What do you think?
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whate=
ver
reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a b=
lack
and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vis=
ion
and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obta=
in
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 chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the utteri=
ng
of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’ … What will happen when
Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour televis=
ion
monitor? Will she learn anything new or not?
According to Dennett=
, Mary would not learn anything new, as she has already acquired all the
information that there is to know about processing of colours.
However, most of us =
would
have a strong intuitive feeling that Mary would
learn something new, as she has never had the ‘experience’ of
colour – phenomenal consciousness.