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The Mary's room thought experiment was proposed by Frank Jackson in 1982 as a counterargument to physicalism, physicalism being the belief that the universe consists of nothing more than its physical characteristics. In other words, physicalism is what used to be called materialism: the denial of any kind of mind/body or matter/spirit dualism.
To quote from Wikipedia:
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?
Fair enough. Here's my problem:
[...] if Mary does learn something new upon experiencing color, physicalism is false. Specifically, the Knowledge Argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical explanations of mental states. Mary may know everything about the science of color perception, but can she know what the experience of red is like if she has never seen red? Jackson contends that, yes, she has learned something new, via experience, and hence, physicalism is false. Jackson states:
It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.
I have a very real problem with that, as I don't believe it follows at all. I'll set it out, as the Wikipedia page didn't address this particular problem with the main argument, and I consider it decisive.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett, a capital man who writes about zombies, has objected. According to Dennett, if Mary really knew everything about color, she would learn nothing upon first experiencing color. I tend to agree with him: if, by definition, Mary really had all possible physical knowledge of color, then presumably that would include knowledge of the experience of seeing color.
In my opinion, the whole Mary's room argument is nothing but what Dennett calls an intuition pump: a thought experiment designed to evoke an intuitive response by misleading us.
Specifically, I believe the Mary's room scenario makes use of an intuitive division between theoretical knowledge and experience. On reading it, most of us assume that Mary has all the theoretical knowledge of color, but has no practical experience of it. The difference is similar to knowing how to drive a car but never having driven one. From a common sense standpoint, we will automatically assume that when a person who has been taught all about cars but has never driven one actually does, they will, indeed, learn something.
Notice, though, that that isn't what Jackson said. He said Mary has all the physical information. Isn't the experience of seeing a color also physical information? Basically, in claiming that Mary's knowledge does not include the experience of color, Jackson is claiming that experience, in this case experience of a qualia, is not physical information.
The entire thought experiment is set up to justify the existence of qualia as non-physical information. In my opinion, it does this by simply assuming the existence of qualia as non-physical information. If we assume that the experience of seeing a color is physical information, then by the premise of the experiment, Mary doesn't learn anything new on stepping out of the room.
Dennett's further objection is very relevant here. He says we can't imagine such a comprehensive amount of knowledge: Mary would really need to know literally everything about color before stepping out of the room for the experiment to make any sense. We find that difficult to imagine, so we transpose "all theoretical knowledge of color" for "all possible knowledge".
Basically, the way I see it, the whole thought experiment doesn't prove anything. It only begs the question. If, if, you assume that the experience of seeing a color is not physical knowledge, then Mary will learn something new the first time she sees a color, and then physicalism is false. If, however, we assume that the experience of seeing a color is physical knowledge, then Mary possesses a practically supernatural level of knowledge while still in the room, and will, in fact, learn nothing.
The question that any solution to the thought experiment boils down to is very simple: do you believe that the experience of seeing a color is physical knowledge? In other words, when you see the color blue, what happens? Physicalism asserts that something happens in your brain: at the end of the day, a physical process. This physical process could, theoretically, be recreated, so it would be possible for someone to upload the experience of having seen all the colors into Mary's brain. Therefore she, already possessing this superhuman knowledge of things she has never seen, would indeed learn nothing upon leaving the room.
On the other hand, if one chooses to believe in the transcendent existence of qualia, and the existence of a transcendent mind above and beyond the brain, then it is possible to postulate that something transcendent happens to the mind when it sees a color for the first time. I, as a physicalist, would kindly suggest applying Occam's razor to all these assumptions.
So, in short, my opinion of the Mary's room thought experiment is that it only proves the existence of qualia and the falsity of physicality if one presupposes qualia to exist outside physical knowledge. Therefore, it proves nothing: it only begs the question that it supposedly answers.
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