The thought experiment of Mary’s room, introduced by the philosopher Frank Jackson, has the basic aim of showing that our consciousness and our thoughts as well as other mental activities cannot be entirely explained in terms of physical processes, such as neurological activity in our brain. The thought experiment asks us to imagine that there is a young girl named Mary, who has lived all her life in a room that has been lit in such as a way that there is absolutely no color in the room. Everything in the room is namely black or white.
At the same time, Mary is a type of scientist, who is also a genius, and she is able to learn everything that there is, especially about the subject of neuroscience. This means that she knows, for example, how the brain works in relation to various mental states. She knows all about the neurological activity that corresponds, for example, to being angry. She also knows, however, all the neurological activity that corresponds to the brain when it sees a color, such as the color red, even though Mary is in a room that is entirely black and white. Mary is a true master of all the material on neuroscience and she knows everything there is to know about the brain. The thought experiment then asks us to consider what would happen if Mary would suddenly be let out of the room and for the first time in her life see suddenly the color red.
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Frank Jackson’s argument is that Mary, by actually seeing the color red, will have learned something that she did not know before, even though she was a master of neuroscience. Even though she knew everything there was to know about neurological functioning of the brain, here was a new piece of knowledge, actually seeing the color red. Jackson’s point, therefore, is that the actual mental state of seeing the color is something that cannot be explained in terms of the activity of the brain, since Mary knew everything there was to know about the brain. Accordingly, our mental activities and what we gain from mental activities cannot be merely explained in terms of our physical and neuroscientific explanations of how the brain works. We cannot explain specific phenomena, such as experiencing colors solely in terms of the physical hardware of the human brain.
Thus, the major consequence of the argument is that physicalism is not sufficient to explain how certain mental states function, such as the experiencing of colors. The physicalist account would reduce everything that goes on in our minds as explainable in terms of how the physical hardware of the brain functions: but Mary already knows how the brain functions, but nevertheless still, Jackson argues, experiences and thus learns something new, namely, what it actually means to see the color red.
In my opinion Jackson’s argument is very convincing. The strongest point of the argument, in my view, is that Mary knows everything about the brain and how it works. Her knowledge of physicalist accounts of the brain is thus complete. Jackson’s point is that when she actually sees the color then something has been added to her knowledge and therefore her previous knowledge was incomplete. This would seem to be accurate: something new has been gained.
But does the novelty of experiencing the color red truly mean that she has learned something new, that was not included in her previous purely physical explanation for phenomena such as perceiving colors? I believe it does and let us consider the following example. I have never driven a car before but I study everything about how to drive a car from youtube videos and conversations with the world’s best Formula One drivers. I am declared a master of driving cars by all the experts. I then drive an actual car and drive it perfectly according to my knowledge, there are no surprises. Is there something new in my actual experience of driving this car? Certainly, we can see the experience itself is new, since I have never driven a car before. But to say that something has been added to my knowledge would seem incorrect, since I drove the car perfectly, even though I had never driven a car before.
I think the same logic appears to be at work in Mary’s case, but to prove that she has in fact learned something new. She had never seen the color red, but she knew exactly how our physical brains perceive the colors. When she actually sees a color it does not change anything in her knowledge. Her brain is working the same. But she now knows what the color red actually looks like. She did not know this before, since she was always in a black and white room. The purely physical data never gave her the actual experience of what red is.
This would seem to imply that we are not merely robots running around the world, but actually interact with the world in a way that is not entirely explainable by physical processes. Something falls short in our explanations to explain the actual experience of a phenomena. This would seem to mean that we have an active engagement with our world, and the potential to change it, precisely because we are not merely pre-determined physical processes. Mary’s Room is a very compelling, in my view, argument against physicalism, while at the same time making
the experience of consciousness something magical and ethereal.
