like this: 'A Martian coming to Earth may be amused that humans try and find a straightforward answer to something he finds trivial. However he may be astounded by the abilities of a human child to develop language.Ê There are limits to what we can know about the brain. In the example of Mary we can this never know whether her experience of red has a non-physical aspect. We will just have to accept this. We are now no closer to answering the question whether colour experience has a non-physical aspect! Frank Jackson writes ÂHow can pain have a weight, belief a certain temperature how can desire exact a gravitational pull and where in space is the feeling of boredom?Ê all these properties are so wildly different that they must be distinct from physical properties. Although the brain is clearly physical matter, the feelings, desires and qualia are so diverse that they cannot be clumped together with physical properties. (This is where I think materialism falls down). And so I would like to align myself with attribute dualists in saying that the brain is made of physical matter but inherent in it are mental properties and that interactionism is the best explanation we have yet of a causal link. Thus yes, MaryÊs experience of red is more than just a physical aspect.
Although this seems to follow that a physical state causes a mental state and so on, it fails to completely explain the causal link: how and where this interaction takes place. At this point it seems very easy to say that colour experience cannot have a physical aspect. Mary, although she might have experienced a new mental property, she has only undergone a physical change. Her feeling of seeing re is in fact only neurones in her brain there is no mental aspect. But for a second consider if the black and white world Mary lived in was in fact not reality at all, that her black and white house was being simulated. Her actions because she saw red and the action of seeing red were not real: the only thing that was real was the mental property of Âred. Materialism doesnÊt deal with the fact that the only thing we can be certain of is our mental state, not our physical state. Both materialism and dualism it would seem fail to answer conclusively if colour experience has a non-physical aspect or not. Mysterianism. It has some advocates such as Colin McGinn and Noam Chomsky. It states that we can never have the intellectual capacity to understand fully the brain and consciousness, in the same way that a chimpanzee will never be able to read plays or compose symphonies. Chomsky puts it The last theory is called transcendent naturalism sometimes known as
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