Mary's Room Part I

"Mary's Room" is a thought experiment designed to show the limitations of physicalism and the inability of any theory based on physicalism to adequately describe subjective experiences known as qualia. The experiment goes as follows: A woman named Mary is locked in a completely monochromatic room where anything visible to her is only visible in black and white. She spends her entire life studying optics and electromagnetic theory until she knows all there is to know about light. The argument then is, if she knows all there is to know about light, does she know what the colour red looks like? If she knows all there is to know about light, then surely she should not be shocked when she is released from her room into the full colour world the physicalist argument would espouse. But what Frank Jackson put forward (the man who conceived the experiment) is that despite all her hard work learning about every aspect there is to know about light, no matter how much factual knowledge she accumulates, she cannot capture what it is to experience the colour red, and should therefore be in awe at seeing it for the first time. In summary, no matter how much she learns she can never factually know the sensation of redness, or any number of subjective experiences, and thus physicalism is incomplete. My rebuttal of this view is as follows: Although she has learned as much as she can about light, one crucial piece is missing, and that is a complete knowledge of neuroscience. Lets instead imagine that we give Mary a little bit more time in her tucked away room before we release her and she teaches herself all about neuroscience as well. She learns that as light enters the eye it elicits various nerve impulses depending on a variety of factors. In our case we'll focus solely on colour perception. Mary finds that when the wavelength of light commonly referred to as red is detected, it sparks action in a set of particular neurones. Mary proceeds to build a device capable of stimulating those neurones in her own brain and for the first time beholds the colour red! Mary concludes then that "redness" can be identified as a collection of information that when processed by the brain in sum leads to the sensation of red. The Mary's Room argument in an attempt to show the incompleteness of physicalism, I believe demonstrates that it itself is not complete because it leaves out the very crucial physical process that the observer herself must complete to fulfill the experience. Thus the experience itself remains firmly within the physical realm.