The color Red and the Language of Science

A stunning conclusion of 20^th-century philosophy is that there are properties in the world that are not amenable to scientific exploration. This conclusion sprang from the study of consciousness. We are all conscious, or so we believe. But this consciousness, this experience of being each one of us has so far escaped science. In fact, from a scientific perspective, it is just easy to imagine a functional human being without consciousness. The latter notion of a nonconscious functional human being is known as a Philosophical Zombie or P-Zombie. Such a P-Zombie as the thought experiment goes, acts just like a functional human being but doesn’t have consciousness. And from the perspective of science, it is impossible to tell the difference with a conscious human being.

But what is consciousness? Frank Jackson, a 20^th-century philosopher, in one of his seminal papers, introduces this notion of Qualia. Qualia is the feeling that we humans (and probably animals) have of “what’s it like” to experience something. He claims that Qualia is beyond scientific explanation.

In his paper he gives, the example of Mary, a Color Scientist who has been under the influence of a terrible experiment. She was born in a black, white, and gray room. She had her hands painted gray. She is thrown into an environment where she can’t experience color. But despite that, through a television screen and books, she managed to learn all there is to know about colors: What are their wavelengths and how they reflect, etc.

On her 30^th birthday, she is exposed to a red tomato. Jackson claims at this point: Mary has learned something new. Namely “what it is like to experience the color red.” Even though through the language of science, Mary knew everything she could know about the color red, up until seeing red, she could not know what’s it like to see red.

The argument in canonical form can be represented as below:

P1 - Before seeing the ripe tomato, Mary knows all features of color experience that can be described in the language of the natural sciences.

P2 - Upon seeing the ripe tomato, Mary comes to know something new.

P3 - What she comes to know is that a particular color experience (that of seeing the ripe tomato) has a certain feature (that this is what is is like to have the experience).

C - There are features of color experience that cannot be described in the language of the natural sciences.

On first examination, the argument appears sound. As the premises seem true and there is no way for those true premises to lead to another conclusion. However, a challenge to this argument has come from what is known as identity theory and goes as follows:

“Consider a brain with a configuration A when seeing the color red. And B the experience of seeing the color red. Identity theorists claim that A=B”.

In other words, Mary, the color scientist, knowing everything that is to know about red would know the brain state that would result in seeing the color red. Thus, the identity theorists challenge premise P2 of the argument above.

Indeed, if Mary has a way of somehow seeing her brain configuration or better yet, if human beings are somehow able to reconfigure their brains when they get new information, then reading a brain configuration that results in the color red, can indeed let a human being know everything about red without ever experiencing it. To me and using the language of science and namely information theory, we can understand the brain configuration resulting from seeing red, as a series of bits. If we could somehow inject those bits into our brains when reading those bits in a scientific book, we would understand red without seeing it. Or rather we would see those bits in our minds’ eye. However, what I describe here is beyond human nature.

This is deeply unsatisfying. If we are physicalists, then brain configurations are the same as experiences. Yet confined to being a normal human being and with the current language of science, we can’t help but think that Mary has indeed learned something new. Maybe she knew from the start that the brain configuration that results from seeing the color Red. But can’t know anything of her experience upon seeing the color red.

The dispute between the identity theorists and the proponents of qualia is around this latter point. More practically, Mary, when presented with an MRI of the brain, can tell that it is a brain that is experiencing red, but she can’t tell when her brain experiences the color red then it is indeed that color.

In this essay, we have summarized what it means for some properties to exist that are not amiable to the scientific investigation: namely qualia, which is intrinsic to the conscious experience. We have examined the story of Mary, the color scientist who lives in a black and white world and comes to know something new when presented with a red object, namely what it is like to experience the color red. We also presented the challenge to this argument given by the identity theorists who claim that the brain state configuration of a person experiencing red is the same as the experience of seeing the color red. We didn’t agree with the identity theorists on this point and thus reiterated Jackson’s original claim. At least given, we are human beings who can’t somehow examine and inject experiences into their brains.