Mary's Room & Color Irrealism

Marchesk

As you've probably heard before, Mary is a super scientist who knows all the physical facts about vision, but when she leaves her life-long black and white room and sees red for the first time and knows what it's like to have a color experience.

Whether Mary actually learns a new fact or is even suprised has been discussed to death. But there is another component, and that would be the status of color itself.

The physical facts don't include the experience of red. Experiential red isn't a property of light or objects. Rather it's a result of animal vision that sees and process light of that wavelength a certain way. Mary would know all about this.

The problem is accounting for how our visual system has color experience, since all the physical facts about vision would be without color. As such, Mary inside or outside of her room cannot explain how it is that we have color experiences, despite knowing all the physical facts.

This leaves one with several choices:

1. Color realism
2. Color eliminativism
3. Color identity
4. Hard Problem
5. Idealism/Anti-Realism

Number One would mean that our visual system is reproducing the color that is out there in the world, or somehow directly perceiving it. Thomas Reid is one philosopher who has defended such a position.

Two would be a Dennettian approach. We don't actually experience color anymore than p-zombies do. It's an illusion. As such, the physical facts leave nothing out, and there is nothing more to explain.

Three would be to espouse an identity theory of mind with physical facts about perception (brain states or what not). Some physical facts therefore explain color experience.

Four leads to dualism, panpsychism, cognitive closure, emergentism, etc.

Five would be a denial of physicalist and realist premises, obviously.

In my view, #1 is impossible, #2 is ridiculous, I don't know what to make of #3, I can't accept #5, which leaves #4.

Mongrel

I don't think it's clear where 4 leads, but I agree that it's the open door.

Cavacava

1. Color realism

Number One would mean that our visual system is reproducing the color that is out there in the world, or somehow directly perceiving it. Thomas Reid is one philosopher who has defended such a position.

Why isn't the position the color is inside and not outside is not a realist position. as in objective vs subjective realism. Are you saying our subjective reality is not real?

Michael

The physical facts don't include the experience of red. — Marchesk

The physicalist would probably disagree. They might say that certain physical facts cannot be learned by reading a book or listening to someone speak; they must be seen.

Marchesk

Why isn't the position the color is inside and not outside is not a realist position. as in objective vs subjective realism. Are you saying our subjective reality is not real? — Cavacava

Realism means mind-independence. Physicalism is an objective ontology. Yes, it does need to account for subjectivity, and that's a problem.

Marchesk

hey might say that certain physical facts cannot be learned by reading a book or listening to someone speak; they must be seen. — Michael

That doesn't help.

Michael

That doesn't help. — Marchesk

Doesn't help what?

Marchesk

↪Michael

Physicalism. Stating that some things can't be described, they have to be experienced supports experience being something additional to the physical.

Why? Because the physical is an objective description of the world.

Cavacava

Realism means mind-independence. Physicalism is an objective ontology. Yes, it does need to account for subjectivity, and that's a problem.

So physicalism has a monopoly on the meaning of being a realist? I think Subjectivity has just as much a claim to ontological reality as what is mind independent and but subjective reality cannot be fully reduced to objective/physical reality.

Marchesk

So physicalism has a monopoly on the meaning of being a realist? I think Subjectivity has just as much a claim to ontological reality as what is mind independent and but subjective reality cannot be fully reduced to objective/physical reality. — Cavacava

No, physicalism has no monopoly. It's just that realism entails mind-independence, whatever the ontology of that reality is. Subjectivity isn't mind-independent.

Thus, dreams are real, but they're not realist, because they have no existence independent of dreamers.

Michael

Physicalism. Stating that some things can't be described, they have to be experienced supports experience being something additional to the physical.

Why? Because the physical is an objective description of the world. — Marchesk

But for one to understand the description one must understand the language, and one can't learn a language just by being spoken to. You need to connect the words to something else. Can you learn about gravity – or even what it means for one object to move closer to another – if you're never shown one object moving closer to another and told that this event is described as "one object moving closer to another"? I doubt it. Does it then mean that gravity is a non-physical thing? No. So why is it different for colour?

Andrew M

Number One would mean that our visual system is reproducing the color that is out there in the world, or somehow directly perceiving it. Thomas Reid is one philosopher who has defended such a position. — Marchesk

I accept color realism, with the qualification that "out there in the world" includes the physical particles in an animal's or person's brain and body as well as the rest of the world (this provides an indexical onto the perceived object, where different creatures perceive an object differently). And, secondly, that normative factors influence the naming of colors (e.g., a blind person should also regard fire engines as being red).

Two would be a Dennettian approach. We don't actually experience color anymore than p-zombies do. It's an illusion. As such, the physical facts leave nothing out, and there is nothing more to explain. — Marchesk

From my own reading of him, I think Dennett also accepts color realism. In "Bacteria to Bach and Back" he says, "Yet another option insists that colors do indeed exist; they just aren't what the folk think they are. I have followed that path throughout my career, insisting that not only colors are real but also consciousness, free will and dollars."

In this case, the illusion is not that colors are experienced (they are), the illusion is the idea that objects have color independent of any perceptual experience that would give meaning to color terms.

Cavacava

↪Marchesk

No, physicalism has no monopoly. It's just that realism entails mind-independence, whatever the ontology of that reality is. Subjectivity isn't mind-independent.

So the hammer is real, but my pain when I hit my finger is not?

Michael

So the hammer is real, but my pain when I hit my finger is not? — Cavacava

Realism being the case and things being real are not the same thing. Pain is real even if one is an anti-realist about pain.

Cavacava

↪Michael

I can't see your pain, I can only feel mine, so how do I know it is the case.

Wayfarer

The physical facts don't include the experience of red — Marchesk

Physical facts don't include experience. There's your 'hard problem' in few words.

Marchesk

↪Wayfarer

Right! I should have just said that in the OP.

↪Andrew M

That's a good defense of color realism, but the physical facts about perception still leave out the experience of color. So you're left with #3 or #4. In order for the physical facts of perception to include the color experience, further argument is needed to show how they are identical, supervene, emerge, etc.

Marchesk

So the hammer is real, but my pain when I hit my finger is not? — Cavacava

Your pain is real, but pain is dependent on creature with nervous systems existing. It's not a property of the hammer. The question of what's real comes up when we want to know what, if anything, exists independent of human perception, conception, language, cultural conventions, etc.

Everyone agrees that unicorns aren't real. But the idea of unicorns and their cultural representations do exist. But unlike horses, the existence of the unicorn depends on human beings.

Now if one doesn't accept the existence of mind-independent world, then horses could also be said to be ideas in human minds, although we perceive horses and not unicorns as living animals. However, the question can easily be asked why horses can't have minds too.

So anyway, the question of color realism is whether color is like pain or color is like shape, in that shape is taken to be a property of objects themselves, and pain is not. The hammer doesn't feel pain when I hit myself with it, but the shape of the bruise it leaves on my face is related to the shape of the hammer.

To paraphrase the ancient Cyrenaics, I am pained* but I am not hammer shaped. Am I colored or is the hammer?

*I am sweetened was the perceptually relative way the Cyrenaics would put things.

The Great Whatever

Color realism seems plausible. Mary doesn't learn any new facts, but gains a new ability, which in turn might help her learn certain facts about individual red things in a way she couldn't before.

Cavacava

Ok, couple of thoughts.

If I claim the X is the case, and that it entails that X is independent of thought, how did I get to X in the first place if not by thought. Sounds like a sort of contradiction.

I think Mary's room argument is an ontological argument, not an epistemological argument. It is not about some newly found ability, it is about experiencing more than what can be described as some sort of physical manifestation.

Wayfarer

What if you put Mary in a room with a blue, yellow and red ball and said 'which one is red?' if until that moment she had never seen any colours how would she know that, until someone pointed and said 'that is the red one'? Until that moment 'which was the red ball' would have been something she didn't know.

jorndoe

Couldn't a similar argument (to Mary's Room) be made for roughly any new phenomenological experience (qualia)?
Self-reference warning: mind comprehending mind. ⚠
I don't have Mary's color experiences, just my own, when they occur, and we agree what to call them by pointing them out.
Doesn't seem anti-physicalist as such, more like a variety of Levine's explanatory gap.

SophistiCat

I really hate these semantic confusions. — Marchesk

But that's all this is: playing with words in order to finagle a cheap semantic victory. So subjective experiences are not objective physical facts, and physicalists only believe in objective physical facts, therefore... Therefore, there are no "physicalists," as you construe them, because no one in their right mind denies having experiences.

Wayfarer

Dennett denies that experience is anything other than physical. He says experience merely plays tricks on people so that it appears nonphysical—in other words, it simply seems like it requires nonphysical features to account for its nature. In this way, Dennett compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things

Marchesk

Therefore, there are no "physicalists," as you construe them, because no one in their right mind denies having experiences. — SophistiCat

The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective, and thus there are only objective facts. That's why Mary's room, the p-zombie argument, the mind/body problem, etc exist and philosophers debate both sides of the argument. Chalmers, Dennett, McGinn, Nagel, etc have written books on this topic.

Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. All of his arguments amount to subjective experience being an illusion.

SteveKlinko

I like to trace the experience of Color from the Source to the Experience. Electromagnetic waves associated with Red hit the Retina. At the instant the Retina is activated there are no Electromagnetic waves anymore. All we now have is a cascade of Neural firings traveling through to the Visual Cortex in the back of the Brain. Some Neurons in the Visual Cortex that fire for Red will fire. We know that when these Red Neurons fire that we will have a Red experience. No one has discovered how this happens yet. This is the Hard Problem of Conscious Perception. This is where we are in our understanding. So I vote for #4.

jkop

What Mary lacks is not the knowledge of what it’s like to see a particular colour but the possibility to acquire that knowledge by seeing it directly. She can still acquire it indirectly by other means, via our division of linguistic labour, a use of colour meters and so on. That's how we get to know what things are like in places we haven't experienced ourselves, and a lack of direct experience is no good reason to reject the knowledge.

Marchesk

She can still acquire it indirectly by other means, via our division of linguistic labour, a use of colour meters and so on. That's how we get to know what things are like in places we haven't experienced ourselves, and a lack of direct experience is no good reason to reject the knowledge. — jkop

Right, but let's say we want to know what bat sonar experiences are. We can only know about bat perception indirectly, since we're not bats and don't utilize sonar. But would any amount of indirect facts tell us what bat sonar experience is? Maybe if sonar experience is similar to vision (as Dawkins has suggested), then we could be noticing similarities in bat neurophysiology, but if not, it would seem we're out of luck.

Mary's in the same position regarding color until she leaves the room. I wanted to modify it to apply to all humans with regards to explaining why we have color experiences at all. If we don't perceive color as an objective property of light or objects, then there is a problem for physicalism, since all the physical facts leave out the color experiences.

Cavacava

↪jkop

↪Marchesk

Studies of people, born blind, who then suddenly become able to see (such as those who undergo cataract surgery), suggest they have to learn how to interpret what they see, learn how to coherently construct objects in space, which takes them months. A child has to learn that the toy truck is red, just as Mary has to learn that what she is experiencing is red, but she still experiences it, its experiential reality is prior to its determination, prior to knowledge.

jkop

would any amount of indirect facts tell us what bat sonar experience is? — Marchesk

It is simply the experience of the location of objects that reflect sound. You don't have to be a bat to know what that is, and the experienced location of objects is the same for humans and bats. Some blind people navigate by echolocation, and they use sounds that are easier for humans to produce and hear.

If we don't perceive color as an objective property of light or objects, then there is a problem for physicalism, since all the physical facts leave out the color experiences. — Marchesk

Experiences are biological facts. Talk of physical facts tend to leave out things which are not so relevant in physics, such as biological facts. How is that a problem for "physicalism"?

Marchesk

Talk of physical facts tend to leave out things which are not so relevant in physics, such as biological facts. How is that a problem for "physicalism"? — jkop

It's only a problem if biology isn't necessitated by physics. Physicalism is the modern version of materialism, which is an ontological monism. Matter is all there fundamentally is has been replaced by physics, which means that matter-energy, fields, spacetime is all there is.

It's an updated version of atoms and the void.

Mary's Room & Color Irrealism

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