What is wrong with the Knowledge Argument? “ The appropriate evaluation of Knowledge argument remains controversial… It is therefore safe to predict that the discussion about the knowledge argument will not come to an end in the near future,” states Nida-Rümelin (2009). I this paper I argue that the knowledge argument about whether we acquire knowledge about phenomenal states or not is stated invalidly. The reason for this is that the ranges for the application of two perspectives of consciousness, which play a crucial role in the Knowledge argument – the first- and the third-person perspectives – overlap each other. To make this point clear I construe a thought experiment where these two perspectives of consciousness are kept separate. The consequences that are drawn from the thought experiment are then discussed in relation to the Knowledge argument put forward by Frank Jackson (1982) and in relation to the ongoing philosophical debate.

1. The two perspectives of consciousness Many scholars of consciousness have drawn attention to the essential differences between two ways of knowing the world around us – from the first- and the third-person points of view. The old philosophical dispute was resurrected when Nagel (1974) presented his today classical paper, “What is it like to be a bat.” The distinction between different points of view was also a core point in Frank Jackson’s (1982) argumentation for the falsity of the Physicalism. In the contemporary discussions one often refers to the issue in terms of the problem of ‘epistemic asymmetry’:

One of the basic problems in developing a theory of consciousness is the so-called ‘epistemic asymmetry.’ We know of conscious experiences in two essentially different ways: through direct inner acquaintance and through access from the outside, i.e., the third person perspective. For centuries, philosophers have been troubled about whether and how the introspective knowledge of phenomenal states from the first person perspective can be brought into accord with our knowledge from the third person perspective. (Metzinger 1995, p. 215)

The focus of this paper is ‘epistemic asymmetry’. I first have to specify, however, the way in which ‘epistemic asymmetry’ will be discussed. When Metzinger in the quotation above emphasizes the two fundamentally different methodological approaches to conscious experiences – one from within (from the first-person perspective) and one from without (from the third-person perspective) – he introduces the first-person perspective as providing “introspective knowledge of phenomenal states.” It is not however clear in what way introspective knowledge acquired through the process of self-observation, a process of the mental activity of a subject who is looking into his own mind, can be seen as a result of a first-person point of view on his own first-person-point-of-view experiences. Isn’t it sooner a methodological attempt to grasp one’s own experiences by taking the third-person perspective on one’s own first-person-point-of-view experiences? Without pursuing this issue further I would like to invite the reader into my discussion of ‘epistemic asymmetry’ in the following way. I suggest discussing the first- and the third-person perspectives as two essentially

1 different pathways, by which consciousness expresses itself in its encounter with the world. One way then is, for example, the experience of the blueness of the sky from the first-person perspective, another – the acquisition of the knowledge about this experience from the third- person perspective. The third-person perspective is understood here as the acquisition of knowledge about experiencing, whether it be the knowledge expressed in any introspective assertion or knowledge about the structures of the brain involved in this experience. The crucial point here is the distinction in employing these two perspectives – the first-person perspective is non-reflective in contrast to the detached and reflective nature of the third- person perspective.

When Eilan (1995, p. 54) reflected upon how the question of the mutual exclusiveness of two perspectives could be answered she put it in following words:

The most direct way of securing this result is to say that it is constitutive of the employment of the first person perspective that one not represent oneself as an object at all, but rather, serve as the unrepresented focal point of representation from that perspective. … The third person requires substantive self consciousness, the representation of oneself as one object among others.

The main point of this distinction is that to express what many thinkers would call a “first”- personal belief about oneself one need adopt, to borrow Eilan’s expression, an “externalist” stance on oneself. Eilan (1995, p. 53) expresses this idea by following words: “Now consider a thought one might express with an utterance such as ‘I am in pain’ where the ‘I’ is taken to be expressive of substantive self consciousness. This presupposes detachment, disengaged or objective treatment of oneself as one object among others.”

The fact that one has a unique, first-hand acquaintance with one’s own experiences (without sharing this ability with anyone else) does not change the fact that every act of referring to these experiences requires employing a frame of reference wherein one can see oneself as an object among many others. The only frame of reference that allows this kind of reflective investigation is, to my mind, the third-person perspective. It is in the sense of investigating an object (and not experiencing it, which would imply employing the first-person perspective) where the methodology of referring to oneself and the methodology of referring to someone else are identical. In the discussion below I shall regard reflexivity and self-consciousness as the prerogatives of the third-person perspective alone. The proposed distinction between the two perspectives of consciousness is crucial for the discussion that follows.

The conventional understanding of the first- and the third-person perspective in the way described by Metzinger in the quotation above give rise, as we are going to see, to methodological confusion. It prevents many researchers of consciousness not only from being able properly to distinguish first-person phenomena from third-person phenomena but also from being able to discuss the phenomenon at issue in the light of correct methodological means. The gain of the proposed distinction is that the two perspectives of consciousness, while mutually exclusive, no longer overlap each other on the basis of reflective investigation. The consequences of this distinction will be further highlighted in the thought experiment where the two perspectives of consciousness are kept separated. Frank Jackson’s case of the

2 neurophysiologist Mary is interesting in this respect. To argue for the falsity of Physicalism Jackson (1982) uses the same strategy – the two perspectives of consciousness in different stages of Mary’s research were separated: first Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision from the outside, i.e. from the third-person perspective, and only later on does she complete her knowledge with a new experience of colors from the first-person perspective – by actually seeing the colors. Here is a brief summary of Jackson’s anti-materialist argument.

The case of Mary Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who spent her entire young life in a black-and-white environment studying human color vision through a black-and-white television monitor. As time goes by Mary acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see (chromatically) colored objects. This information includes facts about the surface reflectance properties of objects, wavelengths of light and causal interactions between retinal stimulation and processes in the brain. Jackson then asks: “What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?” His answer is: “It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it” (Jackson, 1982, p. 130). The knowledge that Mary acquires after her release is about what it is like (Nagel, 1974) to experience colors. This new knowledge should be, according to Jackson, non-physical in its nature, for Mary knew all the physical information about color vision before her release. The conclusion is thus that Mary’s previous knowledge was incomplete; and since Physicalism requires that all facts are physical facts, Physicalism is false.

The way Jackson formulates his thought experiment rests on the underlying assumption that Mary’s knowledge – when incomplete (without any access to first-person experiences) and when complete – is knowledge about the one and same type of object, i.e., color-experiences. There is no consensus in the ongoing philosophical debate about whether Mary really gains new knowledge or not. However, there seems to be a mutual agreement between most of the participants that the two different perspectives that consciousness can have on its objects of investigation deal with one and the same type of object. In this paper I call this assumption into question. I claim that the two essentially different ways of knowing the world of phenomena – from the first-person point of view1 and from the third-person point of view – have two essentially different types of objects under their consideration.2

I begin with posing the problem by means of a thought experiment where the two perspectives of consciousness are, like in Jackson’s case, keep separated. However, the main difference of

1 I want to stress it once more – the first-person point of view is in this paper regarded as a point of view of a perceiver, who experiences the world around him in a one-way directed unreflective manner. To reflect upon one’s own experiences would imply a crucial move to third-person reflective investigation even if this investigation be expressed in any introspective assertion.

2 Different terms designating the kind of things that the two perspectives of conscious experiences are referring to have been used: phenomenal states, phenomenal types, phenomenal characters, properties, first-person data, third-person data and so on. I am mainly going use the term “object” to refer to the type of thing which is under the consideration of each perspective.

3 the thought experiment presented here is that it is based on the distinction between the first- and the third-person perspective sketched above.

2. The case of a man who lived in two worlds Sven suffers from a disorder that stumps all the scientists. Sven’s behavior has been studied and observed in a great number of different medical and neurological examinations but a physiological explanation for Sven’s disorder has never been found. Because of his disorder Sven is forced to live in two phenomenally different worlds which have no connection with each other. The cause of this is that Sven in his daily life is unable to constantly switch between the first-person and the third-person perspective. On certain days in his life Sven experiences his environment only from the first-person perspective while on other days he is completely left to live in the world of the third-person perspective. When Sven is in his first- person-perspective world he experiences his environment with all his senses in a colorful and nuanced way. However, because of his inability in that world to see himself and others from a perspective other than his own Sven is unaware of his disorder and cannot correct his behavior vis-à-vis his environment. Therefore Sven in a social context acts inadequately and improperly and is often regarded by others as quite egoistic and self-centered. Sven’s egocentric behavior is explained by the fact that Sven, because of his dysfunction, acts at the developmental level of a child who hasn’t yet developed the cognitive ability to see himself and his environment from another person’s perspective.3

When Sven is living in his third-person-perspective world he is an outstanding scientist interested in neuroscience and perception. The distinguishing quality of Sven’s behavior in this world is that he is almost completely missing any perception of the world through his senses. Sven seems to be missing a sense of touch; his hearing and vision are experienced as very limited. Sven cannot distinguish chromatic colors, cannot smell anything, and cannot experience taste or even hunger. When Sven studies human perceptions he cannot therefore rely on his own personal experiences but almost exclusively studies his objects only from the third-person perspective. However, Sven’s inability to experience the world through his senses doesn’t prove to be so much of a handicap for his scientific work.4 As an eminent

3 Thorough detailed descriptions of changes in the organization of the cognitive system of a child from birth to adolescence led Piaget, Swiss psychologist and epistemologist, to observe that a child under 7 years old cannot see himself and the world around him from another person’s perceptual or conceptual perspective (Miller 1993). The phenomenon observed was, according to Piaget, a result of the undeveloped cognitive capacity of a child to completely differentiate himself from other people. A child’s frame of reference was projected or applied to the people around him. One implication of this was that the child showed the tendency to perceive, understand, and interpret the world in terms of himself; another – that the egocentric frame of reference rendered the child unable to see himself as an object of his own or another person’s considerations. It is the capacity to think of himself as one object among others (which implies the ability to take the third-person perspective) that Sven in his first- person-perspective world lacks.

4 Sven’s limited capacity to use his senses in his third-person world seems however to be necessary to enable him roughly to understand what the subjects whom he investigates mean when they talk about a specific experience. This point will be discussed further in the section “Hidden ambiguity in the case of Mary”.

4 neuropsychologist Sven has a solid knowledge about how the various sensory faculties are built up and what happens in the brain when it is exposed to various stimuli. As one of the most successful scientists in his field Sven has found and described very complex and intricate connections between different sensory faculties and various structures in the brain. Owing to his ability in his “scientific world” to see himself and others from a third-person point of view Sven can also reflect over his relationships with other people. Sven is aware of his disorder and knows that he has complete access to the world of the senses when he is in his “egocentric” self – Sven has been informed of this by doctors who have observed him. However Sven has no recollection of experiencing the world from a first-person perspective.

Even if Sven in his “egocentric” world lives in state of a happy ignorance about his condition he is “painfully” cognizant of his affliction in his “scientific” world. In the latter world Sven has insight into the fact that he, time after time, is caught in a dilemma of never being able to meet his other phenomenal I. Those researchers and doctors who have studied and observed Sven’s behavior for many years have tried to answer the question Why. When no physiological explanations of Sven’s disorder could be found (all of Sven’s sensory modalities and underlying structures in the brain work as they should when their neural functions are tested by functional magnetic resonance imaging) psychiatry then became the next avenue. Certain parallels have been established between Sven’s disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder – a mental affection which expresses itself in that one cannot integrate different parts of one’s personality.5 However that which distinguishes Sven’s disorder from all the other known cases is that Sven’s disassociated personalities seem to appear on two different levels – for in one of his personalities (the ‘egocentric’ one) Sven does not have any self-image – and, in addition, Sven doesn’t show any characteristic signs of identity disorder such as being “passive, dependent, guilty, and depressed” (DSM-IV, 526) in either of his states. Rather Sven works so well he can with mental health professionals in the attempt to integrate the two separated parts of his personality. However, despite all efforts to the contrary this project seems doomed to fail. The problem is that, on the cognitive level, Sven is not capable in his first-person-perspective world to have any conception of himself. Since his ability to self-reference is missing no one can succeed in making Sven conscious of his mental disorder – first-person-Sven has difficulties comprehending that there exists another part of himself that he should integrate with. The problem has also no solution in Sven’s other world where he, from his third-person perspective, fights in vain to come in contact with that part of himself which (in the third-person world) lacks any means (senses) with which to express itself. All attempts to integrate Sven’s dissociated personalities seems

5 According to DSM-IV – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders there are four diagnostic criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder): A. The presence of two or more distinct identities of personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self); B. At least two of these identities of personality states recurrently take control of the person’s behaviour. C. Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. D. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance or a general medical condition. DSM-IV notes: “Dissociative Identity Disorder reflects a failure to integrate various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness. Each personality state may be experienced as if it has a distinct personal history, self-image, an identity, including a separate name. … Alternate identities are experienced as taking control in sequence, one at the expense of the other, and may deny knowledge of one another, …” (526)

5 to come up against an insoluble problem – in each of his worlds Sven lacks the means to capture that part of himself which in the actual world is missing. Sven, together with the entire scientific community, stands bewildered in the face of his untreatable disorder.6

Why doesn’t Sven succeed in integrating his two dissociated personalities? The reason Sven’s two separate personalities never meet each other lies in the fact that those things which Sven is able to deal with in his two worlds are of essentially different natures. When Sven is in his first-person-perspective world he experiences the world through all his senses. When Sven is in the third-person-perspective world he has no contact with the world of the senses but instead has the first-person’s experiences of others as the object for his investigations. In one of his worlds Sven experiences the world; in the other he turns away from experiencing to studying the processes underlying these experiences. More concretely this takes its expression in the following way. When Sven is in the world of the senses, he experiences, for example, an apple as a red, tasty and fragrant object. Then that object loses all its meaning in Sven’s “scientific” world. In his “scientific” world Sven studies instead the structures of the brain which are activated in connection with the experience of an apple. In the world of phenomena it is the apple which lands in focus; in the world of science it is the neurological structures in the brain which are studied. As long as Sven is in his “scientific” world any connection with the world of phenomena (and therefore also with that Sven that lives in the world of phenomena) is broken.7

6 Sven is a fictitious person, but his disability (in one of his states) to perceive the world through his senses mirrors the problems of some patients who have congenitally inherited or acquired serious perceptual dysfunctions because of infection or inflammation, traumatic head injuries, or other disease rendering them unable to experience the world via one or more sensory modalities. There are achromats who are either totally or almost totally colour blind, or those who suffer from anosmia – the inability to identify common odours, or ageusia – the inability to taste. There are patients suffering from deafness or acquired hearing loss. There are patients who are congenitally indifferent to painful stimuli or those who, because of injury to the brain, can recognize the sensation of pain but are mostly or completely immune to suffering from it. One example is Gun Sederfalk (1994) who, two years after her car incident can feel neither pain, cold, nor heat. All tastes and almost all smells have disappeared. She never gets hungry, never gets tired, and never gets nervous. The doctor who is following her says that considering her injuries Gun lives a surprisingly normal life. Gun herself says that after her accident she more registers rather than participates in the world, that even if she lives in this world her soul seems to be in another. Gun’s case, as many others, shows that those who loose their ability to perceive do not have any other alternative than to change from experiencing the world from the first-person point of view to knowing the facts about the experiences from the third-person point of view.

Discussing Sven’s ability to dedicate himself to his scientific endeavours is useful to see in relation to Knut Nordby. As a complete achromat working in vision research and lecturing in perception and neuroscience Nordby calls himself “a living embodiment of the Mary in the gray-room thought experiment” (Nordby 2007, 78). Nordby seems not to have any insurmountable obstacles in managing his work. Despite the fact that he has no first-person point of view on colours he can notice: “In my research I have had few problems related to my visual handicap.”(8)

7 To see more clearly the case of there being two different types of objects, each one of which is exclusively dependent on the perspective one takes, I am going to be referring to visual perception, but similar reasoning can also be applied to all other sense modalities. We can turn to Knut Nordby (a vision scientist and also a complete achromat) who explains the sensation of colour in following words:

6 Why doesn’t Sven succeed in integrating his two dissociated personalities? The answer to this lies in the very nature of the fact that the two worlds that Sven is obliged to live in, are irrevocably separated by the two different types of objects. In the world of first-personal experiences it is colours, sounds, smells, pains or any other, what some philosophers would call qualia, that fall into Sven’s focus. In the world of third-personal scientific reflection it is essentially different entities, such as neurological structures, processes, schematic descriptions or scientific classifications that Sven investigates. The reason why the two worlds never have anything in common is that the first-person perspective of Sven’s phenomenal world and the third-person perspective of Sven’s scientific world relate to each other in a special way – one of the perspectives (the scientific world’s perspective) has the other perspective (the phenomenal world’s perceptive) as an object of its investigation. As a consequence, the scientific world’s perspective does not (!) investigate the very object which is under focus for the perspective which it studies; i.e., the third-person perspective does not investigate the type of objects which are under focus for the first-person perspective. In different words, Sven, in his scientific world of reflective investigation can never reach out to the objects of his phenomenal world, which is to qualia.8 This, in its turn, leads to Sven’s different personalities forming themselves in different ways. The fact that Sven in his two worlds deals with essentially different objects accounts for the fact the Sven in neither of his worlds can ever “meet” his other self.

At first glance it may seem astounding that Sven’s disability expresses itself in the way that Sven makes use of only one perspective at a time. But if we stop to reflect for a minute we

Visual information is mediated by the sensory cells (cones and rods) of the retina of the eye. The cones mediate vision under bright (photopic) light conditions, and the rods mediate visual information under low (scotopic) light conditions. There is an intermediary (mesopic) region where the cones start to function. There are three types of cones, each type with its peak sensitivity to light of different wavelengths. … The relative contributions of the three cone types, when combined in the color centers of the visual cortex of the brain, give rise to the sensation of color. (Nordby 2007, 77)

Nordby’s vocabulary is the vocabulary of the third-person point of view. The objects of this point of view are sensory cells (cones and rods), the retina of the eye, light conditions, different wavelengths, and the visual cortex of the brain. Nordby’s explanation lacks any references to the first-person-point-of-view types of objects like the colors ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘green’ and so on. A simple reason for this is that Nordby, as long as he is missing the first- person perspective on colors, is also missing access to the kind of objects which are only definable from that perspective. The only reference in the quotation above to “the sensation of color” is made by Nordby in order to explain the connection between his, Nordby’s, third-person objects and the objects of those with chromatic color vision – the objects, which he, Nordby, had heard about and which he does not understand. Nordby writes: “Most achromatopic people think of color as some curious property of surfaces that for them is somehow related to their apparent brightness” (Nordby 2007, 78), and summarizes: “Color, like tones and tastes, are firsthand sensory experiences, and no amount of acquired theoretical knowledge can create this experience.” (Norby 2007, 82). There is also the case of the painter, Jonathan Isacson, which Nordby refers to. Jonathan Isacson has been, in distinction to the totally color blind, exposed to colors during all his life preceding his car accident (Sacks and Wasserman 1987, Sacks 1995). As a result of brain injury, the painter lost his ability to perceive colors. After only a couple of months he could not even remember what the different colors looked like and knew that colors existed only as statement of fact. By losing the first-person perspective on colors Jonathan Isacson also lost for the rest of his life the ability to understand what kinds of object we are referring to when we are using the word “color”.

8 That is also why Nordby, who exists in real life, neither understands nor can study such object as color.

7 will see that Sven really doesn’t differ so much from the rest of us in this respect. As soon as any one of us turns away from the experience of the phenomena at hand to direct one’s attention instead to studying it one immediately loses contact with the experience itself. The only thing that makes Sven different is that he doesn’t have the ability to change from one perspective to another freely and in the same pace that we do. Our ability to shift perspectives whenever we want to saves us from having to end up with the insoluble dilemma that Sven faces: we do not need to integrate two “dissociated” experiences of the world. But, ironically enough, the very ability to shift freely from the one perspective to the other leads us to another pitfall. It may result in that we, without even noticing it, express an opinion from a perspective from which that opinion could never be valid. Without even noticing it we cross the boundaries of the perspective from which we are speaking, and we do not realise that the object, which we first had the right to comment on, had also been changed. The confusion of objects in relation to the perspectives within which they are valid leads inevitably to invalid assertions. Evidence for this will be seen both in the case of Mary and in the contributions to the ongoing philosophical debate about the Knowledge argument.

3. The hidden ambiguity in the case of Mary It will be useful to see the point that two different perspectives of consciousness have two different types of objects in relation to Jackson’s Mary. Mary’s physical knowledge about human color vision acquired in black-and-white room is knowledge from the third-person point of view. Jackson’s case rests on the widely accepted assumption that physical knowledge can be acquired independently of one’s particular perceptual apparatus. This assumption needs however a clarification. Even if Mary does not seem dependent on her own ability to perceive the world of color, she, to be able to acquire the physical knowledge of what goes on during the process (of perception) needs (in Jackson’s presentation of the case) some access to the experience of what it is like to perceive those colors from the first-person point of view. Mary needs, in other words, an access to someone else’s perceptual apparatus (through, for example, reports of those who perceive colors or through books on the physiology of human color vision). For without such access Mary has no means to establish the very fact that a perceiving subject has an ability to distinguish different wavelength of electromagnetic radiation in terms of different colors appearing as the light spectrum. In her third-person-point-of-view research Mary, in other words, is dependent upon information accessible from the first-person point of view. To see this point let us suppose the opposite.

Let us suppose that Mary, living in her black-and-white room, has the same relation to color vision as a human being has to a bat’s sonar system (Nagel 1974), i.e., that Mary has no access to the first-person point of view on colors. 9 What could Mary then say about human

9 The parallel mentioned (between Mary’s investigations and the investigations of a bat’s sonar system) does not however work all the way through. If a human being does not have any sense-modality equivalent to a bat’s sonar system then Mary, who, in her black-and white environment, does not see any chromatic colors, still has the ability to see, and her black/gray/white world will stimulate her normal color-sensing system allowing her to have some kind of restricted first-person visual experience. This restricted access to first-person experiences seems to be important for some minimal understanding of what could be meant by having this or that experience.

8 color vision? Presumably – everything that could be said from the third-person perspective. Mary would be able to establish the fact that there are two kinds of sensory cells (cones and rods) in the retina of the human eye. She could also find out that there are three types of cones, each type with its peak sensitivity to light of different wavelengths, and she could probably conclude that the contributions of the three cone types are combined in some centers of the visual cortex of the brain. What Mary, however, could never say anything about is that this process gives rise to the sensation of color. The boundaries of Mary’s third-person perspective simply do not allow her to say anything about experiences from the first-person point of view (as is also the case when human beings investigate the processes underling a bat’s sonar system). Without any first-person perspective Mary has no use for the word ‘color’ in her vocabulary; she does not even know that such a phenomenon as color (as an object of the first-person perspective) exists. To be able to acquire as Jackson writes: “all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on” (130) Mary needs, in other words, an access to information from the first-person point of view (i.e. the point of view which she does not have). However, the fact that Mary, in her scientific, third-person perspective world, is dependent on information accessible from the first-person point of view does not change the following. The type of perspective in which Mary is obliged to live in during the different stages of her research inevitably determines the type of objects she is dealing with. Why is this point opaque in Jackson’s presentation of the case?

The crucial point in Jackson’s argumentation is that he, to show the falsity of Physicalism, separates two perspectives of consciousness – the third-person perspective from the first- person perspective. But the hidden ambiguity (here) – when Jackson describes the two separate stages of Mary’s epistemic access to the knowledge about human vision – is that he, at the same time, conflates these two perspectives. The reader of Jackson’s case is led to think that Mary, in both of her perspectives, is dealing with one and the same type of object. When Jackson writes that Mary acquires “all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on” (130) it appears that there is, from Jackson’s description, a one-to-one correspondence between Mary’s physical information from the third-person point of view and every specific object of the experience from the first-person point of view.

This account of Mary’s research leads the reader further to think that Mary, from her third- person point of view, acquires all physical information about ripe-looking tomatoes, the blueness of the sky, and so on. It is, as if there were a direct correspondence between a specific piece of physical information and the experience of, say, blueness of the sky – the

Even if Knut Nordby as a complete achromat does not see any chromatic colors he still is dependent on his restricted visual experience to have some kind of intellectual understanding of what one can mean when using the word ‘color’. He writes: “Most achromatopic people think of color as some curious property of surfaces that for them is somehow related to their apparent brightness” (Nordby 2007, 78). This kind of intellectual understanding that an achromat can at least have about colors (as the objects of the first-person perspective) we can never have in the case of objects of a bat’s first-person perspective. The observation that a parallel to a bat’s sonar system does not work all the way through has no impact on arguing that objects belonging to a perspective other than the perspective of investigation are still inaccessible.

9 idea that a specific piece of physical information can identify the experience at issue.10 In Jackson’s presentation of the case, Mary, quite without noticing it herself (and for that matter neither do we others) seems to proceed from the third-person perspective to utilizing information about the objects of the first-person perspective. The objects of the first-person perspective have crept into Mary’s third-person-point-of-view world. The point that Mary, from her third-person point of view, is not investigating any colors (which she has no access to) but the process by which the experience of colors is possible (by using such expressions as “the facts about causal interactions between retinal stimulation and processes in the brain”) remains obscure.

What is then Jackson’s mistake? In his wording of the thought experiment, as long as Jackson is talking about what goes on (when we see colored objects) and not colored objects themselves, he is on the safe side. But, as soon as question of knowledge centers on what it is like to experience colors, Jackson’s Mary crosses the boundaries of her third-personal investigation by taking into consideration the object that does not belong to the range of those objects that are definable in the third-personal reference frame. This is precisely the mistake – the question of knowledge (the third-person question) is posed about the object (of the first- person perspective) which is never reachable from the third-person point of view. Generally, if Physicalism requires that all facts are physical facts, then, in this sense, Physicalism is true! For there are no facts about any qualia, but only facts about the physical processes that underlay and enable this very experience; that is, all facts are physical facts!

Jackson’s unrealized mistake, when presenting of the case of Mary, is of the same dignity as ours uncountable mistakes when we, in our daily endeavors as well as in our scientific investigations, switch between two different perspectives – one of experiences and one of knowledge. By doing so we don’t realize that we have also switched two different ontological objects, and, possibly, have made a judgment about an object which we have no right to express our opinion on. For this very reason the Knowledge argument about phenomenal states or qualia is based on the confusion of two perspectives, and therefore is illegitimate.

I want to once more recapitulate the cause to this illegitimacy: the relation between these two perspectives of consciousness, where the third-person perspective studies the first-person perspective, does not allow for any claim of any one-to-one correspondence between objects that fall into focus for each of these perspectives. The physical processes underlying the experience of visual information (the third-person-point-of-view object) and any specific identifiable object of that visual experience11 (the first-person-point-of-view object) can never be connected. We will proceed now to some examples in philosophical discussions where

10 I am going to show in the following that this is not possible. The understanding of a direct correspondence between information acquired from the third-person point of view and every specific object of the experience from the first-person point of view mistakenly leads, however, many thinkers to conclude that the information Mary acquires after her release is only another way of expressing the knowledge of the facts she knew before her release (see the discussion in this paper of what Nida-Rümelin (2009) calls the “New Knowledge/Old Fact-View argument”).

11 The same is valid for all other senses.

10 scholars of consciousness actually have commited themselves to this impermissible leap between these two types of objects.

4. The ongoing philosophical debate The fact that there are two different types of objects for the two different perspectives of consciousness has not gone unnoticed in the philosophical debate. Nagel (1974) and Lycan (1995) have, for example, observed that it is doubtful that knowledge from a first-person perspective about the mental events and knowledge from a third-person perspective about the physical events is knowledge about one and the same object. If Physicalism implies that “mental events are physical events”, then it is not clear, Nagel argues (1974, 446) how two terms of the identification, mental and physical, (as “X is Y”) might converge on a single thing: “We may not have even a rough idea of how the two referential paths [mental and physical] could converge, on what kind of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework will have to be supplied to enable us to understand this” (Ibid., 447). Nagel concludes: “The idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same thing is lacking…” (Ibid., 447). Lycan (1995) makes a more general point about the total incongruity of images seen from the two points of view:

With one eye, so to speak, we look at the gray, cheesy brain of someone who is in fact having (say) a visual impression of blazing red. With the other eye, we vividly imagine seeing blazing red ourselves. The two images do not match; they are totally different, totally incongruous! (76-7)

The impossibility of making any sense of combining these two images Lycan calls a “stereoscopic fallacy.”12 Lycan confines himself to this statement and refrains from going into any further discussion about why the metaphor of an optical device of stereoscopic vision does not work in the case of two different perspectives of consciousness. But the reason that we never can manage the task of stereoscopic vision and see the “depth” of the object of knowledge is that the pictures that Lycan’s eyes are looking at are not the pictures of one and the same type of object. While one eye sees blazing red the other eye looks at (investigates) the first one in terms of its anatomical and physiological construction as well as the neurological arrangements of the brain involved in visual perception.

In spite of the warning for the “stereoscopic fallacy” and lack of any theoretical framework for understanding of how (if ever possible) mental and physical images can converge on the same thing we still are discussing the Knowledge argument as if two essentially different ways of knowing conscious experiences were dealing with the same type of objects. I want in the following to present some examples for this. There is extensive literature in the field of discussion about the Knowledge argument. It is nearly impossible to survey all the contributions to the debate and that is not the aim of this paper.13 My aim instead is to

12 A stereoscopic vision, as an optical device, should help us combine the images of two pictures that we are seeing from points of view somewhat apart and thus get the effect of solidity or depth of the object.

13 For a recent overview of the debate about the Knowledge argument see Nida-Rümelin (2002/2009).

11 elucidate the proposed frame of understanding of the two perspectives of consciousness by pointing out the serious mistakes in those cases where this frame of understanding is not observed. For this purpose I have chosen some examples of philosophical reasoning from Papineau (1996) and Nida-Rümelin (1996). I will also make some general observations in relation to Nida-Rümelin’s (2002/2009) overview of the Knowledge Argument debate.

David Papineau (1996) is clear about the distinction between what he calls first- and third- person ways of thinking about experiences. If first-person thoughts really refer to experiences, then third-person thoughts seem merely to refer to the “physical goings-on” which accompany that experience. This kind of difference leads us to think (Papineau refers to Nagel and Lycan) that there are two things which are being thought about. But this is, observes Papineau, a fallacy for “when two different modes of thought create the impression that two things are being thought about, the illusion is easily enough dispelled by evidence that there is in fact only one referent” (263). What kind of evidence is then Papineau referring to?

Papineau admits that even if physicalistically-minded philosophers and psychologists can often produce adequate physical descriptions of experiences such as seeing red, feeling pain, and so on, they do not seem to succeed in offering any explanation of why those conscious states arise in those physical circumstances. But questions of the type of Why the experience of pain should be identical with the firing of a system’s C-fibers or Why water is the same stuff as H2O are ‘bad questions,’ Papineau makes clear. “You cannot explain why the two terms of a true identity coincide, since the truth of the identity means there is only one item in reality, and so no possibility of ‘them’ diverging” (264). What Papineau actually suggests to help us here in providing an answer to the question of identity, is that one must simply assume the fact of ‘one item in reality’ which then makes it possible to infer that ‘two terms of a true identity coincide.’ Pappineau assumes, in other words, the very relation for which he should be searching evidence for. The question is only if Nagel, who is asking for a theoretical framework for how the mental and the physical can coincide, would be content with Papineau’s suggestion. Is Nagel’s illusion (as Papineau calls it) that two things are being thought about, easily dispelled by Papineau’s evidence? Hardly. It seems rather that examples that postulate the identity between something which is observed from the first-person point of view and something which is established from the third-person point of view, such as ‘heat = molecular motion’ or ‘pain = stimulation of C-fibers’ (Kripke, 1980) cannot be explained for the simple reason that the first- and the third-person ways of thinking about experiences do not have the same referent. If these questions are bad questions it is only in the sense that they are misguided when one tries to assert an equation between different entities at two different levels. Papineau’s reasoning is, however, an example of an inability to deal with them – he begs the question – by assuming the very issue he should be trying to answer. We can, however, look at some passages to see how Papineau deals with the issue of “only one referent.”

The fact that we do not have certain experiences when we think third person thoughts does not mean that we are not referring to them. (263)

12 The question is: in which way can a third-person refer to some experience which he or she, in the very quality of being the third-person, does not have? The fact that we do not have certain experiences when we think third-person thoughts but still can refer to them (as Papineau wants to assert) implies that the third-person possesses in one way or another first-person information about the experience. The only way for the third-person to do so is by breaking through the boundaries of its own perspective. To claim that the third-person can refer to certain experiences Papineau needs to draw on information available only from the first- person point of view.

The phrase ‘what it’s like’ doesn’t refer to anything non-physical, but just to the presence of the physical state for the individual that has it. (265)

One can only wonder how the phrase ‘what it’s like’14 can ever refer to the presence of the physical state for the individual that has it. The phrase which expresses the first-person point of view can never refer to any physical facts which only can be established from the third- person point of view. First-person thoughts cannot by any means refer to something which is not definable from the first-person point of view. It is as if one would try, from the point of a two-dimensional surface, to refer to a point in three-dimensional space. What Papineau is suggesting here is to ascribe to the first-person thoughts of the third-person, which Papineau himself (as a third-person) has on the situation. These two examples, I suppose, show clearly enough that the claim that third-person and first-person thoughts have “only one referent” presupposes the confusion of the two ways of thinking about experiences.

Here is another example of the confusion of two perspectives. In the paper “What Mary Couldn’t Know: Belief about Phenomenal States,” Nida-Rümelin (1996) proposes a distinction between phenomenal and nonphenomenal belief. The distinction is introduced by the unusual epistemic situation of Marianna, who like Jackson’s Mary, always lived in a black-and-white environment, and like Mary, has detailed knowledge about human visual perception. Both Mary and Marianna have to some point a shared history – they do not have any phenomenal access to the experience of color and have acquired what Nida-Rümelin calls, nonphenomenal beliefs, i.e., beliefs about colors that other normal sighted people experience when they look at the sky, grass, tomatoes etc. Both Mary and Marianna acquire nonphenomenal beliefs during the time they cannot use their own perceptual apparatus. Mary’s and Marianna’s nonphenomenal beliefs are thus the result of the third-person point of view on reports (from the first-person points of view) of normally sighted people. Nida- Rümelin allows for the following nonphenomenal reading:

Marianna has learned the term ‘blue’ by people who refer to the colour blue using this

term. Her nonphenomenal belief that the sky appears bluenp[nonphenomenally] to normally sighted people, is, therefore, in a sense a belief about this colour, namely, about blue. (227)

The citation above is an example of a jump in reasoning where a reference from the third- person point of view is assigned to the object of the first-person point of view. Marianna’s nonphenomenal belief is not any longer (in Nida-Rümelin’s interpretation) a belief about

14 The locution ‘what it’s like’ is well known from Nagel’s paper: “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel, 1974).

13 other’s people beliefs, a belief about how the sky appears to normally sighted people (a belief of a second order) but simply a belief about the color blue.

I want to proceed now with a more general remark. In summarizing different attempts to defend Physicalism Nida-Rümelin (2009) refers to what she calls the New Knowledge/Old Fact-View argument – a position based on an opinion that some physical facts about color vision can be known in two different ways: in a physical way and in a non-physical way. Many philosophers admit, observes Nida-Rümelin, that Mary gained new factual knowledge after her release but deny that Mary thereby has come to know facts that she did not know before. The physical facts Mary knew before her release give rise after her release to new items of knowledge – old facts are now known under another conceptualisation.15 The idea is that Mary, after her release, does not get to know any new facts but rather a new type of knowledge (a phenomenological one) of the very same facts she knew before. The position of the two modes of presentation – the physical and the phenomenal – of the physical facts can be summarised, according to Nida-Rümelin (2009), in the following way:

In standard cases, if a subject does not know a given fact in one way that it does know in some other way, this can be explained by two modes of presentation: the subject knows the fact under one mode of presentation and does not know it under some other mode of presentation. So, for example, a person may know the fact that Venus is a planet under the mode of presentation associated with the “the morning star is a planet” and fail to know the very same fact under the mode of presentation associated with “the evening star is a planet.” In this particular case, as in many others, the difference in the mode of presentation involves two different properties that are used to fix the referent. In one mode of presentation Venus is given as the heavenly body visible late in the morning (or some similar property), whereas in the other mode of presentation the object is given as the heavenly body visible early in the evening.

Generally, the idea that one and the same referent can be fixed by two different modes of presentation is, Nida-Rümelin observes, the idea of a two-dimensional framework where “one singular fact can be known under a physical mode of presentation as well as under a phenomenal mode of presentation.” This idea can be found, according to Nida-Rümelin (2009) in works of Lockwood (1989), McConnell (1994), White (2007), Chalmers (1996, 2002), as well as in Nida-Rümelin herself (2007).

In relation to the discussion above it is important to note that in spite of their disagreement about the status they ascribe to the two modes of presentation both proponents and opponents of the New Knowledge/Old Fact-View argument proceed in their argumentation from the assumption that two modes of presentation are the presentation of one single fact. This point is also clear in the way Nida-Rümelin presents the position. The same fact that ‘Venus is a planet’ can be known in ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ modes. The question is only – in which way can an example of ‘Venus’ substantiate and defend the idea of a two-

15 Positions that fall into the category of New Knowledge/Old Fact-View are defended according to Nida- Rümelin (15) in Horgan (1984), Churchland (1985), Tye (1986), Bigelow and Pargetter (1990), Loar (1990), Lycan (1990), Pereboom (1994), Perry (2001), Van Gulick (2005), Byrne (2002), Levin (2007), Balog (forthcoming), Papienau (2002, 2007).

14 dimensional framework wherein “one singular fact can be known under a physical mode of presentation as well as under a phenomenal mode of presentation” (Nida-Rümelin, 2009).

To draw a parallel between ‘morning star’/‘evening star’ and first-person/third-person modes of presentation is to violate the idea of two essentially different perspectives of conscious experiences. It is to commit oneself to what Lycan calls the “stereoscopic fallacy”. In respect to the “stereoscopic fallacy” both proponents and opponents of New Knowledge/Old Fact-View argument are not alone. The example of ‘Venus’ is widely used in the discussion of the nature of the Identity theory of mind – a view that holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain.16 The idea that the mental state and the brain state are simply the same thing can, according to the identity theory of mind, be expressed in following way. In the sense that we did not know, until astronomers discovered it, that “the morning star” is the same thing as “the evening star”, we upon scientific investigation shall find out that mental states and physical states of the brain are empirically identical. In analogy with the morning-star-evening-star case we cannot conclude that the mental state and the brain state are two different things just because they show up in two different ways.

But this reasoning – based on the hope for future findings of identity between mental states (the first-person experiences) and brain states (the third-person knowledge about experiencing) – is not valid. By drawing a parallel between the example of ‘Venus’ and the two perspectives of consciousness the proponents of the identity theory of mind are overlooking one crucial point. If the two perspectives on ‘Venus is a planet’ are different, it is not in the same way as two perspectives of consciousness are different. The two perspectives of conscious experience are of different logical levels (one of these perspectives has the other as an object to investigate); the two perspectives on ‘Venus is a planet’ are, in this respect, equivalent. If ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ have one and the same referent it does not therefore follow that it is also the case for the two perspectives of consciousness. To use the example of ‘Venus’17 as some kind of empirical evidence for what will turn out to be the case for establishing an identity between the mental and the physical is misleading! This example is not in any way satisfying if we are searching for a theoretical framework which enables us to understand how the mental and the physical can coincide. This type of reasoning is but one more example of an inability to distinguish the two stages of epistemic progressing from the first-person perspective to the third-person perspective (on that first-person perspective).

5. Some concluding remarks “ It is safe to predict”, writes Nida-Rümelin (2009) in her concluding remarks, “that the discussion about the knowledge argument will not come to an end in the near future.” The focus of this paper was to reflect upon some underlying reasons for this statement. The important starting point for the discussion was to define epistemic asymmetry between the

16 The identity theory of mind was developed in the 1950s, chiefly by the works of philosophers U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart and Herbert Feilg. See the overview in Smart 2000/2007.

17 Smart 2000/2007, 3

15 two perspectives of consciousness in the following way: the first-person perspective was seen as non-reflective in contrast to the detached and reflective nature of the third-person perspective. When the two perspectives of consciousness were no longer overlapping each other it was possible to show that unreflective experience vis-a-vis a reflective detached understanding of this experience should be seen with respect to the two different types of objects which these points of view have.

This important and often overlooked point was illustrated by the case of Sven. Together with the fact that the nature of the objects that Sven was dealing with in each of his worlds (perspectives) was different, and his inability to freely change from one perspective to another, Sven was never able to integrate the two different pictures of experiencing the world. The goal, in using Sven’s case, was not, however, to show the importance of integrating the two different perspectives – we have no problems with that; the point was to emphasize that the every alternation between the perspectives of consciousness implies inevitably a change in the type of objects one has in one’s focus.

The crucial point for arguing against the view of the one and same type of object for the two perspectives of consciousness was the fact that the third-person perspective has the first- person experiences (and not the object of the first-person experiences) as the object of its investigation. This important finding made it possible to claim that Jackson, in construing the case of Mary, was never entitled to pose the question of knowledge (that belongs to the third- person perspective) about the object of another (the first-person) perspective. As long as Jackson in the case of Mary was taking about the physical information of what goes on when we see (chromatically) colored objects, he was quite right. The physical facts are, actually, about various ‘goings-on’ – the objects of the third-person perspective. The impermissible leap in reasoning was, however, inevitably made when Jackson required knowledge about what it is like – which is the object of the first-person perspective. Concerning the question of Physicalism one can now state that Physicalism, when claiming that all facts are physical facts, is, indeed, true! There are no physical or any other facts about qualia. There are only facts about what goes on when we experience qualia.18

The point of there being two different types of objects for the two perspectives of consciousness which proved to be disastrous in Sven’s case often get lost in the rush of our on-going and uninterrupted activity of changing perspectives that we are all constantly engaged in. Our unhindered ability to change from the first- to the third-person perspective deludes us into thinking that we, when we are in the third-person perspective, are still studying the object which we experienced from the first-person perspective. This confusing the two perspectives with respect to their objects is, however, not only common in our

18 The facts about what goes on can also seem to be pure physical facts such as the classification of phenomena in terms of theirs chemical or physical structures: water can, for example, be described as H2O or the first- person-point-of-view phenomenon of light can be identified by the physical theory of electromagnetism as electromagnetic radiation. However, the question of the relation between the third-person perspective and the first-person perspective in a case including both the social and the physical sciences, requires a more elaborate exposition and, therefore, goes beyond the framework of this paper.

16 everyday lives but also in our scientific endeavors. Contributions to the philosophical debate about the Knowledge Argument are no exception to this.

Nagel’s and Lycan’s question about how mental and physical events might converge on a single object must, therefore (and contrary to Papineau’s opinion) be answered in the negative. The special connection that two perspectives of consciousness have (in the proposed frame of understanding of two perspectives) does not allow establishing any correlation or identity between the objects that these perspectives exclusively can handle; that is, between the mental and the physical. We should stop our futile attempts to overbridge the cliff between the mind and the brain and, instead, respect an important insight that the third-person (the brain’s) perspective is a meta-perspective in relation to the first-person (the mind’s) perspective which it investigates.

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