mary's room a philosophical thought experiment eleanor nelsen

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Eleanor Nelsen: Mary's Room: A philosophical thought experiment

Imagine a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary.

Mary lives in a black and white room,

she only reads black and white books,

and her screens only display black and white.

But even though she has never seen color, Mary is an expert in color vision

and knows everything ever discovered about its physics and biology.

She knows how different wavelengths of light

stimulate three types of cone cells in the retina,

and she knows how electrical signals

travel down the optic nerve into the brain.

There, they create patterns of neural activity

that correspond to the millions of colors most humans can distinguish.

Now imagine that one day,

Mary's black and white screen malfunctions

and an apple appears in color.

For the first time,

she can experience something that she's known about for years.

Does she learn anything new?

Is there anything about perceiving color that wasn't captured in all her knowledge?

Philosopher Frank Jackson proposed this thought experiment,

called Mary's room, in 1982.

He argued that if Mary already knew all the physical facts about color vision,

and experiencing color still teaches her something new,

then mental states, like color perception,

can't be completely described by physical facts.

The Mary's room thought experiment

describes what philosophers call the knowledge argument,

that there are non-physical properties and knowledge

which can only be discovered through conscious experience.

The knowledge argument contradicts the theory of physicalism,

which says that everything, including mental states,

has a physical explanation.

To most people hearing Mary's story,

it seems intuitively obvious that actually seeing color

will be totally different than learning about it.

Therefore, there must be some quality of color vision

that transcends its physical description.

The knowledge argument isn't just about color vision.

Mary's room uses color vision to represent conscious experience.

If physical science can't entirely explain color vision,

then maybe it can't entirely explain other conscious experiences either.

For instance, we could know every physical detail

about the structure and function of someone else's brain,

but still not understand what it feels like to be that person.

These ineffable experiences have properties called qualia,

subjective qualities that you can't accurately describe or measure.

Qualia are unique to the person experiencing them,

like having an itch,

being in love,

or feeling bored.

Physical facts can't completely explain mental states like this.

Philosophers interested in artificial intelligence

have used the knowledge argument

to theorize that recreating a physical state

won't necessarily recreate a corresponding mental state.

In other words,

building a computer which mimicked the function of every single neuron

of the human brain

won't necessarily create a conscious computerized brain.

Not all philosophers agree that the Mary's room experiment is useful.

Some argue that her extensive knowledge of color vision

would have allowed her to create the same mental state

produced by actually seeing the color.

The screen malfunction wouldn't show her anything new.

Others say that her knowledge was never complete in the first place

because it was based only on those physical facts

that can be conveyed in words.

Years after he proposed it,

Jackson actually reversed his own stance on his thought experiment.

He decided that even Mary's experience of seeing red

still does correspond to a measurable physical event in the brain,

not unknowable qualia beyond physical explanation.

But there still isn't a definitive answer

to the question of whether Mary would learn anything new

when she sees the apple.

Could it be that there are fundamental limits to what we can know

about something we can't experience?

And would this mean there are certain aspects of the universe

that lie permanently beyond our comprehension?

Or will science and philosophy allow us to overcome our mind's limitations?

Apr 01 2019

Imagine a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary. Mary lives in a black and white room, she only reads black and white books, and her screens only display black and white. But even though she has never seen color, Mary is an expert in color vision and knows everything ever discovered about its physics and biology. She knows how different wavelengths of light stimulate three types of cone cells in the retina, and she knows how electrical signals travel down the optic nerve into the brain. There, they create patterns of neural activity that correspond to the millions of colors most humans can distinguish. Now imagine that one day, Mary's black and white screen malfunctions and an apple appears in color. For the first time, she can experience something that she's known about for years. Does she learn anything new? Is there anything about perceiving color that wasn't captured in all her knowledge? Philosopher Frank Jackson proposed this thought experiment, called Mary's room, in 1982. He argued that if Mary already knew all the physical facts about color vision, and experiencing color still teaches her something new, then mental states, like color perception, can't be completely described by physical facts. The Mary's room thought experiment describes what philosophers call the knowledge argument, that there are non-physical properties and knowledge which can only be discovered through conscious experience. The knowledge argument contradicts the theory of physicalism, which says that everything, including mental states, has a physical explanation. To most people hearing Mary's story, it seems intuitively obvious that actually seeing color will be totally different than learning about it. Therefore, there must be some quality of color vision that transcends its physical description. The knowledge argument isn't just about color vision. Mary's room uses color vision to represent conscious experience. If physical science can't entirely explain color vision, then maybe it can't entirely explain other conscious experiences either. For instance, we could know every physical detail about the structure and function of someone else's brain, but still not understand what it feels like to be that person. These ineffable experiences have properties called qualia, subjective qualities that you can't accurately describe or measure. Qualia are unique to the person experiencing them, like having an itch, being in love, or feeling bored. Physical facts can't completely explain mental states like this. Philosophers interested in artificial intelligence have used the knowledge argument to theorize that recreating a physical state won't necessarily recreate a corresponding mental state. In other words, building a computer which mimicked the function of every single neuron of the human brain won't necessarily create a conscious computerized brain. Not all philosophers agree that the Mary's room experiment is useful. Some argue that her extensive knowledge of color vision would have allowed her to create the same mental state produced by actually seeing the color. The screen malfunction wouldn't show her anything new. Others say that her knowledge was never complete in the first place because it was based only on those physical facts that can be conveyed in words. Years after he proposed it, Jackson actually reversed his own stance on his thought experiment. He decided that even Mary's experience of seeing red still does correspond to a measurable physical event in the brain, not unknowable qualia beyond physical explanation. But there still isn't a definitive answer to the question of whether Mary would learn anything new when she sees the apple. Could it be that there are fundamental limits to what we can know about something we can't experience? And would this mean there are certain aspects of the universe that lie permanently beyond our comprehension? Or will science and philosophy allow us to overcome our mind's limitations?

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Mary’s Room: A Philosophical Thought Experiment

SHORT VIDEO CLIPS , 6 Sep 2021

Eleanor Nelsen | TED-Ed - TRANSCEND Media Service

Imagine a neuroscientist who has only ever seen black and white things, but she is an expert in color vision and knows everything about its physics and biology. If, one day, she sees color, does she learn anything new? Is there anything about perceiving color that wasn’t captured in her knowledge? Eleanor Nelsen explains what this thought experiment can teach us about experience.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGYmiQkah4o

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 6 Sep 2021.

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Mary's Room: A philosophical thought experiment - Eleanor Nelsen

• Subtitles info
• 0:07 - 0:11 Imagine a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary.
• 0:11 - 0:14 Mary lives in a black and white room,
• 0:14 - 0:16 she only reads black and white books,
• 0:16 - 0:21 and her screens only display black and white.
• 0:21 - 0:26 But even though she has never seen color, Mary is an expert in color vision
• 0:26 - 0:31 and knows everything ever discovered about its physics and biology.
• 0:31 - 0:33 She knows how different wavelengths of light
• 0:33 - 0:37 stimulate three types of cone cells in the retina,
• 0:37 - 0:39 and she knows how electrical signals
• 0:39 - 0:43 travel down the optic nerve into the brain.
• 0:43 - 0:45 There, they create patterns of neural activity
• 0:45 - 0:51 that correspond to the millions of colors most humans can distinguish.
• 0:51 - 0:52 Now imagine that one day,
• 0:52 - 0:55 Mary's black and white screen malfunctions
• 0:55 - 0:58 and an apple appears in color.
• 0:58 - 0:59 For the first time,
• 0:59 - 1:04 she can experience something that she's known about for years.
• 1:04 - 1:05 Does she learn anything new?
• 1:05 - 1:10 Is there anything about perceiving color that wasn't captured in all her knowledge?
• 1:10 - 1:13 Philosopher Frank Jackson proposed this thought experiment,
• 1:13 - 1:17 called Mary's room, in 1982.
• 1:17 - 1:21 He argued that if Mary already knew all the physical facts about color vision,
• 1:21 - 1:25 and experiencing color still teaches her something new,
• 1:25 - 1:27 then mental states, like color perception,
• 1:27 - 1:32 can't be completely described by physical facts.
• 1:32 - 1:33 The Mary's room thought experiment
• 1:33 - 1:37 describes what philosophers call the knowledge argument,
• 1:37 - 1:40 that there are non-physical properties and knowledge
• 1:40 - 1:45 which can only be discovered through conscious experience.
• 1:45 - 1:48 The knowledge argument contradicts the theory of physicalism,
• 1:48 - 1:51 which says that everything, including mental states,
• 1:51 - 1:54 has a physical explanation.
• 1:54 - 1:56 To most people hearing Mary's story,
• 1:56 - 1:59 it seems intuitively obvious that actually seeing color
• 1:59 - 2:03 will be totally different than learning about it.
• 2:03 - 2:06 Therefore, there must be some quality of color vision
• 2:06 - 2:09 that transcends its physical description.
• 2:09 - 2:13 The knowledge argument isn't just about color vision.
• 2:13 - 2:18 Mary's room uses color vision to represent conscious experience.
• 2:18 - 2:22 If physical science can't entirely explain color vision,
• 2:22 - 2:27 then maybe it can't entirely explain other conscious experiences either.
• 2:27 - 2:29 For instance, we could know every physical detail
• 2:29 - 2:33 about the structure and function of someone else's brain,
• 2:33 - 2:38 but still not understand what it feels like to be that person.
• 2:38 - 2:42 These ineffable experiences have properties called qualia,
• 2:42 - 2:48 subjective qualities that you can't accurately describe or measure.
• 2:48 - 2:50 Qualia are unique to the person experiencing them,
• 2:50 - 2:52 like having an itch,
• 2:52 - 2:53 being in love,
• 2:53 - 2:55 or feeling bored.
• 2:55 - 2:59 Physical facts can't completely explain mental states like this.
• 2:59 - 3:02 Philosophers interested in artificial intelligence
• 3:02 - 3:04 have used the knowledge argument
• 3:04 - 3:07 to theorize that recreating a physical state
• 3:07 - 3:11 won't necessarily recreate a corresponding mental state.
• 3:11 - 3:13 In other words,
• 3:13 - 3:16 building a computer which mimicked the function of every single neuron
• 3:16 - 3:18 of the human brain
• 3:18 - 3:23 won't necessarily create a conscious computerized brain.
• 3:23 - 3:27 Not all philosophers agree that the Mary's room experiment is useful.
• 3:27 - 3:30 Some argue that her extensive knowledge of color vision
• 3:30 - 3:33 would have allowed her to create the same mental state
• 3:33 - 3:35 produced by actually seeing the color.
• 3:35 - 3:40 The screen malfunction wouldn't show her anything new.
• 3:40 - 3:43 Others say that her knowledge was never complete in the first place
• 3:43 - 3:46 because it was based only on those physical facts
• 3:46 - 3:49 that can be conveyed in words.
• 3:49 - 3:50 Years after he proposed it,
• 3:50 - 3:54 Jackson actually reversed his own stance on his thought experiment.
• 3:54 - 3:57 He decided that even Mary's experience of seeing red
• 3:57 - 4:02 still does correspond to a measurable physical event in the brain,
• 4:02 - 4:06 not unknowable qualia beyond physical explanation.
• 4:06 - 4:08 But there still isn't a definitive answer
• 4:08 - 4:11 to the question of whether Mary would learn anything new
• 4:11 - 4:13 when she sees the apple.
• 4:13 - 4:16 Could it be that there are fundamental limits to what we can know
• 4:16 - 4:19 about something we can't experience?
• 4:19 - 4:22 And would this mean there are certain aspects of the universe
• 4:22 - 4:25 that lie permanently beyond our comprehension?
• 4:25 - 4:31 Or will science and philosophy allow us to overcome our mind's limitations?

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/mary-s-room-a-philosophical-thought-experiment-eleanor-nelsen

Imagine a neuroscientist who has only ever seen black and white things, but she is an expert in color vision and knows everything about its physics and biology. If, one day, she sees color, does she learn anything new? Is there anything about perceiving color that wasn’t captured in her knowledge? Eleanor Nelsen explains what this thought experiment can teach us about experience.

Lesson by Eleanor Nelsen, animation by Maxime Dupuy.

English subtitles

Revisions compare revisions.

• Revision 4 Edited Jessica Ruby
• Revision 3 Edited Jessica Ruby
• Revision 2 Edited Jessica Ruby
• Revision 1 Edited Jennifer Cody

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Mary’s Room: A philosophical thought experiment – Eleanor Nelsen

Lesson introduction.

The lesson on “Mary’s Room” presents a philosophical thought experiment that challenges the notion of physicalism by illustrating that knowledge gained through conscious experience may differ from theoretical understanding. Mary, a neuroscientist confined to a black-and-white room, knows everything about color vision but learns something new when she experiences color for the first time, suggesting that there are non-physical aspects of perception, known as qualia, that cannot be fully explained by physical facts alone. This thought experiment raises important questions about the nature of consciousness and the limitations of our understanding of subjective experiences.

Lesson Article

Mary’s room: a philosophical thought experiment.

Imagine a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary. She lives in a world devoid of color, confined to a black and white room. Her books and screens are all monochrome. Despite this, Mary is an expert on color vision. She knows everything there is to know about the physics and biology of how we perceive color. She understands how different wavelengths of light interact with the three types of cone cells in our retinas and how these interactions send electrical signals through the optic nerve to the brain. These signals create patterns of neural activity that allow most humans to distinguish millions of colors.

Now, picture this: one day, Mary’s black and white screen malfunctions, and she sees a red apple in color for the first time. This is something she has studied extensively but never experienced. The question arises: does Mary learn something new from this experience? Is there an aspect of perceiving color that her extensive knowledge didn’t cover? This scenario is part of a thought experiment proposed by philosopher Frank Jackson in 1982, known as “Mary’s Room.” Jackson argued that if Mary, who knows all the physical facts about color vision, learns something new by experiencing color, then mental states like color perception cannot be fully explained by physical facts alone.

The Knowledge Argument

The Mary’s Room thought experiment highlights what philosophers call the knowledge argument. This argument suggests that there are non-physical properties and knowledge that can only be discovered through conscious experience. It challenges the theory of physicalism, which claims that everything, including mental states, can be explained physically. To many, it seems obvious that seeing color is fundamentally different from merely understanding it theoretically. Thus, there must be an aspect of color vision that goes beyond its physical description.

The knowledge argument isn’t limited to color vision. Mary’s Room uses color vision as a metaphor for conscious experience. If physical science can’t fully explain color vision, it might not fully explain other conscious experiences either. For instance, we might know every detail about someone else’s brain structure and function, yet still not grasp what it’s like to be that person. These unique experiences are known as qualia—subjective qualities that can’t be accurately described or measured. Qualia are personal, like feeling an itch, being in love, or experiencing boredom. Physical facts alone can’t fully explain these mental states.

Implications for Artificial Intelligence

Philosophers interested in artificial intelligence have used the knowledge argument to suggest that replicating a physical state doesn’t necessarily recreate a corresponding mental state. In other words, even if we build a computer that mimics every neuron in the human brain, it might not achieve consciousness.

Debate Among Philosophers

Not all philosophers agree on the usefulness of the Mary’s Room experiment. Some argue that Mary’s extensive knowledge of color vision would allow her to mentally simulate the experience of seeing color, meaning the screen malfunction wouldn’t reveal anything new. Others believe her knowledge was incomplete because it was based solely on physical facts that can be described in words.

Interestingly, years after proposing the thought experiment, Jackson changed his stance. He concluded that Mary’s experience of seeing red corresponds to a measurable physical event in the brain, rather than unknowable qualia beyond physical explanation. However, the question of whether Mary learns something new when she sees the apple remains unresolved. Could it be that there are fundamental limits to what we can know about experiences we haven’t had? Does this imply that certain aspects of the universe are permanently beyond our comprehension? Or will science and philosophy eventually help us overcome these limitations?

This thought experiment continues to provoke discussion and debate, encouraging us to explore the boundaries of knowledge and the nature of conscious experience.

Lesson Vocabulary

Philosophy – The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline. – In her philosophy class, Maria explored the ethical implications of artificial intelligence.

Biology – The scientific study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, evolution, and distribution. – The biology lecture today focused on the evolutionary adaptations of marine mammals.

Knowledge – Information, understanding, or skill that one gets from experience or education. – The philosopher argued that true knowledge must be justified, true belief.

Experience – The process of gaining knowledge or skill through direct involvement in or exposure to events. – The biologist emphasized that fieldwork provides invaluable experience that cannot be replicated in a laboratory.

Color – The property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light. – The philosopher discussed how the perception of color might differ between individuals, raising questions about subjective experience.

Vision – The faculty or state of being able to see; the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom. – In studying vision, the biology students learned about the complex processes that allow humans to perceive the world around them.

Qualia – The internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena. – The debate on whether qualia can be fully explained by physical processes remains a central issue in the philosophy of mind.

Consciousness – The state of being aware of and able to think about one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, and surroundings. – The seminar on consciousness explored various theories about how subjective experiences arise from neural activity.

Physicalism – The doctrine that the real world consists simply of the physical world. – Physicalism posits that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by physical processes and phenomena.

Neurons – Specialized cells transmitting nerve impulses; a nerve cell. – The biology professor explained how neurons communicate through synapses to process information in the brain.

Discussion Questions

• How did the Mary’s Room thought experiment challenge your understanding of the relationship between knowledge and experience?
• In what ways do you think experiencing something firsthand differs from having a theoretical understanding of it?
• What are your thoughts on the knowledge argument’s suggestion that there are non-physical properties of consciousness that cannot be fully explained by physical facts?
• How do you interpret the concept of qualia, and do you believe they can be measured or described accurately?
• Do you agree with Frank Jackson’s initial argument or his later conclusion regarding Mary’s experience of seeing color? Why?
• How might the implications of the Mary’s Room thought experiment influence our approach to developing artificial intelligence?
• What are your views on the debate among philosophers about whether Mary’s knowledge was complete or if she learned something new from seeing color?
• Do you believe there are fundamental limits to human understanding, or do you think science and philosophy can eventually overcome these boundaries?

Lesson Activities

Color perception simulation.

Engage in a virtual reality simulation that mimics Mary’s experience of seeing color for the first time. Reflect on how this experience compares to your theoretical understanding of color perception. Discuss in groups whether the simulation provided new insights beyond your prior knowledge.

Debate: Physicalism vs. Dualism

Participate in a structured debate where you argue either for or against the knowledge argument’s challenge to physicalism. Prepare by researching both sides, and present your arguments to the class. Consider how Mary’s Room influences your stance on the nature of consciousness.

Qualia Journal

Keep a journal for a week, documenting your personal experiences of qualia, such as emotions or sensory perceptions. Analyze whether these experiences can be fully explained by physical facts. Share your findings in a class discussion, exploring the limits of scientific explanation.

AI Consciousness Workshop

Attend a workshop on artificial intelligence and consciousness. Explore how the knowledge argument applies to AI development. Work in teams to design a hypothetical AI system that could potentially experience qualia, and present your design to the class.

Philosophical Reflection Essay

Write an essay reflecting on the implications of Mary’s Room for understanding human consciousness. Consider whether you agree with Jackson’s revised stance or maintain that there are aspects of experience beyond physical explanation. Use examples from your own experiences to support your argument.

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Mary’s Room: An Animated Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge and the Mystery of Consciousness

By maria popova.

“It is not half so important to know as to feel ,” Rachel Carson wrote after catalyzing the environmental movement with the rigorous science and passionate poetics of reality, harmonizing fact with feeling as the score to a larger understanding. The sentiment speaks to something essential about our human experience: that understanding is always governed by feeling and that any factual knowledge, rather than shaping subjective experience, is shaped by it.

Consciousness — that synaptic cataclysm of cerebration symphonic with feeling — is our only lens on reality, half-opaque to itself, its nature ever quickening our hardest questions, their answers ever beyond our grasp.

A decade after the electricity of life and subjective experience ceased firing in Carson’s consciousness, Hannah Arendt delivered her staggering Gifford Lectures on the life of the mind , observing that if we ever relinquish our hunger for unanswerable questions — the pinnacle of “the appetite for meaning we call thinking” — we would not only lose all art, but lose science and “the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

At the center of this delicious realm of the unanswerable are our qualia — those subjective states springing from the essence of individual consciousness, intimate and inchoate, pulsating with the mystery of what it is like to be oneself: what it is like for you to look at the blue I am looking at and see it in a way I never will, nor will ever grasp through knowledge.

In the early 1980s, the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson (b. August 31, 1943) set out to explore how knowable that mystery is with his knowledge argument — a thought experiment, also known as Mary’s Room or Mary the Super-scientist , probing the unfathomed regions of consciousness and the limits of what is knowable with the proboscis of our rational inquiry.

Living in a black-and-white room, reading black-and-white books, and watching black-and-white screens, Jackson’s conceptual Mary studies what the world is and how it works — its physical structures, processes, and causal relationships. But then she leaves her monochrome confines and encounters color — itself the product of physical processes and phenomena, yet producing in Mary a perceptual-psychological experience beyond the knowledge of those processes and phenomena, beyond everything she had understood about color through the knowledge-acquisition paradigm of learning.

A gasp beyond fact, intimating that knowledge of the physical might fail to capture some essential aspects of our consciousness, the experience of color being but one. An almost-answer to the ancient question Plato posed with his thought experiment about consciousness and the nature of reality , the question quantum theory originator Max Planck picked up two and half millennia later with his insistence that “science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature… because… we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

Originally devised as an argument against physicalism — the notion that everything known and knowable to us, through thought or feeling, has a physical fundament — the knowledge argument is widely considered “one of the most discussed, important, and controversial” arguments in the ongoing quest to fathom consciousness . That it was later challenged by Jackson himself suggests that we might, after all, be stardust suspended in the hammock of spacetime .

This animated primer from my friends at TED-Ed and chemist Eleanor Nelsen delves into the complexities, the revelations, and the unanswered, possibly unanswerable questions the knowledge argument contours — the central questions of what it is like to be human:

Complement with Richard Feynman’s Ode to a Flower — a Nobel-winning physicist’s sidewise gleam on the same abiding question — then consider a supreme counterpoint to physicalism in the mysterious experience of music .

— Published August 24, 2021 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/08/24/marys-room-frank-jackson-animated/ —

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Monday 7 September 2020

‘mary’s room’: a thought experiment.

Can we fully understand the world through thought and language—or do we only really understand it through experience? And if only through experience, can we truly communicate with one another on every level? These were some of the questions which lay behind a famous thought experiment of 1982:

8 comments:

Well, talk about an article being topical. This piece was published just hours before the BBC published 'Can artificial intelligence create a decent dinner?' You saw it first on Pi. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53794472

Although the BBC item was somewhat playful, I agree, Thomas, there exists a more ambitious tie between the ‘Mary’s room’ thought experiment — aka the ‘knowledge argument’ — and artificial intelligence. Many of the factors surrounding AI will increasingly borrow from and/or adapt aspects of the knowledge argument — as framed or inspired at least in part by the ‘Mary’s room’ discussion — to suit AI-related considerations: put simply, the what and how of knowledge. Also with respect to AI and the knowledge argument, longer-term considerations, I suspect, might increasingly bear on the still-thorny issues related to consciousness, ‘personhood’, and the full range of what falls under the rich rubric of cognition, including experience and learning. The stuff of both philosophy and neuroscience.

Re. that Guardian opinion piece, like much in this area, it is rather breathless and rushes to declare human intelligence matched by machines. That claim was made back in the 1960s when computers 64k things barely capable of returning user input. And this Guardian essay, it turns out in the small print, was re-edited by humans, who merged elements from six computer versions to make "a good one". But back to this essay, and I do think it is very fine one, just the stuff a computer could be proud to have done! Maybe I don't quite get the argument, but it seems to me that experience and knowledge are not the same things. I may be told that the wavelength of red light is x, and that of green light is y, but still not be able to distinguish between the two when I look at a traffic light...

I suspect that not even AI’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders pretend AI yet matches human intelligence. Rather, what’s going on is people tipping their hats at the wow factor of each step in AI’s advance, across many sectors of our lives. Also, I’d venture there are gulf-like differences between the AI of the 1960s and the AI of the 2020s. That progress will predictably continue, as AI experts, computer scientists, neuroscientists, physicists, biologists, engineers, industrial researchers, and experts in other fields determinably keep moving that needle. So, just as the AI of the 1960s and the 2020s don’t compare, the AI of the 2020s and the 2100s likely won’t, either.

I agree that knowing the ‘wavelength of red light is x, and that of green light is y’, is insufficient to fully understand the difference between the two at a traffic light. The personal experience, that is, of red and green as one sits in her car. But that’s only because the ‘wavelengths’ of red and green don’t represent the totality of what distinguishes the two colours. I think that the Mary of this thought experiment, her hypothetically endowed as a brilliant neurophysiologist with all knowledge of the physics, biology, chemistry, and neuroscience of colour vision, would by definition have complete knowledge (beyond just wavelength) of the experience of red and green traffic lights — including of what brain events occur in our experiencing red and green at a traffic light.

I think there is a mistake in the experiment. There is a suppressed inference: the bounds of information in both knowledge and experience are basically the same, which in this case concerns the narrow information and experience of a colour. Our experience deals with things as they relate to the universe, while our knowledge (or what it has become) deals with stripped down concepts. My experience tells me what, say, a woman is in all her inexhaustible fullness, while a definition tells me she is 'an adult human female'. Mary knows 'absolutely everything' about colour, says the post. Yes, as a stripped down concept. But that description of Mary's knowledge is deceptive. It is not 'absolutely everything' that she knows. It is 'absolutely everything' as a theorist decided it.

That last comment above by Thomas sounds plausible to me. The mind, if trained by discriminating, might presumely become that rigid that it al-ready knows by sticking to the acquired theories. Though orange-red or purple-red, how to be sure of red? Nobody sees colors alike, like nobody experiences a cut leg alike. There is more in the game than just the knowledge.

It is questions like this that make the outside world regard philosophy as an irrelevant pastime for the unemployable. The idea that Mary can have full knowledge of colour by reading a technical description is absurd. It is simply not reasonable to say that Mary's response to seeing the tomato would be "Oh, yeah - that's what I expected it to be". Thomas has pointed out some issues but on top of those there is the question of how Mary could ever be imparted with the knowledge of what makes blue different from red in a way that would have allowed her to decide which colour she was shown for the first time. Having only ever seen white light, what description could eliminate from her mind any chance of confusing red and blue when she sees either one for the first time? Anyone who said that Mary learnt nothing is clearly delusional so I guess the thought experiment has at least some utility as a job interview question.

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Mary's Room: A philosophical thought experiment - Eleanor Nelsen

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Imagine a neuroscientist who has only ever seen black and white things, but she is an expert in color vision and knows everything about its physics and biology. If, one day, she sees color, does she learn anything new? Is there anything about perceiving color that wasn’t captured in her knowledge? Eleanor Nelsen explains what this thought experiment can teach us about experience.

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TED-Ed Animations feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators. Are you an educator or animator interested in creating a TED-Ed Animation? Nominate yourself here »

Meet The Creators

• Educator Eleanor Nelsen
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