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Comparing Jackson And Nagel's Arguments Against Physicalism

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Physicalism is the concept that each existing thing is no more or less than its physical assets1. Many philosophers are unsatisfied with Physicalism’s arguments as it does not account for the individual’s subjective thoughts and experiences. Both Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel take the stance that people do have subjective experiences, that humans do not conform to merely physical structures. Jackson and Nagel perform their own thought experiments to question Physicalism. In his article Epiphenomenal Qualia, Jackson reasons against Physicalism through his Knowledge Argument by using his example of Mary the neurophysiologist. Similarly, Nagel provides respectable arguments against the theory of Physicalism where he draws upon the idea of ‘What …show more content…

He demonstrates this through The Knowledge Argument. He uses the example of Mary the neuroscientist who has lived in a black and white room her whole life. She studies colour and the brain and knows everything there is to know about colour, including the way it is processed in the brain. However, she has never experienced seeing colour herself. Jackson explains that Physicalists would say that Mary’s knowledge regarding colour is complete. He continues his thought experiment by postulating that one day Mary’s door is opened, and she goes outside into the world of full colour. Jackson then asks if Mary will “learn anything [from her colour experience] or not”3(p130). Jackson argues that she will undeniably learn something new about colour. She will learn how it feels to perceive and experience colour, something which is unique to every person, a concept called qualia. Qualia are the introspective qualities that make up the character of experiences4. It is irrefutably clear that Mary gained new knowledge when she saw colour for the first time and has learnt what it is ‘like’ to experience colour. Therefore, Jackson claims that her knowledge was previously incomplete and thus, “Physicalism is incomplete” 3(p130). Jackson has revealed that Physicalists do not account for the subjective quality of experience and mental states. Hence, Physicalism cannot be absolutely true since they ignore this important

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In 1986 Frank Jackson published an article titled “What Mary Didn’t Know.” , Jackson’s argument in this paper was to be aligned with Physicalism; more specifically the knowledge argument. In his paper he tells us of a woman, Mary who for scientific purposes has been confined to a black and white room, and learns everything there is to know about the physical world through lectures and black and white books, she understands all the physical facts about us and our environment. This is the basic definition of physicalism and why this paper was written because to say that there is more information that Mary doesn’t understand which isn’t physical would disprove the entire existence of physicalism. Just a few years earlier in 1982 Daniel Dennet wrote an article titled “How to How to study human consciousness

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Jackson argues that Mary learns what it feels like for other people to experience color, therefore she learns a new fact, not about herself, but about the experiences of other people. However, she had already learned that other people can see color while inside the room. Jackson’s knowledge argument is incorrect regarding knowledge and physicalism, and it does not effectively disprove physicalism. His argument relies on the existence of qualia, and the notion that Mary learns something when she sees color, and not just that she applies her previous knowledge to a new situation. One problem with the concept of qualia is that it's not entirely proven.

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To begin, we don’t really know what qualia “are”, because qualia are an excrescence; they do nothing and they explain nothing. So if they don’t help explain anything, then how can we explain still that physicalism is false? The answer lies in epiphenomenalism.

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In other words, Nagel would claim the redness of an apple in an objective phenomenal yet, the objective qualia should never have been implicated in the minds in the first place it should have been observed from the outside being able to become subjective to the “redness” of the apple. This example to myself shows that if Nagel describes the redness of an apple based on his experience, my experience can varies therefore using neuropsychological language would be subjective to the apple description. Churchland claim is complex in understand but by challenge ourselves to understand what he is explaining can lead us to master a mature level of communicating and understanding

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His argument criticizes physicalism; he claims that even if all physical knowledge is explained or known, there is still the question of experience. Jackson refers to these subjective, non-physical properties—experience—as qualia (Jackson). Qualia must be the consequence of the physical processes that Mary studied in Jackson’s knowledge argument. Jackson’s argument solely concludes that non-physical properties exist, but he does not argue how qualia affect the physical world (Jackson).  There are two views that a property dualist can take from Jackson’s conclusions: qualia come from physical processes and can have an effect on the physical world or that qualia are a result of physical processes but do not affect the physical world.

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In Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” he attempts to refute reductionism by stating that in order to understand the relationship between mind and body, one must address consciousness and reductionism fails to do that. Nagel lays strong emphasis on what he calls ‘subjective character of experience’ which states that everything has its own interpretation of what it is like to be themselves. Fundamentally, each organism has a unique subjective perspective and conscious experience that is only understandable from the organism’s point of view.

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A philosophical zombie is functionally identical to something that has a mind. It reacts in the same way, but it is strictly physical and does not have qualia, units of conscious experience. Jackson's knowledge argument against physicalism is that physicalists' claim that "all facts are physical facts" is false because there is a subjective character of experience, therefore there is a difference between "knowing what red looks like" and "how red looks". Raffman's criticism of Jackson's argument is that they mean the same and what is different is "what it's like to see red", the qualia, the specific example of experience. In Jackson's thought experiment, Mary gains new knowledge by learning "what it's like to see red", an experience that was

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Knowledge Argument against Physicalism Physicalism is a branch of philosophy which states that everything in this world is physical. There is nothing like non-physical. Physical facts are the truth in this world. Physicalism is also called ‘materialistic monism’. Monism is a singular existence theory like only one substance exists in the world.

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