Mary’s room

Rainy season is over, already. Blue sky. Strong sunshine. Finally.... it's back.

• Mother seems fine today. She says she belatedly begins to understand how her late husband was feeling his old age. "If this is so painful for me it was for him too. I should have understood him more, been more considerate to him and...." This may be a typical process of our "understanding". We can't understand anything beyond our experience after all.

Here is a thought experiment called Mary's Room by a philosopher Frank Jackson.
Mary is a super-scientist who has somehow grown up in a black and white (and gray) room. She has never seen any colors. But she reads black and white books and watch black and white TV to study everything under the sun. She is a professional level scientist concerning visual nerve system and knows everything about neurons, how they work when we see an object, what wavelength of light is recognized by humans as red, blue or yellow. She knows poeple describe the color of a tree using the word "green" a strawberry "red" or the sky "blue". She knows everything about color and visual sense of human. In short she knows every physical facts about color.
But what will she say when she, for the first time in her life, gets out of the house and sees the outside world? Does she learn anything new? .....Yes of course. The explosion of colors!
Jackson says if she learns anything it is not a physical fact by definition, since she's known every physical fact. Then what is it if not a physical fact? They named it "qualia". What is "the redness" in red, if not a Physical fact? Is the redness inside us or outside? It may sound a joke or something but this is a hot topic, philosophers, psychologists, physicists, neuro-scientists, biologists... are seriously discussing and made it up to controversial one.
In this thought experiment there is apparently a confusion in knowing a fact. Knowing or understanding a governing principle of a phenomenon by physics, even if it can predict an earthquake, is not at all the same as experiencing it. After you have a glass of water you never have to ask what water does to thirst. Experiencing itself is knowing.
After all, physics, like our language, is no more than a map. You can't write down every detail about the places on the map. If you could, still it would not by any means be the reality. If you had a map of Tokyo and spotted Aoyama street, you would never confuse it with the real street, lined with neat shops and restaurant, with hustle-bustle of people and cars. But when it comes to physics it seems some of them do. They seem so engrossed in what they are studying they may forget about what's happening outside their brains. Those scientists, however, are not alone to take a map for the real territory. We always do using words as a map. We always confuse description or image with the reality and we are not even aware of it while it may lie in the very core of our problems.
Putting this aside, the reason why you can't examine "your" redness (what you see as red) by, say, putting it under a microscope, is that you can't cut it out from its surroundings. If I said "hey, show me your redness and let's compare with mine." you could do nothing about it. The truth is there is no such thing as redness that stands alone itself. No comparison of what you see as red with what I see as red. There is only consensus between you and me. If you see a color and say red I just agree to call it the same name, red. Likewise we can't put our consciousness on a table and examine it. Redness, our feelings and finally our consciousness can exist only in a context. And even more interesting fact is, this way, consciousness is trying to examine consciousness. This leads us into a question-begging problem unless we reach the conclusion that there is only one absolute consciousness, "consciousness of universe" alias god which cannot be an object of observation. Thus religion is not a knowledge but an experience. And experience is the best and only form of real knowledge.
All in all I feel something very Western about this qualia argument. Everyone wants to break down and mince up the whole into elementary factors or analyze the whole. This may be Greek, Aristotalian tradition. In this case they argue that there may exist an element (whether inside us or outside) that causes us to sense "the redness in red" that is not reduced to physics. Or there is sensation in us to sense the redness in red. In short they think our sense consists of two elements; physical and non-physical factors.
Is this redness the same as yours? How does a bat see the world by listening to supersonic sound instead of light? You may ask these questions if you like, but these questions are meaningless because these are pure experience and it cannot be extracted from the whole. You know the redness only when you and the experience of the redness are not separated. That's all to it. Nothing more or less.
Parts make up the whole. This is how scientists tend to look at the world. But this thinking process is like observing a dead body. It's like an anatomy, in which they take organs and nerves out of the body and one by one examine it. But what this approach fatally lacks is its interactive view of the things and seamlessness of the whole. Even if they know everything about organs, they can't make the dead body alive by putting them back into the body. Then they ask "what is life?" which should have been the original question. Life is relationship. Life does not consist of relationships. Life is relationship ITSELF. So is qualia. And any relationship is not a thing so that it cannot be extracted and examined. It is dynamic and living. In fact we can't take anything out from its surroundings. I mean ANYTHING. Whatever you do will change the object you are observing and its surroundings. Only "the whole" of this moment, perfect anytime anywhere, has meaning. And we can't know it because we are it. Like an eyeball can't see itself or a hand can't grab itself we can't see or grab ourselves. All we think we see as ourselves is not ourselves because if we can see it, it is not the one who is seeing. There is no hope of seeing It (ourselves). If we really understand this fact, for the first time we know It by being Itself. Being Itself means experiencing It without an observer inside us who is looking at us experiencing.
Shlesinger, one of the fathers of the quantum theory, reached this conclusion later in his life.