Explanation Of Jackson's Moodal Argument

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Epiphenomenal Qualia

Uts Shrestha

Frank Jackson attempts to show that physicalism (the doctrine that the entire world is purely physical or is reducible to a physical phenomenon) is false, or at the very least is not comprehensive. In his attempt, Jackson, presents the Knowledge argument and the Modal argument. The knowledge argument seems to be stronger of the two. It holds that there is an essence of the mind and consciousness that cannot be deducted by a(any) purely physicalist truth.

Jackson formulates his knowledge argument in the form of a thought experiment of a brilliant optical neurophysiologist, Mary. The thought experiment is set in the future when all physical facts, at least pertaining to color vision, have been discovered.

But before I get into the reason, here is a brief outline of the modal argument: 1) no amount of physical knowledge about another person can logically prove that the said person is conscious. 2)Therefore we can imagine a world with entities who are physically identical to us, except that they lack consciousness and qualia. 3)Thus, there is more the mind than just the physical. 4)So, physicalism is

That is not truly an argument against physicalism because all that it does is raise the issue of the limitation of human imagination and that does not pertain to whether or not physicalism is false.

Despite its numerous strength, the knowledge argument does face some criticism. However there does not seem to be a decisive counter argument against the knowledge argument. One way to counter the knowledge argument is by rejecting that Mary gains propositional knowledge after leaving the room. Instead she gains the ability, the know-how, to see colors. However a criticism of this argument is that it is dubious that Mary’s learning after leaving the room is solely limited to acquiring the ability to see colors, i.e: when she sees a color X, she needs to know what it is not like to see the color