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Who holds the key to reality? The objective Mary in her monochrome laboratory, or the subjective Alice in her technicolor dreamworld? From Mary’s Room to Alice’s Wonderland (via a trip down the rabbit hole) we examine Frank Jackson’s seminal thought experiment together with Molyneux’s Question and Plato’s World Of Forms/Allegory Of The Cave. Before exploring their implications for the limits of knowledge, sentient AI and the nature of identity and reality.

Can non-physical properties and attainable knowledge be discovered only through conscious experience? Is there a limit to what the scientific method can tell us about the mind, experiential qualities and qualia?

What is Mary’s Room?

Devised by Frank Jackson in 1982, Mary’s Room is an allegory that represents The Knowledge Argument. It posits that conscious experience involves non-physical properties, with the outcome being that conscious experience is irreducibly mental and cannot be explained by physical processes – and as such, cannot be empirically verified or tested through the scientific method. It is, at its core, a thought experiment that delves into the apparent duality of nature consisting of a subjective reality (the ‘in here’ of inner experience, qualia, and feelings) and an objective reality (the ‘out there’ of the external material world). This conflict is also known as the explanatory gap or the hard problem of consciousness – it is the problem of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, and its corresponding phenomenal experience – for example, why a certain electrical brain process should result in the inner experience of seeing and contemplating the colour red.

Subjective reality is that which exists within the mind – your fears, feelings, the act of seeing red, or of tasting a lemon etc. It is the part of our experience that cannot be objectively known.

Objective reality is that which exists independent of the mind. For example: a chair inside an office room. However, the distinction between subjective and objective reality is an abstract one, since it is impossible to state a purely objective reality. For one, an objective reality, as we know it, is perceived solely through the medium of mind – which makes it inherently subjective. Everything related to our experience of an external reality (colour, taste, form, space) is dependent on our minds. This raises the question as to whether reality exists when no one is observing it, a common-sense defying prospect that is contemplated in Plato’s World Of Forms, and a key tenet in the observer effect and elements of quantum mechanics.

Mary’s Room allegory in Frank Jackson’s own words…

‘…Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television.)

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false. Clearly the same style of Knowledge argument could be deployed for taste, hearing, the bodily sensations and generally speaking for the various mental states which are said to have (as it is variously put) raw feels, phenomenal features or qualia. The conclusion in each case is that the qualia are left out of the physicalist story. And the polemical strength of the Knowledge argument is that it is so hard to deny the central claim that one can have all the physical information without having all the information there is to have. …’
Epiphenomenal Qualia, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 127. (Apr., 1982), pp. 127-136.

‘Mary is confined to a black-and-white room, is educated through black-and-white books and through lectures relayed on black-and-white television. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of ‘physical’ which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this, including of course functional roles. If physicalism is true, she knows all there is to know. For to suppose otherwise is to suppose that there is more to know than every physical fact, and that is just what physicalism denies.

Physicalism is not the noncontroversial thesis that the actual world is largely physical, but the challenging thesis that it is entirely physical. This is why physicalists must hold that complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge simpliciter. For suppose it is not complete: then our world must differ from a world, W(P), for which it is complete, and the difference must be in nonphysical facts; for our world and W(P) agree in all matters physical. Hence, physicalism would be false at our world [though contingently so, for it would be true at W(P)]. It seems, however, that Mary does not know all there is to know. For when she is let out of the black-and-white room or given a color television, she will learn what it is like to see something red, say. This is rightly described as learning—she will not say “ho, hum.” Hence, physicalism is false. This is the knowledge argument against physicalism in one of its manifestations. …’
What Mary Didn’t Know, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 83, Issue 5 (May, 1986), 291-295.

Summary of the Argument

To summarise, the argument is as follows:

Mary has all the physical information concerning human colour vision before her release – But there is some information about human colour vision that she does not have before her release.

Therefore: – Not all information is physical information.

Most authors who discuss the knowledge argument cite the case of Mary, but Frank Jackson used a further example in his article: Fred, who sees a colour unknown to normal human perceivers (i.e. Tetrachromacy). We might want to know what other colours Fred experiences but it seems that no amount of knowledge about what happens in his brain and about how colour information is processed in his visual system will help us to find an answer to that question.

The Knowledge argument also rests upon the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism (the idea that the ‘real’ world is entirely physical)

Is Your Red The Same as My Red?
This serves to show that in terms of our perception we are all fundamentally alone – we cannot know another’s mind or perception, only our own. One surprising takeaway from this  video was the statement that “no ape has ever asked a question’” which suggests that unlike humans, apes are not aware of other minds (or rather that other apes and beings possess minds much like their own). 

A few questions to ask yourself… Why and how do our minds experience red? What dictates and informs that experience? Is there anything that science can inform you that would enable you to understand how red appears without actually showing you red? How can you explain red to someone who can only see black and white (or is blind), or explain the smell of ammonia? 

Molyneux’s Question

As an aside, the conflict between objective and subjective reality is also breached in another thought experiment. In brief, Molyneux’s question is… would a blind person who learned to distinguish basic shapes by touch be able to distinguish those objects when they suddenly received the power of sight? In other words, does information from one sense translate to another, or do we only associate them in our minds? 

Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which is the sphere. Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see: query, Whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube? To which the acute and judicious proposer answers: ’Not. For though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, and how a cube, affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so. This question has prompted much debate since it was first posited centuries ago. Today however, medical science has reached the point where it can return vision to some people and answer this question the answer being “no”, people are not able to translate tactile feel into visual information. In much the same way that Mary’s Room highlights a  division between objective and subjective states, Molyneux’s Question highlights a disconnect of objective information between senses and inner experience.

Plato’s World of Forms, Observer Effect and Quantum Potential (Alice’s Dreamworld?) 

For Plato, the physical realm was insufficient to explain certain ideas so he posited the existence of a spiritual plane called the world (or realm) of forms. In this realm were the perfected and unchanging concepts, forms and ideas behind what we deem physical reality. For example, consider a triangle. If a person draws a triangle, that shape may be imperfect: it may not have angles that line up to exactly 180 degrees; its lines might not be completely straight. Nonetheless, it is recognisable as a triangle. But if it fails to have all of the necessary characteristics of a triangle, how can that be? Plato argued that the triangle that a person draws in the physical realm is simply a secondary representation (or shadow) of the perfect Triangle form that exists in the realm of forms. 

Plato’s World of Forms is further explored in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which the prisoners in the cave perceive the shadows on the wall as the true reality when in fact they are merely shadows cast from the real items brandished by the puppeteers – this proposes that the material reality our minds show us is simply a shadow cast by the underlying, true reality. The true reality lies beyond our perception and may be connected (albeit subconsciously) to the realm of forms.

Thoughts: Could Plato’s realm of forms be a deeper level of subjective reality, perhaps the deepest? For example, the perfect colour Red would exist within the realm of forms and our perceptions of red (within conscious awareness) are an imperfect visualisation, shadow, interpretation or experience of this form. Could this explain why NDE experiencers state that the reality they perceive harbours colours that are far more vibrant (and that their experience feels more ‘real’) than the material reality we live in? There is a theory that the brain acts as a filter of consciousness, only allowing enough through to enable us to function competently as human beings in the ‘material’ world. Might it be the case that whilst undergoing the NDE experience, this filter temporarily falls away (since brain function has ceased)? This would allow the individual consciousness to connect with and experience deeper and more vibrant levels of reality (closer to Plato’s realm of forms). Additionally, the mandelas, geometrical forms, Mandelbrot sets that subjects often experience under psychedelic use could also indicate a closer connection to this realm. And since we observe such mathematical patterns (particularly the golden spiral) all around us in nature, could this also suggest that the true nature of reality is somewhat mathematical in nature?

Our connection to this may be through the act of observation… In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. One such example is the double-slit experiment, first performed, using light, by Thomas Young in 1802. This experiment (and its variations) has become a classic for its clarity in expressing the central puzzles of quantum mechanics. Because it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of the observer to predict experimental results. In the double-slit experiment, light behaves differently depending upon whether it is being observed or not – as if light ‘knows’ that it is being observed or recorded in some manner (basically an observer cannot help but influence the outcome of an experiment). In the double slit experiment Richard Feynman called it “a phenomenon which is impossible to explain in any classical way and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery of quantum mechanics.”

This experiment seems to show that our act of observation changes the outcome of an experiment – so much so that John Wheeler posited that we live in a participatory universe. How we observe things changes the ‘objective’ reality. This takes us back to the question of does mind/observer create reality? Whilst also begging the question as to how do multiple minds agree on the same outcome (we all observe the same chair, surroundings, room etc), it may be the case that  we are all one mind/consciousness, but one that has been fractured in such a way that we are all alters of that one mind (in the way Dissociated Identity Disorder occurs in some individuals) – a theory put forward by Bernardo Kastrup

Could virtual reality and gaming be analogous to how reality unfolds before us? For example our minds operate at a certain frame rate (like vision at 25 fps) and just as a scene in a game or virtual reality comes into vision which wasn’t there previously, so does our reality unfold as time passes. It is there in potential (as in the software code of a game) but doesn’t actualise until the observer reaches a point to make that potential actuality.

David Bohm and Basil Hiley in 1975 presented how the concept of quantum potential leads to the notion of an “unbroken wholeness of the entire universe”, proposing that the fundamental new quality introduced by quantum physics is nonlocality. Every outcome lies in potential, and is brought into reality through observation? Here, the disagreements between Bohr, Schrödinger, Einstein and others, came to a head. Whereas Bohr and Schrödinger proposed that entities (such as electrons) had only probabilities if they weren’t observed, Einstein argued that they had an independent reality, prompting his famous claim that “God does not play dice”. In a bid to satisfy both points of view, Hugh Everett’s Many-worlds interpretation  proposes that when a choice/observation is made, it doesn’t choose one, it chooses both and branches off into two separate universes. This interpretation also solves the problem of free will and allows for a deterministic universe (albeit an infinite number of them).  

Science knows what matter does, but not what it is (Mary’s Room)

We know how matter behaves (through the science of chemistry, physics and biology) and have taken advantage of that knowledge to create the technologies we use today. But we still don’t know what the true nature of matter is. We live in a world still tied to the determinism of Newton which involves a reductionist approach to finding out what the nature of things are. Yet this approach yields no answers – just mathematical abstractions. We are now down to the charms, quarks, Higgs particles but none of these begin to answer the core questions of ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’. For all our technological prowess in dissecting the unimaginably small (atomic and quantum realm) and discovering the unfathomably large (boundaries of the observable universe), we still have no idea how life came about, and the nature of time, space, mind and consciousness (perhaps the biggest mystery) remain elusive.

I believe this is down to the hubris of Science and it clinging to an outdated materialist paradigm where everything has to be categorised empirically, physically and objectively. And unfortunately, this does not align with things that appear to be non-physical. This results in absurd notions that consciousness does not exist and is simply an epiphenomenon of matter. That is, as complexity increases, consciousness appears. Scientists still seem to hand wave away the fact that everything they know has been learned through the filter of mind, and as a result, the mind is the key question to understanding the biggest questions.

We have no idea why qualia exists – it does not fulfil any causal or functional role – what utility does the qualia of red have? That said, if we remove qualia, what is the end result? Who or what would we be? Philosophical zombies?

Time, space, light, gravity, mind, consciousness, qualia – no scientist can tell you the innate nature of these things, yet together they are fundamental to life as we experience it.

Time and space in mind.

Everything we know, learn, see and do has been carried out through the filter of mind. Without mind, there would be no consciousness, and an ‘objective’ reality could not be perceived. That also raises the question whether time and space (arguably the bedrock of an objective reality) are physical constructs independent of mind or whether they are a creation within (or of) mind. Life could be akin to a virtual reality simulation (we experience space in VR which isn’t really there), in which case life would exist in mind. 

Implications for General AI and Uploading Consciousness.
We cannot know another’s consciousness, because you cannot experience it in the third person – if you could experience another’s consciousness directly, you would BE that person and would be unable to communicate that experience back to your original self (it’s the hard problem of consciousness all over again!). There is also no way to know if another human being is conscious – it is only inferred through communication and language. With the inability to know and recognise another’s consciousness (outside the bounds of scientific inquiry, at least based on current knowledge) then there is no way of knowing if/when an artificial intelligence becomes self-aware or conscious. 

Since mind and qualia seem non-physical then they cannot be duplicated through physical means. This puts brain uploading and sentient AI out of the picture. The inventor of the microprocessor, Frederico Faggin and his latest book ‘Silicon’ explores such limitations. Science serves us well, but has its limitations. As such we need a new class of science that explores the subjective – whatever form that may take…

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” – Nikola Tesla