As our professor said in class today, there are some people who struggle with the mind-body concept since they rely on science to explain things. That was one of my struggles during class today. Being a student of neuroscience, I had a hard time agreeing with Nagel’s concept that science will never understand why chocolate has a different perception to different people. This can be explained by the different taste receptors on the tongue, different humans have different numbers of taste receptors, causing some people to be very picky eaters and others not so picky. However, I do agree with Nagel that I personally will never be able to experience how someone experiences chocolate.
We also talked about the article by Frank Jackson “What Mary Didn’t Know.” This was about how a young girl never saw color, but learned everything about color. Once she left the colorless room and experienced color for the first time she would not know what to call each color by name, Jackson argues that this shows that the brain does not know all, the mind must perceive color. However, I could argue that color names are learned by association. As is the perception of taste. If you associate chocolate with that time you ate too much chocolate and got sick, you will learn to not like chocolate. The brain has association mechanisms that allow for a certain color to be perceived and felt a certain way.
Overall, I agree that I may never be able to taste, smell, or see something the same way as someone else, but I do believe science can explain why we perceive things a certain way sometimes.
I think you bring up an excellent idea concerning neuroscience, Sarah. Regarding your scientific notion of taste receptors on our tongue, I wonder if in the future we could discover the link between the number of taste buds and how something tastes, potentially allowing us to actually know how someone else experiences a food? Would that make Nagel entirely wrong in his statement?
Answering Jonah’s question, I do believe this would possibly refute Nagel’s argument. If science ever reaches the point where we could surgically plants or remove taste buds from one person’s tongue to have as many and in the same places as another’s tongue, this would allow them to truly experience taste the way that person does. (I have no idea why this procedure would ever be desired, but this is theoretical.) However, unless something like this is possible, we will never know how others perceive taste.
Sarah, I had similar thoughts during class. In the example with Mary, I thought it was unfair to the say that the brain is unable to learn color just from reading about it because that’s not how the brain works. As you stated, it forms associations between a verbal component and a visual or other sensory experience. The color blue is only called “blue” because we predetermined that would be the word for it. We could have just as easily named the color blue “red” and vice versa. This same concept could be applied for other sensations as well. For example if Mary was presented with orange juice in one cup and milk in another I don’t know that she would be able to tell them apart solely on taste. She may have read that orange juice has a citrus taste but how could she determine what this actually was if she had never encountered it? Thus, I feel that the ability of the brain to form associations between descriptions and sensations is to account for Mary’s learning upon entering the real world rather than the abstract concept of the mind.
I’m not saying that Jackson and Nagel are correct, but it is important to distinguish between (a) the question whether someone would know how to use words like ‘blue’ without having experienced colors, and (b) the question whether someone would know what it is like to see the color blue without having experienced colors. Jackson and Nagel are not worried about the first of these questions, but about the second. They claim that the only way to know what it is like to perceive color is to have personally experienced it. Jackson thinks that when Mary sees something blue for the first time, she does not merely learn what the word ‘blue’ refers to, but she learns what it is like to see blue. Even though she already knew everything that science can teach us about color vision, she did not know what blue looks like.