Physical Mind

You don’t know what it is like to taste a pineapple until you’ve eaten one, even if you know its physical features and the processes that happen in a human being once he or she tastes a pineapple. Does it mean that the mind is physical?
In this essay I shall attempt to show that you cannot know what it is like to taste a pineapple unless you have tasted it, even if you knew everything physical that happened to a person when they taste Pineapple according to modern day physics. I will then discuss the implications of this as to whether the mind is physical.

To begin with, I shall explain what I mean by knowledge. In this case I shall be using Descarte’s condition that if something is clearly and distinctly perceived, we can say to have knowledge of it. I shall however be going further by assuming that there is also an external world. This seems to me to be clearly and distinctly perceived, and is also verifiable by other people. Therefore we can claim to be able to know everything physical about what happens to a person when they taste something. We could observe all their bodily functions, specifically, the molecules of pineapple causing taste buds on the tongue to send messages to the brain via the nervous system, and certain fibres in the brain firing. We would be able to observe this with our own eyes and through the use of various medical apparatus, and would also be available for other people to observe and report the same observation. We may not know the true underlying nature of the observed, but would have knowledge of the sense data caused by these physical processes.

However, surely this would not be knowledge of what pineapple actually tastes like. By observing the physical processes occurring in the body we may be aware of the various patterns of electrical current interacting in the nervous system and brain, but not of the experience or “qualia” which a person has when they taste pineapple. This is because these qualia are only experienced by the person doing the tasting. To make this clearer I have devised an argument to show that the opposite is false.

Premise 1: All physical processes of a body are publicly observable

Premise 2: Person A observes all physical processes of person B who is tasting a pineapple

Conclusion 1: Person A has Knowledge of all physical processes occurring in Person B’s body whilst tasting a pineapple

Conclusion 2: Person A has knowledge of qualia experienced by person B.

For this argument to be valid there would have to be another premise in between the first and second conclusion. This would be that knowledge of all physical processes occurring in person B whilst tasting pineapple is also knowledge of the taste or qualia of pineapple. However it seems clear to me that this premise is not true. Never in my experience have I observed someone eating pineapple and thereby experienced the taste qualities myself. Admittedly I have not observed the nerves in the tongue sending nerve impulses to the brain and the brain thereby reacting, but I am aware that neuroscientists have done so and not managed to experience another persons qualia. It seems therefore that the only way we can know what it is like to taste pineapple is to taste it ourselves.

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