Knowledge argument aka Mary in the Black and White Room

A few months ago, I was laying in bed. I was bored, listening to music, and playing with these little magnets that my brother bought for me, a few years ago...

While playing with the magnets, I had what I can only describe as a "self" epiphany.

I would take some of the magnets, and without much effort, I would let the magnetic force bring them together.

Nothing major about that right?

Wrong.. For me.. it opened up some new pathway in my mind.

For many years, I have been an atheist, and would only believe in things I saw.

As I played with the magnets, I took note of the magnetic force that would bring the magnets together or push them apart.

We all know about magnetic forces - but I never once in my life, sat down to REALLY think about it.

It's an invisible force that can't be seen with the human eye.

As I thought about this invisible powerful force, I started to ask myself...maybe there are other forces at play...forces that humans can't see or perceive.

It's been on my mind a lot lately. And today I came across 'Mary in the black and white room'...

Imagine you are a brilliant scientist. You know EVERYTHING there is to know about color... yet you live in a black and white world... you know the properties and wavelengths of colors...but you've never seen a color.

You are then transported to a world WITH color.. and you see color for the first time.

The question then becomes - did you actually know EVERYTHING about color before actually seeing it for yourself?

I makes me think of how simple humans are. Even myself. So silly..so simple.. What if we don't really know anything because we are living in a 3D universe.

Maybe if we lived in a 5D universe, we would be able to see things more clearly.. understand new things.

The knowledge argument is a philosophical question about whether we can understand and know everything just by reading and learning, or if we need to experience things for ourselves. It uses the example of someone who knows all about color but has never seen it to argue that there is a difference between knowing about something and experiencing it.

wiki article below: 

The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986).

The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color.

The experiment is intended to argue against physicalism—the view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical. The debate that emerged following its publication became the subject of an edited volume—There's Something About Mary (2004)—which includes replies from such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, and Paul Churchland.

Thought experiment

The thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson as follows:

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?^[1]

In other words, Jackson's Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The question that Jackson raises is: once she experiences color, does she learn anything new? Jackson claims that she does.

There is disagreement about how to summarize the premises and conclusion of the argument Jackson makes in this thought experiment. Paul Churchland did so as follows:

1. Mary knows everything there is to know about brain states and their properties.
2. It is not the case that Mary knows everything there is to know about sensations and their properties.
3. Therefore, sensations and their properties are not the same (≠) as the brain states and their properties.

However, Jackson objects that Churchland's formulation is not his intended argument. He especially objects to the first premise of Churchland's formulation: "The whole thrust of the knowledge argument is that Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about brain states and their properties, because she does not know about certain qualia associated with them. What is complete, according to the argument, is her knowledge of matters physical." He suggests his preferred interpretation:

1. Mary (before her release) knows everything physical there is to know about other people.
2. Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about other people (because she learns something about them on her release).
3. Therefore, there are truths about other people (and herself) which escape the physicalist story.

Most authors who discuss the knowledge argument cite the case of Mary, but Frank Jackson used a further example in his seminal article: the case of a person, Fred, who sees a color unknown to normal human perceivers.

Whether Mary learns something new upon experiencing color has two major implications: the existence of qualia and the knowledge argument against physicalism.

First, if Mary does learn something new, it shows that qualia (the subjective, qualitative properties of experiences, conceived as wholly independent of behavior and disposition) exist. If Mary gains something after she leaves the room—if she acquires knowledge of a particular thing that she did not possess before—then that knowledge, Jackson argues, is knowledge of the quale of seeing red. Therefore, it must be conceded that qualia are real properties, since there is a difference between a person who has access to a particular quale and one who does not. Jackson believed in the explanatory completeness of physiology, that all behaviour is caused by physical forces of some kind. And the thought experiment seems to prove the existence of qualia, a non-physical part of the mind. Jackson argued that if both of these theses are true, then epiphenomenalism is true—the view that mental states are caused by physical states, but have no causal effects on the physical world.