The Inside View and the Outside View: Mary and the Black and White Room

We’re clearing some important ground today. This space will operate as a base camp for us in our romp through the jungles of meaning, and even when we aren’t out exploring, there will be a  great many things we can examine from this basecamp. Today, we’re looking at the inside view and the outside view.

To start, let’s clear the brush by way of a story. It’s the story of Mary and the black and white room.

“Mary 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 Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”

Among other things, this thought experiment is meant to pump your intuition that Mary will absolutely learn something, namely what it is like to see the color red. 

Now, we can spend all day arguing about whether Mary can actually know everything in her black and white room about the color red. We can argue about whether the experiment even makes sense and try to think of ways to improve it. There are many fertile discussions about physicalism versus epiphenomenalism to be had. Leave those aside for our time around the campfire, for now.

Instead, notice how this thought experiment turns on our assumptions about the exterior world versus the interior world. In the Mary thought experiment, we believe that there is a blue sky waiting just outside the room. We believe that there are colors that Mary should be able to see that she cannot while in the white room. Tomatoes are red and the sky is blue, whatever Mary may believe about them while in the room. 

This is the outside view of the world. It’s the view that is, or tries to be, objective and stable and perception independent. When we go through school, we are taught that the sciences and history are focused on the outside view. Moreover, we are taught that this is the only way to look at reality, to discover the truth. 

This, of course, is utter nonsense. We know that there is a whole world of experience, a feeling of what it is like on the inside. We know our feelings, our thoughts, our sensations, which are invisible and unknowable in the outside view, but are nonetheless very real. If we pay careful attention from the inside view, we notice that our noses are as tall as every room, that every sound we hear has a location tag, but is also without location. We notice that even nonlinguistic thoughts have weight and bearing. The inside view is just as real, just as true, and just as important as the outside view.

So, from the inside view, Mary doesn’t know red or blue, but comes to know them. The experience of the color blue is a fact that exists on the inside view, but because of clever experimental design, Mary has been prevented from having.

So what?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the universe is made up of a bunch of stardust, that entropy always increases, and that it seems like our species is a bunch of upjumped monkeys that developed speech and society. Perhaps you’ve noticed, that from the lowest quarks and electrons, to the biggest blackholes and galaxies, anywhere we look in this view of the world, we cannot seem to find something called “meaning.”  This is all true, but it is an outside view of things. 

So, if meaning cannot be known from the outside view, can it be known from the inside view? I hope so!  We’re on the search for meaning, for advice on what a good life would mean. It’s a feeling we’re after, or some combination of feelings and beliefs. Wherever that can be found, if it can be found, it can’t be found out there, in the outside view of the world. Meaning is not a rock, an atom, gravity or a wave. Meaning is not an outside view sort of thing. 

If we can find an answer to the question, “How should I live?”, the only place to look for it is in the jungles of the inside view. And to do that, we need to hone in on the tools that will allow for that exploration. In the next essay, I’ll sharpen your intuition on the inside view using an area that you most likely already hold inside and outside views side by side.