These experiences would teach her something
about color that all her previous knowledge could not.
"Alarmed at where this is going, the atheist Dennett disputes Jackson's
interpretation, insisting that if Mary really knew everything about color,
including, as Dennett puts it, '10 billion word treatises' on the subject,
then she actually would know what it was like to see the blue sky and red
tomatoes. Dennett admits this is counterintuitive, but he contends that
intuitions are not always our best guide.
"I agree with him on that, but on balance I have to go with Jackson here.
It defies not only intuition but also reason to say that Mary, on being
liberated from her black-and-white world, wouldn't discover something new.
Her extrinsic knowledge of color would now be supplemented by intrinsic
knowledge. If this is so, then it is hard to resist Jackson's conclusion
that all attempts to reduce mental states to physical states must be false,
because Mary had all the physical information, and yet her prior knowledge
was incomplete."
-- [D'Souza: Mind over Matter; www.essentialism.net/mind_over_matter.htm]
As I read it, the moral of this story is: Conscious awareness is far more
than the acquisition of factual knowledge (or a collection of "interrelated
patterns").
When it comes to knowing something, there's nothing like experience!
What say you now, Marsha?
--Ham
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