Abstract
M.A. (Philosophy)
Philosophy of mind has begun to rely on input from neurobiology and neuroscience to answer questions concerning consciousness, representation and the subjective character of experience. Some philosophers believe that through studies done on the brain, neuroscience will help us answer the hard-problems of consciousness. The first chapter of this paper is concerned with the kind of contributions neurobiology can make to certain debates in philosophy of mind and proceeds to explain that even though neurobiology is mostly a positive contributor to philosophy of mind, it still fails to answer some of the more pressing issues in philosophy of mind.
In the second chapter of this paper, I focus on Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. Jackson’s Knowledge Argument is perhaps one of the most challenged arguments concerning experience in philosophy of mind and responses to this argument will possibly tell us more about the mind. Jackson argues that we gain a new kind of knowledge when we experience something, for example when seeing the colour red. He argues that these new learnt facts are non-physical. David Lewis argues that a person learns no new facts upon experiencing red, but rather abilities such as the ability to recognize, imagine and remember. In this chapter I also examine some of the counterarguments to Jackson’s Knowledge Argument
and conclude that these philosophers have approached the Knowledge Argument incorrectly. I suggest a different physicalist response to the Knowledge Argument.
In the third chapter of this paper, I propose a new physicalist account of experience I call ‘bifactualism’. The Knowledge Argument is an argument for dualism that claims that there are both physical and non-physical facts which can be learnt through experience. I reject the Knowledge Argument and suggest bifactualism. Bifactualism is a new physicalist account essentially comprising two elements. First, it distinguishes between two kinds of physical facts: general and particular. The second element is the claim that this distinction explains facts about consciousness, without resorting to dualism. I disagree with the dualist claims made in the Knowledge Argument and show that the Knowledge Argument neither supports dualist claims nor does it refute bifactualist claims. Most contributions made with regards to the Knowledge Argument focus on what Mary is able to learn once outside the black and white room. Bifactualism is interested in what she is able to learn in the black and white room which makes this a novel approach to the Knowledge Argument.
In the fourth chapter of this paper I propose bifactualist responses to several issues that have been highlighted throughout this paper. In this chapter, I primarily focus on Nagel’s What it is Like to be a Bat? Nagel claims that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat
subjective character of experience. This chapter argues that it is as difficult to know the feeling of what it is like, or WIL (Prinz, 2012), to be a bat which has a feeling of WIL, as it is to know the feeling of what it is like to be a book (which has no feeling of what it is like: non- WIL). I argue that this is not because of two different ways of knowing two different properties, but rather that there are two different physical facts about both WIL and non-WIL properties. I show that with a bifactualist account, there are particular physical facts that can be known about WIL and non-WIL properties alike that are not expressible in the language of physics.