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?
-- Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Philosophical Quarterly 32, p. 130
OK, I hear you ask; what is this and why is it here, in a political community? Follow me over the fold and see...
Recent philosophy has tackled the problem of what the world really is at a fundamental level, and along the way two camps in this area have evolved - the Dualists and the Physicalists. Physicalism maintains that the physical truth of the world is all there is, and a complete understanding of the world can be attained by accumulation of facts.
Dualists claim that there are two aspects to the world - one factual, the other experiential; that is to say that there are certain aspects (termed qualia) that can only be accessed by experience. In the thought experiment above, Jackson tries to disprove Physicalism by maintaining that when Mary leaves her room and experiences color for the first time she will learn something new - she will gain the quale of experiencing color.
Physicalists maintain that this is not the case. If she has a supposedly "perfect" knowledge of color - what it is, how it affects the optic nerve and the brain – then there is no mystery to the experience of it. In other words, perfect knowledge of a thing equates to experience of a thing; the world is composed of factual qualities.
For the record, I am something of a dualist; I think that there is a qualitative difference between perfect knowledge of a thing and the experience of it. While my scientific mind would prefer to adhere to Physicalism, I accept that, for example (in my own realm of expertise) complete knowledge of a dinosaur does not equate to seeing one in the flesh before you. Of course, this begs the question of perfect knowledge, but I think that even perfect knowledge will not equate to the experience of laying eyes upon a living, breathing dinosaur. The dinosaur has a quale – a property inherent to the dinosaur – that cannot be "known" or "discovered" without the experience of seeing one.
So what does this have to do with politics? This may be a stretch, but after the furor over Barack Obama’s Cabinet picks and the whole Warren issue, I think there is a case to be made that a form of Dualism does pertain here.
For more than a year (two years in some cases) we accumulated knowledge of Barack Obama, assimilated it with knowledge of other Democratic Presidencies, and formulated an image of what an Obama Presidency would look like. This knowledge was incomplete, to be sure, but now we are in a situation where we are seeing, experiencing for the first time what an Obama Presidency will look like.
Given the upsets among some in the left, it appears that there is a quale to an Obama Presidency, a quality that can only be experienced, not known. While some would argue that with imperfect knowledge of Obama and the world in general, it is not a dualistic quale at all, but rather our lack of understanding of the man himself, I would say that there are things that we can only experience, and the array of issues and solutions, Cabinet picks and positions is so complex that only experience of them will suffice.
I do not seek to call for calm – I find myself swayed by the arguments of those who vehemently oppose the Warren issue, or Hillary’s SoS pick, or many other issues, even if I do not agree with them, that civil discourse and opposition are necessary, even vital components of a thriving democracy. What I do ask is that those who oppose (for good reasons and bad) at least think about this; the experience of an Obama Presidency can never be predicted from external fact. Obama’s quale is unique to himself, as are your own, and we must judge for ourselves how to respond to each new quale that appears over time.
Most of all, do not think in terms of betrayal – yet. This is all experience, and all new to us. Like Mary emerging from her room to lay eyes for the first time upon a red rose, we must let the Obama presidency sink in, let the experiences speak for themselves. Opposition is good, necessary, to be applauded and encouraged; but prepare for the fact that, when all is said and done, we are fundamentally unprepared.