Mary's Room Refutes Physicalism

Why I don't buy Matthew's blog post

The other day, Matthew Adelstein wrote a substack post “Mary’s Room Refutes Physicalism”¹. I believe that Matthew’s presentation of the argument does not successfully “refute” physicalism. Here I shall talk about why.

“What it’s like” to see in black and white (allegedly)

Matthew presents the argument as follows:

1. Mary in her black and white room can, merely by reading textbooks, learn everything physical.

2. Mary in her black and white room cannot, merely by reading textbooks, learn everything about consciousness (she cannot learn what red looks like).

3. Therefore, some things about consciousness are non-physical.

I am not sure this is a particularly good presentation of the argument. This is partly because it bakes in a lot of ambiguity with respect to how we should interpret the premises. We can make inferences about what Matthew might mean from further arguments he provides in favour of the premises — I shall mention some of these points later. Additionally, for the interpretations of these statements that I take to be plausible, I believe there is good reason to doubt each.

Mary in her black and white room can, merely by reading textbooks, learn everything physical.

Is this a claim about a possible state of affairs for a human being in the actual world? If so, how can I know that this is something possible for a human being to do? Can a human being know everything?

If we can’t specify exactly what it is that we are supposed to be imagining, what confidence should we give to inferences we make using our imaginations for such cases?

(A quibble, though I believe important to “pumping intuitions” in accurate ways). Is it plausible to think a human would learn anything sophisticated (up to a high-school / undergrad level) only by reading text books? This is easy to dismiss as mistaken, but assume I’m not stupid, if you will. What does imagining other ways of learning “everything”, or all facts or something do to our intuitions?

What does it mean to “learn everything physical”?
Given the statment about “reading textbooks” should we take “learning everything physical” to be the act of memorising a very long list of English language sentences? Why English? Is “learning” the same as being able to reproduce an English sentence?

Are English sentences exhaustive of “everything physical”? If not, what do we mean? Do we mean English sentences about everything physical? What do we mean by about? Do we mean something like that these sentences correspond to all the facts? What does it mean for them to correspond? What is a fact? and what is corresponding to what? Could someone know all English sentences about everything physical and would that leave some physical things out? i.e. does learning everything physical mean learning to produce a declarative sentence about everything physical or something else?

Whatever we say about facts, language and their relationship to everyting in the thought experiement, are we setting up the dominoes according to a physicalist account of these things, or something else? If something else, then what? If something else, why is this a problem for physicalists?

Mary in her black and white room cannot, merely by reading textbooks, learn everything about consciousness (she cannot learn what red looks like).

Is this what happened when we performed the experiment? If not, why think this? Do we have any empirical evidence about what happens when Mary leaves her black and white room? If not, how confident should we be in our hunches?

Do physicalist theories of mind entail that this is false?
Do non-physicalist theories of mind entail that this is true?
If so, does this premise tell us what we think about mind, or does what we think about mind tell us what we think about this premise?

What does it mean to “learn everything about” consciousness? Does this mean to produce English declarative sentences about consciousness, or something else?

If we buy this can Mary learn something about consciousness? If so, what? What might she say about this thought experiment?

Would reading textbooks about dualism, panpsychism or idealism teach someone everything about consciousness? If not, why? Does this mean that reality is not exhausted by facts about the physical + those about mind (and whatever else there is, or only about mind). If this objection is mistaken in some way, then can you specify what way that is, and what the hidden claim is about what-consciousness-is that makes this parity-argument mistaken?
Once that is done, is the argument obviously mistaken in some way, or question begging against physicalism?

Therefore, some things about consciousness are non-physical

I have only raised questions about each of the premises — someone responding in an uncharitable mood might tell me that questions are not arguments. This is correct, however questions can provide insight that undermines assumptions made by argument that are required for the argument to be succesful. Further, insofar as the purpose of an argument is to persuade someone, or to persuade me specifically, these are the sorts of questions I would like detailed answers to from proponents of the argument in order for me to understand what they’re trying to tell me and whether it shows anything about my commitments as a physicalist.

(Briefly) how I naviage these questions, and what I think of this presentation of the argument.

I believe that the first premise of this argument is false, I do not know if one can learn “everything physical” only by reading textbooks. I do not know if one can learn “everything physical”. I do not know what “everything physical” is. I do not believe I am required to have a strong or clear view on any of these things in order to be a physicalist.

I do not know if Mary in her black and white room cannot, merely by reading textbooks, learn everything about consciousness (she cannot learn what red looks like). Given my questions about the first premise, I am not sure what I am supposed to be imagining at all. I have a very low resultion picture with the details often filled in for me by those telling the story (i.e. “she comes to learn something new”). I am not sure Im clear on what it means to “learn everything about consciousness”.

I do not believe the first or second premise, so I don’t believe the conclusion of this argument as an entailment of these premises. Additionally, as a physicalist I do not believe the conclusion of this argument is true for independent reasons.

As such, this presentation of the argument does nothing to “refute” my physicalism. Though for Matthew, who (as I understand things) was a non-physicalist prior to his consideration of this argument or his writing of this piece the argument does refute physicalism.

Some Commentary on Matthew’s Approach

Matthew says with respect to the first premise

I think 1 is on extremely firm footing, and it’s very widely accepted.

Matthew provides no evidence for this claim. Amongst the people that I talk to about this topic it certainly isn’t. However, even if we did have good evidence that most people (ever?) accepted this claim then I don’t know why that would mean I should believe it too?

Matthew then goes on to state

Mary could learn every fact about chemistry, biology, physics, and so on simply by reading the textbooks. Physical facts can be exhaustively described in terms of physics and in terms of behavior—they’re the sorts of facts that you can learn about just from a textbook. If Mary could learn every other physical fact just by reading from textbooks, why couldn’t she learn this one?

This is simply to restate the premise, I don’t think there are any additional resons in there to justify the premise.

Matthew then goes on to say

When you present this argument to normal physicalists, you almost never get anyone. I have, on at least 1 billion occasions, at various Rationalist meet-ups given the argument, only for my interlocutor to flail around soliloquizing rather than clearly enumerate a premise they reject. The most common thing they say is roughly the following:

Of course Mary wouldn’t see red in the room. Ever heard of neuroscience? A person can only see red if their brain is in certain states. Just reading textbooks about how people see red doesn’t put you in the brain state of seeing red, so therefore, Mary could never see red.

(Sean Carroll, a very smart guy who should know better, continues making this error to this very day).

First, for someone tooting their own horn in such a self aggrandising way about how interlocutors at Rationalist meet ups “flail around”, presumably caught in the intellectual web of someone as intelligent as Matthew I wouldnt expect there to be odd grammatical errors such as in the first sentence. Im not really sure what that is supposed to mean, unless “get [someone]” is a sort of stand in for what we take ourselves to be doing when we present arguments and discuss philosophy; we “get” people, and if the argument is succesful we “get” them real good?

I also found the tone with respect to Sean Carroll incredibly off-putting. Perhaps one would not believe that Sean was making a basic error every day if they exercised a small amount of cognitive empathy for a differring position on a highly controversial and contested philosophical thought experiment.

With respect to the second premise, Matthew offers no further justification in support of this premise. He does moan that he doesn’t like it when physicalists provide alternative locutions for what happens to Mary than that she “learns a new fact”. I’m not really sure what that’s supposed to do for me.

Concluding Remarks

If I try to distill this presentation of the argument down to it’s core it seems to be playing on something like the following set of claims:

If Physicalism is true then all facts are physical facts.
If all facts are physical facts then consciousness facts are physical facts.
I can imagine a story where some facts are not physical facts.

These (obviously) do not constitute a valid argument. I would like a non-physicalist about mind to take these statements and combine them with whatever assumptions I’m missing to tell me why I should buy Mary’s room arguments as demonstrating something significant with respect to my own views on physicalism.

At most, it seems this form of the argument might show us something like that an english sentence about colour is not the same as having the experience of a colour. Or, that non-physicalists have some very peculiar accounts of physicalism in mind. I will write another piece about Mary’s room detailing my thought on different (better) presentations of the argument and how it has changed over time. However, I wanted to write this piece to engage with what I took to be a particularly polemical and overconfident post that did not adequately examine or make clear its assumptions.

1. Mary's Room Refutes Physicalism