Epiphenomenal Qualia

Frank Jackson (1982). Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 127-136

I'm not saying that people with aphantasia won't enjoy this philosophical work, I am saying I am including it more specifically for all the folks who are visualizers. And if you can't make it past the first couple of sentences, at least skip to the last one.

This is the paper that introduced Mary the color scientist, one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy of mind. Mary knows everything there is to know about the physics and neuroscience of color vision but has lived her whole life in a black and white room. The question is: when she finally walks out and sees red for the first time, does she learn something new?

Jackson says yes, and that yes has been arguing with neuroscientists and philosophers ever since.

The paper argues that there are facts about conscious experience that physical science simply cannot capture. You can know all the biology of what happens when someone sees red and still not know what red actually feels like. For students with aphantasia this hits differently than it might for others. The whole paper is essentially asking whether inner experience can be fully described from the outside, and anyone who has tried to explain what it is like to have no mental imagery knows that gap between description and experience is very real. Jackson gives it a name and a framework.

If you remember one thing: Knowing everything about how the brain works does not tell you what it feels like to be inside one, and that gap is exactly what makes aphantasia so hard to explain to people who have never experienced it.