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Mary's Room






  Mary's Room is a proposed thought experiment that attempts to establish that there are non-physical properties and attainable knowledge that can be discovered through conscious experience. It attempts to refute the theory that all knowledge is physical knowledge.





The thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson as follows:

   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 by way of 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?

 

  In other words, Jackson's Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The question that Jackson raises is: once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?





   Thompson questioned the premise that Mary, simply by being confined to a monochromatic environment, would not have any color experiences. Furthermore, would it not be a possible case that Mary, upon release, still would not be able to see colors?





  Nemirow claims that "knowing what an experience is like is the same as knowing how to imagine having the experience". He argues that Mary only obtained the ability to do something, not the knowledge of something new. There have been arguments against this ability hypothesis as well, namely that being able to imagine having a particular experience is neither necessary nor sufficient for having the knowledge of exactly what it is like to have that kind of experience.



  Thomas Nagel takes a slightly different approach. In an effort to make his argument more adaptable and relatable, he takes the stand of humans attempting to understand the sonar capabilities of bats. Even with the entire physical database at one's fingertips, humans would not be able to fully perceive or understand a bat's sonar system, namely what it's like to perceive something with a bat's sonar.





Wikipedia