The Knowledge Argument.docx - The Knowledge Argument The...

The Knowledge Argument
The complete physical nature of man has been an unanswered question since humanity first
attained consciousness, with the mind-body connection at the heart of the mystery of what
really is a person. From the dualist perspective, a person is comprised of both a body and a
soul, as we cannot explain everything about the human experience in purely physical terms.
On the other hand, the physicalist perspective argues that a person is just a body, and
everything can be explained by chains of causal physical processes. In attempt to argue for
the existence of a ‘non-physical’ aspect of the human body, Australian professor Frank
Jackson’s thought experiment ‘Mary’s Room’ posited that if epiphenomenal qualia can be
shown separate from physical information, then that would by extension imply that the
human body cannot purely be expressed in physical terms. I reject not only Jackson’s
hypothesis, but the validity of the thought experiment as a whole, as it relies on human
intuition to answer a question predicated upon an inconceivable premise, and therefore serves
not to support or deny physicalism or dualism, but rather merely flush out an individual’s
intuitions on the debate. Instead, to answer Mary’s question we must look to the validity of
non-physical or epiphenomenal qualia, and attain whether qualia can be causally potent on
physical processes.
Mary’s Room and the Dualist Approach
Frank Jackson’s thought experiment is as follows:
Mary is trapped in a black and white room from birth, forced to learn all of the physical
information there is to learn about colour. She learns “wave-length combinations”, the
“stimulation of the retina”, how we perceive colour “via the central nervous system” and the

complete internal physical processes relating to colour perception. One day, Mary is released
from her black and white room and sees colour for the first time. The question is: has she
learned something new about colour? For Jackson, the question seems obvious, of course she
learns something new about “the world and our visual experience of it”, and thus there must
be information that is not physical. Jackson’s argument can be laid out as such:
Premise 1: Mary has access to all physical information regarding colour vision
prior to her release.
Consequence 1: Mary has complete physical knowledge regarding colour
vision prior to her release.
Premise 2: There is some kind of knowledge regarding facts about colour
vision that Mary could not have had prior to her release.
Consequence 2: Therefore (from P1 and P2) there are non-physical facts about
colour vision.
Consequence 3: Therefore (from C2) not everything relating to the human
body can be described in physical terms. Ergo physicalism is false.
Physicalist Approaches
Yet, I don’t believe the question to be as simple. For a physicalist, there seems to be only
three solutions. Either: