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SUMMARY Imagine that from birth, our hypothetical friend Mary is put to live in a room where no Color s are shown. Her Food , her books, and even the color of her Skin are all in Grayscale . Now imagine that Mary, a very bright girl, has a wealth of Information at her disposal, and through concentrated study she comes to learn ''everything'' there is to know, which includes that colors are Mental Process es in the Brain and how the brain produces them. But she has never '' Experience d'' color. If she is set loose and starts experiencing colors, will she have learned anything new? EXPLANATION This thought experiment has two purposes. First, it is intended to show that Qualia (the properties of experiences which determine what it is like to have those experiences), exist. If we agree with the thought experiment, we believe that Mary gains something after she leaves the room—that she acquires knowledge of a particular thing that she did not possess before. That knowledge, Jackson argues, is knowledge of the qualia of seeing red. Therefore, it must thus be conceded that qualia are real properties, since there is a difference between a person who has access to a particular quale and one who does not. The second purpose of this argument is to refute the physicalist account of the mind. Specifically, the Knowledge Argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical explanations. She may know everything she can learn, but can she know what "red" is if she has never seen red? Jackson contends that, yes, she has learned something new, via experience, and hence, Physicalism is false. It is important to note than in Jackson's article, physicalism refers to the epistemological doctrine that all knowledge is knowledge of physical facts, and not the metaphysical doctrine that all things are physical things. RESPONSES Daniel Dennet Daniel Dennet argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew "everything about color", that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "qualia" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room. Dennett argues that although we cannot conceive of such a deep knowledge, if a premise of the thought experiment is that Mary knows all there is to know about color, we cannot assume that we can fathom or even describe such knowledge—or that such knowledge doesn't exist. Jackson and the thought experiment Frank Jackson, who created this thought experiment in 1982, later rejected its implications. Jackson believes in the explanatory completeness of Physiology , that all behaviour is caused by physical forces of some kind. The Mary thought experiment seems to prove the existence of qualia, a non-physical part of the mind. It seems then that the only situation where both of these ideas can be true, is that of Epiphenomenalism , where the non-physical mind exists, but has no effect on behaviour. Explanatory completeness qualia of physiology + (Mary's room) = epiphenomenalism Thus, at the conception of this thought experiment, Jackson was an epiphenominalist. Later on however, he decided to dismiss epiphenomenalism. This is due to the fact that when Mary first sees red, she says "wow", so it must be Mary's qualia that causes her to say "wow". This contradicts with epiphenominalism. Since the Mary thought experiment seems to create this contradiction, there must be something wrong with the thought experiment. This is referred to as the "there must be a reply, reply". MISCELLANEOUS Though this has no effect on the validity of the argument, research into the neural basis of sensation and perception suggest that Mary, if she is not exposed to colour before the critical period required to form proper normal perception, may not be able to correctly process colour, as the Occipital Lobe may not have developed to allow her to perceive colour. SEE ALSO
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