How does our own life experience constrain or enhance our ability to understand other people?
Can I really understand a person who has had experiences very different from my own? Can I understand the suffering of a refugee? Or the challenges of ageing? Can I really make sense of what I am hearing about as I walk around a concentration camp memorial?
Who would you trust to fully understand you, if you were wanting to speak to someone about a traumatic experience that you had been through?
These questions seem related to a *famous* thought experiment, in which we are asked to consider the case of Mary. Mary is not a real person, but a construction of the philosophical imagination. Bear with me for a bit.
There are two (remarkable) things that you need to know about Mary:
1. She is an expert scientist, specializing in the field of color perception. When it comes to such matters, she knows everything that happens in the brain, from the wave of light entering the eye, right through to you thinking, or saying, 'I am seeing red!'. She knows it all. Forget what our current leading scientists know, when it comes to physics, Mary is omniscient. Pretty impressive, huh!
2. Mary has never herself seen a color. The original version of this case had Mary confined to a black and white room for her whole life! (who would put her there? how did she nevertheless become a great scientist? and what about her hands - couldn't she see her own rosy fingers?). But it would do just as well to suppose that she had limited eye function.
One auspicious day, Mary sees color for the first time! (she is released from her gray-scale prison, or she has eye surgery) Just imagine! Her first glimpse of a blue sky. A yellow banana. Green grass. Maybe someone takes her to see Joseph And the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Who knows!
And here comes the rub. Does Mary learn new facts about the world, as she she sees all of these colors for the first time? Perhaps you think, 'yes, her new adventures will be full of revelation. Every time she sees a new color, she will say 'aha!' this is what my friends have been trying to tell me about all this time. I have only been able to draw up nobel prize winning neurological maps of color perception, but now I have finally learnt what it is to experience all of these colors!'.
This line of thought has been offered as an attack against physicalism - the view that everything that exists is physical. In her chromatically innocent state, Mary knew all of the physical facts about color perception. So if, through her colorful epiphanies she learns new facts, then those facts cannot be physical facts. There must be more to our mental lives than physics.
But many people like physicalism, so it will come as no surprise that this line of argument has generated a large and complicated philosophical debate.
My interest here is not in metaphysics. I'm interested in how we understand each other. So what I am working on in my current research is how to play with the Mary case a little. Here is a little taste of where I am headed:
1. Suppose you are a friend of Mary, in the dark days, before she had seen color. When you are skyping her, and telling her about the sunset you just saw, can she fully understand you? She can map out your brain states, for sure, but does she know what your experience is like?
2. Instead of focusing on our experiences of color, lets look at our experiences of emotions, moods and physical sensations. In other words - our experiences of affect. Suppose there was a therapist who, from even a short consultation with you, could offer a comprehensive list of all of the affective states that you were experiencing. More than this - she can even describe to you exactly what each of these states does to your brain and body. But - you saw it coming - suppose also that this therapist has never experienced any of those things herself. Would you really trust that she understood you?
3. More realistically, we all vary in what we have experienced in our lives. When it comes to suffering, each of us has been exposed to a different mix of (for example) anger, fear, grief, heartbreak, and physical pain. Can someone with limited experience of these things really understand a person who has had a more intense set of experiences?
Finding answers to these questions is, I think, difficult. My goal is to show that this kind of discussion is not *just* a matter of philosophical speculation. It has important implications for our everyday practice of understanding the lives of others.
Can I really understand a person who has had experiences very different from my own? Can I understand the suffering of a refugee? Or the challenges of ageing? Can I really make sense of what I am hearing about as I walk around a concentration camp memorial?
Who would you trust to fully understand you, if you were wanting to speak to someone about a traumatic experience that you had been through?
These questions seem related to a *famous* thought experiment, in which we are asked to consider the case of Mary. Mary is not a real person, but a construction of the philosophical imagination. Bear with me for a bit.
There are two (remarkable) things that you need to know about Mary:
1. She is an expert scientist, specializing in the field of color perception. When it comes to such matters, she knows everything that happens in the brain, from the wave of light entering the eye, right through to you thinking, or saying, 'I am seeing red!'. She knows it all. Forget what our current leading scientists know, when it comes to physics, Mary is omniscient. Pretty impressive, huh!
2. Mary has never herself seen a color. The original version of this case had Mary confined to a black and white room for her whole life! (who would put her there? how did she nevertheless become a great scientist? and what about her hands - couldn't she see her own rosy fingers?). But it would do just as well to suppose that she had limited eye function.
One auspicious day, Mary sees color for the first time! (she is released from her gray-scale prison, or she has eye surgery) Just imagine! Her first glimpse of a blue sky. A yellow banana. Green grass. Maybe someone takes her to see Joseph And the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Who knows!
And here comes the rub. Does Mary learn new facts about the world, as she she sees all of these colors for the first time? Perhaps you think, 'yes, her new adventures will be full of revelation. Every time she sees a new color, she will say 'aha!' this is what my friends have been trying to tell me about all this time. I have only been able to draw up nobel prize winning neurological maps of color perception, but now I have finally learnt what it is to experience all of these colors!'.
This line of thought has been offered as an attack against physicalism - the view that everything that exists is physical. In her chromatically innocent state, Mary knew all of the physical facts about color perception. So if, through her colorful epiphanies she learns new facts, then those facts cannot be physical facts. There must be more to our mental lives than physics.
But many people like physicalism, so it will come as no surprise that this line of argument has generated a large and complicated philosophical debate.
My interest here is not in metaphysics. I'm interested in how we understand each other. So what I am working on in my current research is how to play with the Mary case a little. Here is a little taste of where I am headed:
1. Suppose you are a friend of Mary, in the dark days, before she had seen color. When you are skyping her, and telling her about the sunset you just saw, can she fully understand you? She can map out your brain states, for sure, but does she know what your experience is like?
2. Instead of focusing on our experiences of color, lets look at our experiences of emotions, moods and physical sensations. In other words - our experiences of affect. Suppose there was a therapist who, from even a short consultation with you, could offer a comprehensive list of all of the affective states that you were experiencing. More than this - she can even describe to you exactly what each of these states does to your brain and body. But - you saw it coming - suppose also that this therapist has never experienced any of those things herself. Would you really trust that she understood you?
3. More realistically, we all vary in what we have experienced in our lives. When it comes to suffering, each of us has been exposed to a different mix of (for example) anger, fear, grief, heartbreak, and physical pain. Can someone with limited experience of these things really understand a person who has had a more intense set of experiences?
Finding answers to these questions is, I think, difficult. My goal is to show that this kind of discussion is not *just* a matter of philosophical speculation. It has important implications for our everyday practice of understanding the lives of others.
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