[MD] Quantum Enigma

[Ham Priday]

Marsha --


The story that you attribute to Rosenblum & Kuttner coincidentally appears 
in Dinesh D'Souza's essay 'Mind over Matter' which is archived on my 
website.   D'Sousa, who is highly insightful  in his own right [you would 
enjoy his bestselling "Life after Death"], mentions that philosopher Thomas 
Nagel wrote a famous essay in 1974 with the provocative title "What Is It 
Like to Be a Bat?"

Neither that question nor the question of whether Mary adds anything to her 
"complete knowledge" of color by actually seeing red has anything to do with 
"probability" that I can see.  D'Souza explains the point of both 
propositions in this essay.  (You'll note that the author refers to the 
"Mary problem" as an argument introduced by Frank Jackson to refute 
"materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely physical terms").

"Nagel's point was that there is something that it is like to be human, or 
male, or a dog; by the same token, there must also be something that it is 
like to be a bat.  But however much we learn about bat physiology, bat 
brains, and echolocation, Nagel says we can never fully understand what it 
is like to be a bat.  The clear implication is that an objective physical 
understanding is necessarily incomplete, apparently because there is 
something to living organisms that transcends the physical.

In 1986, philosopher Frank Jackson broadened Nagel's argument into a 
refutation of all materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely 
physical terms.  In what has come to be called the "Mary problem," Jackson 
envisioned a brilliant scientist named Mary who is locked in a 
black-and-white room from which she investigates the world by way of a 
black-and-white television monitor.  As a specialist in the neurophysiology 
of vision, Mary knows everything there is to know about color.  She 
understands how different wavelengths of light stimulate the retina, and how 
those are channeled to the visual areas in the brain, resulting in such 
statements as 'The sky is blue' and 'Tomatoes are red.'

"Now here's Jackson's question: Suppose Mary finally gets a color TV monitor 
or is released from her black-and-white room into the outside world. Will 
Mary learn something that she didn't know before?  Jackson says she 
obviously would.  She would for the first time know what it's like to see 
the blue sky or red tomatoes.  These experiences would teach her something 
about color that all her previous knowledge could not.

"Alarmed at where this is going, the atheist Dennett disputes Jackson's 
interpretation, insisting that if Mary really knew everything about color, 
including, as Dennett puts it, '10 billion word treatises' on the subject, 
then she actually would know what it was like to see the blue sky and red 
tomatoes.  Dennett admits this is counterintuitive, but he contends that 
intuitions are not always our best guide.

"I agree with him on that, but on balance I have to go with Jackson here. 
It defies not only intuition but also reason to say that Mary, on being 
liberated from her black-and-white world, wouldn't discover something new. 
Her extrinsic knowledge of color would now be supplemented by intrinsic 
knowledge.  If this is so, then it is hard to resist Jackson's conclusion 
that all attempts to reduce mental states to physical states must be false, 
because Mary had all the physical information, and yet her prior knowledge 
was incomplete."
-- [D'Souza: Mind over Matter; www.essentialism.net/mind_over_matter.htm]

As I read it, the moral of this story is: Conscious awareness is far more 
than the acquisition of factual knowledge (or a collection of "interrelated 
patterns").

When it comes to knowing something, there's nothing like experience!

What say you now, Marsha?

--Ham