Work · Analytic Philosophy
Epiphenomenal Qualia
Mary’s room: complete physical knowledge about colour vision is not knowledge of what it is like to see red.
Introduction
Frank Jackson, an Australian philosopher, published the paper in The Philosophical Quarterly in 1982. Besides Mary, the scientist who knows every physical fact about colour vision but has lived in a black-and-white room, it presents Fred, who can distinguish two colours where everyone else sees a single red. Both cases support the “knowledge argument”: physicalism says that all information is physical, but Mary learns something new when she first sees colour. Jackson concludes that there are qualia, the felt qualities of experience, and that they are epiphenomenal – caused by physical processes but without physical effects. In the late 1990s he abandoned the argument and became a physicalist; replies include David Lewis’s and Laurence Nemirow’s ability hypothesis.
Connections
Responds to
- What Is It Like to Be a Bat?1974 · Thomas Nagel
More works by Frank Jackson
Sources: Wikidata
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