The Colorblind Thought Experiment: Warrior Mind Podcast #253

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The purpose of this Warrior Mind Podcast is to help you understand how important real experience is in reaching your full potential.

A Thought Experiment

The Colorblind Neuroscientist

Sometimes referred to as the Inverted Spectrum Problem or the Knowledge Argument, this thought experiment is meant to stimulate discussions against a purely physicalist view of the universe, namely the suggestion that the universe, including mental processes, is entirely physical. This thought experiment tries to show that there are indeed non-physical properties — and attainable knowledge — that can only be learned through conscious experience.

The originator of the concept, Frank Jackson, explains it this way:

Sally is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, 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.

She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’…

What will happen when Sally is released from her black and white room?

Will she learn anything or not?

Put another way, Sally knows everything there is to know about color except for one crucial thing: She’s never actually experienced color consciously. Her first experience of color was something that she couldn’t possibly have anticipated; there’s a world of difference between academically knowing something versus having actual experience of that thing.

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Enjoy This Warrior Mind Podcast on the colorblind neuroscientist thought experiment

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This thought experiment teaches us that there will always be more to our perception of reality, including consciousness itself, than objective observation. It essentially shows us that we don’t know what we don’t know.

The thought experiment also gives us hope for the future; should we enhance our sensory capabilities and find ways to expand conscious awareness, we could open up entirely new avenues of psychological and subjective exploration.

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