Mary’s Room

Mary's Room, conceived by philosopher Frank Jackson in his 1982 paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia," presents a hypothetical neuroscientist named Mary who has lived her entire life in a black and white room. She has learned everything there is to know about the physical processes of color perception, including the wavelengths of light, neural activity, and the behavior of the human eye.

Despite her comprehensive physical knowledge, Mary has never actually experienced color. The thought experiment asks: when Mary leaves the room and sees color for the first time, does she learn something new?

Jackson argues that Mary does learn something new – she learns what it is like to experience color, a subjective, qualitative experience known as qualia. This new knowledge, he contends, is non-physical and cannot be derived from or reduced to physical facts.

The knowledge argument, built upon Mary's Room, challenges physicalism by suggesting that complete physical knowledge does not encompass all knowledge. If Mary gains new knowledge upon seeing color, then there must be facts about conscious experience that are not physical facts.

Critics of the knowledge argument have offered various counter-arguments. Some argue that Mary doesn't gain new knowledge, but rather gains a new ability or a new way of representing the same physical facts she already knew. This is known as the ability hypothesis.

Another counter-argument suggests that Mary only gains acquaintance knowledge, which is a direct experiential awareness, rather than propositional knowledge, which is knowledge of facts. This distinction aims to diminish the force of the claim that Mary learns a new fact about the world.

The enduring significance of Mary's Room lies in its ability to provoke debate about the nature of consciousness and the limits of physicalism. It continues to be a central reference point in discussions about qualia, subjective experience, and the mind-body problem.

The thought experiment has also spurred discussions about the nature of scientific understanding and the limitations of purely objective, third-person descriptions of the world. It highlights the importance of subjective, first-person experience in understanding consciousness.

Ultimately, Mary's Room remains a powerful tool for exploring the philosophical implications of consciousness and the relationship between the physical and non-physical realms. It forces us to confront the question of whether a complete scientific understanding of the brain is sufficient to explain the totality of human experience.