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"Mary who knows everything there is to know about human perception from a scientific point of view. ... Since she knows everything there is to know" The second

by gnosis 14y ago

"Mary who knows everything there is to know about human perception from a scientific point of view. ... Since she knows everything there is to know" The second assertion does not necessarily follow from the first. There may well be more to understanding something than what science can know about it. Also, there's something that analytic philosophers like to call "qualia", which is what it's like to experience something. That's one thing that would be missing from the above account. To take another example: I could know quite a lot about the neurological processes that underly the sensation of pain in the human nervous system and the brain. However, such knowledge is very different from the sensation of pain itself. Same with sex. You can read up about its physiology all you like, but your knowledge of it is going to be of a quite different order from someone who's actually had sex.

nessus42 14y ago
> There may well be more to understanding something than what science can know about it. I'm pretty sure I mentioned that. But who knows? Maybe I just did too much acid back in the hippy days. The amount of literature on The Knowledge Argument is staggering, and there are many ways out of the apparent paradox. Frank Jackson who came up with the Knowledge Argument was using it to argue that mental states do not supervene on physical ones. I.e., one's mental states are not uniquely determined in the space of all possible worlds by one's physical state. (He later changed his mind about this, however, and is no longer a dualist.) One way out of dualism is, as you hinted at, is to maintain that even if dualism is false, there are things that you can't know without having a certain concept in your head, and the only way to get the concept in your head is to have a certain experience which puts your mind into a state that you could not get to via pondering alone. Another way out of dualism is to deny that Mary acquired any new knowledge when she sees the ripe tomato. Etc, etc. And the philosophers will probably be arguing about Mary for the next thousand years.

by gnosis 14y ago

nessus42 14y ago

> There may well be more to understanding something than what science can know about it. I'm pretty sure I mentioned that. But who knows? Maybe I just did too much acid back in the hippy days. The amount of literature on The Knowledge Argument is staggering, and there are many ways out of the apparent paradox. Frank Jackson who came up with the Knowledge Argument was using it to argue that mental states do not supervene on physical ones. I.e., one's mental states are not uniquely determined in the space of all possible worlds by one's physical state. (He later changed his mind about this, however, and is no longer a dualist.) One way out of dualism is, as you hinted at, is to maintain that even if dualism is false, there are things that you can't know without having a certain concept in your head, and the only way to get the concept in your head is to have a certain experience which puts your mind into a state that you could not get to via pondering alone. Another way out of dualism is to deny that Mary acquired any new knowledge when she sees the ripe tomato. Etc, etc. And the philosophers will probably be arguing about Mary for the next thousand years.