Editor’s introduction
like to be a bat ?’, the physical sciences can never account for the texture of physical experience, or what philosophers often refer to as qualia . 7 Frank Jackson introduced the thought experiment about a scientist (Mary) who knows everything about the physics of perceiving the colour red but who, stuck inside a black and white room, has never actually perceived the colour red. Jackson argued the following:
1. If materialism is true, then Mary has a complete and final theory of colour experience.
2. If she has such a theory, then she cannot experience anything new.
3. Yet when she leaves the room, she experiences something new, namely, the colour red.
4. Therefore, materialism is false.
This difference between a materialist understanding of the physical world and the mental experience of it is sometimes refer to as the explanatory gap . 8 Another term for the same difficulty, coined by the pre-eminent living dualist, David Chalmers, is the hard problem . Here is one way Chalmers described this: It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. 9 So, at this point, we can say that we have the sort of matter that is observable and measurable in the language of mathematics. This is what science does. And we also have subjective experience, also observable (we experience it!). The former is quantitative ; the latter, qualitative . One way to deal with this to be a dualist, and respect the two, different aspects of reality. But this means – very briefly – that subjective experience is not explained. (Or, at least, not yet.) Then there are two non-dualist responses. The first is that of the hard materialist, who must argue that our subjective experiences are a sort of illusion (or a ‘magic trick’, as Dennett has sometimes said) 10 and that the only real matter is the measurable kind. This is not an explanation of subjective experience either. The second response must have a different view of the nature of matter. Science since Galileo has defined key terms in our understanding of matter in relation to each other. So, we understand mass in relation to distance and force, and distance and force in relation to other phenomena. This means that physics is an excellent tool for prediction because it tells us (simply put) 7 Nagel 1974. 8 Jackson 1986; see also 1982 by the same author, and Papineau 2002: 141-60 for a discussion of the explanatory gap by an avowed materialist 9 Chalmer 1995: 201. In the same essay Chalmers goes through what he takes to be ‘easy’ problems (e.g. how do perceptions get turned into language ? What happens when something is on ‘the tip of your tongue’?) , by which I think he means questions answerable in principle using scientific method; for critical discussion of this characterization of ‘easy’ problems, see Dennett 201 3: 310-18. Seth 2021: 22., from a neuroscientific perspective, tries to redraw the problem as ‘real’, rather than either easy or hard: ‘ The primary goals of consciousness science are to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.’ For an excellent survey of the various arguments launched against materialism, see Searle 2004. Levine 2001 is another good introduction to the main arguments, 10 See Dennett 1991, where he argues for this position at length.
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