There’s a famous story in the philosophy of mind: the story of Mary. It goes something like this. Mary is the world’s greatest neuroscientist. She knows everything there is to know about the physical world, and about how our brains work to perceive and interpret the world. In particular, Mary knows everything there is to know about color and color vision: from the physics of light, to the structure of the eye and the nervous system in human beings and other organisms, to the ways that our brains recognize and distinguish particular colors, to the evolutionary origins of color vision, to the functions served in our minds by the apprehension of color, and the ways that our moods are affected by seeing one color or another. In short, Mary has all the “physical information” about color: she knows every material and scientific fact that there is to know. The science of color is complete: nothing about it remains undiscovered.
But there’s a catch to the story. Despite her exhaustive knowledge, Mary herself has never perceived any color at all. She has lived for her entire life in a room that is entirely black and white. She has read black-and-white textbooks, and watched black-and-white videos. And so she knows that the sky is blue, that grass is green, and that roses are red. But she has never actually seen the sky, the grass, or a rose. She has only read about them, or viewed black-and-white photos and videos of them.
The question is: what happens when Mary finally leaves her black-and-white room, goes outside, and sees a red rose for the very first time? What does it mean for her to feel, for herself, what she has previously only known about? What is it like for her to perceive the color red? Does the phenomenal experience of redness add anything to her store of knowledge about the color, and about how people respond to it? Does Mary learn something that she didn’t know before?
The story of Mary is an exemplary science fiction narrative. It imagines a fantastic scenario: one that goes beyond our present scientific knowledge and technological abilities, but that – at least in principle – remains within the bounds of scientific possibility. This doesn’t mean that I would actually expect such an experiment to be carried out. My mind boggles at the thought of how sadistic it would be to submit a human being to imprisonment and deprivation of this sort, all in the name of posing a philosophical puzzle. (Not to mention – as Moira Gatens suggested to me, when I gave an earlier version of this chapter as a talk – the problem of keeping Mary’s existence color-free even when she had her period.) I also wonder about how expensive Mary’s confinement would be, and who would pay for it. Perhaps Mary’s life in the blackand-white room could be broadcast to the public as reality television. Think of the way Jim Carrey’s personal life becomes a spectacle for millions in the 1998 movie The Truman Show.
Any thorough, materially grounded consideration of the story of Mary would need to take issues like these into account. Nonetheless, the story of Mary works as science fiction even when we bracket such pragmatic concerns, because of the way that it invites speculation. It asks us to consider what visual perceptual experience is like, and what we can learn from it. More specifically, it poses the question (which has vexed philosophers for hundreds of years, and which seems nearly impossible to test scientifically) of how private inner experience – like the sensation of seeing the color red – relates to public, outward linguistic expression. Does the latter adequately describe or correspond to the former? In what sense can the former be said to exist, without the latter?
The story of Mary was not actually published as science fiction, however. It was invented by the philosopher Frank Jackson, in the course of his 1986 paper, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”. Jackson’s account exemplifies the way that analytic philosophers often construct bizarre scenarios, in order to test the extreme consequences of their arguments. I think of this strategy as a form of science fictional speculation. As the philosopher of mind Eric Schwitzgebel puts it:
A good science fiction writer can open your mind up to possibilities that you might not have considered before, can break you out of your culturally-given shell of presuppositions about how the world must be. I especially like science fiction that explores possibilities around amplification of our cognitive powers and what this means for our sense of personhood and our values.
Most contemporary philosophers are not as forthcoming as Schwitzgebel about how their own work uses the methods of overt science fictional fabulation. But the similarity is evident. In addition to the story of Mary, philosophers have imagined such scenarios as the following:
1. Inverted visible spectra, so that everything that one person experiences as “red” is experienced by another person as “green”.
2. Worlds in which water has exactly the same properties as it has for us, but in which the chemical formula for this “water” is not H2O.
3. Brains in vats being fed simulated experiences by direct neurochemical stimulation.
4. Zombies who are physically indistinguishable from actual people but who lack any sort of consciousness or inner experience.
The lineage of this sort of speculative-fiction-as-philosophy extends back at least to Descartes’ hypothesis of an Evil Demon. In more contemporary terms, these speculative scenarios are not far from the ones imagined in the novels of Philip K. Dick, or in movies like The Matrix. Analytic philosophers, no less than science fiction authors, engage in a systematic practice of speculative extrapolation. Weird and extreme scenarios can challenge our everyday assumptions, and push actually existing conditions to their most far-reaching possibilities. In reading the story of Mary as a science fiction narrative, I will consider both the powers and the limitations of such fabulations as a form of philosophical inquiry.
One reason for proposing speculative scenarios is to challenge our common intuitions. These would seem to suggest that Mary does, at the very least, encounter something new when she leaves her room. Redness is an example of what philosophers call qualia: phenomenal sensations, or “raw feels”, that seem to make up the very fabric of our mental experience. And the qualia of color vision, in particular, are precisely what Mary is missing inside her black-and-white room. Until she actually sees a red object, therefore, Mary does not know, from the inside, what it is like to experience redness. But how does this square with the supposition that, while still stuck inside the room, she already knows everything that there is to know physically, materially, and scientifically – about color?
Frank Jackson calls himself a “qualia freak”, and he initially poses the story of Mary in these terms. He argues that “there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes”. For the “information” we get by experiencing something is quite different from the “physical information” that allows us to say that we know about it, or understand it. No amount of objective physical information can tell us, Jackson claims, “about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky”. Jackson concludes that physicalism – the doctrine that everything in the world is physical or material – must be wrong. For any description of the world in exclusively physical terms excludes qualia, and therefore is radically incomplete.
In the decades since Jackson first published the story of Mary, it has been the subject of scores of articles by analytic philosophers. Nearly all of these thinkers have responded to Jackson’s challenge by seeking to account for qualia and phenomenal experience in a way that does not lead to his anti-physicalist conclusion. If physicalism is true, and everything in the world is composed of material stuff, then there must be some flaw in the logic of Jackson’s argument. Even Jackson himself has come to embrace this position. He now says, rather disparagingly, that no mere “epistemological claim”, such as he made in his story about Mary, can get in the way of the basic metaphysical truth of physicalism. We may not know how to “deduce” the physical basis of qualitative “psychological states” from the information that we have, but it does not follow that these states are therefore devoid of any such physical basis at all.
But there’s one serious problem with all these philosophical discussions. Even though nearly everyone agrees that there is something fundamentally wrong with Jackson’s initial claims, nobody can agree as to just where the mistake lies. Every philosopher has a different account of what is wrong. Daniel Dennett, for instance, argues that the whole story of Mary “is a bad thought experiment, an intuition pump that actually encourages us to misunderstand its premises”. If Mary really knew all the physical facts about color, Dennett says, then she would already know what it is like to have the sensation of seeing red. She would not learn anything new when she left the room. She would not be in the least surprised when she actually saw a red object for the first time.
Dennett even composes his own weird science fiction scenario in order to reinforce his point. He proposes that, when Mary leaves her room, somebody tries to trick her by showing her a banana that is painted blue. The trickster hopes that, since Mary knows from her readings that bananas are supposed to be yellow, she will mistake the qualitative feel of blue for that of yellow. But Dennett insists that Mary cannot be fooled, because she already knows, “in exquisite detail, exactly what physical impression a yellow object or a blue object (or a green object, etc) would make on [her] nervous system”.
For Dennett, if Mary really knows everything there is to know about color, then she must already know what it feels like to encounter this or that color. The story misleads us when it suggests that there could be an experience outside of discursive knowledge. Dennett denies that there can be anything like an ineffable experience of qualia; for him, “what is it like?” is not a meaningful question. Indeed, Dennett insists that “qualia” do not exist in the first place. At the very least, they do not have the special qualities that Jackson – following common sense – attributes to them. Dennett argues that so-called “qualia” are nothing more than “mere complexes of mechanically accomplished dispositions to react” to various stimuli. There is no mystery about first-person phenomenal experience, he says, because there is nothing more to it than such mechanistic habits.
The late David Lewis, in contrast to Dennett, accepts that Mary does in fact learn something new when she exits the black-and-white room. But he denies that what she learns is a new fact, beyond the physical facts she knew already. Mary does not gain any new propositional knowledge, Lewis says. Rather, she acquires something like “know-how”, or the instrumental ability “to remember and imagine and recognize” the color red. “Knowing-how” to do something is not the same as “knowing-that” something is the case. In this way, the novelty of Mary’s actual experience of colors is admitted, but the physicalist claim that physical facts are the only facts is preserved.
Lewis, unlike Dennett, concedes that Mary could not have acquired her know-how about the color red simply by studying all the facts about color from inside her black-and-white room. But he still insists that there is nothing special about inner, subjective experience. Indulging in his own science fictional speculation, Lewis suggests that Mary could also get her pragmatic know-how about color in other ways. For instance, she might acquire the ability to recognize red through “precise neurosurgery, very far beyond the limits of present-day technique”. Such surgery would implant in her brain the very same neurochemical configurations, and therefore the same instrumental abilities, that are produced within her when she first learns to recognize the color red. Like a character in a Philip K. Dick story, Mary would remember what it is like to experience the color red, despite never actually having had such an experience.
In contrast to both Dennett and Lewis, Michael Tye argues that, when Mary leaves her room, she actually does learn something new; and that what she learns is not just a pragmatic ability like Lewis’ “know-how”. Rather, according to Tye, when Mary leaves her room she develops a new “phenomenal concept” of red. This “phenomenal concept” is the knowledge of “what it is like” to experience red; it plays the “functional role” of allowing Mary to “discriminat[e] the experience of red from other color experiences in a direct and immediate manner via introspection”. Mary thus gains a genuinely new piece of knowledge. “What is it like?” is a meaningful question for Tye, although it is not one for Dennett and Lewis.
Despite this, however, Tye still rejects Jackson’s antiphysicalist conclusions. For Tye says that Mary’s new phenomenal concept does not involve (or correspond to) any new, nonphysical facts. Rather, Mary experiences the same old physical facts about red – facts that she already knows – in a new way. A new concept offers us a new manner of understanding and organizing facts, but the facts themselves remain unchanged. Even though Mary has a new – and true – thought, “there is nothing nonphysical in the world that makes her new thought true”. Rather, “the new experiences she undergoes and their introspectible qualities are wholly physical”.
I have only cited a few of the many published responses to Jackson’s tale of Mary. For someone like me, an outsider to analytic philosophy, the results are rather discouraging. The arguments by the various philosophers all display a tremendous amount of ingenuity, skill, and verve; they are all – given their premises – quite rigorously logical. And they are all more or less convincing on their own terms. Indeed, I cannot stop myself from being swayed by whichever one of the arguments I have read most recently.
But unfortunately, these multiple arguments are not at all compatible with one another. Although the discussion about Mary’s experiences has been going on for nearly thirty years now, no one has ever convinced anyone else; nothing has been resolved or agreed upon. The disputes seem to continue forever. Robert van Gulick and David Chalmers have even both developed schemas, delineating the logical space of all conceivable replies to Jackson’s argument, and showing which philosophers fill each slot. The phase space of the Mary question has been thoroughly explored, we might say, but no consensus has ever been reached as a result.
Given this situation, I am led to suspect that there is something wrong with the entire discussion. Indeed, the story of Mary seems to me to involve a philosophical version of a baitand-switch scam. Our attention is captured by one thing, and then it is diverted to something completely different. What really makes the story of Mary compelling and exciting is its focus upon qualia, or actual phenomenal experience. Because we are so accustomed to qualitative experience – it makes up the intimate texture of our every conscious moment – we tend to forget just how strange it is, and how difficult to pin down or define. Jackson makes the radical and important suggestion that the seemingly simple question “what is it like to experience the color red?” might well be even more slippery and unanswerable than Thomas Nagel’s famous query about what it is like to be a bat.
Nagel suggests that, although bats are evidently sentient beings, so that it is unquestionably “like something” to be a bat, we cannot ever find out for ourselves just what this something is. “Bat sonar”, Nagel writes, “though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine”. A bat’s experience is so radically different from our own, Nagel suggests, that we will never be able to feel from the inside what that experience is like.
Nagel may well be underestimating human adaptability and neuroplasticity; arguably, when blind people learn to negotiate spaces by means of sound, tapping their canes and listening for echoes, they are in fact experiencing something quite like a bat’s mode of perception. Jackson, however, suggests that Nagel’s question is insufficiently radical. For Nagel, Jackson says, it is just a matter of “extrapolating from knowledge of one experience to another, of imagining what an unfamiliar experience would be like on the basis of familiar ones”. But this is not a problem in the case of Mary; I can easily get a sense of Mary’s new experience, since I have had precisely such an experience myself. I know what it is like to perceive red, and I know what it is like to experience something for the first time. And yet, in spite of this familiarity, the mystery remains.
Instead of just appealing to experiences that are different from our own, then, Jackson defamiliarizes qualitative experience per se. His story suggests that there is a fundamental difficulty even in describing “what it is like” for me to have my own inner sensations. Apparently, qualia cannot be grasped in objectifying terms, and cannot be known in advance. This difficulty is what leads thinkers like Dennett and Lewis to deny that “what is it like?” is a meaningful question at all.
Such, at least, is my own speculative reconstruction of Jackson’s argument. But unfortunately, Jackson himself does not quite pursue this sort of approach. He declines to speculate in the way that I wish he had. This is because he phrases his question, as we have already seen, in terms of “physical information”. He asserts that this sort of information – which physicalists believe to be complete – is not “all the information there is to have”. For Jackson, qualitative experience becomes a different sort of information from the physical kind; “there is something about [such] experience, a property of it, of which we were left ignorant”.
In stating this, however, Jackson never questions the equivocal notion of information itself. He fails to ask what it means to “have” a certain type of information, or to wonder whether experience can really be described as a substance that has certain “properties”. As a result, his argument diverts us away from its initial seductive promise of helping us to think about “what it is like” to undergo sensory experience. Instead, Jackson pulls us towards thinking about something entirely different: the metaphysical claims of physicalism, and the question of whether the supposed “properties” of experience are always “physical” ones. Instead of wondering “what it is like” to perceive the color red, we are led to consider the criteria for – as Lewis puts it – "knowing what it’s like” (emphasis added) to experience red. The questioning gets displaced from an affective register into a cognitive one.
The story itself therefore involves a basic misdirection. The whole question of physicalism – which is the crucial stake for Jackson and all of his respondents – is actually irrelevant, and entirely beside the point. For even as Jackson argues for the specialness of qualia, and claims that they cannot be reduced to the status of “physical information”, he also, quite rightly, takes it for granted that they do indeed have a physical basis. He already accepts that “qualia are effects of what goes on in the brain. Qualia cause nothing physical but are caused by something physical”. Even as he tries to deny physicalism, he has already locked himself into the assumption (as reflected in the very title of his initial article) that qualia are nothing more than epiphenomena of physical processes. He takes for granted both that qualia must have physical causes, and that they must lack any physical or causal efficacy of their own.
What Jackson brings up, but then seems to forget, is the important claim that qualitative experience is embodied. Jackson only states this as a passing observation. In the passages that I have already quoted, he notes that qualia can be identified with “certain features of the bodily sensations especially”; the examples he gives include “the hurtfulness of pains” and “the itchiness of itches”. But we may well generalize further from this. Qualia are not simply free-floating mental events; they arise in the course of a body’s physical activity, and its interactions with the rest of the world. They are necessarily concomitant with our bodily exertions, because (as Whitehead likes to remind us) “we see with our eyes, we taste with our palates, we touch with our hands, etc”. What William James says about emotions may well be the case for qualia as well: that they are effects, or correlates, of bodily states.
I would add to this that the experience of qualia does not and cannot take place in the absence of a body. Almost no one today would argue anything different. Indeed, even such phenomena as phantom limb pains and out-of-body experiences – which have become privileged cases for philosophers of mind as diverse as the interactionist Alva Noë and the representationalist Thomas Metzinger – seem to require the existence of a body in the first place. For it is only in relation to some lived body that fantasmatic experiences of disembodiment or false embodiment can occur at all. I cannot have an out-of-body experience without there being a body for me to go out from. And I can only experience sensation in an inexistent phantom limb if there is some sort of body to which that limb used to be attached, or at the very least is supposed to have been attached. Indeed, qualia or phenomenal experiences would still be physical and embodied even if my body were reduced to a brain in a vat whose neural circuitry was being manipulated by mad scientists. And these experiences would still be physical even if my mind were downloaded to a computer, and instantiated in silicon instead of carbon. Even an entirely hallucinatory, or programmed, virtual reality requires – as Bruno Latour might well remind us – a vast physical apparatus in order to be produced and maintained.
Despite Jackson’s own initial claims, therefore, nothing in the story of Mary actually casts doubt – upon or even relates in any significant way to – the actual metaphysical doctrines of physicalism, materialism, and naturalism. The problem is not one of physicalism versus something else (like dualism or supernaturalism, or even epiphenomenalism). It is rather, more straightforwardly, a question of the very status of phenomenal experience. It involves the problem of under what circumstances we can legitimately ask “what is it like?”-style questions. How can we possibly account for qualia, given both that we do in fact experience them, and that physicalism is unquestionably true? More broadly, what is the place of experience in the philosophy of mind?
Most of the philosophical commentators on the story of Mary sidestep this question. Indeed, they tend to diminish, or empty out, the very idea of phenomenal experience. In Lewis’ account, for instance, Mary never really experiences anything. When she sees a patch of red, or an object that is red, she only gains the know-how, or the ability, to recognize the color red when she encounters it again. The sensation itself becomes curiously empty; it points beyond itself, to future instances, but it never “happens” in the present moment and on its own account. Other thinkers go even further in this direction. Dennett makes the general argument that, even though "there seems to be phenomenology … it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology”. Scott Bakker, with his Blind Brain Theory, similarly suggests – in the course of his own commentary on the story of Mary – that the brain’s unavoidable blindness to its own processes entails, as a necessary consequence, “the nonexistence of things like affects, colours, and so on”.
One obvious response to these sorts of claims is simple exasperation. As Galen Strawson says about Dennett, it makes no sense to claim that percepts and affects only seem to exist; “for there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience just is for there to be such phenomenology or experience”. Phenomenal experience is a seeming; it “exists” regardless of whether its apparent contents are “real” or not, and whether anything we can say about these contents is true or not.
This assertion is a minimalistic, bedrock version of the Cartesian cogito: even if everything that I experience is delusional, I can still rightly say that I am experiencing it. We may well wish to be more stringent than Descartes, and replace his overly intellectual cogito (“I think”) with a more primordial sentio (“I feel”); thus Deleuze and Guattari suggest that every I think already “presuppose[s] an I feel at an even deeper level”. And we may also rightly doubt the assignment of this feeling to a stable and substantial “I”, existing in a moment of time that can be isolated as the “present”. But even when such reductions have been made, a minimal what-is-it-likeness remains. Lewis, Dennett, and Bakker seem to slide from the unreliability – or even the inevitably delusional nature – of subjective experience to the assertion of its sheer nonexistence. But how can subjective experience even be delusional if it does not “exist” at all?
I think that the problem here has to do with the grounding philosophical assumptions of the whole discussion. Daniel Stoljar and Yujin Nagasawa, introducing an entire volume of essays on the story of Mary, say that “everyone agrees that something happens when Mary comes out of her room” (emphasis added). But they go on to suggest that the mere fact “that Mary comes to have a new experience when she comes out of her room” is nothing more than a banal “truism”. Mary’s actual experience doesn’t have any intrinsic significance. What is really important to all these thinkers, rather, is something else. Jackson wonders what “information” Mary acquires as a result of her new experience; Tye finds a way to subsume this experience under a “concept”. Dennett and Lewis, in their different ways, regard the experience as entirely insubstantial, for it is nothing more than the demonstration of a “disposition”, or the production of an instrumental ability.
What unites all of these thinkers is that they do not find Mary’s experience to be the least bit interesting or important in and of itself. They are only concerned with the grounds and consequences of the experience, or with what it allows us to infer. The experience per se doesn’t seem to matter – but only how it gets cognized or accounted for. If the modernist poet T. S. Eliot once complained that “we had the experience but missed the meaning”, all these philosophers suffer from the opposite problem: they have figured out all the meanings, but they somehow missed the actual experience.
How can this be? When philosophers squabble over the value and significance of phenomenal experience, the “properties” it possesses, the “dispositions” it displays, and even over the question of whether it “exists” or not, they fail to consider this experience in any terms other than cognitive ones. There is a dimension of experience missing from the philosophical account; it is missing precisely because it cannot be conceptualized by philosophy. We might well say that this missing dimension of experience is the aesthetic one; aesthetics in this sense is cognitive philosophy’s other. As Kant himself puts it in the Third Critique, aesthetic experience “contributes nothing to cognition… it is neither grounded on concepts nor aimed at them”.
Kant’s account of aesthetic experience would seem to contradict his famous assertion, in the First Critique, that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”. But this contradiction may itself be taken to express the difference between the faculties of the understanding and the imagination; or between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and what Kant calls aesthetic ideas on the other. The latter do not have a respectable philosophical status, Kant says, “because no concept can be fully adequate to them, as inner intuitions… An aesthetic idea cannot become a cognition, because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate”. And this is why such intuitions are blind. Without an adequate concept, they cannot be categorized in any way. Nor can they be generalized or classified. Aesthetic ideas are unqualified – to use the term that Brian Massumi applies to free-floating, prepersonal affect.
This is not to deny that we do in fact cognize and qualify our experiences, and generalize from them; in fact, we cannot avoid doing so. Without some sort of conceptualization, we would not be able to remember these experiences, to refer to them, to compare them, and to reflect upon them. Indeed, it is only through some process of cognition that I can even conceive of something as happening “for the first time”; it is only by means of conceptualization that my experience can be constituted and recognized as a temporal event, a Now, a “living present”. In strictly philosophical terms, no experience is possible without something like Kant’s “pure categories of the understanding”. In a more modern language, we must reject what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the myth of the given”, or the idea that raw sense experience comes to us free of conceptualization. From this point of view, the story of Mary’s first exposure to color might well be – as Dennett complains – “a bad thought experiment, an intuition pump that actually encourages us to misunderstand its premises”.
But as an extra-philosophical science fiction narrative, the story of Mary also solicits us to consider phenomenal experience noncognitively – which is to say aesthetically. Even though we cannot, as it were, conceive of sensory experience without, precisely, conceptualizing or cognizing it, this does not mean that qualia can simply be eliminated, or else fully subsumed within their conceptualization. Something like a trace, or a remainder, is always left behind. Kant is at least uncomfortably aware of this remainder, which is why he writes the Third Critique as a kind of supplement to the First. Sellars also leaves space for extraconceptual experience when he notes that “the awareness of redness”, which he regards as irreducibly conceptual and linguistic, is “not to be confused, of course, with sensations of red”. It is noteworthy, as well, that Sellars describes his own positive account of how we come to be aware of having inner thoughts and sensations as “a piece of science fiction – anthropological science fiction”.
The point, I think, is this. Intuitions without concepts are indeed blind; but blindness is not the same thing as sheer nonexistence. I may still be affected by a light that I cannot see. I may sense it unawares, as happens in cases of blind-sight. Or the functioning of my body may be altered by it in some way, as happens when I am exposed to radioactivity, or to electromagnetic radiation at frequencies outside of the visible spectrum. Direct, conscious perception (what Whitehead calls “presentational immediacy”) is only a small subset of the much broader range of processes by means of which entities “perceive” other entities, or are affected by those entities (what Whitehead sometimes calls “perception in the mode of causal efficacy”). These latter processes may well be “blind” (Kant) or “vague” (Whitehead), but perception is no less real for happening indirectly or vicariously.
The virtue of science fiction – in contrast to cognitive philosophical discourse – is that its fabulations point up, or “represent”, precisely this sort of indirect influence. Sellars reminds us that a “direct account of immediate experience” is not possible. But as Graham Harman points out, aesthetics is a matter of allusion, rather than one of representation. Science fiction can allude to, or recount an approach to, states and conditions that exceed any possibility of direct depiction or explicit conceptualization. In a science-fictional framework, nonconceptual experience can still be narrated – even if it cannot be rendered “present”. Naturalistic or mimetic fiction often follows the banal rule that one must show, rather than tell; but speculative fiction makes a point of telling – allusively and indirectly – that which, quite literally, cannot be shown.
This gets to the heart of what is extra-philosophical about science fiction. The genre has been defined as an art of “cognitive estrangement”. This means, in the first place, that science fiction distances us from our everyday cognitive assumptions and frames of reference – which is something that philosophy is also supposed to do. But the definition also implies, at least in some instances, that science fiction works to estrange us from the very possibility of being able to cognize our “immediate experience” at all. In science fiction narratives, cognition may fail because new technologies “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception” so radically that there is no evident pathway from here to there; or because the sort of subjectivity that we take for granted has broken down; or because we encounter alien forms of sentience that are not commensurable with our own.
For instance, in his novel Accelerando, Charles Stross envisions the evolution of machines whose artificial intelligence so far exceeds our own mental powers that we would need “dehumanizing cognitive surgery” in order to be able to communicate with them. Charles Harness, in his story “The New Reality”, imagines a scenario in which Kant’s Categories, the fundamental conditions of all possible experience, are themselves shattered as the result of an illicit scientific experiment. In Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, as in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, we seem at first to be confronted by deep cognitive puzzles. But in both novels, the puzzle-solving approach reaches a dead end. Lem’s sentient planet and Dick’s creepy half-life commodity-God both defy, and refuse to be contained within, the cognitive models that we (together with the novels’ human characters) seek to apply to them.
Where does this leave us in the case of Mary? In taking her story as a science fiction narrative, I am pushing back against the philosophical accounts that seek to ground Mary’s experience by explaining it – or explaining it away – in cognitive terms. Instead, I would like to suggest that Mary’s “intuition” may well be “blind”, not because of an absence, but rather due to a dazzling excess of illumination. Perhaps when Mary leaves her black-and-white room for the first time, her knowledge of color simply fails her. None of her concepts is adequate to the qualia that arouse her inner intuition. She is so overwhelmed by her new color sensations that she is unable to tell us (or to tell herself, for that matter) just what it is that she sees and feels. There can never be a “direct account” of such splendor – which is aesthetic both in the sense of being beautiful, and in that of forming the basis of sensory experience. It’s sort of like what happens when you take LSD.
Among the many philosophical conceptualizations of the story of Mary, the one by Michael Tye comes closest to registering this nonconceptual, science-fictional sense of unqualifiable sensation. Tye insists that phenomenal perception involves a sort of overflow. Immediate experience always goes beyond our ability to classify and conceptualize it, let alone to remember it. This is why there is a gap between the sensory experience that Mary has, and the instrumental ability to recognize particular colors that she gains (according to David Lewis) as a result. Actual “sensory experience”, Tye says, is “far, far richer” than what is needed to provide the basis for a cognitive disposition or capacity. As a result of leaving her room and seeing a red rose for the first time, Mary may well gain the cognitive ability to distinguish things that are red from things that are green or blue or some other color. But of course, Mary does not see the color red in general; she sees one specific hue of red. And this is an entirely different matter. As Sellars tells us, we must distinguish between determinables and determinates. It is one thing to ask whether this color that I am seeing now is determinable as red, and quite another thing to ask which determinate shade of red it is. Sellars suggests that the confusion between determinables and determinates has long plagued empiricist accounts of sensation.
As Tye points out, the problem here is not just that Mary sees a particular, determinate shade of red, rather than seeing the generality of that-which-is-determinable-as-red. Even more perturbingly, the fact is that Mary will never be able to distinguish the particular shade of red that she is seeing now from another, slightly different shade of red that she encounters at a later time. These determinate sensations of red can only be cognized, and remembered, as instances of what is determinable as redness in general. This is simply a consequence of the physical capacity of human brains. We “have no stored representations in memory”, Tye says, for hues that only differ slightly from one another; “there simply isn’t enough room. My experience of red19, for instance, is phenomenally different from my experience of red21”. But in my memory, I only have a more general concept of red; there are “no such concepts as the concepts red19 and red21”. The subtleties of closely-related-but-not-identical hues therefore cannot be grasped in retrospect. When Mary sees a particular hue of red, Tye says, “she certainly knows what it is like to experience that particular hue at the time at which she is experiencing it”. But she will not be able to retain this sensation in the form of conceptual knowledge. Later on, “presented with two items… in a series of tests, she cannot say with any accuracy which experience her earlier experience of the rose matches”.
The neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger makes a similar point. Metzinger defines “phenomenal properties”, like color, as “cognitive structures reconstructed from memory”. Since such properties are already intrinsically conceptual, they “can be functionally individuated”. In this way, Metzinger works in the tradition of Kant and Sellars. But just as Kant makes room for aesthetic ideas to which no concept is adequate, and just as Sellars distinguishes sensations of red from the awareness of redness, so Metzinger – following Diane Raffman – also admits an exceptional, or primordial, form of noncognitive experience. Beneath a certain threshold of cognitive discrimination, he says, perceptual sensations lack identity criteria.
This sort of experience, Metzinger says, “is available for attention and online motor control, but it is not available for cognition”. Its “informational content” cannot be remembered or subsequently recognized. The experience is one of such “subtlety” that it “cannot, in principle, be conceptually grasped and integrated into cognitive space”. How is this possible? “The core issue”, Metzinger says, “is the ineffability, the introspective and cognitive impenetrability of phenomenal tokens… Therefore, we are not able to carry out a mental type identification for these most simple forms of sensory concepts”. Aesthetic apprehensions come and go; we cannot hold on to them or keep track of them. “To speak in Kantian terms”, Metzinger concludes, “on the lowest, and most subtle level of phenomenal experience, as it were, only intuition (Anschauung) and not concepts (Begriffe) exist”.
When we no longer have concepts to guide our intuitions, we are in the realm of what David Roden calls dark phenonemology. Roden extends the arguments of Kant, Sellars, and Metzinger. Since I am able to experience the subtlety of red, but I can only conceive and remember this experience as one of red in general, there must be, within consciousness itself, a radical “gulf between discrimination and identification”. This leads to the ironic consequence that first-person experience cannot be captured adequately by first-person observation and reflection. “What the subject claims to experience should not be granted special epistemic authority since it is possible for us to have a very partial and incomplete grasp of its nature”.
In other words, rather than claiming (as Dennett does, for instance) that noncognitive phenomenal experience is somehow illusory, Roden accepts such experience, espousing a full “phenomenal realism”. But the conclusion he draws from this non-eliminativist realism is that much of first-person experience "is not intuitively accessible”. I do not necessarily know what I am sensing or thinking. It may well be that I can only figure out the nature of my own experiences indirectly, in the same ways – through observation, inference, and reporting – that I figure out the nature of other people’s experiences. Introspective phenomenological description therefore “requires supplementation through other modes of enquiry”. Roden concludes that we can only examine the “dark” areas of our own phenomenal experience objectively, from the outside, by means of “naturalistic modes of enquiry… such as those employed by cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and cognitive modelers”.
Roden’s account of dark phenomenology is compelling; but I find his conclusion questionable. For surely the crucial distinction is not between first person and third person modes of comprehension, so much as between what can be cognized, and what cannot. Phenomenological introspection and empirical experimentation are rival ways of capturing and characterizing the nature of subjective experience. But dark phenomenology points to a mode of experience that resists both sorts of conceptualization.
The story of Mary is a story of illumination and liberation. Mary escapes her physical and cognitive prison, and steps out into a new world of color. She gets to see the blue sky, the green grass, and the red flowers – or else, as I sometimes prefer to imagine, the garish blue, green, and red neon signs of a large city at night. In any case, though, Mary’s rapturous new experience cannot be translated into positive knowledge, or exchanged in the currency of “information”. This is why Jackson, in his original telling of the story, is only able to present Mary’s sensations as epiphenomenal, serving no “functional role”. We might well say that, for all its light-streaming brilliance, Mary’s experience is nonetheless one of dark phenomenology. It is “dark with excessive bright”. Or, as Metzinger so ominously puts it, “transparency is a special form of darkness”. The role of speculative aesthetics – and specifically of science fiction, in the way I am invoking it here – is to probe this darkness, so that we may immerse ourselves within it, without denaturing it by lighting it up.