SNHS Science Blog 2: Philosophy

Clara Jeon

---

Imagine you are a professor named Mary. Your whole world is black and white. You read black and white books. You live in a black and white room, and everything around you is black and white. However, you are a color expert. You know everything about color from how light waves allow for different color to how our eyes perceive these colors. You understand the science in our retina with the three cones in our eyes identifying different colors. You know EVERYTHING there is to know about color and the science behind color. One day, your computer malfunctions and you see a red apple on your screen. Will you, Mary, learn anything new? Will actually experiencing color give you insight into color?

This is called the Mary’s Room thought experiment. Proposed in 1982 by Frank Jackson, this experiment deals with the idea of knowledge and experience. Jackson argued that even though Mary knew everything about color vision, if the experience of seeing color can still teacher her something knew, mental states can not be fully explained through physical facts.

An example would be if we recreated a working human brain by replicating each neuron necessary with robots. This brain would function, but would it ever be able to experience new emotions?

Knowing everything about a mental illness does not allow us to fully understand what this mental illness is. Physical facts are limited by experiences, or do are they really?

Some argue that Mary would not have learned anything. Mary’s vast knowledge on color vision would have been enough to allow her to create the image of color in her mind, and the mere fact of seeing and experiencing color will be nothing new to Mary.

Jackson, the person who proposed this experiment, changed his mind later on and stated that Mary seeing color for the first time is also a physical fact that teaches her something knew.

But if physical facts can not fully explain everything in the universe, does that mean there are certain aspects of the universe that we will never be able to learn?