If machines can perceive, think, and feel, people can study parts and motions but never know about perception, thinking, or feeling {argument from knowledge} {knowledge argument} [Leibniz, 1840].
color scientist
Mary lives in the future and knows everything about human vision structures and processes, including color perception, and visible light and surfaces, but she has never seen color because her environment has only blacks, grays, and whites, including her skin and clothes. When she first sees red roses, she learns something she did not know before, sensations [Jackson, 1977].
knowledge argument
Knowing all physical facts does not include personal experiences, therefore physicalism is not correct. Phenomena require knowledge of feelings and cannot be just functions [Jackson, 1982] [Jackson, 1986].
People can know all physical facts about other people but not know or feel their experiences, so experience has non-physical properties. Experience provides knowledge that people cannot obtain in other ways. However, people can learn more, physical or non-physical, about physical-facts parts. Perhaps, people actually do not learn more at all.
Mary knows all about color vision and physical colors, such as stimuli, responses, causes, effects, similarities, and differences, but has never experienced color. Complete physical information is only sentences about physical things, properties, and relations. However, complete physical information can mean sentences deduced from physical description about non-physical things, properties, or relations.
People can acquire physical knowledge without perception. Mary knows the colors things have. If she can see colored objects, she experiences colors whose names she knows. She then learns something more about color. At least she has acquired new information. Does she learn about subjective, phenomenal qualities, which differ from objective, physical qualities? She definitely learns something about experiences, because environment is new. Does she know conditions that result in experiences, which experiences have which qualities, and facts about experiences?
Does Mary learn phenomenological concepts, such as representing or thinking methods, and can now look at same facts in different ways? Does she learn new properties about world, physical or non-physical? She does not use memory. People can only remember experiences after they happen. She does not use recognition. People can only recognize phenomena after experiences happen. However, learning environment is new, so fact is new.
light
If Mary has cones, she will see colors from refractions and diffractions anyway.
imagination
Perhaps, Mary's cones have damage from no use. Perhaps, she can imagine colors but only knows imagined color, not real color. Perhaps, imagination requires different faculties than knowledge. Inability to imagine does not preclude color perception. Perhaps, Mary realizes that sense qualities are concepts but also then learns such associations. Perhaps, some physical facts have no statements, and some phenomena have no expressions, only experiences. Perhaps, she sees either arbitrary colors or colors associated with objects known to her.
summary
Fundamentally, Mary will be in a new situation, and interactions between body and environment are too complex for anyone to know completely beforehand, at same time, or in the future.
new color
Fred can see color that others cannot perceive. Other people cannot know what he sees, unless they can see it already, no matter how much they know about brain and color [Jackson, 1982] [Jackson, 1986].
Social Sciences>Philosophy>Epistemology>Knowledge Argument
6-Philosophy-Epistemology-Knowledge Argument
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Date Modified: 2022.0224