Mary's Room

[GrowingSmaller]

Mary's room - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mary is a genius of brain science who knows everything there is to know about the physical brain, it's workings and it's processes. Until now, she has lived in a black and white room, but nevertheless is an expert on all the physical theories about colour perception. When she leaves the room for the first time, and sees colour, will she (due to her knowledge of the brain and it's workings, and learning about the neural correlates of consciousness of seeing green, for instance), will she be able to recognise red as red, and green as green, or will her scientific understanding of the brain be of no avail?

My answer is that, no matter how complete the physical science, the will only be abje to judge rightly "this is red, and that is green" if she has access to a scan of her own brain. Otherwise, her scientific expertese will not avail her. I am not sure if this refutes physicalism (cf "mind body problem"), though.

 

[Chesterton]

Has anyone born blind ever become an artist? Anyone born deaf ever become a music composer? I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't let Mary borrow my car if she's never seen a traffic light.

 

[SithDoughnut]

If you give her a way of measuring wavelengths, or comparing colours against things she knows (e.g., if she knows the sky is blue, she can work out what blue is) she'll work it out quickly. Otherwise, she'll have no way of knowing; you can't actually describe what red looks like, only what it is.

 

[daniel777]

i think that's an interesting deviation from the original, dealing with the recognition of a thing rather than the knowledge of a thing.

theoretically, i think marry would be able to recognize anything that is recognizable, even from an indirect means like measuring wavelengths or viewing a brain scan. however, completely isolated from ever seeing "red", i don't think she could ever know "red" without seeing it.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

theoretically, i think marry would be able to recognize anything that is recognizable, even from an indirect means like measuring wavelengths or viewing a brain scan. however, completely isolated from ever seeing "red", i don't think she could ever know "red" without seeing it.

An implication has been drawn that even if she knows all the physical facts about the brain, but she does not know red without seeing red, there must be something non-physical about experience which "seeing red" (or green, blue, etc) is. Therefore, physicalism must be false. What do you think?

 

[kharisym]

Mary's room - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mary is a genius of brain science who knows everything there is to know about the physical brain, it's workings and it's processes. Until now, she has lived in a black and white room, but nevertheless is an expert on all the physical theories about colour perception. When she leaves the room for the first time, and sees colour, will she (due to her knowledge of the brain and it's workings, and learning about the neural correlates of consciousness of seeing green, for instance), will she be able to recognise red as red, and green as green, or will her scientific understanding of the brain be of no avail?

My answer is that, no matter how complete the physical science, the will only be abje to judge rightly "this is red, and that is green" if she has access to a scan of her own brain. Otherwise, her scientific expertese will not avail her. I am not sure if this refutes physicalism (cf "mind body problem"), though.

I don't see this as an argument against physicalism, but rather as an argument against universal perception. The question is more accurately phrased 'Even though Mary has a conceptual understanding of color and how the mind processes color, would she *perceive* red as red?'

There are two answers depending on the detail you want. The first (and what I assume you want) is if we assume her brain develops normally and has the capacity to process color as information. If this is the case then she'd be able to *perceive* red but doesn't have this color linked with the symbol 'red' so unless she's given an external frame of reference (such as a wave length meter) then the arbitrary symbol 'red' has no correlation to the color red. This is an issue of perception, not the physical nature of reality.

The second answer assumes her brain doesn't develop normally. We've grown Mary up in a controlled environment devoid of a particular stimuli- color. In experiments where we've given nearly life-long blind people sight back, we've found that while the optical hardware works, the brain had 'repurposed' those areas dealing with sight to perform other duties, so they lacked the ability to comprehend faces (a function with a dedicated brain region) and several other abilities sighted people have. There's only very slight reason to assume the brain's ability to repurpose color perceptivity since I haven't read any papers specifically on this topic, but if this is the case then Mary would be incapable of perceiving color as we do, and therefore would be in some strange form of color-blindness.

Either way, this question speaks about the ductility of perception, but not really about physicalism.

Keep in mind that 'red' is a symbol- and symbols are arbitrary. Do you know what 'aka' is? It's another symbol.

 

[Eudaimonist]

For Mary, it's literally a matter of perspective. There's no reason why an external perspective on someone else's brain processes should be equivalent to having the internal perspective of the subject of those processes.

Mary would not "know" red because her perspective is abstract and external, but she would know the sort of brain states which are associated with the perception of the color red. These she might recognize quite clearly -- enough to understand that after leaving her colorless world, she has entered a world of color.

No, this doesn't in any way disprove physicalism.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Ty for your thoughtful response.

I don't see this as an argument against physicalism, but rather as an argument against universal perception. The question is more accurately phrased 'Even though Mary has a conceptual understanding of color and how the mind processes color, would she *perceive* red as red?'

There are two answers depending on the detail you want. The first (and what I assume you want) is if we assume her brain develops normally and has the capacity to process color as information. If this is the case then she'd be able to *perceive* red but doesn't have this color linked with the symbol 'red' so unless she's given an external frame of reference (such as a wave length meter) then the arbitrary symbol 'red' has no correlation to the color red. This is an issue of perception, not the physical nature of reality.

The second answer assumes her brain doesn't develop normally. We've grown Mary up in a controlled environment devoid of a particular stimuli- color. In experiments where we've given nearly life-long blind people sight back, we've found that while the optical hardware works, the brain had 'repurposed' those areas dealing with sight to perform other duties, so they lacked the ability to comprehend faces (a function with a dedicated brain region) and several other abilities sighted people have. There's only very slight reason to assume the brain's ability to repurpose color perceptivity since I haven't read any papers specifically on this topic, but if this is the case then Mary would be incapable of perceiving color as we do, and therefore would be in some strange form of color-blindness.

Either way, this question speaks about the ductility of perception, but not really about physicalism.

Keep in mind that 'red' is a symbol- and symbols are arbitrary. Do you know what 'aka' is? It's another symbol.

Ty for teaching me about "repurposing". As for the first response, the having read further I think that the room thought experiment is not meant to prove that the mind is immaterial, but that not all knowledge is physical knowledge.

 

[daniel777]

An implication has been drawn that even if she knows all the physical facts about the brain, but she does not know red without seeing red, there must be something non-physical about experience which "seeing red" (or green, blue, etc) is. Therefore, physicalism must be false. What do you think?

i don't think it does. i don't see why learning by experience and by analysis shouldn't equally be forms of "physical" learning. it's possible that mary didn't know everything about the brain because she had never seen red. it's possible that without seeing "red" mary's analysis of the brain remains incomplete.


or,

if mary only knows how to recognize brains without knowing something in her own brain (if she's only able to recognize the pattern of red in other people's brains), then of course "seeing red" is a new form of knowledge to "her" that doesn't at all falsify physicalism. getting her brain to fit a physical pattern of seeing red doesn't point to a non-physical experience.

 

[SithDoughnut]

An implication has been drawn that even if she knows all the physical facts about the brain, but she does not know red without seeing red, there must be something non-physical about experience which "seeing red" (or green, blue, etc) is. Therefore, physicalism must be false. What do you think?

No, because Mary hasn't learned everything. She hasn't learned what red looks like. Association between concepts and the physical thing still fits in to physicalism, but Mary cannot do this.

 

[kharisym]

Ty for your thoughtful response.Ty for teaching me about "repurposing". As for the first response, the having read further I think that the room thought experiment is not meant to prove that the mind is immaterial, but that not all knowledge is physical knowledge.

Repurposing is very interesting. The brain is an amazingly plastic organ.

I would agree that not all knowledge is physical knowledge, in so far as not all knowledge pertains to physical objects. There's knowledge that pertains to knowledge, for instance.