Mary's Room
Bono:
This thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson, in the following form
"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?"
In other words, we are to imagine a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The interesting question that Jackson raises is: Once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?
What do you think?
dead0man:
Yes. She learns what it's like to see red. I can learn everything there is to know about China, but I won't truly know China until I see it for myself. She didn't know what the color red looked like before, she only knew why it looked red. Now she knows what it is to see red.
Bono:
I totally forgot about this thread.
Anyway, I agree with dead0man. Only when she first sees red will she know what it's like to see red. Qualia cannot be reduced to the physic conveyors of experience.
J. J.:
She might learn disappointment.
Verily:
No, and there"s absolutely no evidence to suggest otherwise. Of course, the argument is fairly intricate and highly theoretical; we have to remember that we are teaching her everything there is to know about red. But none of us knows, consciously, everything there is to know about red (at least individually, and I'm hesitant to say we know it all collectively either).
Jackson's example is just an intuition pump. It doesn't make an argument, only raises a question.
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