On Epiphenomenal Qualia, by Frank Jackson
1. “We find out perhaps that Fred’s cones respond differentially to certain light waves in the red section of the spectrum that make no difference to ours and that this leads in Fred to a wider range of those brain states responsible for visual discriminatory behaviour. But none of this tells us what we really want to know about his colour experience. […] We have all of the physical information. Therefore, knowing all this is not knowing everything about Fred. It follows that Physicalism leaves something out.”
2. Jackson is arguing against the Physicalist, materialistic account of consciousness by saying that there is something fundamentally different between a physical account of consciousness and what we, as individuals, know subjectively to be true insofar as our own experiences are concerned. This so-called “knowledge argument for qualia,” as the first section of his article is entitled, is that there is something left unaccounted-for in the traditional physicalist account of consciousness. Jackson also wants to argue that this will remain the case, regardless of what scientific advances are made in the empirical investigations into consciousness. In order to make his point, Jackson uses the example of aforementioned Fred, whose discrimination of colors serves as a thought experiment. There is for Fred as much difference between two different shades of red as there is for most human beings between blue and yellow; the colors themselves are utterly distinct. Therefore, to Fred, we are colorblind. We can analyze the frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum in which those reds—red1 and red2—fall, and we can even have an absolutely detailed description of the optical apparatus in Fred (e.g., extra cones, &c.), and how his brain, his optic nerves, his eyeballs, and the colors red1 and red2 are all interacting. But, says Jackson, we nevertheless do not thereby have all of the information about Fred’s “color experience.”
3. Continuing in this first section of the article, Jackson puts forth his knowledge argument by continuing with Fred. He makes the further point that, upon Fred’s hypothetical donation of his body to science, and upon the transplantation of his optical system into another, it can then be said that we know more about Fred’s experience than the physicalist picture of what was occurring in his brain and body could take into account. He then develops this with a further example of Mary, a woman reared in a black-and-white room, who has learned everything there is to know (factually) about the physical account of the world and the way human beings are constructed to interact with it. Jackson’s position is that, upon Mary’s leaving the room and being exposed to all the rich colors of the world, there will be something that she learns that she did not know before. Jackson points out in the addendum to Epiphenomenal Qualia that “what Mary did not know” is, by virtue of the what, the important question—and not the type of knowledge that Mary had, since she had all necessary knowledge as described by the physicalist schema. Jackson then differentiates his argument from the modal argument and Nagel’s “what it is like to be” argument—the former being something like the Cartesian deduction that we can imagine a consciousness outside of body and therefore must be more than body, along with the more modern idea of zombies, physiologically operative beings that nevertheless lack consciousness; and the latter mostly by merely calling into question whether having enough imagination to conceive of the way it is to be a bat is really a challenge to physicalism at all. In the final section of his article, Jackson defends the claim that there is nothing about qualia that make a difference in the physical world—and thus escape the purely physical account of consciousness. On the first case, taking a cue from Hume, Jackson argues that possibly, both qualia and that which is behaviorally explainable are due to “happenings in the brain,” but are not causally linked. On the second, qualia come about via evolution as inconsequential appendages, irrelevant to survival, as resulting from the crucial develpment of rationality. Thirdly, Jackson mentions the problem of other minds, and that we can infer qualia from others’ behavior, just as we link behavior and qualia in ourselves. Ultimately, says Jackson, it is altogether too optimistic to believe that physicalism accounts for consciousness altogether—even though its appeal is obvious, in giving us an account of our place in the grand scheme of things.
