Paper # 1 1. READ THE ARTICLE THAT FOLLOWS THESE INSTRUCTIONS 2. THINK ABOUT IT 3. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION (USING 2 PHILOSOPHERS YOU HAVE READ OR READ ABOUT SO FAR IN THE CLASS). DOES MARY LEARN ANYTHING NEW WHEN SHE SEES RED FOR THE FIRST TIME? IF SHE DOES, THEN, WHAT IS IT? IF SHE DOES NOT, WHY NOT? The paper should be: · 12 font · Times New Roman · With a cover page · A works cited page · Cite all references and quotations made · 3 pages What Did Mary Know? Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness. Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up entirely in a black and white room, she has never actually seen any colours. Many black and white books and TV programmes have taught her all there is to know about colour vision. Mary knows facts like the structure of our eyes and the exact wavelengths of light that stimulate our retinas when we look at a light blue sky. One day, Mary escapes her monochrome room, and as she walks through the grey city streets, she sees a red apple for the first time. What changes upon Mary’s encounter with the red apple? Has Mary learnt anything new about the colour red upon seeing the colour for the first time? Since Mary already knew everything about the physics and biology of colour perception, she must surely have known all there is to know about the colour red beforehand. Or is it possible that some facts escape physical explanations? (‘Physical’ in this sense refers to all the realms of physical science, including chemistry, biology, neuroscience, etc.). If Mary has learnt something new, then we can conclude that scientific explanations cannot capture all there is to know, argues Professor Frank Jackson, who thought up this scenario in ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, in The Philosophical Quarterly (1982). The story of Mary is known as the ‘knowledge argument’ and it has become one of the most prominent thought experiments in the philosophy of mind. You might say, “Hang on a minute, how was it possible that Mary grew up in a black and white room in the first place?” Never mind the first place. Some philosophers have put forth that she wore special goggles. But this issue need not concern us, because philosophical thought experiments depend on logical coherence rather than practical feasibility. Philosophers devise such narratives to think through an imagined situation, so as to learn something about the way we understand things. Thought experiments require no Bunsen burners or test tubes; they are laboratories of the mind. In thought experiments, time travel is logically possible, but no philosophy professor is expected to travel back in time to prove their point. Reinvigorating The Debate The reason Professor Jackson devised the thought experiment involving Mary was to challenge the physicalist school of thought. In philosophy of mind debates, proponents of physicalism argue that what really m.

1. Paper # 1
1. READ THE ARTICLE THAT FOLLOWS THESE
INSTRUCTIONS
2. THINK ABOUT IT
3. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION (USING 2
PHILOSOPHERS YOU HAVE READ OR READ ABOUT SO
FAR IN THE CLASS). DOES MARY LEARN ANYTHING
NEW WHEN SHE SEES RED FOR THE FIRST TIME? IF SHE
DOES, THEN, WHAT IS IT? IF SHE DOES NOT, WHY NOT?
The paper should be:
· 12 font
· Times New Roman
· With a cover page
· A works cited page
· Cite all references and quotations made
· 3 pages

2. What Did Mary Know?
Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness.
Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and
a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up
entirely in a black and white room, she has never actually seen
any colours. Many black and white books and TV programmes
have taught her all there is to know about colour vision. Mary
knows facts like the structure of our eyes and the exact
wavelengths of light that stimulate our retinas when we look at
a light blue sky.
One day, Mary escapes her monochrome room, and as she walks
through the grey city streets, she sees a red apple for the first
time.
What changes upon Mary’s encounter with the red apple? Has
Mary learnt anything new about the colour red upon seeing the
colour for the first time? Since Mary already knew everything
about the physics and biology of colour perception, she must
surely have known all there is to know about the colour red
beforehand. Or is it possible that some facts escape physical
explanations? (‘Physical’ in this sense refers to all the realms of
physical science, including chemistry, biology, neuroscience,
etc.). If Mary has learnt something new, then we can conclude
that scientific explanations cannot capture all there is to know,
argues Professor Frank Jackson, who thought up this scenario in
‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, in The Philosophical Quarterly (1982).
The story of Mary is known as the ‘knowledge argument’ and it
has become one of the most prominent thought experiments in

3. the philosophy of mind.
You might say, “Hang on a minute, how was it possible that
Mary grew up in a black and white room in the first place?”
Never mind the first place. Some philosophers have put forth
that she wore special goggles. But this issue need not concern
us, because philosophical thought experiments depend on
logical coherence rather than practical feasibility. Philosophers
devise such narratives to think through an imagined situation,
so as to learn something about the way we understand things.
Thought experiments require no Bunsen burners or test tubes;
they are laboratories of the mind. In thought experiments, time
travel is logically possible, but no philosophy professor is
expected to travel back in time to prove their point.
Reinvigorating The Debate
The reason Professor Jackson devised the thought experiment
involving Mary was to challenge the physicalist school of
thought. In philosophy of mind debates, proponents of
physicalism argue that what really matters is physical matter.
For them, consciousness is all about the brain; or more
specifically, it is identical to the brain. Physicalists have
formulated ‘identity theories’ that equate human consciousness
with the human brain. Long before contemporary debates on the
mind-body issue, physicalists were directly opposed
by dualist philosophers. Nowadays there are not many
straightforward dualists left, with the notable exception of
David Chalmers – kudos to him. Descartes would have been
proud of him, because the dualist position goes right back to
Descartes’ idea that the body is a different entity from the soul
(mind). Descartes argued that they are two different substances.
In-between the physicalists and the dualists you will find
proponents ofsupervenience theories. They argue that
consciousness emerges from(a.k.a. fancy word ‘supervenes’)
brain activity but is not reducible to it. For the sake of this
article I am going to focus on the opposing perspectives of
physicalists and anti-physicalists, rather than on the more
nuanced supervenience theories. (If you are interested in

4. supervenience, look up Sydney Shoemaker’s work.)
Jackson’s thought-experiment about Mary challenges
physicalism in the following way. Physicalists claim that
physical science can fully explain consciousness. However,
when Mary sees the red of the apple, says Jackson, she learns
something new, despite having previously learnt all the physical
facts about colour vision. Thus, argues Jackson, Mary has come
to know a non-physical fact; so proving that not all knowledge
is physical.
What is it like to imagine yourself to be a bat?
Jackson was not the first to challenge physicalism over the
question of consciousness. Anyone who engages with the mind-
body problem [ie, How do the mind and the brain relate?] will
discover that consciousness is almost always the pea on which
the philosopher princess rests. Consciousness is what keeps
philosophers awake at night. In his famous article ‘What Is It
Like To Be A Bat?’ (Philosophical Review, 4, 1974) the
philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote: “Without consciousness the
mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With
consciousness it seems hopeless” – a great admission by one of
the key figures in the philosophy of mind.
Nagel argued that it is impossible for human beings to know
what it would be like to be a bat. Certainly, bats have an idea of
what it feels like to be a bat on a daily basis. However, because
we have no sense equivalent to bats’ sonar, we cannot begin to
imagine what it is like to use that sense. Yes, we can do our
best to imagine ourselves hanging upside down in a pitch-black
cave, but even then we can only imagine this from a human
perspective, rather than from the perspective of a bat. With this
argument, Nagel was one of the first to reinvigorate the debate
in the second half of the twentieth century on how
consciousness may be explained, or rather, whether
consciousness can be explained at all.
Are Colours Physical?
When Nagel wrote that we don’t have any idea of how to share

5. the mental state of a bat, he was challenging the physicalists’
perspective that everything can be captured from a scientific,
objective point of view. Nagel argued that some facts can
instead only be captured from subjective points of view. Even if
we objectively know how the bat’s sonar system works and
enables the bat to avoid collisions, other questions remain
unanswered such as ‘What is it like to perceive the walls of a
cave using a bat’s sonar system?’ This argument about the ‘what
it is like’ subjective aspect of being a bat is different from
Jackson’s argument, because Jackson says we cannot explain
our own ‘what it is like’ sensations, let alone those of another
person, or a bat. While Nagel argues that the trouble with bats
is that they are too unlike us, Jackson thinks that this is hardly
an objection to physicalism, because physicalism makes no
special claims about the extrapolative powers of human beings.
Never mind that we can’t understand or explain what it’s like to
be a bat – we don’t possess that kind of knowledge about
ourselves either. According to Jackson, we can’t explain our
own qualitative sensations: what it is like to be happy and sad,
or what it is like to hear a saxophonist play at night. (All these
sensory aspects of experience will from now on be called
‘phenomenal states’.)
In 1974 Nagel thought about bats and so made his case arguing
that physical knowledge does not explain phenomenal states. In
1982, almost a decade later, Joseph Levine coined the
expression ‘the explanatory gap’ to express the problem faced
by any attempt to explain consciousness in physical terms.
Without wishing to reject physicalism altogether, Levine put
forward the idea that there is a gap in our ability to explain the
connection between phenomenal states and the properties of our
brains. We have no satisfactory understanding of why brain
processes produce the taste of chocolate, or the visual sensation
of seeing blue. If you hear a philosopher wonder “How can
colour perception arise from the soggy grey matter of our
brains?” you will recognize that they’re acknowledging the
‘explanatory gap’. Generally, we lack any explanation of how a

6. phenomenal state is identical with a physical state of the brain.
According to Levine, the difficulty of explaining consciousness
is unique. He says that we do not struggle to explain why water
is H2O, or why heat is molecular kinetic energy, in the same
way that we struggle to explain why brain states are phenomenal
states.
Another decade later, in 1995, Chalmers proposed a distinction
between the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard’ problems of consciousness in
his book The Conscious Mind. Mental properties divide into
phenomenal ones and psychological ones, argued Chalmers, and
the latter are far easier to explain than the former because they
don’t involve any deep metaphysical enigmas. Easier aspects to
explain include our ability to discriminate between different
things, or to categorize them, or to remember them. These easier
aspects can be explained through physical accounts. According
to Chalmers, the easy problem of consciousness is accounting
for cognitive ‘abilities and functions’, and in order to explain
them, one only needs to specify the mechanism that can perform
the function. Meanwhile, the hard problem of consciousness is
to explain how it is that we experience phenomenal states at all:
to explain why there is a certain feel to the phenomenal state of
pain, for example. So even though we might be able to explain
that the body needs pain for a particular function (i.e. as a
warning system) we cannot explain how brain processing gives
rise to a rich inner life.
The Physicalists Respond
Nagel’s arguments kicked off the ‘what it is like’ subjectivity
debate; Jackson’s story about Mary has challenged physicalism
in relation to sensations; Chalmer’s ‘hard and easy problem’
and Levine’s ‘explanatory gap’ arguments try to highlight what
it is that we cannot explain. Now let us look at the ways in
which physicalists have responded to the challenges that have
been mounted against them. Let’s consider some of the
reactions Mary has received, and then proceed to a recent
response to the knowledge argument called the ‘phenomenal
concept strategy’ (which is not as brain-racking as it sounds.)

7. To begin with, some philosophers have simply doubted that
Jackson’s argument is coherent. Mary doesn’t learn anything
new, just because she would in fact know that the apple is red
once she saw it, argues C.L. Hardin. Based on her complete
physical knowledge of colour vision, Mary would see the red
apple and joyfully exclaim, “Oh, so this is red!” If we were to
show Mary a blue banana instead, she would not be fooled; she
would know that it had the wrong colour, argues Daniel
Dennett, in what he coined the ‘blue banana trick’. Hats off to
Dennett for coming up with a fun name for his argument, but
both Hardin’s and Dennett’s arguments can be countered by
saying that the experience of seeing red goes beyond the ability
to recognize red.
Another philosopher, Owen Flanagan, plunges straight into
human biology and argues that the phenomenal state of seeing
red is a physical event, and that an individual seeing red
undergoes ‘red-channel activation’. In order to be able to
undergo red-channel activation, a causal interchange between
the person and an external red object is needed. In other words,
the individual needs to be hooked up with a red thing so that
experience of seeing red can be triggered. So phenomenal states
of seeing red are physical events, because they require red-
channel activation. According to Flanagan, what Mary goes
through is a physical event. Two other arguments – ‘the
experience argument’ and ‘the ability argument’ – also build on
the idea of a first-person perspective being a physical event.
The experience argument probably echoes the first doubt that
comes to your mind in relation to Jackson’s thought experiment,
dear reader. Namely, the question whether one can know all
there is to know by taking lessons and reading books. David
Lewis argues that you can’t learn certain things by being told
about the experience, however thorough your lessons may be.
Some facts you can only learn by experience, although they may
nevertheless be physical facts.
The experience argument can be extended into the ability
argument. Both Lewis and Laurence Nemirow claim that when

8. Mary sees red after her escape, her sensation of what it is like
just means her acquiring certain practical abilities. According to
Nemirow, knowing what an experience is like is the same as
knowing how to imagine having that experience. According to
Lewis, knowing what an experience is like is possessing the
ability to recognize it, the ability to imagine it, and the ability
to predict one’s behaviour. Lewis eloquently explains that
knowing what it is like is not knowing that – it is knowing how.
Flanagan, meanwhile, distinguishes between ‘linguistic physics’
and ‘complete physics’ to say that there is no reason to think
that just because Mary is a leading expert on colour vision she
can express phenomenal states in the vocabulary of physics.
Mary being an expert on colour vision does not entail that she
or anybody else could express the phenomenal state of seeing
red in physicalist terms, or even more basically, in words, but
phenomenal states are nevertheless physical states. However,
Jackson responds that physical knowledge must be complete
knowledge, which means that it not only encapsulate the
physical world, but that it should also be able to express and
explain all the facts about the physical world.
To recap, Jackson’s purpose in conceiving the knowledge
argument was to show that there are non-physical facts or
properties. His argument is that although Mary knows all the
physical facts about seeing red, she still learns a new fact when
leaving her room and seeing something red. Jackson therefore
concludes that there are facts that evade the physicalist theory.
According to Jackson, if physicalism was true, Mary must have
had complete knowledge about seeing red even in her
monochrome room. But she did not have complete knowledge,
he argues, because physicalism cannot explain phenomenal
states as it explains physical facts.
The Phenomenal Concept Strategy
The most common responses philosophers of the physicalist
persuasion give to the knowledge argument are based on the
‘new knowledge, old fact argument’. For instance,
contemporary physicalists such as David Papineau have

9. formulated something called the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’
to counter anti-physicalist arguments. Papineau denies
Jackson’s distinction between physical and phenomenal facts or
properties. Instead, he asserts that the knowledge argument
itself provides “an excellent way of establishing the existence
of distinctive phenomenal concepts” (Thinking About
Consciousness, 2002). Papineau claims that the difference
between phenomenal and material concepts is a difference at the
level of sense, not reference. In other words, phenomenal and
material concepts refer to the same thing through different
means. So proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy argue
that while our intuition for some sort of dualism is correct, this
intuition is due not to the nature of phenomenal states, but
rather to the concepts we use to refer to them, in contrast to the
concepts we use to refer to our brain states.
What exactly is a ‘phenomenal concept’? Well, it is somewhat
akin to a picture. Think of mental representations of the sort
that can occur in thought. We do not have to think of concepts
in linguistic terms – which means concepts do not have to be
expressible in scientific language.
Papineau argues that we hold phenomenal concepts about
phenomenal states we have experienced. For instance, we hold a
phenomenal concept of the taste of chocolate or of the sound of
a drum. When Mary sees a red apple, argues Papineau, it
activates the relevant neural region in her brain. This activation
can be compared to a reusable stamp. Following her original
experience of red, Mary’s brain has acquired an ‘original’ stamp
from which to make future ‘moulds’, and after its original
activation this stamp can only be re-activated by the relevant
experience. So Mary can consequently imagine and
introspectively classify experiences of red.
Papineau holds that while humans require original external
experiences of phenomena, one could conceive of creatures born
with introspective imaginative abilities, who do not need any
specific experiences to set up those stamps. In those creatures
the moulds necessary for seeing colours, and the dispositions to

10. use them, would be hard-wired. A creature like this would be
able to imagine seeing something red without ever having seen
something red. However, humans are not like this. Papineau
gives the example that although we might be capable of
imagining seeing a red circle even though we have never
actually seen one before, purely by combining our previous
experience of seeing red with our previous experience of seeing
a circle, we cannot imagine the colour red without having first
actually seen something red.
According to physicalists, phenomenal concepts have inimitable
features that make them distinct from all other concepts. What
makes them special is the uniquely direct relation they seem to
provide for a person to their own mental state. When we see
red, we seem to be acquainted with the sensation through the
concept. For this reason, some philosophers describe
phenomenal concepts as ‘recognitional’, ‘demonstrative’ or
‘quotational’ concepts.
Phenomenal concepts offer this special intimacy (why not drop
the word ‘intimacy’ into a highly abstract discussion on
knowledge?) because they refer to their referent directly. More
precisely, phenomenal concepts are made out of instances of the
phenomenal states to which they refer. So the phenomenal
concept of seeing red is a vision of red in our imagination. This
means that phenomenal states are actually deployed while we
conceive phenomenal concepts. Papineau illustrates this feature
particular to phenomenal concepts as opposed to physical
concepts with the example of an ache: we can think of an ache
in material terms by envisioning brain activities, facial
grimaces, or the flinching of body parts; or we can think of the
ache in terms of what it would feel like for us to be in a state of
pain – what it would feel like for us to experience that ache.
The first concept is purely functional or physical, whereas the
second concept refers to the painphenomenally. It offers, to use
Hume’s words, a ‘faint copy’ of the pain. Both concepts refer to
the same ache; the difference lies in the way the state is
conceptualized.

11. This is a key argument physicalists use to say that actually,
consciousness is something physical after all. Again, they say
that our intuition for dualism is correct, but the dualism is
actually only at the conceptual level, not on a metaphysical
level. But there are potential problems with this idea. Would a
phenomenal concept necessarily be a faint copy of a pain for,
say, a doctor who deals with pain every day? And can such
concepts really capture all there is to a phenomenal experience?
If we could explain the sensation of seeing a red apple in
scientific terms, maybe we could also explain the feeling of
love with reference to the concept of a heat wave, as one
proponent of physicalism has suggested. But I doubt that.
What We (Don’t) Know
Consciousness is likely to always be somewhat mysterious. This
may be an unduly pessimistic view of our capacity to articulate
a truly comprehensive picture of the world and our place in it,
admits Jackson:
“But suppose we discovered living on the bottom of the deepest
oceans a sort of sea slug which manifested intelligence. Perhaps
survival in the conditions required rational powers. Despite
their intelligence, these sea slugs have only a very restricted
conception of the world by comparison with ours, the
explanation for this being the nature of their immediate
environment. Nevertheless they have developed sciences which
work surprisingly well in these restricted terms. They also have
philosophers, called slugists. Some call themselves tough-
minded slugists, others confess to being soft-minded slugists.
The tough-minded slugists hold that the restricted terms (or
ones pretty like them which may be introduced as their sciences
progress) suffice in principle to describe everything without
remainder. These tough-minded slugists admit in moments of
weakness to a feeling that their theory leaves something out.
They resist this feeling and their opponents, the soft-minded
slugists, by pointing out – absolutely correctly – that no slugist
has ever succeeded in spelling out how this mysterious residue
fits into the highly successful view that their sciences have and

12. are developing of how their world works. Our sea slugs don’t
exist, but they might. And there might also exist super beings
which stand to us as we stand to the sea slugs. We cannot adopt
the perspective of these super beings, because we are not them,
but the possibility of such a perspective is, I think, an antidote
to excessive optimism [concerning scientific explanations].”
From ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ in The Philosophical
Quarterly (1982)
© Marina Gerner 2013
Marina Gerner is a PhD student at the London School of
Economics, as well as a culture journalist and feature writer.